Chapter 2 Door of the Moon
DOOR OF THE MOON
IN ALL OF its preceding features, the day replicated the others before it. Baker awoke as the adults in the cripples’ cottage hobbled to work or beg. Valentine ushered her out to attend to her job at the local cobbler. After hours of arduous, dusty labor, she picked flowers from the fields nearby.
She spent so much time in the fields, the other children in the village had accused her of living in them.
With tangled vines of sun-bleached hair and a deep constellation of freckles across her nose and cheeks, she found it hard to disagree.
The fields were her stage to act out stories of love, romance, and heroism, and under the derision of the other children, she told herself that she adored the fields because she was part tree and part nature spirit.
She’d stolen her skin from the wheat, her hair from the sun and her eyes from the earth.
She danced and cast silent spells with her hands, and the other children didn’t quite know how to make fun of her after that.
Part of her enjoyed believing her own tale, looking out at miles of gently rolling hills checkered with crops that rotated each passing season.
Fort Kit was a remote village and the crops were one of the few things that ever changed.
The horizon never staged coming travelers.
Nothing ever left town but the sun, and even that they could expect back each morning.
It was the reason the presence of a visitor caused a stir. That, and Valentine’s enraged yelling from the cripples’ cottage. Baker stood at the cottage threshold she’d crossed a thousand times before, now with a fistful of yellow wildflowers clasped to her chest.
The sheer volume of Valentine’s voice vibrated through the doorway, causing Baker to miss the words he’d spoken.
If she was his mischievous, ragged cub, he was her groveling, protective bear, and in such a way he looked wounded, heaving in the center of the cottage. Pearls of sweat lingered on his thick, red beard, teeth bared in a snarl. His back looked broken into a hunch, as if he’d been shot in the gut.
“I’m not something you fix!” Valentine yelled to the stranger standing in the center of the cottage, back to her, the inky silhouette like a phantom.
To Baker he became Death. She’d always imagined that Death lived near Fort Kit, sneaking in late at night to take souls like it had when illness struck last winter.
Perhaps Valentine was such a respected man that Death had come for him in broad daylight.
Valentine stumbled away, peg leg clattering through empty bottles of alcohol. Startled by the sound, he took a sharp limp back and flailed into a cot. His body thrashed as if wrestling an invisible opponent. Other strangers inched forward from the back of the room.
“No!” Valentine objected and the roar of his voice burst forth like a lion’s.
His fighting settled, and now he looked at Death with a wicked glare.
Baker had never seen him wear such hateful eyes, and his speech matched the look as if Valentine had been arrested in a dark trance.
A strange and complete calm settled on him, and from it marched the words, “They always come from the North and the North is always there.”
“Hold him, now, hurry!” Death commanded as if Valentine were casting a spell, and the strangers in the room rushed.
Valentine’s voice carried higher with the melody of a chant. “Prophets of Madness, the Strike, the Strike, the broken arrow always points North!”
She felt the recoil of terror in her chest as if Valentine had finally crossed a line he’d only walked in the past. No one in their village spoke openly about Madness or those who were said to channel it.
Valentine had once said that the very idea of their existence permeated everything like radiation, forbidden secrets vibrating through the rocks, trees, and air.
“They always come from the North, and the North is always there!” He screamed now, and she wanted to cover her ears, but her arms felt frozen beside her.
Each repetition of the phrases rang like a nail in his coffin, truths he’d only ever whispered to her in bitter secrecy when he’d been drinking. She never understood their meaning but sensed their gravity.
The group knocked her aside as they pushed toward the door, Baker dropping her flowers across the floor before they wrestled Valentine through them.
She sat up on her elbows, staring at her flowers with a grave sense of loss as his heels made two paths in the dirt. They dragged Valentine toward a compact bundle of trees in a nearby field.
He shouted so loud that he drew a collection of villagers, fighting a cloth as they wrestled it around his mouth.
Baker watched the drama of the play escalate with the beat of her heart, her feet glued to the dark obscurity of the audience as she lay where she’d been cast along with the trampled flowers she’d picked for him.
Terror arrested her into a trance as she heard the drama play out.
“Tie them up and toss with tar!” Valentine shouted out. “Frostbitten fingers play the chords. Burn! Burn, the Strike! The broken song sings on! They come from the North, and the North is always there!”
The cloth sunk into his mouth, and he groaned through it as if the dreadful song had been trapped inside him for years.
She felt the groans inside her soul, her body locked in place like a cage that forced her to watch the scene unfold.
The group kept him in the field, but there was no violence, just stillness as they stood around him.
One member of the group hunkered down on a knee and appeared to be speaking with him as his thrashing tired into heaving desperation.
As he settled, so did her heart, and at last, she was thawed from her frozen state to look around.
Baker glanced back to see Death sitting on a cot with a look of defeat on his face. She could see him better now, with dark brown hair that dusted his shoulders. He had a bag with him, full of black vials, and she knew what that meant. She’d heard stories of traveling doctors.
It seems he wasn’t Death after all, but perhaps not far off.
She focused her attention back on Valentine.
He was sitting alone on a stump, his chin sunk to his chest, the others gesturing with their hands as if reasoning with him. They offered him something to drink. He stared at the flask for a long time and then, with a trembling hand, drank it.
Baker looked back as the doctor gathered his things to leave. He glanced over at her on his way out, and said, “What about this one?”
“She’s mute and dumb,” a woman said behind her, “hasn’t said or written a single word since she showed up here a couple years ago and doesn’t seem to understand most things anyway. It would be a waste of Amnesia. Almost a waste of rations.”
The doctor didn’t question it, and neither did Baker as he moved on. She craned her head down the street to see him galloping between the houses, out of sight into a setting sun.
He was the first person she knew to travel to the village since she’d arrived. He became the first person to leave it just as fast. The doctor’s visit lingered like an obvious black crack through the sensible monotony they all lived in.
She glanced down the streets. People hustled to dinner meals and final errands.
The stranger’s visit had disrupted the flow of their world.
Baker spotted a boy chasing a dog between two carts. She heard someone laughing. Nothing seemed as different as she felt.
Had no one else just seen what she had?
Baker curled up against the door frame of the cottage with one of the untrampled flowers between her fingers, her other hand clutching the muddled brown clothes she wore day in and day out.
One by one, the men and women filtered back through the door, some knees bumping her as they entered.
Valentine was the last to come back from the field, a picture of exhaustion from his gait to his face.
He waved her over with a gesture of his finger and sat down on the cot near the entrance.
She rested the flower on his knee, stepping back across the threshold to give him space to accept her gift.
Picking it up mechanically, he twirled it between his calloused fingers.
She waited in the silence they often shared, waited for the real man to come back from sitting out there on that tree stump. He was still holding the flask they’d given him in his other hand.
She lifted a hand and grabbed his knee, an invitation for him to speak.
Valentine’s eyes emptied for a second, and she knew that instead of urging some form of action, she’d sent him into his old life again.
When he blinked back into this one, it always seemed like he came back with less of himself.
Baker caught a familiar smell on his breath as she remembered the doctor’s black vials.
She knew now what he drank. Her heart twisted.
They called it Amnesia, a tonic blended from a type of native root that had been mutated by Madness. It was a tonic that made people forget.
Baker must have had it once before because her past before Fort Kit was nothing more than flashing images of her parents and a birthday or two.
She didn’t know how she’d ended up in this fort, far away from the rest of the world, but here, they all drank Amnesia.
Most people no longer remembered where they’d come from or how long they’d been here.
Valentine whispered hoarsely. “Is this the only way?” he asked, resting his hands back on his lap. The flower slipped from his fingers, but he made no move to retrieve it.
For a moment, she reached into that near-empty box of her past, pulling out her fragmented memories like moth-eaten fabric.
She imagined she was like him and that she remembered what lay behind the mountains. No one seemed to know anymore. She wondered why he’d come to the village in the first place if he’d wanted to be so free.