"Only what travelers tell us," I replied through teeth clattering like stones on a tin roof. I am half dead, I thought. Shriveled by the touch of his almost alien flesh: a wolf in man's clothing, something beneath the skin.
His smell, pungent, alien, stifling the breath out of me, like a cat over the face of a child.
"And what do the travelers tell you?" Wicked amusement. (Here I have a child to pollute, torment, seduce.)
"They said it was a youth cult, and then more than that. Like a mutation. They said Wraeththu can have strange powers, but we didn't really believe that. . . . They say you want to kill all mankind. . . . They say you are Tearless warriors ... that you murder all women. Many things like that. Not all of it is true .. . is it?"
"How do you feel about women?" he asked abruptly.
"I know what it means to be Wraeththu," I murmured, hoping that would suffice.
"Answer!" he demanded and I was afraid Terez would wake.
"I've never known them," I spluttered quickly. "I never think about things like that. Never. It doesn't matter. Inside. Nothing. It doesn't matter." I struggled in his hold.
"It will," he said quietly, relaxing his grip on me. "But not yet, and certainly not here. You will be Wraeththu. Perhaps you always have been, waiting here at the end of the world. You've just been asleep, that's all. But you will wake, one day."
We lay in silence for a while, listening to Terez rattling away on the bed, For the first time I opened my eyes and looked at Cal. He noticed and smiled at me. I did not feel strange lying there with him. He was like an old friend.
"For now, I shall give you something very special. It is a rare thing among us and not given lightly. You will learn its significance as time goes on. I'm doing it because you fascinate me. Because there's something important inside you. I don't know what it is yet. But I know it was no accident I found you." He leant on his elbow, over me. "This is called the Sharing of Breath. It is sacred and powerful."
I was nearly sick with fright as his face loomed above me, satanic with shadows. I closed my eyes and felt his breath upon me. I expected a vast vampiric drain on my lungs, pain of some kind. I felt his lips, dry and firm, touch my own. His tongue like a thread of fire touched my teeth. He called it a sharing of breath. My arms curled around his back, which was hardened with stress and muscle. He called it a sharing of breath. Where I came from, we called it a kiss.
Before dawn, before anyone would notice our leaving, Cal and I went away from the farm, Cal was riding the pony and I walked beside. I have never been far into the desert before and the vast stony wilderness spread out in front of us appalled me. We had filled every available and portable container we could find with fresh water and I had plundered my mother's larder mercilessly. I asked Cal why we had to branch out into the desert, why we could not follow the road. I did not think anyone from home would come after me. I felt sure Mima would stop them, somehow. Cal only replied that there was only one way to go and we were on it. He seemed to be in a bad mood, his voice was terse, so I did not press him further.
After maybe half an hour of walking, I stopped and looked back for the first time. On the horizon, the Richards' house bulked huge and desolate against the faintest flush of dawn. I could not see my old home, but I knew that presently Mima would be stirring. Would she know immediately what I had done? That I had realized her fears. I felt a needling pang of remorse. Maybe I should have left her a farewell note, some kind of explanation. Only we two had ever been taught to write; our father had known us to be the brightest of his children. Whatever I could have written for her would have been understood by her alone; a last shared secret between us. But it was too late now. Cal called me sharply. "Regrets already?" he asked cruelly, but his eyes were amused. I shook my head.
"This is probably the last time I'll see this place. I've never lived anywhere else ..." I finished lamely and began walking again, The desert had a peculiar barbaric beauty. Gray rocks rose like frozen dragons from the reddish, stony ground, and sometimes, strange warped plants sprouted rampantly like unkempt heads of hair or discarded rags. Lizards with flashing scales skidded away from us and wide-winged carrion-birds rode the hot air high above. By noon, it was too hot to travel and Cal unpacked a blanket to make a canopy. I was drenched with sweat because I was wearing all the clothes I owned. It was easier to wear them than carry them. The only shoes I possessed were canvas plimsolls, which I envisaged dropping apart after about three days. Luckily, the feet inside them were quite hardwearing. We stretched out under the shade of the makeshift canopy and ate sparingly of the food we had brought; cheese, fruit and bread. All our water tasted tepid and sour. Hungry insects gorged themselves dizzy on our blood.
I was still very wary of Cal. He appeared cheerful and easy going most of the time, but other times he drifted off into tense, quiet moods, when he stared fixedly at the sky. I could only guess at what he might have suffered in the north. Perhaps he had witnessed things I could not even imagine. Northern society had been disintegrating for years. Even we knew that, safe in our far-away farms. The people now had Wraeththu for a scapegoat. I could almost visualize the brutality that must go on in those gray, mad cities. The people must see Wraeththu as perverted wretches sinking further into decay. Perhaps I too had thought that for a time. Panic and fear blinded them to the cleansing lire that Wraeththu could be. From the ashes new things would grow; not quite the same as they had been before the fire. It annoyed me though, when Cal ignored me and angered me when he would not discuss his life with me. He thought I was naive and sheltered, I supposed, and had no experience to console him. At first, I also dreaded any physical contact with him. In the dark, in the middle of the night, his unexpected kiss had seemed a fitting start to my grand adventure. Here, in daylight, things were different. Most of my reticence, I admit, was due to a fear of making a fool of myself. I was not sufficiently bothered by sex to find him either attractive or repellent. I would accept Wraeththu proclivities because it was necessary if I wanted to be with them; it really did not arouse my interest. Perhaps Cal knew this. On that first day, it was as if what had happened in the night had never been. In my innocence I thought I understood the context of Wraeththu sexuality. It was this way or that way; nothing abstract. "Cal is strange, being around him feels strange, because he craves the bodies of his own kind," I thought cleverly. "That's all it is."
Once the sun had begun its way back to the horizon, we packed up our things and headed out farther into the desert. Far away, bony mountains rose like black spines into the lavender haze. Beneath our feet the ground had become more uneven and sharp stones plunged into my feet through my thin shoes. Cal rode ahead of me, staring into the distance. Annoyance and finally anger gradually unfurled within me. I was carrying a heavy bag of food; my back ached furiously, my ankles were grazed and bleeding and my skin was rubbed raw by sweat and sweaty clothes. There was no way I had begun this journey just to be Cal's unpaid servant. Caught up in a storm of selfishness, that was how I felt. Foaming with wrath, I threw down my baggage, which clattered onto the rocks. Surprisingly, Cal reined the pony in immediately and looked at me. I ranted for a while about my discomfort, feeling both hopeless and abandoned. Sheer willpower kept the tears inside me. "Pellaz, I'm sorry," Cal interrupted me. "Sometimes I don't think. We will take turns upon the pony. Come on." Stunned into silence, I sheepishly hoisted myself onto the animal's back, who immediately sensed an incompetent rider and began tensing its haunches. Cal swung the heavy bag of food over his shoulder and, holding the pony's bridle, walked beside me.
"You must forgive me for being insensitive," he told me. "I've been alone for months now. It's easy to forget how to share things."
I was going through a phase of being uneasy with him, which came about every two hours, and struggled for something to say. Eventually, "Where have you come from?" burbled out. He ran his hand down the pony's sleek orange neck, his face troubled.
"About ten miles north of your place, I came to a
nother farm. It was huge, expensive. You know—palm trees, verandas, drinks on the terrace, that sort of thing. They were into horses in a big way: and I was in a bad way. God knows what they thought when I lurched into their polite little tea-party! My arm was cut to the bone and stank like a carcase. I was sweating, swearing, hallucinating!" He laughed and so did I, but I did not think it was funny. "God, I was nearly dead," he continued. "Two days before that I had been traveling on the road with a friend. We stopped while I went into the bushes. We had a car, you know, and a whole tank of petrol. Anyway, I was only gone for a minute or two, but when I went back, the car was on fire and my friend was lying beside it—what was left of him. Raw meat! God! Two men, a woman and a child were watching. They didn't smile, not anything. But their hands were red with his blood . . ." I did not like him talking like this. My heart was beating fast and I wanted him to stop. I did not want to hear any more. It made me nervous and sick. He spoke of the life I had now chosen. I was so fickle; one moment I begrudged his silence, the next I loathed his confiding in me. He did not see me though, did not see my discomfort, just kept stroking and stroking the pony's neck and carried on exorcising his bitter ghosts.
"I ran and I ran and I ran," he said, his voice getting fainter, "and I fell, got up, ran and fell again. That's how I hurt my arm. I can't remember doing it..." He straightened up and smiled. "Anyway, I was lucky, the fine people at that very white, clean, prosperous farm weren't prejudiced. They knew I was Wraeththu, but they were only curious. Wonderful liberals. Fools. They cleaned me, fed me, healed me and then, can you believe it, even offered me a job! Decorative as the palm trees, that's me. It would have been easy to stay, forget who and what I was for a time, but I had to keep going. I couldn't stay. So I repaid their hospitality and kindness by stealing this very expensive pony—and money. Look." He burrowed in his shirt and held out a crumpled bundle of paper. Silver stripes in it caught the sun.
"You said you had no money!" I gasped in one of my common moments of pathetic innocence.
"I know," he said wryly, smiling, and put it away again. "We'll need money later, really need it. I wasn't going to waste it."
After that, the atmosphere between us improved greatly. He had not crossed the gulf, but at least he had thrown me a rope.
For many days we traveled towards the mountains, conserving our supplies as best we could and resting only when absolutely necessary. We were lucky to find water on several occasions and the pony was content to pick at the sparse vegetation along the way. On the evening of the seventh day, we clambered through the foothills of the crags. Plants were becoming fewer, so we gathered as much as we could carry to feed the pony later on. Cliffs reared black and gaunt in impressive silence toward the darkening sky. Splintered rocks littered the ground, and strangely, brackish, milky pools of water lay in the hollows of them. Cal warned me not to touch it. As there was neither brush nor wood to gather, we could not light a fire when we camped for the night. We huddled uncomfortably under a blanket, too tired to keep going, too discomforted to sleep. For the first time since that first night, Cal deigned to touch me. We sat with our backs pressed into an overhanging rock with the blankets swathed around us. Awkwardly, Cal had put his arm around me, more because he was feeling miserable than because he wanted to hold me, I think. I realized that now I was absurdly disappointed that he had initiated nothing physical between us. It is difficult to work out why I had changed my mind about that. I thought that Wraeththu were on the way to not being exactly human, and it was part of their glamor, I suppose, that forbidden and secret sensuality they shrouded in ritual and reverence. Cal had spoken only briefly of such things and then only dropping meager hints; to test my reaction, I think. He once said, as we lay in a sandy hollow at night, that I possessed a rare and stunning beauty. His words had come to me out of the darkness, I could barely see him, and I had laughed, too loud, immediately, in sheer embarassment
"Don't be ridiculous!" I had cried, more aggressively than I had intended, because I felt nervous, and just a little scared. He had smiled in a horrible, sneery way.
"Pell, that's one thing about you that is unattractive," he said. "You must know you are beautiful. It is more conceited to deny it. If you think that kind of modesty is becoming, you're wrong. It's just pathetically human. When someone tells you you're beautiful, you don't have to say anything at all."
I squirmed in humiliation for hours afterwards, and would not speak to him, but I knew he was right. Mima and I had always thought ourselves superior to all our peers, and not just in looks. But I had always thought
it ill-mannered to let people know that. Cal was of a different world. His kind are proud of themselves and because none of them are truly ugly, Wraeththu are never ashamed to admit they are beautiful. Only in a world where ugliness prevails is it a shame to be vain, a cruelty to appreciate loveliness in oneself. Just being around Cal kindled my sexuality. I must admit this worried me. Had I possessed, unknown within myself, the inclination to desire another male? Perhaps I was being subtly brainwashed, and yet... sometimes, when I looked at Cal, out of the corner of my eye, in the evening, in the red light, it seemed a woman stood there; a woman who might have green hair or wings; something strange, unearthly. Sometimes I was frightened, sometimes just confused. Was my mind losing its grip on reality? The heat of the desert. .. ? I was in awe of Cal's magic; that which I could sense beneath the surface and his precise yet languid movements; his cat-like pride in himself, called to me, softly but insistent, like an enchantment. His eyes mirrored an intimacy long-gone, but it was caught within him for ever. That night, crouched under the gaunt, black cliffs, I longed to touch his face, to make him look at me, instead of the middle distance where old memories replayed themselves on the night, but I could not bring myself to move. My previous life had been cut off and had floated away from me, Mima's face was fading and her hands were mere wisps that reached for me, but I was still young, inexperienced and frightened. The beast slept within me but I was not ready to wake it.
The next day, we made our way up into the mountains. Starting at dawn, we followed a winding, stony path between the rocks, always traveling upwards. Cal told me he thought that once water had flowed down the mountains and had cut this convenient little road for us. In that time, the desert would have been lush and fertile. People would have lived there. I wondered how long it had been since others had climbed this path. It might have been centuries. The mountains had been attacked by huge pressures. We passed through a canyon, so deep it seemed we walked underwater and, looking up, we could see stars. The sides of it looked as if they had been hacked by a giant axe. Huge, scrawny birds, wheeled high above us in the light, their ragged voices reaching us as mournful cries.
"They are lost souls who cannot give up this world," said Cal. "They will not pass to the other side."
I shivered, even though I felt he was joking. "Will we have to leave Red behind?" I asked. By this time, our pony had a name.
"Oh no, it's not very far now," Cal replied vaguely. "Look at this." He had found a fossil in the canyon wall.
A thought struck me. "Have you been this way before?" "Yes. Once."
My theory of us venturing into territory untouched by man for centuries abruptly evaporated. "Are we near Immanion, then?"
"Oh no, nowhere near." He was now sorting through some interesting stones that glittered pink and blue along the path. "Look at this. It could be anything." He held a rough crystal up to me. I was riding the pony more expertly now and it stopped when I wanted it to.
"Cal!" I said with a slight whine in my voice. "Where are we going?" My trousers had ripped at the knees because I had fallen over earlier in the day. While I waited for an answer he thoughtfully licked his forefinger and rubbed the graze on my knee.
"Hopefully, by tonight, we will reach the end of this pass. We will come to what looks like a vast moon crater mostly filled with a rather unpleasant soda lake. On the shores of that lake is a rough little Wraeththu town cal
led Saltrock. It's been there about eighteen months, and yes, I have been there before. I have friends there. Good friends who have pioneered their way to this hellish spot to build a safe haven. At the moment it's not much, but it will be . . ." He was annoyed with me. I can see why now, but at the time I went sulky. "Is that all you want to know?"
I shrugged in the most irritating way I could. Was that all I wanted to know? I wanted to know everything and he told me as little as he had to. I was a willing convert to the way of Wraeththu, yet I knew so little about them. Cal's alien strangeness had become familiar because I was used to him, not because I understood him.
By twilight, the cliffs suddenly fell away beneath us and we stood at the lip of what once must have been a waterfall. Two figures, almost completely covered in sand-colored cloth, appeared in our path. They were armed with long knives. I felt as if my heart had leapt into my throat and I jerked Red's head savagely. But Cal spoke softly to them and they melted away again. For once I held my tongue. A path had been hewn out of the rock to the valley floor. It was narrow and difficult to follow. A strange, acrid stench reached my nostrils as we descended. Only when we reached the bottom did I dare look up. Ahead of us a vast sheet of what looked like molten gold reflected the sinking sun. Steams and vapours coiled and leapt off the surface. Everywhere, grotesque mineral deposits stood like sculptures, the models for which I would not care to meet. The lake was ringed by mountains and not too far away I could see fresh water cascading down the black rock. Saltrock town, a ragged silhouette in the twilight, was lit by flickering yellow and orange fingers of flame.