of a soldier. And a soldier son. And that is as true as that you owe me a death. Or a life. However you wish to name it, it is what you owe to me.’
‘I owe you nothing!’ Soldier’s Boy shouted at him and his words echoed in a distant cave. He was braver than I was. His hands darted out to seize two great handfuls of the croaker bird’s plumage. He gripped the bird and shook him, shouting, ‘I owe you nothing! Not a life, not a death! I owe you nothing!’
Far away, someone shrieked and then the croaker bird took flight, laughing like a mad thing.
Cold water splashed Soldier’s Boy’s face. It was a shock, and with a shudder he opened our shared eyes. He blinked, trying to focus, and lifted a shaky hand to wipe at his eyes. Olikea was angrily untangling her hair from his fingers. A waterskin on the ground beside him gurgled out its contents. It took a moment for him to make sense of it, and then the unjustness of it broke his heart. ‘You threw water on me,’ he wailed accusingly, and he sounded like a weepy child. His voice shook with weakness.
‘You ripped out my hair when I was trying to give you a drink! And if you think you owe me nothing, then consider that I owe you less than nothing!’
I could barely make out her features. The fire had subsided to a dim red glow. The body was cold and ached badly. Olikea looked tired and haggard. I became aware that strands of her hair were still tangled in my fingers. I’d ripped them out of her head. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, aghast, and then was shocked when the words actually came out of my mouth.
‘Olikea!’ I began, but abruptly lost the power to speak. I could feel Soldier’s Boy’s anger at me thrumming through his body. He was weak and ill and tired. His strength was barely enough to confine me. I stopped struggling against him. I was listening to Olikea’s words.
‘We are out of food, and there is scarcely any firewood to be found. We must go on to the Wintering Place. Can you walk?’
It was hard for him even to think about it, his head ached so. ‘I can’t quick-walk. Give me water.’
She picked up the slack waterskin and held it for him. He drank, and was surprised at how thirsty he was. It cleared the thickness from his mouth and throat. He felt more alive. ‘You are right,’ he said when she took the water away. ‘We need to move on from here. Even if I cannot quick-walk, we should try to move on.’
She nodded grimly.
Likari suddenly loomed up out of the darkness behind her. He carried an armful of salvaged wood. ‘It’s hard to find anything in the dark – is he awake now? Are you better?’ He leaned unpleasantly close. Soldier’s Boy involuntarily drew back from the boy’s looming face and closed his eyes. ‘Did you find a name? When babies make this journey, it is often their naming journey. Did you find your name?’
‘Nevare,’ he croaked out, then angrily shook his head. Once. Shaking his head made the world spin. He lifted his hands to his face. The skin of it was hot and dry and tight. He rubbed his eyes; they were crusty.
‘Nevare is the name you had before,’ Olikea observed tartly. ‘And I do not think you were wise to do this. We are ill prepared to spend time here waiting for you to recover.’
‘I am not interested in whether you think I am wise or not.’ He placed his hands flat on the cavern floor. He turned onto his belly, got his knees under him and finally tottered to his feet. He tried not to let her see the effort it cost him, but when she took his arm and put it across her shoulders, he didn’t have the will to resist her.
‘Likari, bring our things and whatever you have scavenged that might be useful.’ Olikea sounded sceptical that we would get far but eager to try. Plainly she wished to be out of the dank cave. She and the boy had to be at least as hungry as Soldier’s Boy but neither complained.
‘I do not have the strength to make a light for you,’ Soldier’s Boy grudgingly admitted. ‘We will have to travel in the dark.’
‘There will be light enough for us to make our way, once we are away from the fire,’ Olikea asserted.
That puzzled me, but Soldier’s Boy seemed to accept her statement. Likari had gone to fill the waterskin and retrieve our blanket. He returned with it slung over his shoulder. He had also bundled together the bits of firewood he had scavenged and tied them with a leather thong so that he could carry them easily. He came to Soldier’s Boy’s other side and took his hand. Without ceremony, he set my hand to his shoulder, as if confident he could take some of my weight. With no more ado, we set forth.
The dim red glow of the fire quickly faded behind us and we walked forward in darkness. Soldier’s Boy was content to let Olikea lead him, and she seemed confident of the way. So many others had trodden this path for so many years that it was flat and smooth. Soldier’s Boy did not think of such things. He focused simply on moving his body along. Fever ran over his skin like licking flames. The places where he had pierced his skin with the crystal itched. He scratched the heads of the scabs off and fluid leaked from the swollen cuts. He decided that he had been foolish to use the crystal, yet in the same thought, doggedly determined that his act and the pain and fever that followed it were necessary. His joints ached, and his head pounded with pain. The desire to lie down and sleep soon became a pressing need, one that was even stronger than the hunger that assailed him. Yet both had to be ignored as he pressed on towards his journey’s end. All thought became a narrow focus on walking. Ghost light crawled and danced at the edges of his fevered vision. He squeezed his eyes shut, opened them, and then blinked again, but could not banish the dots of sickly luminescence. He tottered on.
Gradually I became aware that the ghostly light was not an illusion. It occurred in patches and in tiny moving dots. It was a pale, creamy green and sometimes a white-blue. The blue lights were the ones that moved. When one hummed up to us, hovered near my face and then flittered away, I recognized that it was some sort of underground lightning bug. That knowledge helped me to resolve what I was seeing. The greenish patches became a glowing slime or moss on the cavern walls. The blue insects frequented such patches, eating or drinking perhaps, and adding their light to it until they were sated enough to take flight again. The softly lit patches of gentle green seemed to occur at almost regular intervals. I decided that whatever it was, moss or plant or slime, the Specks had deliberately marked their trail with it as a dim light to show the way for travellers. I admired their innovation at using such a natural material even as I wondered at their lack of planning in other regards. I thought of my own beloved cavalla, and knew that if this were a path we used frequently, there would have been caches of firewood and food. I wondered if the Specks did not care for one another in that way or if they had simply never thought of such things.
I became aware of something far more important to me. In his weariness and pain, Soldier’s Boy was focusing all of his resources on staying upright and walking.
He was not guarding against me.
My first impulse was to attempt a coup against my oppressor and regain control of the body. Luckily, I swiftly realized that it would leave me in the position he was now occupying: feverish, full of pain and battling hunger. But if I remained quiescent for now, it might be that he would lose even more of his wariness of me, and that when next he slept, I could at least dream-walk on my own. And so I curled small within the prison of my own body and awaited my opportunity.
Soldier’s
