The Rain Heron Read online

  Now he is gone from my darkness. When the rain heron plucked out my eye, it took that scene, too. These days, when I close my eye, I see the woman on the mountain. I see the fever in her skin. I see her broken in my arms. I see my bullet in her throat.

  49

  I CAN’T REMEMBER arriving at the sanctuary. If I concentrate I can see the shapes of trees, smell the rot of my infection, feel the slime of it on my cheek. But otherwise there is only shadow.

  We woke up sometime later, the bird and I, in a large windowless room. I was lying on a medical cot, the kind found in doctors’ surgeries. A door in the corner led to a shower and toilet. The walls were white and sterile, the floor badly polished concrete. I was still wearing my uniform. I remember feeling glad that I hadn’t been undressed in my sleep, but angry that the uniform was still on me. I hadn’t known how much I’d wanted to be rid of it until I woke up in that new place, still clad in its greens and browns, its muddy swirl. Mostly I felt groggy, disoriented. It took me a long time to remember where we’d been going—the destination we must have arrived at.

  I looked around, glad to realise that the others were gone, especially Daniel. I couldn’t have coped with any more of his concern, his troubled kindness. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d had to spend another day watching him suffer in my presence.

  My face had been washed, the bandage changed. Pus no longer leaked from my empty socket, which felt curiously dry. An itch in my forearm led me to a small fluff of cotton that had been taped over the skin. I’d been injected with something. Normally this would have annoyed me, but instead I felt loose, calm. I’d definitely been given some kind of painkiller, because the throb from my socket—which during the trip had been agonising, each bump in the road a fresh dagger—had dulled. I was aware of it, but it did not trouble me. I felt clean and fresh and rested. Once I swam out of my grogginess, I found that I had energy, and was hungry: two states I’d almost forgotten my body could enter.

  In a corner of the room sat the heron’s cage. I knew the bird was awake, because the edges of the cloth were moving, gusted about by puffs of moisture, and I could hear an occasional huffing. I watched the movement of the cloth, thought about the creature trapped beneath it. When I first saw the bird burst into its high grotto, when I watched its dance of wet light, I was mesmerised by it. Then it took my eye, and that feeling was replaced by terror, and with the terror came extraordinary pain, as I felt the icicle of its beak pierce the jellied rim of my eyeball. There’s no other feeling like it—to experience the softest part of your exterior being stabbed and ruined is to know how vulnerable you really are. As fast as my eye was skewered, it was ripped out. Blood sprang, and for the briefest of moments I could feel a coldness, a breeze at the back of my eyeball. I know it didn’t happen, I know it was a phantom pain, but I can still remember it: the night air licking at the back of my eye.

  You would assume that as soon as it left my body, the eye went dark. And I’m sure it did—of course it did—but all the same, I have memories of witnessing myself from its new perspective, threaded onto the heron’s beak. From up there, I could see the bleeding, screaming cyclops I had become. Then that vision begins turning, twisting, and I see myself flashing in and out of frame, as the bird tosses my eye off the tip of its beak in a neat arc, before catching it in its open mouth.

  That’s what my men never knew. The bird didn’t just take my eye—it ate it. Down the river of its throat my stolen sight coursed, and as it was squeezed and swallowed I witnessed the eye’s path, a darkening current, the high stars growing fainter through the closing beak, until it settled in the bob of a lightless lake, and I saw no more.

  My eye went out, and the only view I had left was the one I still have: single-orbed and depthless. The oilcloth was thrown over the bird, and the creature was hidden from me. There in that foreign room, in a different high place, I realised how hidden it had stayed. I hadn’t seen a feather of it since it devoured my grace.

  50

  EVENTUALLY THE DOOR was knocked upon, and a man entered the room. He came in backwards, using his hip to nudge the door open, carrying a tray of food with both hands. Without speaking, he walked to my bed and placed it on a small table near my pillow. When his hands left the tray he finally turned to me—clean cheeks, floppy hair, neutral expression—and I remembered how I had collapsed onto him. I remembered how my knees buckled, how my weight had been propped against his body. He had held me gently, with no awkwardness, even as I had smeared my infection all over his shoulder. I didn’t remember him doing anything but standing there, holding me, until I found some strength in my legs and the curl of his fingers had led me inside.

  Now those fingers weaved together, his hands a nest, as he stood before my bed. I sat up and rubbed my arm.

  Good morning, he said. I’m Alec.

  Did you give me an injection?

  Yes.

  What was it?

  I don’t know.

  He shrugged.

  Your friend—I mean, one of your troops—gave it to me when you arrived. He said I needed to administer it while you were sleeping, and that you needed to rest.

  Daniel jumped into my mind. My medic, pleading to help me, as I refused to let him near. I was suddenly, furiously angry. Then I thought of him swabbing at my socket by the bank of a river, the night after I’d lost my eye. I thought of how I’d struck him at the stone farmhouse. I remembered the sobs I’d heard leak from him that night by the lake—tiny, hopeless sounds, just loud enough to reach me in my tent.

  I felt myself cool. I looked back at this Alec person.

  Don’t ever touch me again.

  If you say so.

  He left my bedside, walked to the door. At the cage, he stopped.

  What’s in here?

  You haven’t looked?

  He looked at me, his face placid.

  It’s yours. I didn’t think I should look without your permission.

  Scepticism must have shown on my face, because he smiled. I realised he wasn’t lying. If he had looked, he wouldn’t be this calm. I motioned at the cage.

  Go on.

  He knelt down. As his fingers moved towards it the cloth flared up, and fog lifted from the gap. He recoiled, and glanced at me, confusion on his round face. I kept my expression still. He turned back and dipped a finger below the edge of the fabric. I saw the apprehensiveness in his posture—hands yanked back to his chest. The cloth settled. Slowly he regrasped it, and then carefully, with tentative fingers, he peeled it away from the bars. The aperture he created was obscured by his back; I couldn’t see what he was seeing. He had stopped breathing. I held my own breath, made sure I was not moving; I gave myself every chance to hear the swell of his lungs. But still I heard nothing. His shoulders and back were raised high. Nothing came from the gap he’d created in the cloth—no fog or ice, no burst of sound or bird.

  At last he let go of the cloth and stood up. I waited for the questions, the incomprehension. But he just stood there, not asking anything, not even turning towards me. He rubbed at his arms, his neck. After half a minute he took a step towards the door.

  Wait, I called.

  He paused, his hand resting on the doorknob.

  You must have somewhere better for it than here.

  I could see the agitation twitching in him. Then he pivoted, grabbed the cage’s handle and swung it through the door. His body followed, disappearing behind the click of the closing latch as he left me to lie in that strange bright room alone.

  51

  IT’S NOT THAT I wanted to die. I just couldn’t see the point in continuing to live. I had done the world nothing but ill. I wasn’t as bad as some, and during the coup I had tried to avoid causing unnecessary suffering, but I had known for a long time how my skills and inclinations were being used against others. I had ignored it, rationalised it, even played it to my advantage. But after what I did on the mountain—my greatest cruelty, in the midst of what was perhaps my greatest succes
s—I realised that unless I changed, I would continue to make life worse for all those I was loosed upon.

  After shooting the woman, I tried to think about my own life with logic and detachment. What I should do, how I should act, now that it had been incontrovertibly confirmed that I was a force of illness. I knew the generals wouldn’t allow me to change. If anything, I would be made to become worse. I thought that maybe I’d maim my leg. One leg, one eye—surely they’d release a soldier that broken.

  But I knew they wouldn’t. Not now that I’d brought a myth to life.

  I was in a lot of pain as I considered these things, so I kept closing my eye, which meant I kept seeing the mountain woman. Again and again I saw her break and bleed and fall. Completing missions, taking pills, drinking clean water, watching the sun climb and the clouds run—it all stopped making sense.

  If I’d had any courage, I would have nosed the northerner’s pistol into my socket and fired it for a second time. But I have never been brave. Just strong, and at times—too many times—cruel.

  52

  THE MORNING AFTER I told the man named Alec to take the bird, I woke up clear-headed and without pain. I rose at something like dawn, drank some water, brushed my teeth, and was doing my stretches before I remembered the bird, my eye, the woman I’d shot. I showered. I found some stiff, block-coloured hiking clothes in a cupboard and left the room.

  Through the door there was a short corridor, and at the end of that another door that led outside. Fog hung thick and moist, right down to the ground. I could only see a few metres past my hands. I stepped out onto a path, into the mist, and let the contours of the trail guide me wherever they went.

  I could occasionally make out the trees that hemmed the compound. Through gaps in the fog their brown-white trunks loomed, always appearing closer or more distant than they had first seemed. Or maybe that was just another symptom of the death of my depth perception. Much closer than the trees were the buildings of the sanctuary. Small, flat-roofed things, not very different to the barracks I was used to. They looked like offices and accommodation, but I didn’t enter any of them to investigate. In my two-eyed life I would’ve scouted them, found their exits, their points of strategic interest or value, but in my newly adjusted state they were too boring to bother with. I could imagine what was inside them: single beds, flatpack desks, flip calendars, green lamps, ancient filing cabinets; beige dread.

  More interesting were the empty enclosures scattered between the buildings. Barred cages, topped in spikes, rendered useless by gates that gaped wide and loose. Inside were the remnants of artificial environments—hollow logs, rocks assembled into climbable structures, the thirsty dents of empty cement ponds. Gravel neatly scraped into tiny yards, unmarred by footprints. Dry branches stretched out at head height, supported by lattices or chains. It was an abandoned zoo, or a rehabilitation clinic, or a place of protection for endangered animals. Perhaps it really was a sanctuary, or once had been.

  I found the outer gate where we’d arrived, and the spot where I’d fallen onto Alec. I turned back into the compound, and saw that the fog was thinning. More of the forest was visible from here, and so was the only structure of any size: a cathedral-like building three times the size of the others, with a domed glass roof. I went straight towards it, stepping on rock, slipping on frost, ignoring the paths.

  An unlocked door led into a narrow room. Two rows of floor-bolted stadium chairs were arrayed before an enormous window that also served as a wall between this corridor and the rest of the building. Alec was sitting in the centre of the front row. He looked up as I entered the room. His hair still flopped at odd angles, and his posture was bad. For a second, I wanted him to straighten up—I wanted to jam my palm into the small of his back. I took a seat, leaving an empty one between us. He spoke first.

  Good morning.

  Morning.

  How are you feeling?

  Fine. Better. Fine.

  I was annoyed at the question, annoyed at the unnecessary tripling of my response, and was ready to snap something at him. But he said nothing. He kept looking at the window, hunched forward, back bent. I realised I was watching him, so

  I stopped, and copied him in looking straight ahead.

  Through the glass I could see an exaggerated version of the abandoned enclosures I’d spent the morning exploring—long branches, fake structures, ropes and chains, and swinging apparatus of metal and wood and bone. The floor was covered in decaying leaves and artificial ponds, although these cement indentations were full, connected by unmoving streams. It looked less neglected than the others. High at the top I saw the clear dome, its thick glass, the white banks of mist bobbing at its outer surface. Alec’s voice appeared, almost as a whisper.

  It’s remarkable.

  I didn’t answer. The enclosure was impressive in its way, I supposed, but it was empty. Suddenly he stopped breathing again, the way he had in my room the day before. I glanced at him and saw a wide wetness in his eyes. I looked back at the enclosure.

  I hadn’t seen it at first because it hadn’t been there—not as itself, or the self I had seen in the mountain grotto. Now I saw it rise from the sad fake pond, as I had seen it rise from the mountain pool. Up from the water it formed, flying on blue-wet wings, glistening into being as it made for a chain-suspended branch. It came to a brief perch, then leapt to a hanging tyre on the other side of the aviary. In its path between perches it flapped, soared, and briefly burst into a shower of rain, before reforming in the moment it landed. There its beak fell into its wing, preening back and forth, straightening feathers, shedding streams of water, wet-shining and ghostly.

  Seeing it again produced no great reaction in me. No bubbles of terror, no horrible memories. I just watched it, as amazed as I had been when I saw it on the mountain. After a while I closed my eye, half-hoping that my lost one would open inside the bird, revealing to me the swishing wetness of its belly. But all I saw, as usual, was the mountain woman, this time shovelling blackberries into her mouth as I watched from the shadow of a pine.

  I opened my eye and saw a cloud parting overhead, brightening the aviary. The bird twisted its head upwards, then dissolved into a bank of rising fog. It lifted past the winding boughs of dead wood, the dirty-white walls, towards the curve of glass that was letting in the sunlight. A metre below that high window the mist-bird reformed into a spray of dense droplets, which hung in the air for a heavy second before shooting up to smack against the glass. I could hear the angry pelt of them on the pane. When they had all smashed into their target they fell again, shattered into drops that dispersed again into mist, then again into hard drops, which again flew like wet bullets into the window. The glass did not shake, did not grow hairlines. The drops broke, fell, reformed, and shot again.

  After this third attack the water stopped falling. It stayed on the glass in a smeared puddle. I watched it glisten, watched it change again into steamy condensation that clung to the glass like breath. From the ground, I couldn’t tell how hot that moisture was, if it was hot enough to weaken the window. I wasn’t sure how hot I wanted it to be, if I was on the side of any particular outcome.

  I’ve always liked animals, Alec said. I used to catch them and bring them home. I’d dam crabs into rock pools at the beach, then scoop them into a bucket filled with sea water. Or I’d trap skinks behind books and tumble them into my palms. Back at our house I’d put the crabs in the bath, where they died, and the skinks in my bedroom, where they escaped through the crack under the door, or the windows I kept leaving open. When I did manage to keep them alive or in one place, my mother would inevitably find them and let them go. She liked animals too, but not as much as I did. Maybe she liked them more when she was younger; most people like things more intensely as children, I guess. Although I don’t know what she was like as a child.

  All I know is that when I was a child—he pointed at the condensation still heating the glass dome—I believed rain herons were real. I believed everything
I was told. What child doesn’t? It wasn’t until much later that, like everyone else, I understood that they were made up. An old story about droughts, luck and cruelty. I wanted to believe in a bird made of water, as harsh as it was generous, but I was taught it was impossible. I limited myself to crabs and skinks. Birds made of flesh and feathers. Then the coup happened, and the world stopped making sense—to me, and to everyone. And now you appear with something that I had convinced myself didn’t exist.

  He pointed again at the condensation. It was changing shape, changing temperature. Instead of turning into mist or rain it was falling slowly, creeping and hardening into mottled, sharp stalactites tethered to the glass by anchors of bristle-patterned frost. The air took on a chill. I began to shiver.

  I wish you hadn’t brought it here.

  There was no accusation in his voice. No anger. Just regret and sorrow.

  I didn’t know what to say. Mentioning orders or missions suddenly felt like the most childish justifications imaginable, so I said nothing.

  He saw me shivering and took off his coat. I thought he was going to hand it to me or, worse, drape it over my shoulders. But he just put it on the chair between us, an act both obvious and subtle, and said in the same sad voice: I suppose we should tell Gladstone and Ramiro.

  53

  FROM THE FIRST, he was gentle like that. Not in a way that communicated sympathy, or concern, or confusion. He was just gentle. Quiet, with no skein of violence running beneath that quietness. He didn’t admire me. He didn’t fear me. He didn’t love me. He didn’t regard me as anything other than a wounded stray, a stranger who needed to be taken care of. And that’s what he did. With quiet force, he took care of me.

  54

  IN A GAP in the trees, behind the drear of the abandoned compound, was a kind of garden. Tussock grass had been herded into a humpy lawn, bisected by a roughly gravelled path. At its end the cider gums strained upwards, towards light. Beside the trees was a patch of grassless dirt, and on it sat a grey, humped boulder. Scraped into its face, above the disturbed earth, were two words: Gladstone and Ramiro.