Jon Grimwood - redRobe

Unrelated, intense but not mine. At least, Mai didn’t think they were hers. What she liked best was the feeling of calm so deep it made her relax just to think about it. She really liked that. Liked the way her heart slowed and the knot in her stomach untied itself and faded away.

What surprised Mai most was the discovery that just because Kate had told her how lucky she was to be brought to Samsara didn’t mean it was a lie.

‘ Mai?’ She felt rather than heard the question. At first she thought it came from the silver monkey now circling overhead higher than the vultures. Mai couldn’t really see Rinpoche, not by looking, but sometimes he was in her head and other times she was the one looking out through his eyes. She liked that, too.

Most of all, she liked watching herself as a tiny dot who moved slowly across a great expanse of rough grass, skirting bushes and small ponds. Mezzanine, said a voice in her head. It’s a mezzanine between Samsara’s broad central valley and the high passes. But she didn’t know that word and no sense came attached to it so that didn’t help her much, not that Mai minded.

‘ Mai?' There was that question again, the one she’d forgotten she’d been asked. The kid looked round her, saw nobody speaking and wondered if it was one of the wolves. Then told herself not to be stupid.

‘Stupid is good if it helps. Crazy is better… But, do I look like a wolf?’

The bald man sitting ahead of her on an altar was wrapped in a thin orange robe. His mouth didn’t open and there was nothing to say he was the one who had spoken, but she knew it was him from the smile on his face. And besides… she just knew.

‘Like a wolf?’ said Mai, ‘No, you look like you should be cold.’

The man laughed. It sounded like echoes fading inside a prayer drum.

Slap bass, the real thing… impressively fuzzy analogue. Slow as a heartbeat, only looping four notes not two, repeated endlessly. Axl couldn’t remember the song it had been stripped from but he recalled the original fly poster. A blonde Scandinavian framed topless against a pantone sky, white flannel shorts pulled up so tight they probably explained the idiot grin on her face.

He hadn’t liked the track back then.

Axl watched Kate approach, keeping his own face impassive. It was the first time in two days she’d come near him, and Axl had long since stopped trying to draw her aside and explain. Mainly because he wasn’t too sure explain what? And besides what on earth made him imagine for a minute that she’d believe him? Axl wouldn’t have done if he was Kate. Hell, half the time he didn’t believe himself…

As rest stops went, here was better than anywhere else they’d found and infinitely preferable to where they’d been a day and a half before, sitting by an altar as Mai wandered aimlessly closing the eyes of the dead.

But a whole day’s light had gone and, because he hadn’t told them, none of the group understood why Axl refused to leave the slope above the woods that edged Samsara’s central valley. And when Ketzia had forced herself to ask him two hours earlier, he’d just snapped that he was watching time go by.

Axl stood, Kate opened her mouth and the slap bass slid into silence, a straight fade.

‘You can’t take Mai back.’ Kate didn’t bother to pretend the conversation was about anything else. Nor did she slide into it gently. Nothing but worry for Mai would have made her cross the patch of grass from where she sat with Louis and Ketzia to where Axl sat alone.

He could, quite easily. Provided neither of them got killed first. Whether he should was a different question, but that wasn’t what she’d asked.

‘I can,’ said Axl demolishing half a tiny apple with a single bite. They had food now. Two rabbits killed with a slingshot by Tukten. And sour pippins from a row of trees that looked as if they’d once been cultivated but had long since been allowed to grow wild. ‘Quite easily.’

They were watching her, the others. And it was obvious Kate realised the fact from the tension whipcording her neck and the way her fingers wrapped into fists that pushed hard into her hips. If Axl hadn’t known better he’d have said Kate was doing her best to stop herself from shaking.

‘She’s ill.’ It was as close as Kate had come to pleading and closer than she liked.

‘I know.’

Mai was, too. Shakes like he’d never seen and night sweats that left her skin mottled and slick. The fever had come on immediately after the charnel ground and Axl was trying very hard to ignore the thought that she’d infected herself while tidying the corpses. Either that, or she’d caught some disease saying goodbye to her shadows when the wolves began to slobber all over her face.

‘And she’s a child,’ Kate hissed at him. They’d been there before.

‘That child,’ said Axl, ‘is a kinderwhore.’ He flipped out his hand to grip Kate’s wrist, stopping her from turning away. Here was somewhere they’d been as well.

‘Sit down,’ Axl snapped at Louis, then jerked his head at Tukten who’d dropped all the firewood he’d been collecting except for a large branch which he held like a club. ‘You too.’

Neither moved.

‘You can sit down,’ said Axl, ‘or I can kick seven shades of shit out of you, do it in public and sell tickets ...' Both the boy and Louis sat down. And why not, thought Axl. Those were the words that always worked for Black Jack.

‘The child was kidnapped, dumped in the middle of fucking nowhere and has spent the last month spreading her legs in the hope of getting out again. Don’t even think of trying to guilt me.’

Axl left Kate standing there. He didn’t need to look back to know she was really shaking now.

Mai was sitting in a huddle under a small oak tree, arranging the dried cups of last year’s acorns into intricate mandalas. Axl tried to ignore her wet trousers as he dropped to a squat in front of her, much as he tried to ignore the puddle of urine that kept expanding around his boots into a fractal-edged map, darkening a slope crusted with acorn cups and rotted leaves.

The girl smelt of sweat and a sweetness that made Axl think of disease until he realised it was only the remains of a purple flower that lay stripped of its petals in her lap.

‘People want to kill you,’ Mai said softly. She might have been talking to Axl, but equally well her comment could have been to the flower dying in her lap. She glanced up and Axl realised she wasn’t talking to the flower.

‘Everyone has enemies.’ Fortune cookie stuff and about as true. Some people had friends.

‘Not enemies who intend to kill everyone around you too.’

Axl paused to wonder what they were actually talking about. ‘Everyone?’ He asked Mai.

‘Ketzia, Louis, Tukten… Kate.’

‘You too?’ Axl asked quickly. Not wanting to think about the last name on her list.

‘No, not me. But definitely you.’ Mai concentrated on the PaxForce conscripts in the woods far below. The language they spoke was odd, a hill dialect not Spanish, but she had no trouble with what it meant. Its sense just fed through to her along with the pictures.

‘That man,’ Mai said.

‘The Colonel.’ Axl sighed. He’d been hoping he was wrong, that they weren’t talking about the same thing but they were. ‘All of the soldiers from the village?’

Mai paused, held up ten fingers and then her eyes glazed over and she was gone.

‘Fuck it,’ Axl said, standing up. He was going to have to talk to Kate after all.

‘We’ve got problems.’