“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?”
Della sighed. I wanted to hold her, comfort her, protect her. But I knew I never could. “Look at all that,” she said, indicating the basket of fruit I carried. “I’ll never use all that. A few pies, a tart, a fruit salad. All that’s left will turn brown, decay, collapse in on itself. Then I’ll spread it on the ground and it’ll give new life to the seedlings I plant next year. New from old. Good fruit from bad flesh.” She took a bite from a strawberry, cringed and threw it to the ground. “So, in years to come, when all the mess of the Ruin has cleared up or rotted down, the world’s going to be a much safer place.”
I did not understand what she meant. I still do not understand now. But I like to think she was right.
II
We arrive back in the town and make straight for the harbour. There is a ship at anchor there, a large transport with paint peeling from its superstructure and no visible emblem or flag of any kind.
“Pirates?” I guess.
“That’s all there are nowadays, I suppose.” Jade has become quiet, withdrawn, but I am uncertain as to the cause. We made the journey from String’s in one go, travelling through the night and keeping a close look-out for roaming gangs of bandits. I’m still not sure whether I believe the cannibal yarn Jade spun when I first arrived here, but I kept my eyes wide open on the way down. Wide, wide open.
I wasn’t about to be eaten after receiving a miracle cure.
“I suppose I could find out where it’s heading.”
“Good idea,” she says. “I’ll try to get us some food.”
There is a subject that we are both skirting around, though I can tell by the air of discomfort that she is as aware of it as I: Where are we going, and are we going together?
III
“When you’ve got a tough decision to make, don’t beat around the bush. That’ll get nothing sorted, and it’s prevarication that’s partly responsible for the mess the world’s in. Remember years ago, all the talk and good intentions? Farting around, talking about disarmament and cleaning up the atmosphere and helping the environment, while all the time the planet’s getting ready to self-destruct under our feet.”
Della threw another log on the fire, popped the top from a bottle with her teeth and passed it to me, laughing as it foamed over the lip and splashed across her old carpet. It was an Axminster. I wondered what it was like in Axminster now, how many people were living in the carpet factory, whether it was even still there.
“Take that Jade. Now, whatever it is she wants she’s already made up her mind, she’s that type of woman. So why piss around when time’s getting on? Ask her what’s up, tell her what you’re up to. That’ll solve
