The Fire Sermon. Francesca Haig

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СКАЧАТЬ was this shallow valley, the houses and the wooden barns grouped a hundred feet from the river, high enough up to avoid the floods that drenched the fields with rich silt each winter. But my dreams thronged with unfamiliar landscapes and strange faces. Forts that loomed ten times the height of our own small house with its rough-sanded floors and low, beamed ceilings. Cities with streets wider than the river itself, and swollen with crowds.

      By the time I was old enough to wonder at this, I was old enough to know that Zach was sleeping through each night, undisturbed. In the cot that we shared, I taught myself to lie in silence, to calm my frenzied breathing. When the visions came in the daytime, especially the roaring flash of the blast, I learned not to cry out. The first time Dad took us downstream to Haven, I recognised the jostling market square from my dreams, but when I saw Zach hang back and grip Dad’s hand, I imitated my brother’s dumbfounded stare.

      So our parents waited. Like all parents, they’d made only a single cot for us, expecting to send one child away as soon as we’d been split and weaned. When, at three, we remained stubbornly unsplit, our father built a pair of larger beds. Although our neighbour, Mick, was known throughout the valley for his skill at carpentry, this time Dad didn’t ask for his help. He built the beds himself, almost furtively, in the small walled yard outside the kitchen window. In the years that followed, whenever my lopsided, ill-made bed creaked I remembered the expression on Dad’s face when he’d dragged the beds into the room, setting them as far apart as the narrow walls would allow.

      Mum and Dad hardly spoke to us, anymore. Those were the drought years, when everything was rationed, and it seemed to me that even words had become scarce. In our valley, where the low-lying fields were usually flooded every winter, the river thinned to an apathetic trickle, the exposed riverbed on each side cracked like old pottery. Even in our well-off village, there was nothing to spare. Our harvests were poor the first two years, and in the third year without rain the crops failed altogether, and we lived off hoarded coins. The dried-up fields were scoured by dust. Some of the livestock died – there was no animal feed to buy, even for those with coins. There were stories of people starving, further east. The Council sent patrols through all the villages, to protect against Omega raids. That was the summer they erected the wall around Haven, and most of the larger Alpha towns. But the only Omegas I glimpsed in those years, passing our village on the way to the refuges, looked too thin and weary to threaten anyone.

      Even when the drought had broken, the Council patrols continued. Mum and Dad’s vigilance didn’t change, either. The slightest difference between me and Zach was anticipated, seized on, and dissected. When we both came down with the winter fever, I overheard my parents’ long discussion about who had sickened first. I must have been six or seven. Through the floor of our bedroom I could hear, from the kitchen below, my father’s loud insistence that I’d looked flushed the night before, a good ten hours before both Zach and I had woken with our fevers peaking in perfect unison.

      That was when I realised that Dad’s wariness around us was distrust, not habitual gruffness; that Mum’s constant watchfulness was something other than maternal devotion. Zach used to follow Dad around all day, from the well to the field to the barn. As we grew older, and Dad became prickly and wary with us, he began to shoo Zach away, shouting at him to get back to the house. Still Zach would find excuses to tail him when he could. If Dad was gathering fallen wood from the copse upstream, Zach would drag me there too, to search for mushrooms. If Dad was harvesting in the maize field, Zach would find a sudden enthusiasm for fixing the broken gate to the next paddock. He kept a safe distance, but trailed our father like an oddly misplaced shadow.

      At night I clenched my eyes shut when Mum and Dad would talk about us, as if that would block out the voices that seeped through the floorboards. In the bed against the opposite wall I could hear Zach shift slightly, and the unhurried rhythm of his breathing. I didn’t know if he was asleep, or just pretending.

      *

      ‘You’ve seen something new.’

      I scanned the cell’s grey ceiling to avoid The Confessor’s eyes. Her questions were always like this: phrased blankly, as statements, as if she already knew everything. Of course, I could never be sure that she didn’t. I knew, myself, what it was to catch glimpses of other people’s thoughts, or to be woken by memories that weren’t my own. But The Confessor wasn’t just a seer; she used her power knowingly. Each time she came to the cell, I could feel her mind circling mine. I’d always refused to talk to her, but I was never sure how much I succeeded in concealing.

      ‘Just the blast. The same.’

      She unclasped and reclasped her hands. ‘Tell me something you haven’t told me twenty times before.’

      ‘There’s nothing. Just the blast.’

      I searched her face, but it revealed nothing of what she knew. I’m out of practice, I thought. Too long in the cell, cut off from people. And anyway, The Confessor was inscrutable. I tried to concentrate. Her face was nearly as pale as mine had become over the long months in the cell. The brand was somehow more conspicuous on her face than on others’, because the rest of her features were so imperturbable. Her skin as smooth as a polished river pebble, except for the tight redness of the brand, puckering at the centre of her forehead. It was hard to tell her age. If you just glanced at her, you might think her the same age as me and Zach. To me, however, she seemed decades older: it was the intensity of her stare, the powers that it barely concealed.

      ‘Zach wants you to help me.’

      ‘Then tell him to come himself. Tell him to see me.’

      The Confessor laughed. ‘The guards told me you screamed his name for the first few weeks. Even now, after three months in here, you really think he’s going to come?’

      ‘He’ll come,’ I said. ‘He’ll come eventually.’

      ‘You seem certain of that,’ she said. She cocked her head slightly. ‘Are you certain that you want him to?’

      I would never explain to her that it wasn’t a matter of wanting, any more than a river wants to move downstream. How could I explain to her that he needed me, even though I was the one in the cell?

      I tried to change the subject.

      ‘I don’t even know what you want,’ I said. ‘What you think I can do.’

      She rolled her eyes. ‘You’re like me, Cass. Which means I know what you’re capable of, even if you won’t admit it.’

      I tried a strategic concession. ‘It’s been more frequent. The blast.’

      ‘Unfortunately I doubt that you can have much valuable information to give us about something that happened four hundred years ago.’

      I could feel her mind probing at the edges of mine. It was like unfamiliar hands on my body. I tried to emulate her inscrutability, to close my mind.

      The Confessor sat back. ‘Tell me about the island.’

      She’d spoken quietly, but I had to hide my shock that I had been infiltrated so easily. I’d only begun to see the island in the last few weeks, since the final trip to the ramparts. The first few times I dreamed of it, I’d doubted myself, wondered if those glimpses of sea and sky were a fantasy rather than a vision. Just a daydream of open space, to counteract the contraction of my daily reality into those four grey walls, the narrow bed, the single chair. But the visions came too regularly, and were too detailed and consistent. I knew that what I had seen was real, just as I knew that I could never speak of it. Now, in the overbearing silence of the room, my own breathing sounded loud.

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