35. Chapter 35
ELLIE
Iwas a long way down in the dark, and the dark had a texture to it, the way deep water has a texture when you sink far enough that the light stops reaching.
I understood, in the distant way you understand things from that far down, that I was dying.
It didn't frighten me as it should have.
That was the strangest part of the whole strange sinking, that the terror I'd have expected simply wasn't there, and in its place was a great grey tiredness, an exhaustion so complete it felt almost like peace, the pull of a body that had carried something too heavy for too long and had finally been given permission to set it down.
The thing I'd held my whole life had gone out of me on the earthquake morning, poured into the ground to save the people I loved, and what little remained had curdled somewhere in the emptying and now sat sour under my breastbone, a spoiled thing turning slowly against the body that carried it.
I could feel it doing that. I could feel myself failing around it, as a fire fails when the last of the fuel burns down to nothing, and the grey tiredness said, gently, that I could stop now.
That I'd done enough; that no one would blame me for setting it down and letting the dark close over.
I almost listened to it, God help me. Some nights on that road, sunk as far down as I'd gone, I came close enough to setting it all down that I frighten myself now, remembering.
What kept me from it was not courage. I want to be honest, here at the bottom of everything, because I'd spent a whole life dressing my failures up as virtues and I hadn't the strength left for it anymore.
It wasn't courage that held me; it was my men.
I surfaced sometimes, in windows, and the windows were how I marked the passing of a journey I mostly slept through.
I came up once into cold grey light and the rock of a body carrying me, and it was Daska, his heartbeat steady under my ear, his arms a certainty I'd have known in any dark; he was talking to me.
He talked to me whenever he carried me, I'd worked that much out across the windows, a low even murmur, telling me the small ordinary things, the lie of the land ahead, the game sign he'd read, the weather coming.
He never once made it heavy. He never begged me to stay or wept where I could hear it, because he knew, as he knew everything about a body, that a person sinking needs a reason to rise and not a weight to drag them further down.
So he gave me the road instead. He gave me the plain steady facts of a man who meant to keep walking east until either the healer or the dark got to me first, and he wanted me to know the shape of every mile in case I chose to come back for it.
I came up another time to warmth against my other side, and it was Rivik, and he was singing.
The old song, the hunting-song, the one he'd taught me on a spring hunt a lifetime ago and sung across a killing river when they took me.
He sang it low against my hair, and I hadn't the strength to hum it back as I once had, but I felt it reach the place in me that was still listening, and I held onto the thread of it as it wound down into the dark after me.
That song had come for me before, when I was cargo on a slaver's wolf and certain I'd never be found.
It came for me now, down where I'd gone, and it said the same thing it had said then, in a language older than the words.
We were coming for you still; we had never once stopped coming.
You are not lost to us, it said, however far down you go.
I came up a third time to a fire in the snow and a golden face bent over a cooking-stone, and that one I didn't understand at first, because the shape of it was wrong.
Tau was the one cooking, of all people. The king who'd never fed anyone in his gilded life was kneeling in the snow over my scavenged flat stone, swearing softly at it, coaxing broth out of some small kill with the fierce clumsy concentration of a man doing a sacred thing badly and refusing to do it any less.
He lifted me when he saw my eyes open. He got a little of the broth into me, patient past anything I'd ever seen in him, and I understood, in the window before the dark took me back, what I was being shown.
All my life I'd fed people because being useful was the only way I'd ever found to feel worth keeping.
And now, too far gone to lift a spoon, I was being fed, by a king on his knees in the snow, by a bear teaching him the fire, by a wolf saving me the softest scrap of the kill.
The love I'd spent a lifetime pouring out and never once letting back in was pouring into me now, whether I'd earned it or not, whether I believed I deserved it or not, and there was nothing left in me strong enough to refuse it.
That was the thing they were trying to tell me, in the windows, each in his own language, Daska with his steady road, Rivik with his song, Tau with his broth, the same thing said three separate ways. Stay here with us; you are worth the staying. Come back up to where we are.
I wanted to, and the wanting itself was new. Somewhere in the long dark of that carrying, wanting to come back had become a thing I could feel again, faint but stubborn about it, the way warmth returns to a limb you'd thought was dead. I just wasn't certain, yet, that wanting would be enough.
There were others alongside; I caught them at the edges of the windows, as you catch shapes at the edge of a fever.
Megan walked when she could and let the others carry her when she couldn't, her belly round and high now under the loose hides, that stubborn spark of new life she carried holding on through the cold as its mother did.
She came to me at the fires. She'd take my hand and hold it, talking to me as you talk to someone you're not sure can hear, and once, surfacing, I heard her telling me I wasn't allowed to do this, that she had not crossed twenty-five thousand years and made an actual friend for the first time in her adult life only to have me die on a mountain before the baby came.
I owed her, she said, and she was calling the debt in.
I'd have laughed if I'd had the breath. The woman Nathan chose over me, the enemy I'd been handed at the start of all this, sitting in the snow gripping my hand and refusing, in that clipped competent voice, to let me go.
We'd saved each other somewhere on these roads, she and I.
Neither of us had planned it; it might have been the truest thing either of us had.
Dev was always near. The small carrier, the only other soul alive who knew what I'd spent and what it was costing me, kept himself close to the litter and close to the fires, and when I surfaced I'd find his worried face already turned toward me, checking, as he'd checked on the reserves the whole journey; he knew what I'd done.
He was the only one who fully did, that I'd poured out the thing the whole mission depended on, that what I'd saved and what I'd doomed were the same act, that the sum of it might not come right ever again.
He never once reproached me for it. He'd have made the same choice, I think, if the collapse had been under his hands instead of mine, and he carried the knowing of it alongside me so I didn't have to carry it alone.
And then there was Nathan. Nathan was there too, at the far edge of every window, and the strangeness of him was one of the last things I had wits enough left to wonder at.
He was quiet now. The cold certainty that had run him my whole life, the ledger where he kept his heart, had gone quiet somewhere back in the ruins of the pride.
What was left was a man who did the hard mile without a word, fetching and carrying, keeping his distance from me and doing the work anyway.
He didn't come to my fire; he didn't take my hand as Megan did.
But once, deep in a window I wasn't sure was real, I surfaced to find him crouched a little way off, watching me with an expression I had never once seen on him in the years I'd loved him and the years I'd hated him, something that might have been grief, or might have been the beginning of understanding what he'd thrown away on a bright stage two years ago, or might have been nothing at all but the firelight on a tired face.
I couldn't read it, and hadn't the strength left to try.
So I only noted it, as I noted everything in those windows, and let the dark take me back down before I could decide what it meant.
The question was always waiting for me, down in the dark. It was the one thing that followed me all the way to the bottom.
Did you doom them all?
That was what it amounted to, the thing the grey tiredness kept turning over while I sank.
I'd spent the power meant for the rift. I'd poured the world's one cure into an ice-age fault to hold a settlement together and save a woman and a child, and the sum the whole mission had crossed twenty-five thousand years to balance would not balance now, because I'd emptied the greater part of my half of it into the ground.
Dev's face had told me the truth of it in the dust. There might not be enough left, between the two of us, to heal the thing we'd come to heal.
And if there wasn't, if the rift stayed open and the drain went on and the modern world died the slow death it had been dying when they sent us back, then it would be because a broken woman couldn't do the cold arithmetic, couldn't weigh the many against the one and choose the many, couldn't be, in the single moment it mattered most, anything other than exactly what she was.