She thought again of the gods now high above her. Those faces were no different from her own face. The gods were as broken as she was broken, inside and out. Like her, they wandered a wasteland with nowhere to go.
The Fathers drove us out. They were done with children. Now she believed the fathers and mothers of the gods had driven them out as well, pushed them out into the empty sky. And all the while and far below the people crawled in their circles and from high up no one could make sense of the patterns. The gods that sought to make sense of them were driven mad.
‘Badalle.’
She blinked in an effort to clear her eyes of the cloudy skins that floated in them, but they just swam back. Even the gods, she now knew, were half-blinded by the clouds. ‘Rutt.’
His face was an old man’s face, cracked lines through caked dust. Held was wrapped tight within the mottled blanket. Rutt’s eyes, which had been dull for so long that Badalle thought they had always been so, were suddenly glistening. As if someone had licked them. ‘Many died today,’ she said. ‘We can eat.’
‘Badalle.’
She blew at flies. ‘I have a poem.’
But he shook his head. ‘I–I can’t go on.’
‘Quitters never quit,
And that is the lie we live with
Now they walk us
To the end.
Eating our tail.
But we are shadows on glass
And the sun drags us onward.
The Quitters have questions
But we are the eaters
Of answers.’
He stared at her. ‘She was right, then.’
‘Brayderal was right. She has threads in her blood. Rutt, she will kill us all if we let her.’
He looked away, and she could see he was about to cry. ‘No, Rutt. Don’t.’
His face crumpled.
She took him as he sagged, took him and somehow found the strength to hold him up as he shuddered with sobs.
Now he too was broken. But they couldn’t let that happen. She couldn’t, because if he broke then the Quitters would get them all. ‘Rutt. Without you, Held is nothing. Listen. I have flown high-I had wings, like the gods. I went so high I could see how the world curves, like the old women used to tell us, and I saw-Rutt, listen-I saw the end of the Glass Desert.’
But he shook his head.
‘And I saw something else. A city, Rutt. A city of glass-we will find it tomorrow. The Quitters won’t go there-they are afraid of it. The city, it’s a city they know from their legends-but they’d stopped believing those legends. And now it’s invisible to them-we can escape them, Rutt.’
‘Badalle-’ his voice was muffled against the skin and bone of her neck. ‘Don’t give up on me. If you give up, I won’t-I can’t-’
She had given up long ago, but she wouldn’t tell him that. ‘I’m here, Rutt.’
‘No. No, I mean’-he pulled back, stared fixedly into her eyes-‘don’t go mad. Please.’
‘Rutt, I can’t fly any more. My wings burned off. It’s all right.’
‘Please. Promise me, Badalle. Promise!’
‘I promise, but only if you promise not to give up.’
His nod was shaky. His control, she could see, was thin and cracked as burnt skin. I won’t go mad, Rutt. Don’t you see? I have the power to do nothing. I have all the powers of a god.
This ribby snake will not die. We don’t have to do anything at all, just keep going. I have flown to where the sun sets, and I tell you, Rutt, we are marching into fire. Beautiful, perfect fire. ‘You’ll see,’ she said to him.
Beside them stood Saddic, watching, remembering. His enemy was dust.
What is, was. Illusions of change gathered windblown into hollows in hillsides, among stones and the exposed roots of long-dead trees. History swept along as it had always done, and all that is new finds shapes of old. Where stood towering masses of ice now waited scars in the earth. Valleys carried the currents of ghost rivers and the wind wandered paths of heat and cold to deliver the turn of every season.
Such knowledge was agony, like a molten blade thrust to the heart. Birth was but a repetition of what had gone before. Sudden light was a revisitation of the moment of death. The madness of struggle was without beginning and without end.
Awakening to such things loosed a rasping sob from the wretched, rotted figure that clambered out from the roots of a toppled cottonwood tree sprawled across an old oxbow. Lifting itself upright, it looked round, the grey hollows beneath the brow-ridges gathering the grainy details into shapes of meaning. A broad, shallow valley, distant ridges of sage and firebrush. Grey-winged birds darting down the slopes.