Rupert Thomson - Air and Fire

The woman turned her face and smiled in recognition. A smile that said, One of our own. Turned and walked towards her, wrists knocking against her hips, hips swaying lazily. That smile. A skirt that swayed and clicked. The power of life.

Her feet left no prints on the sand.

She was thirteen and running in the long grass. The woods outside the town. That green smell of rain on leaves, rain on the trunks of trees. That hard sound, as if the rain were solid — not water falling from the sky, but coins or buttons. God’s purse, God’s sewing basket. Her friend ran beside her, and everything bad had been undone. All life handed back, all the simple joys released. The rain poured off her arms and legs, and she looked down at herself, among green leaves, among black trunks of trees. She looked as if she had been polished. She looked like something valuable. To be treasured. Something that would last for ever.

Drink it up. All up. It will keep you strong.

A man kneeling beside her. She knew him. He lifted his hat to her and wiped his hand on his trousers before he greeted her. He had come to take her to the cool green waters. She smiled behind her lips. It could not be far now. They were almost there.

Everything settling, everything arranged. All movements gradually diminishing. Even the rain seemed to be touching her more gently now, like the light from distant stars.

Her husband, whom she would always love.

She wanted to say something about happiness, such happiness as she had known. Her lips moved, came as close to words as they could. Which was not even close. The air stood still in her throat. Her tongue not even there.

She blessed him in his absence. She blessed him. He had never been anything less than kind.

So. Are you happy now?

The sky was darkest blue in front of her. The black pearls sown and scattered on the land. This knowledge had been revealed to her. A knowledge that would grow in her. The knowledge of her power.

The woman walked towards her, hips shifting lazily. Somebody who wanted her.

One of our own.

The first rain in months. In years. And out of a clear heaven too. Wilson tipped his head back, felt it beat against his forehead, eyelids, teeth.

He had heard that this could happen. A chubasco, they called it. Canyons became rivers. Coyotes drowned; whole settlements were swept away. And afterwards a spring would come. A spring that was momentary, improvised. The barren landscape bristled with shoots and blossoms. The desert would turn green. That was what they said. He had listened but he had never known quite what to believe. Maybe it was no more than a traveller’s tale, the kind of lie his father used to tell.

But here it was, all round him. And not just drizzle either. Sheets of it between him and everything. Loud bucketfuls tumbling out of the sky. The mule had tipped her head to one side and she was snapping at the rain with her chipped teeth, the way a cat snaps at a blade of grass.

And then it stopped. As suddenly as it had started. The sky still clear above, the sky still blue. Before he had time to fill his canisters. Before he could even take his hat off and turn it upside-down. He listened to the land settling into its new shape. Creaking as the water ran over it and into it. It was already vanishing. Soon there would be no evidence that it had rained at all, and he would be another traveller with a tall tale.

He looked at Suzanne. Her face streaked with dust that had turned to mud, her blonde ringlets matted.

She was whispering something. He had to bend down, put his ear close to her mouth.

‘Water — ’

‘You want some water?’

She shook her head. ‘Green — ’

‘Green? Green what?’ He bent still closer. His ear grazed her lips.

She tried to swallow. ‘Green water — ’ Her chin lifted. ‘Ka — ’ She could not say it. All those syllables. Then her voice found its way clear. ‘You promised.’

He washed her face and neck with torn-off pieces of her own damp dress, then he threaded his hands beneath her body and carried her over to the mule. As he heaved her up into the saddle, her head fell back against his sleeve. He tried to coax a little water through her lips, but her throat was too swollen. It just spilled out again.

He climbed into the saddle in front of her. The mule staggered. He fitted his hand against the muscle of the mule’s shoulder. Spoke a few words into her ear. When she had found her balance, he lashed Suzanne to his back with a length of rope that circled them three times. Then he placed her arms around his waist. He had to keep her from slipping sideways, falling to the ground.

She was still trying to say the name.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I heard you.

‘I understand,’ he said.

He thought of the mission church, solid as the land itself, the masonry tinged with pink. He could remember sitting in the town square, beneath an Indian laurel tree. That huge vault of foliage. One of many men, just sitting. Relishing the shade. Father Lutz had offered him a pomegranate. ‘It’s from my garden.’ He could still taste that fruit, its jewelled pieces sweetened by the volcanic soil in which it had grown. He had stayed in a whitewashed room. Stone floors, the walls bare, the furniture carved from some dark wood he did not know. At dusk he had walked among the palms, beside still waters. He remembered how it had felt to be there. His thoughts seemed blessed. His life became a psalm.

And there would be this advantage: he would not have to lie to her.

She sat behind him, her face turned sideways, one cheek resting between his shoulderblades. At last the sun was dropping through the sky. The heat bore down, a weight upon his head. The air so still that he constantly imagined movement. He was riding into his own tall shadow.

There were lava-fields now, shades of charcoal and maroon. Like raised roads, they curved towards him. This was where the elephant trees put down their roots. Perverse trees, to choose such desolation. Nothing else grew here. From a distance the lava looked smooth, but up close you saw that it was flakes of rock stacked tightly, pages in a book. And each flake sharp as glass; they could slice through boot leather, horses’ hoofs. He let his eye climb towards the mother of the fields. Its slopes striped with lava stains. The shocked blue air above the crater’s edge. The last time it erupted had been a century and a half ago. But the air did not forget.

Suzanne was murmuring into his back. He could not understand what she was saying. He supposed it must be French — though even English, in her condition, might not have been intelligible. He had a sudden picture of the inside of her head: a cage of brightly coloured birds, their wings cramped by the bars and weakening, folding around their bodies, as if they were cold. Delirium. There could be no other explanation for the insistent, soothing murmur of her voice. She could have been comforting a child.

Her head slipped sideways, knocked against his elbow. He had to reach behind him with one hand and heave her upright. During the next few hours this would become a habit. One of those habits that you don’t remember later. But at the time it’s the only thing you know.

The world was turning over. Sky, ground, sky.

He must have been dozing, chin on his chest. Moments above sleep, and moments just below. No clear dividing line. No sense of the difference. Then the rattle of shale and stones, and the mule disappearing from under him.

Blue, brown, blue. Brown. Blue.

He was lying next to Suzanne, tangled in rope, as if he had been delivered to her side by some clumsy angel. The sky had darkened; the day was burning low. He lay still, waiting for pain to start. But his head ached, and one knee. That was it.