The Crippled God

Children. Walking past.

Yet no one was here — no one but me.

They were wending their way out of the city — hundreds upon hundreds of children. Stick-thin limbs and bellies swollen with starvation. As he watched the procession, he saw not a single adult among them.

Mappo walked on, catching glimpses in the crystals of their brief occupation, their squatting presence amidst palatial — if cold — splendour. Icarium, I begin to understand. And yet, cruellest joke of all, this was the one place you could never find again.

Every time you said you felt close … this city was the place you sought. These crystal machines of memory. And the trail you hunted — it did not matter if we were on another continent, it did not matter if we were half a world away — that trail was one of remembering. Remembering this city.

He went on, piecing together the more recent history, the army of children, and many times he caught sight of one girl, her mouth crusted with sores, her hair bleached of all colour. And huge eyes that seemed to somehow find his own — but that was impossible. She was long gone, with all the other children. She could not be-

Ah! This is the one! Voicing songs of incantation — the banisher of the d’ivers. Opals gems shards — this is the child.

He had come to a central square. She was there, looking out at him from a tilted spire of quartz. He walked until he stood in front of her, and her eyes tracked him all the way.

‘You are just a memory,’ Mappo said. ‘It is a function of the machine, to trap the life passing through it. You cannot be looking at me — no, someone has walked my path, someone has come to stand before you here.’ He swung round.

Fifteen paces away, before the sealed door of a narrow structure, Mappo saw a boy, tall, clutching a bundled shape. Their eyes met.

I am between them. That is all. They do not see me. They see each other.

But the boy’s eyes pinned him like knife points. And he spoke. ‘Do not turn away.’

Mappo staggered as if struck.

Behind him, the girl said, ‘Icarias cannot hold us. The city is troubled.’

He faced her again. A boy had come up beside her, in his scrawny arms a heap of rubbish. He studied the girl’s profile with open adoration. She blew flies from her lips.

‘Badalle.’ The tall boy’s voice drifted past him. ‘What did you dream?’

The girl smiled. ‘No one wants us, Rutt. Not one — in their lives they won’t change a thing to help us. In their lives they make ever more of us, but when they say they care about our future, they’re lying. The words are empty. Powerless. But I have seen words of real power, Rutt, and each one is a weapon. A weapon. That is why adults spend a lifetime blunting them.’ She shrugged. ‘No one likes getting cut.’

When the boy spoke again, it was as if he stood in Mappo’s place. ‘What did you dream, Badalle?’

‘In the end we take our language with us. In the end, we leave them all behind.’ She turned to the boy beside her and frowned. ‘Throw them away. I don’t like them.’

The boy shook his head.

‘What did you dream, Badalle?’

The girl’s gaze returned, centring on Mappo’s face. ‘I saw a tiger. I saw an ogre. I saw men and women. Then a witch came and took their children away. And not one of them tried to stop her.’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ Mappo whispered. But it was.

‘Then one rode after them — he wasn’t much older than you, Rutt. I think. He was hard to see. A ghost got in the way. He was young enough to still listen to his conscience.’

‘It wasn’t like that!’

‘Is that all?’ asked the boy named Rutt.

‘No,’ she replied, ‘but he’s heard enough.’

Mappo cried out, staggered back, away. He shot a look back and saw her eyes tracking him. And in his skull, she said, ‘Ogre, I can’t save you, and you can’t save him. Not from himself. He is your Held, but every child wakes up. In this world, every child wakes up — and it is what all of you fear the most. Look at Rutt. He has Held in his arms. And you, you go to find your Held, to fill your arms once more. Look at Rutt. He is terrified of Held waking up. He’s just like you. Now hear my poem. It is for you.

‘She made you choose

which child to save.

And you chose.

One to save,

the others to surrender.

It is not an easy choice

But you make it every day

That is not an easy truth

But the truth is every day

One of us among those

You walk away from

Dies

And there are more truths

In this world

Than I can count

But each time you walk away

The memory remains

And no matter how far or fast

You run

The memory remains.’

Mappo spun, fled the square.

Echoes pursued him. Carrying her voice. ‘In Icarias, memory remains. In Icarias waits the tomb of all that is forgotten. Where memory remains. Where he would have found his truth. Do you choose to save him now, Ogre? Do you choose to bring him to his city? When he opens his own tomb, what will he find?

What do any of us find?

Will you dare map your life, Ogre, by each dead child left in your wake? You see, I dreamed a dream I cannot tell Rutt, because I love him. I dreamed of a tomb, Ogre, filled with every dead child.

It seems, then, that we are all builders of monuments.

Shrieking, Mappo ran. And ran, leaving a trail of bloody footprints, and on all sides, his reflection. Forever trapped.

Because the memory remains.

‘Will you ever tire, Setch, of gloom and doom?’

Sechul Lath glanced across at Errastas. ‘I will, the moment you tire of all that blood on your hands.’

Errastas snarled. ‘And is it your task to ever remind me of it?’

‘To be honest, I don’t know. I suppose I could carve out my own eyes, and then bless my newfound blindness-’

‘Do you now mock my wound?’

‘No, forgive me. I was thinking of the poet who one day decided he’d seen too much.’

Behind them, Kilmandaros asked, ‘And did his self-mutilation change the world?’

‘Irrevocably, Mother.’

‘How so?’ she asked.

‘Eyes can be hard as armour. They can be hardened to see yet feel nothing, if the will is strong enough. You’ve seen such eyes, Mother — you as well, Errastas. They lie flat in the sockets, like stone walls. They are capable of witnessing any and every atrocity. Nothing gets in, nothing gets out. Now, that poet, he removed those stones. Tore away the veil, permanently. So what was inside, well, it all poured out.’