Francesca Haig - The Fire Sermon

‘That? It’s just a rumour. And even if it were true, Zach would never do it. He wouldn’t. I know him best.’

‘No. You’re closest to him. It’s not the same thing. He’ll come for you, Cass. He’ll lock you away, to protect himself.’

I shook my head. ‘He wouldn’t do it.’

Was I trying to convince her, or myself? Either way, she didn’t argue with me. We both knew that I wouldn’t leave.

Before going, Mum reached down from the cart and pressed the coin into my hand again. I felt it in my palm as the cart receded into the distance. And I didn’t spend it; not to run, or even to buy food. I kept it with me, as I’d once kept the key from Alice, and I thought of Zach whenever I held it.

It was Zach who’d taught me to repress my visions, as a child. His need to expose me had made me vigilant about not acknowledging or revealing anything of what I knew. Now I was doing it again, and again it was for him. I refused to countenance the scenes that came to me, just before waking, or during the moments in the field when I paused to splash water from my flask onto my face. I placed my trust in him, rather than in my visions. He wouldn’t do it, I repeated to myself. I thought of how gently he’d bathed my wound, after the branding. I remembered the days, months and years that the two of us, viewed with suspicion by the rest of the village, had spent together. And while I clearly recalled his hostility, his many cruelties, I knew also that he had depended on me as closely as I had depended on him.

So I worked, harder than ever before. When the harvest came, always the busiest time of year, my hands were calloused by the scythe, and the wheat chaff worked its way under my fingernails until they bled. I tried to concentrate on the immediate sounds: the rasp of the scythe, the thuds of the bundled wheat being tossed down, the shouts of the other workers. Every day I worked late, until the reluctant night finally arrived, and I made my way back to the cottage in the dark.

And it worked. I’d almost convinced myself that they weren’t coming at all, until they arrived and I realised that the approach of the armed riders was as familiar as the scythe in my hand or the path between the fields that led to the cottage.

As the rider hoisted me upwards, I caught a hint of gold below. The coin had fallen from my pocket to the ground, and was quickly lost in the hoof-churned mud.

By the time Zach came to my cell, I’d counted one hundred and eighteen days. Two hundred and thirty-six meal trays. Eight visits from The Confessor.

His footsteps were as unmistakable to me as the sound of his voice, or the particular rhythm of his breath while sleeping. In the moments it took him to open the lock, it felt as if all the years without him were unspooling again. I’d sprung up at the sound of his footsteps, but by the time he’d opened the door I’d forced myself to resume my seat on the bed.

He stood for a while in the doorway. When I looked at him, I saw double: the man in front of me, and the boy he evoked. He was tall, now, and he wore his dark hair longer, swept behind his ears. His face had filled out, softening the sharp angles of his cheekbones and chin. I’d remembered that in summer he used to have freckles – a scattering of them across his nose, like the first handful of dust thrown on to a coffin. There was no sign of them now, his skin only a few degrees less pale than my own cell-blanched flesh.

He stepped in and locked the door behind him, slipping the keys into his pocket.

‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’ he said.

I didn’t dare to speak, not wanting my voice to betray how much I’d hated him, or how much I’d missed him.

Zach went on. ‘Don’t you want me to tell you why I had to do it?’

‘I know why you’ve done it.’

He gave a half-laugh. ‘I’d almost forgotten how hard you can be to talk to.’

‘It’s not my job to make this easy for you.’

He began to pace. His voice stayed calm, his words coming with the same measured rate as his footsteps. ‘You can’t let me have anything, can you? Not even the explanation. I knew what I wanted to say to you. I’d practised it. But here you are, the same as always, claiming to know everything.’

‘I can’t let you have anything?’ I echoed. ‘You got everything. You got to stay. You got Mum.’ My voice cracked on her name.

‘It was too late,’ he said, halting his pacing. ‘Alice had already killed Dad. And you’d already poisoned everything. It was like you’d contaminated me – all those years of being unsplit. The others never accepted me. Not properly. It should have been the life I’d wanted.’ He held his empty hands out, fingers splayed. ‘But you’d already ruined everything.’

‘I had nothing,’ I said. ‘There were days in the settlement when we were all going hungry. But you couldn’t even let me have that. You’ve got me locked away here, and you still think you’re hard done by?’

‘I don’t have a choice, Cass.’

‘Why are you trying to convince me? You want me to absolve you? Tell you I understand?’

‘You said you did understand.’

‘I said I know why you’ve done it. I know what your reasoning was. You’ve made enemies, now that you’re a big player in the Council. You think they could use me to get at you. That doesn’t make it right to lock me away.’

‘What would you have done?’

‘Since when have you cared what I want or think?’

He was angry now. ‘Everything’s always depended on you. My whole life was on hold – it couldn’t start until you were gone.’

‘It had started. We had a life.’ I thought, as I so often did, of those years we spent together, the two of us existing at the margins of the village. ‘You just wanted a different one.’

‘No. I wanted my life. Mine. You made it impossible. And now I’m on my way to achieving something big. I can’t let you get in the way.’

‘So you’re ruining my life, to protect yours.’

‘There’s only one life between us – that’s what you don’t realise. You’ve always acted as if we can both have what we want. That’s not how the world works.’

‘So change it. You said you want to be a big, important person and change the world. It didn’t occur to you that we were changing the world, every day we weren’t split?’

He fell quiet. After a few minutes he came and sat beside me, sighing slightly as he slumped back. When he drew his knees up in front of him, they were much higher than mine. The hair on his arms was thicker and darker than I remembered, not tinged blond from the sun as it used to be. Our bodies had changed so much in the years since I’d seen him, but these new bodies slipped automatically back into the same old symmetry: sitting side by side on the bed, backs against the wall, just as we used to sit on my bed in the village.

I whispered to him, like we used to do back then, when our parents were arguing downstairs. ‘You don’t have to be this person, Zach.’

He stood up, taking the bunch of keys from his pocket. ‘I wouldn’t have to be, if it weren’t for you. If you hadn’t made everything so hard right from the start.’

In the months of waiting for him to come to the cell, I’d thought carefully about what I would say, and I’d promised myself I’d stay calm. But as he moved toward the door, my intentions abandoned me. The prospect of being left alone again in the cell loomed in front of me, and I felt too full of blood, until my whole body was a pulse, racing. I ran at him, grabbed at the keys he held.

He was half a head taller than me; stronger, too, after my six lean years in the settlement and the months of stagnation in the cell. With one arm stretched out, hand splayed about my neck, he kept me away from him with barely a struggle. I knew, even as I clawed and kicked at him, that it was pointless. If I were to succeed in knocking him out, or breaking his arm, I’d only find myself as incapacitated as him. But in my mind I wasn’t fighting him; I was fighting the very walls of the cell, and the concrete floor, and the indifference of the hours that came and went while I festered in that room. I threw my whole weight against him, until the bones of his hand were rasping against my jawbone as he held me at arm’s length. Still he didn’t relent, even when I felt the flesh of his forearm snag and rip under my nails.