By Light Alone (40 page)

‘Yes,’ said Issa, although if she’d been pressed for a definition she would have had a hard time.

‘Merchants and fly-commuters, down in Trabzon. People too proud to realize they’re poor like us.’ Pal made a grunting noise at this, presumably in agreement. ‘
Everybody’s
as poor as us,’ said Coco. ‘Save only the super-wealthy, and they’re so different they’re hardly human any more.
Everybody’s
poor as us, only some don’t realize it. People in Trabzon, merchants and fly-commuters – half of them
have hair
, you know? They could live on the sun like we do. But they take food for the status. Only for the status of it! I could believe, easily, they don’t even like the taste. Light-reared cattle is supposed to be pretty tough and flavourless, see. But they slaves to their status, see.’

‘Slaves,’ said Issa. She was feeling her sore ankle with her left hand.

Coco gave her a canny look. ‘You’ve got it, sister.’

‘Why are you after the cow?’

‘It’s stupid,’ said Coco, looking at the beast. ‘It don’t need food save sun, but it need water, and it don’t know it. There’s no water here, so soon enough it will die.’

‘And then what? Will you eat it?’

Coco’s laugh was instantaneous. Pal laughed too, belatedly, with chunky little gasps of amusements. ‘Not that! Not I!’

‘Why, then?’

‘To sell it, of course. For money, of course!’

‘Oh,’ she said.

‘And where are you going? You’re not a wanderer, I’d say, by the look of you. Village girl, eh?’

Issa looked at him.

Coco stood up. ‘It’s crazy to be up in the hills like this, a crazy location for a village girl. You should stay on the road.’

‘
You’re
not on the road,’ she pointed out.

‘We’re following the cow!’

‘I am about my own business,’ she said. ‘Why are you doing the work, though?’

‘Why us? Who else?’

‘Women, of course.’

‘Oh! We’re not like most men. We’re hard workers! We have a
cause
.’

‘I see.’ Issa got to her feet. Her ankle still hurt. Standing, she was the same height as either of the men.

‘Oh you’re tall!’ said Coco. ‘You want to help us? You could definitely help with the cow!’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘But my ankle is hurting. I can’t run.’

‘Oho!’ said Coco. ‘If we can’t rely on our ankles, then on what can we rely? Is it both your ankles? Ankles, plural?’

‘Just the one.’

‘You’ll be fine. Come along.’

The three of them approached the cow. The beast eyed them placidly. From a distance Issa had thought she had a sense of it, but coming closer it loomed much larger than her depth perception had led her to expect. It was, she thought, simply
too big
for an animal. Why did it need to be so big? ‘Will it bite me?’ she asked.

‘You’ve never seen a cow before, that’s obvious,’ said Coco. ‘It won’t bite you. It don’t eat. Look at its hair.’ Pal coughed at this, as though Coco were omitting the truth. But there was something fascinating, to Issa, in the creature: the unhollow heft of it, the unsettling combination of nobility and imbecility in his eyes. The giant folded purses of its outsticking ears. The double curl of its nostrils, branching in two plump arches from its snout like the top of a Greek column.

Pal danced forward and slapped the beast’s rump, and Coco began hallooing and hallooing, wordlessly. Sluggishly the cow lurched forward and trotted cumbrously away. They followed. If it looked like the cow was going to stop, or when it stumbled on the uneven upward slope, Coco would dance, shrieking and flapping his arms to get the cow to move on. Issa, hauling her bag with her, found it hard to keep up. There was a problem with her energy levels, but she did her best to push through.

After a while they stopped, and Issa shared her water bottle with the two men. ‘Where are you down from, then?’ Coco asked her. ‘Livera, is it?’

‘Is that the village? I don’t know the name of the village.’

‘Up the road. They had some trouble, night before last. So I heard.’

‘How did you hear that?’

Coco looked terribly knowing, and winked his eye. ‘That stone?’ He pointed. It looked like a regular stone: grey granite shaped like a two-metre wide bald head, with a ruff of green weeds growing behind and around it. ‘That stone is a door to a magic kingdom. Pull it aside and walk down the stairs to a land of— No, I’m only joking.’ Pal was laughing big, silent guffaws, like a man choking on a fishbone. ‘I have a Fwn,’ said Coco, proudly, with heavy emphasis on the pronoun. He brought out a scuffed, battered old-model device.

‘How do you have one of those?’ Issa asked. ‘Are you a Waali?’

‘Me a Boss? The idea! My sweet flower, I have this Fwn to put an
end
to Waalis.’ He put it away again. ‘So, you, you don’t know anything about a fire?’

‘I used to have a Fwn,’ said Issa.

‘Oho,
you
were a Waali, is it?’

‘When I was younger, I lived in a town where everybody had them.’

Pal started up his conniption-fit silent laugh at this fantastika, and Issa blushed and grew quiet. ‘Well,’ she said, getting up again. ‘Where are we taking this cow, then?’

‘Not far now,’ said Coco. ‘That ledge, and over.’

‘Over?’

‘Sure. Live cow won’t do us any good. Live cow can be tag-traced. Dead cow, all chopped up – well that can be traced, too, but who’s going to the bother of tag-tracing a stringy old burger? Come on.’ He stretched his arms, and groaned. ‘If
we
lived on hard food, we’d have the energy for continuous physical exercise,’ he said. ‘Like the workers of the golden age. They were strong as He-Man, and could work without respite all day and all night like Prometheus! Heliophages like us are puny by comparison.’

Issa didn’t know the word, but didn’t ask what it meant. ‘Come on, then,’ she said.

So they ran at the cow again, disturbing its placid standing-around once again. They slapped it, and shrieked at it, and got it moving. Pal threw flints at it. He had a knack for finding sharp-edged stones that, evidently, really stung the big beast. The idiot-savant look of its bovine eye took on a long-suffering look of accusation. After the third or fourth strike, Cow kicked both his back legs up like a double-punch, and lurched towards a line of low bushes. Issa didn’t realize that this line marked the edge of a precipice until the beast dropped suddenly, its wide chest giving the rim an audible knock. The cow mooed, struggled, its back legs danced up again. Issa was struck, as if for the first time, by the shape of those legs: the chunk of muscle at the top, the walking-stick-tip of the hoofs, the crick in the line of the leg like a knight’s move in chess. Then the whole creature toppled forward and slid from view. Holloing with joy, Coco rushed forward; Pal too. Issa came more gingerly, still clutching her bag. Peering over the lip made a tingle go all through her torso, and filled her stomach with prickles of dread. It was a long way down, not sheer but hideously steep, and the cow’s passage had left a visible trail. At the bottom Issa could see two individuals pushing a handcart up towards the beast’s carcass.

‘Straight down? Round there, I think,’ said Coco. He set off immediately, twenty metres along the cliff edge and down into a gully – still so steep that he slid down on his backside amongst a fuzz of dislodged grit. Pal went after, and Issa, despite misgivings, didn’t feel she could stay behind. Getting down was alarming, but soon enough she was there.

Coco introduced her to the two pulling the handcart: women both, one called Issa (like her), the other a bindimarked old woman, her skin tan brown and wrinkly as bark, called Sudhir. She seemed to be in charge. ‘Your name?’

‘Issa,’ said Issa.

‘
Her
name is Issa,’ said Sudhir. ‘Try again.’

‘It’s a coincidence that her name is Issa. Because my name is Issa also. It’s not an uncommon name.’

‘Not good enough,’ said Sudhir. Issa did not understand her suspicious hostility. ‘Pick another name.’

‘Leah,’ said Issa. It was out before she had time to think of it. And once she had said it, she felt a rush of shame to her chest and face, a feeling that she had, with horrible finality, somehow blasphemed.

Sudhir glared at her.

‘She’s OK,’ said Coco, stepping forward. ‘She shared her water with us.’

‘Did she share her private parts with you too?’

‘No!’ said Coco, wrongfooted. ‘It’s not like that. I just think she’s a good kid. We could use her.’

‘And you just
happened
to bump into her, up on the high ground?’

‘You have trust issues, Sudhir,’ said Coco, chuckling. ‘She’s fine. She can come with us.’

‘I don’t know if I want to go with you,’ said Issa.

‘That’s a little better,’ snapped Sudhir. ‘But still lame. Go back to your espionage master and tell him to train you up better.’

‘I’m no spy!’ said Issa, surprised how shocked she was by the accusation.

‘You’re no spy, but you share water with my people unbidden and you’re not sure of your own name. Go on, fuck off.’ The other Issa had strung a rope harness around the cow carcass, and now the three others joined her in order to haul the beat onto the handcart. Issa had no energy in her body at all. She watched, silently.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Coco, once this task had been performed. ‘Sudhir’s the cadre leader. Maybe in another life! For you are very pretty.’

‘Where shall I go?’ Issa asked. It felt like some supporting strut, vital to the integrity of her inner world, had cracked and sagged. She didn’t know what, or why. It surely was not that these strangers, having been friendly, were now shunning her. It could hardly be anything so trivial. But what else
could
it be? She felt ready to cry. She no longer felt like a brave traveller, heading out alone along an inviting path. She felt like an abandoned kid.

The four were pulling shoulder harnesses on, preparatory to heaving the cow away. ‘Wait,’ Issa said. ‘Don’t leave me.’

‘Fuck off, kid,’ grunted her namesake.

‘Where will I go?’

‘Find a spring in the mountains and live off water and sunlight,’ was Sudhir’s advice.

‘Longlake is just down there,’ said Coco, pointing. When Sudhir, in harness next to him, slapped the back of his head he said: ‘What! What? We can’t stop her from going to Longlake, surely.’

‘Go straight on to Trabzon, why don’t you,’ said Sudhir, not looking at her. ‘Blag yourself onto somebody’s raft, and try sealife. Just don’t pester
me
again, or I’ll fucking rip your hair out, fistful by fistful.’ She yelled a mark, and all four of them pulled together. Issa was trembling, she didn’t know why. She sat down on the gravelly dirt and watched the handcart haul down the track and round the bend.

The sun went down over the screeslope and the flank of the hills. Something – the sunset or some other panic – threw into the sky the loose stones of many birds. They made the friction-noises with their beaks. After flocking, and circling, they eventually settled again.

It got cool in the valley, and then cold. Issa was torpid. This was solitude. Only one bird remained, and this was not a real bird, this was a metaphorical bird. Its name was misery and it nested down for the night, inside her breast.

Issa buried herself as best she could into a bank of bushes. The leaves were scratchy, but after some wriggling she got comfortable enough. Then, sipping a little from her water bottle, and just lying there, she fell asleep. She woke with the cold, fell asleep again. Woke, dozed, woke. At some point in the midst of all this she had a conversation with herself. ‘Where will I go?’ she had asked the others. Sudhir had said: To Trabzon, to sea, to oblivion for all I care. She asked herself the same question. Where will I go?

New York.

What is New York?

I don’t know.

How do I get there?

I don’t know.

Where am I now?

I don’t know.

She drifted into a state between waking and sleeping where the mantra throbbed in her mind I
have
nothing I
am
nowhere, I
have
nothing I
am
nowhere. She was woken by a mountain hare, sniffing at her face. When she opened her eyes, and gasped, the creature leapt backwards with a scuffle of grit and was gone.

She extricated herself from the hedge. It was very early in the morning, the sky pale but the sun not yet visible over the tops of the hills. She was shivering with cold, and no matter how hard she rubbed her arms and legs she couldn’t seem to get any warmth into them. She needed to get up and move around, but a massive inertia, deep inside her bones, prevented her. She could not move. She lacked all energy. ‘Perhaps if I open the tin of beer in the bag I am carrying,’ she thought, ‘and drank it. Perhaps it would work like hard food, and give me the energy to get up and go.’ But she knew that on three days of empty stomach the beer would go down and come straight back up again. With a monumental effort she got halfway to her feet, moved into a more open spot and sat on the ground.

The sun would come over the lip of the valley soon enough.