The Rain Heron Read online

  If Zoe had looked at him as her aunt tipped over the edge, she would’ve seen a grin on his wind-torn lips, a grin carrying satisfaction and revenge and two kinds of victory—over Zoe’s aunt and over himself, for limiting his reaction to a shove rather than a shot. But Zoe was watching her aunt fall. She heard her body break the water open. By the time she’d rushed to the edge her aunt’s head and hands had surfaced, flinging and twisting, before being dragged back under by the weight of her coat. And by the time the northerner realised he’d done something far worse than he’d intended, Zoe was ripping off her jacket and leaping into the cold ocean to grab at the swirl of fabric drowning her aunt.

  She fell, and met ice. The air rushed from her lungs and her flesh blinked numb, and the water that closed over her face stabbed ice into her skull, but she didn’t let herself be paused. As soon as her head re-emerged she stroked towards her aunt and grabbed at the mass of thrashing colour. She found the coat, and water, and a floating wave of her aunt’s hair, and more water. She pulled at everything her fingers found purchase on, and managed to yank her aunt’s head above the surface. Huge gasps shot from her mouth, and her wild arms landed on Zoe’s shoulders. Zoe doubled the pace of her kicks, trying to keep them both afloat, but her aunt’s body continued to panic, and the roil of their bodies sucked them both under.

  In the mess and pain of being underwater Zoe had to extricate herself from her aunt so she could reposition herself behind her, so she could heft her airwards, but her aunt would not let go. Their struggle became manic, and soon it was all Zoe could do to keep her own head above water. She tried to rip the mass of coat from her aunt’s shoulders, but her aunt would not stop wrestling the sea. Zoe’s lungs burned, and her vision swarmed with lights. Suddenly the weight in her fingers lessened, and the coat floated up before her. She felt relief, and joy, and then nothing but a blank wash of terror as her knee bumped into the bob of her aunt’s unmoving body.

  The sound of a crash came to her. It seemed far off, but a spray hit her face, bringing the crash somehow closer. More sounds came, hurried splashes; then another body was there, all limbs and speed. Zoe’s aunt’s face thrust up from the murk. As soon as it appeared it began to retreat from Zoe, pulled away by this new figure in the water, and it was only then, as Zoe was left alone and exhausted in the icy ocean, that she understood the northerner was trying to save her aunt’s life.

  How well he swam. How easily he parted the waves before him. From all her dealings with him, Zoe would never have imagined him to be this strong in the water. Even with his collection of wounds he was easily chewing up the distance to the shore, Zoe’s aunt’s body floating pale in his wake. Zoe began to kick after him, slow and sore. By the time her feet bumped into the seabed he already had her aunt laid out on the snowy sand and was kneeling beside her. His hands worked at her sternum, and every few presses he laid a mouth against her aunt’s and blew.

  Zoe kicked through the shallows towards them. Her aunt was not responding to his attentions, and she could see how tired the northerner was. His speed through the water had come at the cost of his strength, and every breath he wasn’t pushing into her aunt’s throat was coming out haggard and loud. Zoe slumped down and felt for her aunt’s hand. He continued his ministrations for a long time, until he could push and blow no more. He collapsed by her aunt’s side, gasping, shivering.

  Take over.

  He was on his back, not facing Zoe, but she understood. She didn’t know how to do CPR, but she moved straight to her aunt, placing her hands near where she’d seen the northerner put his. Fear filled her, but there was no other choice. She stared at her aunt’s purpling lips, the stillness of her torso. She pulled in a breath.

  Before she could do anything, her aunt moved, or something moved within her. A gurgle came from her throat, and water began to leak from the low corners of her open mouth. Relief began to soar within Zoe, but then she saw that her aunt’s eyes remained glassy and frozen, and that she was not coughing. The water rose in her aunt’s mouth, a flat pool, blocking any air that she would be trying to draw into her lungs if she were still alive.

  Zoe realised she was screaming. Her fingers clawed into tiny buckets, and she began to scoop at the water in her aunt’s mouth. She tried to bail out the ocean in her aunt, but for every handful of water she flung away, more swelled to replace it.

  Her aunt stayed still. So did the northerner. He had seen what had happened and collapsed back onto the sand beside them. His arms hung loose; his chest heaved. His eyes were open. The sky above them was still blue and clean.

  33

  THEY BURIED HER on the beach, at the foot of the dunes where the tide did not reach. The northerner had tried to insist on doing it himself, but Zoe ignored him. Together they gouged a hole into the sand that compacted and darkened and dampened the further down they went. The whole time the northerner was apologising, saying it was an accident. Zoe continued to ignore him, and focused on shifting sand.

  It did not take much time to have a grave deep enough to avoid any digging animals and long enough to hold her aunt’s body. Zoe took her aunt by the arms. The northerner took her feet. They placed her slowly, awkwardly into the pit, and as soon as the body settled Zoe was scraping and hurling sand onto it as fast as she could. The grave filled quickly. Neither of them spoke.

  34

  THAT NIGHT ZOE left the heater on—something her aunt would never have allowed. She did it to stay warm, but also as a reminder. She did not want to fall asleep as usual, unaware of her aunt’s wet death. She wanted to stay awake all night, wasting electricity, remembering her aunt. But eventually she drifted off on the couch, her head resting on a pillowless ledge. She woke sweaty and confused, before the memory of it all engulfed her. Then she went looking for the northerner.

  First she walked the length of the long beach to his camp, where she found his equipment in disarray. The kettles were upturned and scattered across the banks of the stream. Some of the smaller urns were half-submerged and rusting in the dirt-streaked water. The sacks of powders had been emptied, their contents mixed through the sand. The squid corpses were gone—either removed by hand or devoured by scavenging, winter-starved birds. Zoe took the scene in, made sure the northerner wasn’t there, then left.

  She went back into the town, and found him alone in the ruins of the pub. He was sitting under the sea-sky painting, burning pieces of broken furniture in the fire, scribbling on a piece of dirty paper. The only light came from the dim sky, which was covered again with clouds, and from the wriggle of the flames.

  She crunched over glass, sat on the other side of his table, and stared at the glory of the ink paint until the northerner paused his writing and looked up. She stared into the scabbed wreck of his face. He spoke first.

  How are you?

  She didn’t answer.

  Did you sleep?

  She crossed her arms. She looked around the room. She looked at the fire, at his letter, at him.

  I’ll show you.

  His pen clattered against the wood. What?

  I’ll show you how to do it.

  Realisation dawned on his face. Why?

  Look what happened when we kept it secret.

  I didn’t meant to…

  I know. It was an accident. Do you want me to teach you how it’s done?

  He screwed up his piece of paper, threw it on the fire.

  Of course I do.

  35

  THEY TOOK HER aunt’s boat. The northerner’s wasn’t at its dock, and at first Zoe wondered where he’d taken it. Then she remembered, and realised that it must have sunk. If this upset the northerner, he didn’t show it. He followed Zoe down the pier, saying nothing.

  The sea was calm. They flew across it, taking half as long as a rough-water trip would. They did not speak. When they reached the inking ground she killed the engine. Wake rushed at the bow, and the boat slowed. The northerner looked around, seeing horizon in three directions, the shiny smudge of the dock in
the other. Zoe stood up.

  Watch what I do, and pay attention, because I’m only going to do it once.

  Without ceremony, she revealed the secret of the port to an outsider for the first time. She went through the process slowly, showing him the equipment, the knife, the careful cut into her flesh. She demonstrated the run and drip of her blood. When the squid appeared the northerner flinched, but as it fed and calmed he untensed. Wonder replaced his fear. He helped Zoe net the creature, and squatted by its maw as she blooded its gland and collected the gush of ink. He did not get in her way or badger her with questions. He was silent, awed by what he was seeing. He helped cradle the squid in the water when they released it, his fear of it gone. It was only afterwards, when Zoe turned and spoke to him, that he showed any hesitation.

  Your turn.

  He baulked.

  Now?

  We’re not going to do this again.

  She handed him her knife, handle first.

  He took it, looking apprehensive. But he moved to the edge of the boat, and he rolled up his arm, and he unfolded the winking blade of the knife. He looked back at Zoe. She nodded.

  Go slow. Just like I showed you.

  He looked back to his forearm, hanging over the water. With careful pressure he pushed the metal into the skin, which resisted for the briefest of moments before giving way to the blade. A tear of blood brightened the air, and when it did Zoe put into action the plan she’d been stitching together since the moment her aunt’s mouth overflowed with ocean.

  With the point of her knife still in the northerner’s skin, she gripped the side of the boat with both hands and threw her whole body into a huge push. The northerner jolted, jerked off balance by the sudden rock of the boat, and his errant hand whipped the blade deep into his arm. He yelped, as something cut that shouldn’t have, and Zoe felt a swell of pleasure. She hoped the cut was deep. She hoped he thought he would die. This was her revenge—not death, but the fear of it. She wanted him to bleed. She wanted this man to feel so much terror that he changed into something else entirely.

  Blood jumped from the wound, high and fast. The northerner grabbed at the rushing flow just as a wave, unseen by either of them, slapped into the rocking boat. Zoe stumbled; one of the northerner’s feet tangled in the landing net, and the other slipped in a puddle of blood and water. With no free arms to steady himself he wavered, and wobbled, and crashed over the side.

  Zoe rushed to where he’d fallen. His blood was already clouding the water. She waited for his strong strokes to bring him back to the boat. But the northerner seemed too concerned with his injury to worry about his position in the water. He hung in the salt, eyes wide, face pale, grabbing with increasing feebleness at the opening in his vein.

  Here, Zoe called. Swim here!

  She cast about for a rope, but by the time she had one in her grip the first squid had caught the scent. It rose from the navy mass and began shovelling the red water into its clacking beak. The northerner kicked away from it, but he only managed to create a clouding trail that summoned a second beast, then a third.

  Tentacles cut through the water, herding liquid. More squid rose—more swiping appendages and hungry beaks. The sea’s surface was a mess of purple flesh and red-white froth. The northerner finally turned to Zoe, realising what was happening, what could only happen next. He reached for her with the hand of his wounded arm, as his cry for help swirled with brine.

  She threw the rope, too short, too wide. The squid found him long before he could swim to it. That was when his screams began: first of terror, then of pain. Suckers fastened onto the meat of him, their cruel external teeth hooked deep, and Zoe learned something that her aunt and the other inkers had never discovered—she learned how they fed when alone.

  They took the northerner in a voracious embrace, tentacles draping over his neck and shoulders, while others snaked across him, tasting him, until they found the open source of the blood. Into his arm they weevilled, digging and licking and sucking, tearing him open, carrying rich pieces of him back to their beaks. His screams gave way to gurgles. Golden eyes glowed in the wet. Down he was dragged, under the surface, a mass of tentacles slapping and ripping at him as the growing shoal of squid began to flicker through patterns of glorious bioluminescence.

  36

  IN THE YEARS that followed Zoe tried hard to forget the northerner. But he kept appearing to her: his torn face, the bloody thrash of his arm. She tried to push these images away, but they wouldn’t leave. Instead, she forgot little pieces of her aunt. She remembered what she had looked like, but not, except for her waterproof harvesting outfit, the sort of clothes she used to wear. She knew the patterns of her aunt’s speech, the lilt, the sarcasm, the rhythms, but forgot the words themselves. And her laughter—Zoe knew that the laughter had been there, inexplicable and constant, but what had it really sounded like? Rich and throaty? High and wheezy? A year after leaving the port, Zoe wasn’t sure if her aunt had laughed loudly or quietly, and after three years the laugh rang false and harsh in her head, a memory she couldn’t trust.

  As her aunt dripped away, memory by memory, laugh by laugh, the northerner took up residency in the corners of her thoughts, and would not leave. Perhaps it was because she kept a piece of him with her. When she had returned to the dock, she found something in the boat that she’d forgotten about—the northerner’s pistol. Without thinking, she put it in her pocket. It was one of the two things she took when she left the port. The other was a single jar of ink, grabbed from her aunt’s table before she followed everyone else heading north.

  There she stumbled into the clutches of a military poised to take control of a failing nation. She joined the army, although she wasn’t given much choice, and the northerner’s pistol made the shift to her hip. That was where it stayed, even when better firearms were made available to her. She didn’t try to understand the compulsion. She just kept it, and did not think about why. But while she held it, learned to clean it, care for it, became an expert in its use, she never fired it. Through protests and insurrections it hung idly at her waist, as the various other skills she acquired came to the fore: strategy, intimidation, subterfuge.

  Zoe was a phenomenal soldier, a cold revelation in camouflage. She was promoted, again and again, and her life ripped by in a blur of ordered fear, without her ever having to squeeze the pistol’s trigger. First she was a private, then a corporal. By the time she was twenty-two she was a sergeant. As she rose through the ranks, as the coup she became part of surged to success, she barely ever pulled the gun from its holster, and never fired it: not until she became a lieutenant, and was sent to a distant mountain in search of a myth.

  PART 3

  37

  REN’S BODY HIT the ground, and the soldiers surged to their feet. They moved forward, gathering their equipment and the cage as they surrounded their lieutenant and ushered her out of the clearing, through the pines, past the buck-poisoned stream.

  At the edge of the forest, Daniel, the young medic, turned back. He saw the villager tearing off his jacket and pressing it against the hole torn in the woman’s neck. His son was staring at the retreating soldiers. The boy and Daniel locked eyes for a moment. Then Daniel ran.

  He followed his comrades down the mountain in a blinding, green-rinsed rush, down to where the rest of the squad was waiting. They stopped in the village to steal food and fuel, then climbed into their trucks and left town at high speed.

  Lieutenant Harker hadn’t spoken since she’d fired her gun—actually, Daniel realised, he hadn’t heard her speak since they were in the mountain grotto. The silence continued as they sped away: Harker offered no orders to her men.

  There was no clear second-in-command, no obvious course of action for them to take. In the end the men jointly decided that they’d drive until nightfall, and make camp somewhere clear and flat where they might be able to contact high command, which they couldn’t do in the village. The mountain’s loom had been blocking their radio sign
als ever since they’d arrived.

  Around them the pines stayed tall and green, and their scent cut through the blackened smell of the exhaust. Daniel couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened on the mountain. Bile raked his throat, and the only thing preventing him from vomiting was the scent of the pines. Straight ahead, he could see one of the other trucks: the one containing the bird’s cage. Through the windows, he could see that the black cloth was still in place.

  The trucks clattered through the day. When the sun hit the trees they pulled over beside a wide, slow river and pitched their tents on its bank. Someone lit a fire. Another made a great show of scouting a perimeter. Lieutenant Harker sat by the placid water. Daniel watched her. He felt calmer now, and tired, and he remembered that despite everything, he was still her medic.

  He walked over and crouched beside her, noting the red gape of her eyeless socket, thinking that it was a sight he might never get used to. He saw the rusty patina of blood on her face, and wondered for a moment if tears would be warm or salty enough to cut through its crust, before realising the cruelty of such a thought.

  Daniel turned to face the river. He could hear her breaths coming short and fast. He waited until they slowed before speaking.

  You know I need to dress it.

  She dipped her neck in a tight nod.

  It would be better to do it tonight. Infections. Blood loss. You know.

  Again she nodded.

  Now he had her permission, Daniel did not test her with any more words. He fetched his kit and helped her lie on her side. The sound of the river lapped at his ears as he cleaned the wound, swabbing at the contours of the socket, disinfecting the area, noting the neatness of the severed viscera, before stuffing soft gauze into the aperture and gliding her eyelid closed over it. Through these ministrations she did not protest, did not scream, although the whole time she was shaking, wincing, sometimes jerking away from his touch. Sweat salted her face and slimed at his grip, but he kept working, wiping his hand on the soft grass of the riverbank. When he was finished, he helped her sit up.