Into the Wilderness: Blood of the Lamb (Book Two) (18 page)

What is the point in fighting?
Maryam tried a smile. “I've taught you too well. Now you're just as fierce as me!” She watched relief engulf Ruth's face, and sighed deeply to expel the last of the shakes. “But I still think you're totally wrong about Lazarus,” she added stubbornly.

“Just speak with him. Please. For me. I think you'll be surprised.”

“And I think you'll be disappointed.”

“Maybe I will…but maybe I won't.”

“Maybe when you see I'm right you'll leave me be.”

“I'll not leave you be if you go on refusing to eat or drink.”

Maryam shrugged. “You don't understand…when I think of food, it makes me sick.”

“Then don't think about it first! Just put it in your mouth and think of something else.”

“Like what? That Joseph is dead? That I dragged my best friend across the sea only to replace one kind of imprisonment with another?”

Ruth rolled her eyes. “Or maybe that despite the odds we're still alive?”

Maryam smiled at Ruth's about-face. “When did
you
become the strong, optimistic one? That job was mine!”

“That's right and don't forget it now!” Ruth grinned. “But you still have to find the strength to eat…and, by the way, you need to wash! You truly stink!”

This
Maryam did not expect. She laughed, and felt a little of the pressure inside her ease. “You don't smell so good yourself!”

Ruth sent her a beatific smile and pushed herself up to her feet. “I can't believe you'd be so rude!” She held out her hand to Maryam. “Come on, then…let's go find a place to wash!”

Maryam looked at Ruth's outstretched hand, thinking how it symbolised the choice that confronted her: between doggedly fighting on or ending the torment, now, through death. She closed her eyes, picturing this awful camp and what, no doubt, lay in store. But rather than convince her there was no point in persevering, the image chastised her for her selfishness. Now was not the time to leave her one remaining friend unprotected and alone. Even in her pain she knew that
this
was wrong. So, in the end, despite the emptiness inside her heart, she took Ruth's hand.

Maryam and Ruth were hovering in the doorway of their meagre room, trying to decide where they might find somewhere to wash, when a small dark-skinned woman approached them with a welcoming smile. She wore a long beige tunic and trousers, and her head was covered in a frayed white scarf that gathered loosely around her neck. Her eyes were large and very dark, bordered by a network of tired lines.

“My name is Aanjay,” she said in a soft unfamiliar accent. The fact that she spoke English—that
all
of them spoke English, yet each had their own peculiar way of forming the words—struck Maryam as she smiled in welcome. Why would this be? “You must be Maryam and Ruth.” The woman pressed her hands together as if in prayer and bobbed her head in greeting. “I have come to show you around the camp.”

Maryam returned the greeting as best she could. “I am Maryam and this is Ruth.” Ruth, too, pressed her hands together and nodded her head.

“I am so sorry you find yourselves here,” Aanjay said. “This is not a good place to be.” A wave of sadness rippled across her face. “Did you lose many others on the way?”

How could she have known this?
“Yes, our dear friend Joseph died.” She hated how saying the words aloud made his death seem so much more irreversible and real.

“Ah, to lose even one is hard,” Aanjay said. She turned then and beckoned them to follow her. “Come and I will show you around.”

They set off along the narrow pathway between the huts until they came to a large roofed shelter where a group of women dressed much the same as Aanjay were rinsing everything from dishes to babies in a row of rust-specked metal sinks. On the opposite side of the shelter stood a small free-standing building. The stench of human waste that came from it drew a cloud of large black buzzing flies that honed in on the children who dabbled in the dregs of water at their mothers' feet.

“These are your closest toilets,” Aanjay explained. Then she pointed to a line of partitioned cubicles beyond the row of sinks. “The water in the showers is salty and cold, but once a day they bring hot water in as well.”

“Showers?” Maryam asked. “What are they?”

Aanjay smiled. “Come and I'll show you.” She led them over to a cubicle and reached inside to turn a rusty tap. The two girls jumped backwards as water burst from the showerhead like summer rain. “The hot water arrives just after lunch. The first to use it find it much too hot, and the last too cold, but we make do. Only one tank is delivered to our area each day.”

Maryam had to concentrate hard to understand the woman's words. Her accent spun the sounds around in complicated ways. “How many are here altogether?” she asked.

“It changes all the time,” Aanjay replied. “People come and go, and many die.”

“You mean there's a chance we could get out of here?” Excitement lifted Ruth's voice.

“We are given a choice: stay imprisoned here or return home. For most of us, to go back home is certain death.”

“
No one
gets into The Confederated Territories?” Maryam asked.

Aanjay shook her head. “Unless we denounce our own faith and take up theirs, we have no chance. And, even then, it's very rare. They do not trust our kind at all.”

“Your kind?” asked Ruth.

“Buddhist, Hindu or Islamic…people of all the different faiths wash up here.”

“You don't worship the Lord and His Lamb?” Ruth backed behind Maryam, as if Aanjay could somehow do her harm.

“Faith is a choice, child. Here we try to respect every one.”

Maryam blinked back her surprise. She had no idea there were so many alternative faiths. Beside her, Ruth was bristling, so she spluttered out another question to prevent Ruth from antagonising Aanjay right away. She pointed to the row of taps. “Is this water good enough to drink?”

“It does not taste very good,” Aanjay said. “But after a while you will get used to it.”

Maryam crossed to an unoccupied sink and cupped her hand under the running tap. The water looked clean enough, but as she swallowed she pulled a face and the nearby women laughed behind their hands. Aanjay was right. It tasted foul. She slunk back to Ruth's side.

“What about food?” she asked.

“We have rice for breakfast and lunch, and a thin hot soup for our evening meal. Sometimes, if we're lucky, the chickens lay fresh eggs—and a group of us have tried to cultivate gardens to grow vegetables. But the phosphate in the soil is harsh.”

“Phosphate?”

“In the rocks. They used to mine it many generations ago. Now it blows around as dust.” She bent down and combed the white layer of dust with her fingers, then waved her hand under the
girls' noses. The scent of decaying eggs was much stronger now. “It is this dust that causes the smell.”

Maryam met Ruth's eyes. So
that
was the source. “How many people did you say were held here altogether?” Maryam asked.

“Right now about eight hundred…maybe more.”

“So many? From where?”

Aanjay shrugged. “All the islands in the sea. Life is very hard for all the generations who managed to survive the flares. Those of us caught up here desired a better life.”

“You came from a small island too?”

“Indeed. But, unlike many whose islands can no longer sustain them, my people seek to escape the tyranny on our shores.” She beckoned them onwards, moving with such grace her small feet barely seemed to touch the ground.

In the next courtyard a crush of women and children sat cross-legged eating bowls of lumpy rice. Maryam studied them shyly, struck by their many different shades: from the mellow creamy ambers of the fine-boned women like Aanjay to the same rich brown as she and Ruth—and some so dark their skin took on the indigo hue of midnight skies. Lazarus would be the outsider here, something he'd find hard to bear.

Maryam and Ruth squatted on the outskirts of the group as Aanjay volunteered to collect their lunch. It was a sobering sight: many of the detainees were so thin and frail it was hard to believe they received any food at all. Some rocked in a demented way, their eyes wide and haunted, while others stared into space with such desolation Maryam's pulse grew jittery at the sight. Many suffered weeping sores, a few the milky-eyed curse of the blind, and nearly all the grizzling children had tight protruding
bellies and bowed, painfully thin legs. Perhaps she had died and come to Hell already, here amidst the other disbelievers of the Lord? Only Ruth's presence contradicted this possibility, just as only Ruth still kept her from succumbing to the void.

When Aanjay returned with three small bowls of the rice, the girls fell hungrily upon their share. Above them, gulls reeled in the updrafts, seeming to taunt Maryam's inability to refuse the food as they called out their raucous symphony to the wild and free.

The heat of the day was building now, and her own stale body odours rose above the general stench. If only she was back home on the atoll, where old Zakariya would heat clean water for the metal bath and throw in a handful of the pandanus leaves to perfume it. How they'd all taken such luxuries for granted, never for a moment thinking life might not continue so comfortably or peacefully.

“Where are all the men?” Maryam asked, as she scooped the last few grains of rice from her bowl and licked them from her fingers.

Aanjay pointed off to their right. “Unless they're here with family, the men are kept apart at night. You'll see them start to mingle soon, when the last of the breakfast has been cleared away.” She gestured to the group. “We eat in shifts, as there is not enough room for all of us to join together in one place.” She lowered her voice, as though she risked being overheard. “The guards use divisions such as these to keep us from uniting to fight for our rights.”

“Has anyone ever managed to escape?” Maryam asked, thinking how her own people on Onewēre had also lost the will to fight.

“It is impossible,” Aanjay said flatly. “The guards patrol the fences and the people of the island here are far too scared to help. They, too, rely on The Confederated Territories for their survival—without the camp, they'd have no aid at all.”

“And the people of The Confederated Territories don't think this is wrong?”

Aanjay ran her finger around the rim of her empty bowl. “From time to time someone tries to tell our stories to their people, but even when they do it seems no one cares.” She met Maryam's gaze. “Those few of us who can speak English do what we can, but every week more like you arrive and others die until, one by one, we lose the will to fight.”

The rice in Maryam's stomach felt as though it had turned to stone. To be trapped in this place was to be caught inside a sticky web, suspended and helpless until the spider was due its next meal. And, sooner or later, she saw now, that meal would be her.

Maryam perched with Ruth in the doorway of the hut, teasing out the tangles from their long wiry hair. They had rinsed their heads in fresh water to rid them of the sticky coating left by the salt-water shower: it felt so good to be clean again. But the activity had stirred the pain in Maryam's arm, and she found it hard to block the throbbing from her mind.

The camp was busier now, men mixing with the women as the day progressed. “What I don't understand,” Ruth said, “is why we're being held here if the Territorials are Believers too? And Lazarus? He's a Believer
and
he's white. Why are they still holding him?”

Maryam shrugged. “I don't know.” She nearly added that she didn't care, but did not want to fight with Ruth. She stretched, looking for distraction. “Come on, let's take a walk.”

Ruth pulled back her hair and smiled. “Maybe we can find out where Lazarus is being held.”

“Maybe.”

She struggled to her feet, still weighted by the deep sense of exhaustion that had struck her down with Joseph's death. She didn't care about Lazarus, and she hated that he lived while Joseph did not. Despite trying for Ruth's sake to rouse herself from her despair, she couldn't shake the grief of losing him. And, in a way, she didn't want to—for to stop feeling his loss was to forget him, and she vowed that this would never be.

They wandered aimlessly down the dusty walkways, getting a measure of the vastness of the camp. It seemed to go on forever, bigger by far than all Onewēre's villages combined. Eventually they came upon a patch of cultivated ground where women and children toiled beneath the punishing late-morning sun to work the dusty soil. The plants were withered and their fruits were small, though the children worked intently to water each thirsty plant. The more Maryam saw, the more her horror of the place increased. The smell, the heat, the lack of fresh clean water, the misery of knowing they were trapped within these barren bounds…this camp was not a waypoint in some journey, it was the end.

By the time they'd circled the barracks and come back to the place where they'd first entered the camp, the sun had reached its highest point. The same group of men stood stock-still beside the gate, their accusing eyes locked on the guards through the netting of the fence. Up close, the rough stitching
of their mouths made Maryam's stomach churn all the more.
What kind of humans could do such a dreadful thing?

Beyond the fence, Maryam recognised one of the guards who'd brought them here. He glared back at the men, his fingers fidgeting with the mechanism of his gun. To Maryam's surprise, Ruth sidled over to the wire and called to him directly.

“Why have you done this?” Her voice shook with nerves as she pointed to the tortured men.

“Don't blame us,” the guard replied. “They've done this to themselves.”

Ruth's face grew pale. “But why?”

“Ask them yourself!” He chuckled at his joke. “The stupid rag-heads think that by starving themselves they'll shame us into giving in.” He snorted. “But they'll crack eventually—they always do.”

The men's bravery touched something deep inside Maryam. If they could fight in the face of so little hope, then so must she. Fury overtook her as she, too, challenged the guard. “We demand that you release us. We've done nothing wrong!”