Old Green World (7 page)

“You don’t deserve this, love, you don’t deserve any of this,” Aengus whispered against his ear. “You’re a good boy. I’m so sorry.” With each word, Aengus’s affectionate speech became less speech and more breath against the back of Albert’s neck. Around the point of “I’m so sorry” it had become mostly just rough lips on his skin.

Albert lay there silently for a minute, not sure what to do. He thought about Thomas. Thomas’s love was his childhood table, so natural that he had never noticed its contours, its peculiarities, its boundaries. Now, he was amazed that he had never seen the chasms around it or beneath it. He was in the same place, a familiar place, but in another world.

He flipped over and kissed Aengus. Aengus’s face was soft and stubbly. It felt nice. After that, he just let everything happen.

The solid gray sky spat rain as they landed. The wind froze them and tossed the boats as they crossed the channel, and, when they landed, it kicked up muddy sand and blew it on their faces.

Albert looked back from where they had come. They’d spent far less time on the water than he’d expected. He had never been away from the White Island, and, in his mind, Terra Baixa was the other side of the world. Really, though, it was nothing between them; he could look across the water and still see the cliffs of the land they had left.

As they brought the boats ashore, he found himself staring across the water, until the commander shouted, “Make a perimeter!” and slapped him on the back. He gave himself a little grief for not being alert.

They had marched for six weeks, starting in Eden-town and heading down the White Island coast. They had walked through the midlands, and through the North Umbrian lands, where the oldest and biggest trees in all of the White Island stood. They had gone past one of the hot places, where the people before the end had kept infernal machines, where the machines had collapsed and their fires had tainted the very ground. Over time, the hot places had lost their fundamental sickness, but they were still strange, treeless places. The one they visited in North Umbria had been peaceful and uninhabited. They crossed it on a sunny day; the sun shone down on the grasses and heathery crags, and they could see butterflies and bees as they walked.

The forest kept them company through the whole march. It sat always to their right, its trunks and canopy and animals and eternity hiding beyond the tree line. “I wonder if the forest changes as you go south, like the coast does,” Aengus had asked Albert, as they stared into the green.

“Sure it does. I don’t know exactly how, but it has to, like anything else.” Albert said. “I guess that’s what makes Eden-town and Over-town special. That’s the best road from east to west on the White Island, isn’t it? It’s the only place where we can imagine just going right west. Otherwise, it’s all like here. Stuck between the woods and the water.”

Aengus smiled then, and looked a little less weary. When they had started the march, Aengus was full of jokes and vigor, but then he began to complain about the walking, the orders, the monotony, and the blisters on his feet. His complaints had gotten gradually louder and more frequent, until the commander yelled at him to shut up.

He and Albert shared a tent, but the romps of the first few nights had turned into long, worried heart-to-heart talks, and then the quiet, worn nights of the final weeks.

“I’m so tired, but I can’t sleep,” Aengus would say to Albert, who had been trying. Albert turned over and watched Aengus staring up at the roof of the tent. “This is the right thing, we’re doing the right thing,” Aengus reassured himself. “But I’m so tired. Are we even going to be able to fight like this?”

“Let’s try to sleep,” Albert said. Albert looked at Aengus and tried to picture the boy at the farm who drank ale on the porch and acted confident and cantankerous to make Albert feel better. Aengus was so much better at comfort than he was, Albert thought. They didn’t need to trade.

They found some respite in village stops along the way—King’s-town, and North-town, and Inland-town. They were all like Eden-town: kindly, hardworking people, small, cozy squares, and happy, safe children. Everyone was excited about the effort. Militia from each town joined them as they went, until Albert lost count of the troops. Kids would follow them out of town and cheer. In King’s-town, a little girl gave him a drop biscuit, like his father used to make. It was wrapped in a little cloth napkin, with butter and honey. He squinted through his wet eyes and thanked her.

The terrain turned to marshes. They came to the estuary of the Dark River, where it met the sea. A boat full of Adepts waited there for them. The Adepts had sailed from their home, the White Island’s Old City. The boat was taller than a house, and its wood glowed a burnished deep gold in the setting sun. It stood between Albert and the sun as he and Aengus took their small pinewood dinghy across the river to the south shore. It would follow them the rest of the march.

Finally, they made it to the launch site at the Headland. They could not have set out farther north, as the land rose into the cliffs and no one disembarked from the Abyss. It was very bad luck.

The Abyss was a decaying stone wall, not far upcoast from the Headland and built before the apocalypse. Someone or something had carved great round openings into the wall that led straight to hell. The Adepts disputed the existence of hell, of course, and claimed that you could travel through the caves to Terra Baixa. Albert had heard that the Old People had powers to travel through magic doors, and he wondered if the Adepts were trying to sell a similar idea. But he knew, regardless, that it was madness. Nothing that went into those holes came out, and to even be there was to tempt demons. Everyone knew that.
 

The militia stopped at the Abyss on the way. Albert wasn’t sure why. He thought it might be some sort of ritual. Maybe they had to face the horror of the Abyss to gain courage, so that they would stay strong in Terra Baixa. Or maybe, he thought, they needed to connect to what they were before the Old People arrived, before there were Adepts and farms and houses. Maybe they needed to remember when they were savages, like the Baixans, not so long ago.

They all stood in front of the holes, in front of the wall and the doors to hell. Then the commander, the hard-ass who had shouted them all the way down the coast—the hard-ass who was taking away Aengus’s soul, bit by bit—the commander screamed at the Abyss, just screamed at it. The troops gradually joined in, until hundreds of them were yelling at the wall, at the wounds in the world that shouldn’t exist.

The Abyss took all the wrath of five hundred young soldiers taken from quiet lives and brought to an effort that barely made sense. In the middle of the screaming, Albert turned to look at Aengus and mouthed, silently,
This is crazy
, and Aengus, with a look of overwhelming relief, mouthed back,
I know!
Albert realized he had pulled Aengus back from a lost place just then. He’d done something worthwhile that day.

After the yelling died down, a cadre of officials—Adepts, Administrators, and a little man, one of the Old People—appeared on horseback at the top of the Abyss hill, facing the soldiers. Albert thought,
That one looks like Thomas
, and then realized that it was.

Thomas and his mother had left for Over-town the same time he and Aengus had started marching. The last time he saw Thomas was the morning he went to do business with Lady Newton.

“What is this about?” Aengus asked as Albert left the farm.

“There are things to do with the bank after your parents die. I think she’s going to give me the money my father gave to the bank.”

“Do you need a bag to carry it?”

“I don’t know. I’ll borrow one if I do.”

When he approached the house, he had seen Thomas staring at him from the upstairs window, but it wasn’t Thomas at the door. Mister Ewan showed him to Lady Newton’s office. Lady Newton didn’t mention Thomas but was very friendly. Mister Ewan brought them tea. It turned out the money was his now, and he could just leave it in the bank.

As they finished their business, they heard a sudden crash and a call from Mister Ewan. “Oh, no! Oh, milady, come quickly, the supper for tonight, I think it’s ruined.”

Lady Newton pursed her lips, tapping them with the stylus. “Albert, just a moment, please. I should attend to whatever he’s on about.” She left him in her office. He drummed his fingers, then looked at the paper she had asked him to write on for the bank. The writing didn’t make much sense. Then, Thomas came in.

“Thomas? What’s going on?”

“She wouldn’t let me come down to see you. I asked Mister Ewan to create a distraction.”

“You’re a grown man,” Albert said.

“Could you shame me later? We have two minutes at most, and I’m leaving for Over-town at the end of the week.” He took Albert’s hand. “I’m sorry I haven’t visited. I miss you.”

“I miss you, too,” Albert said. Then he felt something hot rise inside him, and he let it say: “But what does that matter? With marriage and war going on. Are you not going to get married because you miss me? Does missing me turn me into someone you can marry?”

Thomas just stared at him.

Then the voice coming from Albert said: “Maybe we could just leave. Maybe we could walk away and go live in the woods. That’s what we’d have to do, isn’t it? Are you ready to leave it all? I’ll try if you want to.”

Thomas looked away. He was supposed to say, “Yes, of course, Albert, yes,” but he didn’t.

Albert crossed his arms and said, “Exactly. So let’s stop acting like children and try to act like citizens.”

Lady Newton burst back in and said, “Thomas,” much more loudly than anything Albert had ever heard her say before.

“What did you say to him?” Thomas shouted at her. “I hate you.”

Albert turned to Thomas. “I’ll write you. We’ll figure something out.” He then turned to Lady Newton and said, “Please don’t take this out on Mister Ewan. He was only trying to help.” Then he showed himself the door.

He told Aengus all about it that evening on the porch. “They were the closest thing to family I had left,” he said. “Now it’s all ruined.”

“They’re still your family,” Aengus said. “You’re just upset. You’re going to miss them. You should have said a more proper good-bye.”

“There’s no point in it. Everything’s different now.”

“You can’t just leave what you two have. You’re kidding yourself.”

Albert looked at him. “What do you mean, ‘what we have’?”

“We were all in school for years, Al. Everyone knows. It’s best to be honest about it. It’s fine, I don’t mind.” Aengus looked away from Albert.

And then, there at the Abyss, Thomas stood before them, surrounded by importance. His bearing had changed: he wore the armor of the White Island and held a confident, grave expression over the troops. Albert tried to catch Thomas’s eye, but there were too many people, was too much noise, too much hell, between them.

During the crossing to Baixa, as he bilged the dinghy that Aengus tried desperately to steer, Albert stared across the channel, at the boat that held the Adepts and Old People and Administrators. He wondered if Thomas was on it. Even in the wet grayness he could admire the boat’s size, the quality of its polished wooden hull. A carved horse’s head graced the bow. When the militia landed, the big horse boat sat at the center of everything, soldiers milling around it.

“Half of us help them out, while the rest of us fend for ourselves.” Albert said.

Aengus shrugged, then moved to help another soldier who was fighting his boat out of the waves. Suddenly, the commander jumped onto Aengus, pushing him away from the boat and screaming.

“No! No! You
make a perimeter
! That’s not your boat. What the hell are you
doing?
You . . . make . . . a
perimeter
!” Aengus, flustered, tripped over his own feet and fell over. The commander, continuing to scream, kicked him.

That was enough.

Albert came up behind the commander and swept his leg. The commander fell to the ground while Albert drew his sword.

The commander rolled away from Albert and hopped back up to a crouch. He snarled and drew a knife. The commander was older than Albert, maybe as old as Lady Newton or Albert’s parents. Albert realized that the commander had probably been born in the forest. He might have even grown up in the forest. When he went to battle, he didn’t even think of the sword: he’d rather wrestle and stab with knives. Albert laughed. This would be easy.

The commander lunged forward with his knife, but Albert was already out of the way. He kicked the commander in the back, putting him face-first into the sand. The commander rolled over onto his back, but now Albert’s sword was at his throat.

“You try anything stupid right now, and it’s over. Stay down.”

“I’ll kill you,” the commander said.

“I doubt it. If you tried, I would kill you first,” Albert said. “You might as well just drop that idea.

“All of your . . . behavior is going to stop. Stop harassing us, and start acting like a leader. If you say no, I’ll run you through.”

The commander glared at him.

Albert said, “Take your time if you aren’t sure which way to go. I’m not in any hurry.”
 

“Traitor!” the commander said. “Brat. Fucking Baixan. You’re going to be strung up for this.”

“That isn’t helpful,” Albert said. He pressed the blade into his neck a bit, making a little dent.

The commander’s eyes welled. He howled at Albert in rage, a mad look in his eyes. Albert moved the sword to the right of his Adam’s apple, just afield of the jugular, and pressed in, just until the skin was broken. The mad eyes widened and glazed over in helplessness.

They were surrounded by soldiers. All of them murmured to one another, but no one did anything. Then a little man emerged from the crowd, one of the Old People. Albert had always known about the Old People, from school and from stories, but he’d never seen one until the Abyss. He thought this might be the same one. The Old Person looked frail and small, only six feet tall.