The Annual Migration of Clouds Page 10

  Koda brings her hand down.

  For a split second, none of us moves. Then Rene bounds down the slope, and I leap after him, using the butt of my spear as a third leg, trying to keep the trap intact like we were told. From the corner of my eye I see Aldous and Emil take off, Gabriel’s shiny head moving above them all, adjusting to their pace.

  It’s not till we’re down and shouting at the pigs and slapping the branches that I realize there’s a gap: Henryk. And by then it’s too late.

  We’re yelling, the pigs shrieking and stomping ahead of us, spinning, and in their spinning seeing two gaps, one containing three heavily armed humans, and one containing only the thawing forest and their own familiar footprints.

  The babies break first, vanishing with terrified squeals. “You son of a bitch!” someone shouts, at Henryk, I think, who I can’t even see. Did he run back up the hill? Faint? Is he lying in the dead grass? “You son of a bitch!” It’s Gabriel, upset, not angry I now see but frightened, as the rest of the pigs spot the gap and bolt after their young.

  “Close up!” Aldous yells, and Rene and I barrel towards the pigs coming our way, hoping they will see the gap vanish. They must, must reverse towards the hunters: Elle and Koda, McKinnon and his pig-sticking spear. “Close! Turn them! Quick!”

  The herd screeches to a halt as we flail our spears at them, digging their hooves into the churned dust and leaves; Rene is coughing, unable to catch his breath, the tips of his spears waving wildly back and forth. The pigs scream as he jabs at them, they back up, and for a moment I think we’ve done it, we’re doing it, we’re back on the plan, they’ll run towards death.

  Then he falls, and one of the big sows barrels towards the opening, blocked by nothing more than his supine body.

  “Back, back, yah!” Waving a spear behind me, I run to Rene, his brother shouting along with me, the rope whirling through the air, slapping water from the branches above us. How blue the sky is, how black the traceries of limbs.

  My spear connects with hair and hide, so hard I am sure for a second that I have broken my wrist, pain shooting up to my shoulder; I switch hands and thrust at their faces, seeking to steer them, not to kill. I hope they know that. I want to explain it. A blur of thundering legs, the stench of their bodies, pigshit, blood, dust.

  “These two! These two! Let the rest go!”

  I can’t tell who’s screaming. A man, anyway. Henryk’s is the only voice I would know. Which two?

  But Emil knows, and circles at once, the thick plastic rope weighted with stones whipping around his head, dust rising, falling. The released pigs thunder past, buffeting but not targeting me, and I almost allow myself to feel a moment’s relief . . . until Rene begins to rise, teeth gritted, mouth full of blood, fighting what, I don’t know — the dust, the fear, his disease — and one of the big boars, shockingly, inevitably, pivots and heads for him.

  “Reid!” Aldous, gripping his spear and thrower. I am horrified to see a black arrow sprouting from his shoulder, more than a foot long. He moves as if it is not there. “Get out of the way!”

  Emil is running for his brother just behind Aldous, the rope loose now, coming to kill, thinking only of the fallen. “Get down!”

  The boar hits all three of them.

  Screaming, cracking. In the commotion I cannot even see faces, only that a slender body is flung into the trees, and then something knocks me flat with sickening speed. I crash into the brush, instinctively rolling into a ball, covering my face. Something closes around my ankle, hot and wet, and then I am tossed back into the light, time slowing down just as it did before. Just as when I

  (it)

  saw the dogs.

  They were right. Right. The disease. Everything in me, every muscle, every nerve, wants me to curl up and play dead. I cannot reach for my spears. A sow has my leg in its mouth; in a second she will bite down, as she should, because I threatened the babies, and if bloodloss does not kill me today, blood poisoning will kill me within the week.

  And I left no true will. No love note for my mother. Only the heap of yarn scavenged from the garbage of the old world. Only that.

  “Reid!” A pleading note in the fluted treble. I am the closest to Aldous and Rene now, I think, and the boar is vulnerable, distracted, but I can’t, I can’t move, I am trapped and aside from that, I am trapped, doubly trapped, paralyzed from within. I’m sorry, I want to scream back. But it won’t let even my lips move. Stay silent, it says. Stay alive.

  No! Let me go!

  Kavanagh soars out of nowhere, screaming at a pitch so high that I can only hear the barest edge of it, and looses three arrows into the sow as quickly as I could shoot one. His arms are a blur, reaching back, nocking, drawing, releasing.

  And something within me pauses in astonishment, watching this, and that gives me the chance, a split second before it notices again, to jerk my ankle free and snatch at my bound spears — one, two. It takes me a while to rejoin the others, collapsing into the dust at first on a leg that will not hold me.

  Not broken, I tell myself. Not broken, don’t you dare be broken. It is not, and I’m up again and running back towards the dust and the heavy milling shapes, and someone is at my side — Emil, grim-faced and bloodied. At the last moment he closes his hands around the spear I hold, throws his weight behind it at the same moment I do, easily, effortlessly, like a dance, and we slam into a hairy thrashing side like a ton of bricks.

  Things gallop past us and vanish. I collapse next to the carcass with my spear sticking out of it, and something razor-edged seems to catch in my throat — the dust becomes a glass-edged burr, and I cough and cough without budging the obstacle, it only becomes sharper and larger till my stomach convulses and I spit a few mouthfuls of vomit, and then at last the coughing stops. Everything dims for a moment, gradually returns to blue light. Emil lies at my side, facedown. I nudge him with my boot till he wearily rises.

  Blood gleams in the little pool of puke I left behind. I look at it just long enough to confirm what I’m seeing, and then walk back to the others.

  We have taken three pigs — the sow studded with Kavanagh’s arrows, the boar Emil and I speared, and an enormous sow with no fewer than ten spears sticking out of it. I can barely bring myself to approach our boar, even though it is dead. Its gaping mouth is filled with blood, the tongue indistinguishable in the red. White bone gleams where a spear-thrust glanced off and only flensed it instead of penetrating.

  The pigs, too, have taken three.

  Gabriel lies clearly dead, his skull trampled into pulp, torso gored in stripes of unbelievable violence and depth, as if someone had gone at him not with a blade but an auger. His tusk necklace on its tough leather is intact though, and sparkles with obscene purity on what remains of his chest.

  Rene Dufresne too has been run through and run over, unconscious, though he is still breathing, a ragged, bubbly sound. I am terrified that the third body facedown in the mud will be Henryk, but it is Aldous, moaning low and constant. Elle makes to roll him out of the dust, at least take the weight off the arrow that is slowly working its way through his shoulder, and Koda barks for her to stop: his back is broken.

  Jesus. Jesus fuck.

  At last something sinks in through the shock, something descending through tainted water. Aldous, our fastest hunter. At school so fast he seemed to lift off and fly around the track, leaving the other kids behind panting, pitifully earthbound. His hair streaming behind him shiny as a flag. Caught at last, by pigs. Of all things. Because of our incompetence and plain bad luck.

  Someone is tugging at my coat; I turn in anger, because if it is Henryk, I swear to God — but it is Koda, weary, I think unhurt, two tear tracks slicing dramatically down her cheeks through the dirt. She is pushing something into my hand. I look down, and jump as something looks back at me: watery brown-red eyes surrounded by inky curls, a cut in the eyebrow drooling fre
sh blood. A mirror. My face.

  “Can you climb?” Koda says hoarsely, gesturing at one of the dead poplars near the killing ground.

  No, I want to say. Probably not.

  But I take it, and I try. And just as in the church, the invader fights me, trying various strategies — pulling me back to the ground, curling my hands into fists, giving me vertigo, even darkening my vision — but as it pauses to reassess each effort, inch by inch I snarl and snap and make it up the tree, and sit in the crotch of a branch, flashing Koda’s message to the station across the river, calling for help, asking them to amplify back to the station at campus. No mention is made of success.

  12.

  As is tradition, Gabriel’s share of the meat is offered to his survivors — his wife and father. Both decline, so as is also tradition it is given to the Dining Hall. The rest of us keep ours. From three pigs it is an impossible weight; Koda sends a runner with a soap-smelling note bearing the exact amount on it in pounds and kilograms, and her stamp as the pledge, while I am in the hospital getting washed up and stitched closed. I carefully put the note in my pocket so that I do not disturb this process. Dr. Gagliardi does not like the sow bite on my ankle, which broke the skin.

  “I don’t like it either,” I point out.

  “You, don’t talk.” She growls faintly as she sews, and I stare at the wall; I think watching her sew me up would be one thing, but I cannot for some reason stand to look at a curved needle doing so. There is a faded poster behind sun-yellowed plastic that details all the parts of the ear and the inside of the nose, which is at least something to read.

  She mutters, “Goddamn kid. What were you thinking, going on this? Why am I wasting thread on someone so fucking stupid? This is gonna go bad. Guarantee it. You could lose your leg.”

  She does not add: I mean to say your life. You only have so much blood in you.

  I know, I want to reassure her.

  I try to feel terror about the impending ordeal — the creeping gangrene, the pus, the stench, the fever, and then those frenzied minutes on the operating table, strapped down and screaming around the gag — but it all feels incredibly far away. Maybe I did not deserve to be admitted to Howse, and maybe I did not deserve to be invited to go on the hunt, but Dr. G is right about one thing I do deserve: to die for it.

  The leg is nothing. You can get by fine with a non-whole number of legs. There should be a more sinister punishment for being a murderer. And there is. The gallows only just taken down. They should have kept it up.

  True, I do not know how much of the death and disaster down there was my fault through inaction or action. How much was simply the well-oiled machine of the other hunters working around two scared and inexperienced kids. How much was the Cad. How much was my fear. How much was luck, wind direction, phase of the moon. I don’t know, but I feel certain, I feel surety, in my gut, in my bones, that none of this would have happened if I hadn’t come. And if it is the disease making me so certain, if it is making me think this and be unable to tell that it’s not me thinking it, I should die. I can’t live with something in there insinuating itself into my thoughts in a way that I cannot flag. It should know that.

  A lot of people with Cad do die by suicide, of course. It’s all up there on the board. It’s considered a natural cause of death if you have Cad. It is barely considered death in fact, only the silent withdrawal of a token future.

  Listen. A long time ago, the people of Back Then put people on the moon; and later, they put people on Mars. Just a handful, fired there on ultrafast graphene-silver quantum torus engines. Twelve astronauts, American and Russian and Japanese and Chinese, and they inflated a shiny white hexagonal building, and they drove around exploring and taking samples and measurements, and they answered questions for schoolkids in video chat, and they recorded thousands of hours of their daily lives, and then one day they asked, “When is the next supply ship arriving?” and instead of a date the answer was “We’ll get it to you, don’t worry.”

  Because the world was on fire. The whole world was on fire and starving and at war, and no one could launch anything. And one day the astronauts opened up their video chat and said, “There are still supplies left, but we do not want you to watch what happens next,” and they turned off all their communications.

  I don’t know why I’m thinking about that. Maybe it’s the Cad again. Go somewhere dark, it says. Secret. Or I’m saying it. I don’t know. Go somewhere dark and secret, and die. It is not unjust, untimely, not a tragedy, it is not bad. It is natural and good. Cats do it. Dogs do it. Have to look in dark closets and hidden cabinets when someone’s sick pet disappears.

  Dr. G finishes, washes her hands again, washes my foot, swathes it in bandages, pins them savagely on, still muttering to herself. The grey in her hair is a galaxy. The whole Milky Way, distracting me from the throb. The rest of my cuts she declares trifling, though they are full of forest debris and need a lot of scrubbing to clean out. “They’ll scab,” she says shortly. “Get out of here. I’ll see you again tomorrow to look at that bite. Go talk to reception about times.”

  Outside, I bump into Emil, dazed-looking, scratched and scabbed all over, bleeding slowly onto the floor through the bandages the medics hastily wrapped down in the valley. There are chairs, but he leans against the wall as if it makes a difference. An enormous rope burn around his arm is so raw and weepy that I flinch to look at it. His sleeves hang in tatters.

  I nod to him, but he stops me as I walk past, his hand on my wrist tight and hot so that I look up at him, immediately fearful. He’s lost a tooth: that lovely white canine. His lip is split below it, black and plump. “Where is the boy.”

  “What?”

  “The boy you came with,” he says slowly, his gaze not leaving mine. “The one who broke the circle. Him.”

  “I don’t know.”

  He squeezes my wrist, hard, but it is the work of a moment to twist it towards him and so free myself. But I don’t step back. Fucking touch me again. Try it. We are just about nose to nose, breathing each other’s rank and rotten breath, full of bile, dead adrenaline, swallowed blood.

  “You know him,” he says. “I’ve seen you with him. I know I have. Where is he. Where does he live.”

  “Enough. You stay the fuck away from him.”

  Big words, as I limp away, stiff with pain and pride. Big words. Because I want to fucking kill Henryk too.

  13.

  When I finally find him, hidden in the basement of the Chemistry building, my anger has dissipated; because I know he wanted to be found. He hid here knowing that I would find him. In silence, shamed, he evades my gaze, and nods meekly when I suggest we go outside.

  The crowds of people that would normally be congratulating the boar hunters, singing the songs of celebration, negotiating to buy or beg meat to smoke for the Farrowfair, never materialized. No one sang a single note for us, even when the three huge bodies were displayed in the open of the quad. Now that, that they should have left the platform up for. Undeniable murderers. Not alleged. Justice in some way served by letting people see the carcasses.

  That had been hours ago. I had gone to find my mother, dragging myself up and up the endless steps, but she had not been there, and Yash and Maliah were gone too. No one spoke to me.

  Henryk saw her, though. We sit on the cement steps of the Chem building in the gathering dusk; I am lightheaded, I have not eaten even one bite from my hundreds and hundreds of pounds of kill. It’s good to sit down. I stretch my bandaged leg out in front of me.

  He says, “She came to my office. Said she went to the soapworks to look for you, but she didn’t find you. Hours ago. And then someone told her about the hunt.”

  “You. You told her about the hunt, you mean. Because you can’t keep your fucking mouth shut about anything. Anything in the whole world.”

  He curls in on himself, a spider in a flame, arms going arou
nd his knees, face burying in his thighs. No reply. When I first found him he was folded up like this: as if I were going to kick him across the room. His face bright red and splotchy from crying.

  “She didn’t go back to our place after that. And Yash and Mal are gone too. I don’t even know if they’re together.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Gabriel is dead,” I say after a long time. A magpie hops on the steps in front of us, hopefully, only its white parts visible. People must eat here. Toss it scraps. “The boy with the tusk necklace. He was married. Aldous has a broken back. And Rene Dufresne is in a coma. They’re saying he might never wake up. Skull fracture.”

  He raises his face, wet with fresh tears. “It’s all my fault. I . . . I don’t know. I was standing there. With my spear. Watching the rest of you. And all of a sudden, I was running, trying to be quiet . . . it was like something in a dream. Where you have to escape something big, but you’re small, and you know you can find somewhere to hide that it won’t see you. I wasn’t even thinking. Not until I was halfway up the Drop, and I heard everybody screaming behind me, the pigs screaming, you all screaming. And I knew I couldn’t come back down. I kept going. Came here. It’s all my fault. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “I froze. Me and Rene both did. It’s our fault too.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “Look,” I say, gritting my teeth, “please shut the fuck up for just a minute. You weren’t there. You don’t know what happened.”

  He snuffles into his sleeve and clutches himself, shivering on the cold steps. I can’t believe he volunteered to come. Just like that. Knowing that it might end like this: that it was more likely than not to end like this. He’s the smart one, supposedly, out of the two of us. I can’t believe I ever thought he was my anchor to anything, anything, knowing that he would look at me in danger, and drop his weapons and run lightly away so that no one would hear him. Even now, his sobs are strangely distant. Background noise. Like the hum of a crowd.