White and Other Tales of Ruin

We stay silent for a while, me waiting for her to talk, Jade sniffing and wiping tears away from her cheeks. She cannot meet my gaze, her hands will not touch me. We are islands separated by a deep sea of knowledge. I am waiting for her to let me take the plunge.

“Right,” she says, standing back and preparing herself. She looks into my eyes. Suddenly, I don’t want to hear what she is going to say. Out of everything possible, any words, that is the last thing I want to hear. Because it is something terrible. “Right,” she says again, wringing her hands. I swing my legs from the bed in readiness to flee the tent, steal the moat-boat and make my escape before she can say any more. But String is standing in the doorway. I pause, my heart thumping inextricably clean blood around my body, but find myself too scared to enjoy the sensation.

“Shall I tell him, Jade?”

She shakes her head. “It’s about time I levelled with him, I think.” I sit back down. Jade steps closer until we are almost touching.

“Gabe, the cure that String gave you is distilled in the presence of the tomb, under the mountain, in the realm of the flight of birds, from the brain fluid of the dead.” She turns away and looks pleadingly at String.

I feel empty, emotionless, a void. I should feel sick, I suppose, but I’ve had far too much of that already. I’m shocked, but somehow not as surprised as perhaps I should be. I feel disgust, but second-hand, as if this is all happening to someone else. “Oh,” is all I can say.

“All things must be made use of, Gabe,” String says, a note of desperation in his voice as if he’s trying to persuade himself as well as me. “It’s a new world. If humanity wants to go and slaughter itself, then at least I can bring some small measure of good from it.”

“Did you kill them?” I ask. It seems the most important question to me, the pivotal factor that will enable me to handle what has happened, or not.

“What?” String seems surprised. He could just be buying time.

“Did you kill them? All the dead people I saw last night. Being taken into the mountain. Did you kill them?”

“No.” He looks me in the eye, his gaze unwavering. He smiles grimly, tilts his head to the side. “No. You heard them killed, so Jade tells me. You saw them dying out there, alone, in the heat. We just use the raw material.”

“Brain fluid?” I am filled with a grotesque fascination in what has happened to me, abhorrence countered with a perverse fascination. I wonder briefly how he knows of the cure — how he discovered it — but shove it from my mind like an unwanted guilt.

String nods. “Yes. I won’t tell you the details.”

“Good,” Jade murmurs. “Gabe, come here. Come here.” She throws her arms around me, hugs me to her. I can feel her tears as they drip onto my shoulders, run down my chest. It feels good.

“Are you leaving?” String says.

“Damn right!” I don’t believe I could stay here.

He smiles, and this one touches his eyes. “Good.” He turns away.

“String.” He glances back, squinting either at the sun or in preparation for whatever else I’m going to say. “Thank you.” He nods as he walks away.

Later, Jade and I leave. The moat-boat takes us across the broken glass. I realise that I have never considered what the moat is intended as protection against; now, I do not want to know. I try to avoid standing on the darker patches in the wood, but they are everywhere, and it is almost impossible.

String is nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he is beneath the mountain, beyond the place of books in the cavern that the birds know all about. Brewing.

Tiarnan has had the trike oiled and serviced. This time, on the way back down the mountain, we take it in turns.

PART FIVE: THE SUBSTANCE OF THINGS I

“Sometimes, you’ll have to put up with bad things to accept some good,” Della said. “‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth’, and all that. Sometimes, you may not understand how good can come from events so terrible. But there are places we were never meant to see, ideas we were never meant to know. Even if it’s a person doing these things, it’s with blind faith, not pure understanding. Maybe that’s why it’s so special.”

She was in her garden again, stubbornly wheeling herself between fruit bushes, plucking those that were ripe, cleaning the others of the greasy dust that hung constantly in the atmosphere. I was following on behind her, bagging the fruit and wondering what she was going to do with so much. There were only so many pies she could make.

“I can’t see how any good has come of the Ruin. Millions have died. The world’s gone to pot.” I thought of the marks on my chest, slowly growing and expanding. I had still not told her. “Millions more are going to die.”

She looked up at me from her wheelchair. “If you see no good in the Ruin, it’s ‘cause you’re not meant to. Me, I see plenty of good in it.”

“What? What good?”