Rupert Thomson - Air and Fire

He sat up.

‘Suzanne? Are you all right?’

She had grazed her forehead in the fall. Blood slid from a gash above her eyebrow and sank into her hair. He took his shirt-tail, worked to staunch the flow.

They had been riding in the shadow of a wall of rock. To their left the ground dropped away, sharply in some places, to a valley hundreds of feet below. A sunlit plain, strewn with boulders. And, in the distance, mountains. A burnt colour, toasted. He looked up, tried to figure it. The track must have given way. A kind of landslide. But they had not fallen far. Ten feet, at the most. He could only think that the rain must have weakened the ground. Driven wedges into it. Cracked it as cold water cracks hot glass. They were lucky not to have fallen further. Not to have broken anything. There was no great subtlety about the way death reached for you sometimes. Take his father.

The mule was standing a few yards away. She seemed unharmed. Perplexed too, if a mule could know perplexity. It was in the angle of her jaw, somehow, the gap between her ears. He turned back to Suzanne. And it was then, still smiling at their luck, that he noticed the colour of the soil around her head. He sat quite motionless, all previous astonishment nothing compared to this.

Gold.

A lifetime of winters came tumbling through his memory, as if the rain had seeped down into his mind as well, as if the past itself were crumbling. All the hardships, all the disenchantments. You travelled by foot into unknown country. There were no roads, no guides. You had to carry everything you needed in your hands or on your back: food, clothes, tools. You slept with your head between two stones to cheat the arrows of Indians who might be on your trail. You woke before dawn, your threadbare blanket stiff with frost. You dug holes, washed earth. Pay-dirt, mostly. A diet of snakes and acorns. Unleavened bread that sank a weight in your belly but did not kill the hunger. Tea made from muddy stream-water or dew or melted snow. Loneliness, cold, disease. And so little to show for it. So very little in the way of reward. You felt like those pelican robes the Indians used to wear, Indians who lived on river estuaries, the Gila, the Colorado: feathers on the inside, blood facing out. Life that hard, feelings so raw; all the pain faced outwards. It was enough to break a man. More than enough.

And now this.

Some rain, a landslide; the work of a few moments. And not even his work. He could hardly say that he had found the gold. It had been presented to him.

He squatted down, reached out. It was in large pieces, and in a perfectly smooth, pure state. He could only think that the force of the rain had prised it loose, and that same force had washed the ore away and left the metal free. Some of the grains weighed several ounces; they were closer to nuggets than to grains. It put him in mind of Mariposa gold. One of his father’s friends had dug it up. Wilson had held that gold in his hand so long he might have been learning it by heart. His father had been proud of his reverence that day, boasted to his friend that prospecting ran in the family.

That reverence came back to him as his gaze moved up to Suzanne’s face. Her lilac mouth, all cracked and bleeding. Her skin as dry as paper. Her green eyes slumbering behind burned lids. But her head crowned in gold, which was the way he had always imagined her, somehow. He remembered times when he believed that he might bewitch her with his stories, that he might talk his way into her heart. He did not come close. Even Valence, in the Hotel La Playa, had seemed humbled for a moment, as if he had been faced not with a question but an emperor. And yet that was what she still longed for, still lacked. Some love to match her own. The kind of devotion that did not waver — like worship with all the distance taken out. Something she could understand, accept, return.

‘Suzanne?’ He had a secret for her.

Her eyelids opened.

‘Look.’ He showed her the gold. ‘It was here all the time.’

Though her mouth must have hurt her, she found a way to smile. ‘Mr Pharaoh,’ she whispered. ‘Very lucky man.’

It would be just the way he had said it would be. The last sunlight angling almost horizontally across the valley. Half the palms in shadow. Half still green, and edged with gold.

‘There, Suzanne,’ he said. ‘Look there. Below.’

Her eyes rose above his shoulder. Far-sighted, bloodshot, chalky-green. And one word reached his ears.

‘Down.’

The mule needed no encouragement. Maybe she could already smell the water, imagine the lavish quenching of her thirst. Down they plunged.

It was night when they came to the place. A lake — and yet it had the dimensions of a river. Narrowing in the distance, as if it flowed on from here to the sea. Dark palms leaning inwards, the lake’s banks narrowing. And the grass that he had spoken of, sedge grass: tipped in silver, massed like spears or lances — an army at the water’s edge.

Kadakaamana.

He turned in the saddle to see her face. Her eyes, still open, stared as if entranced. He saw that they would wither now and die. Her eyes would blow away like leaves. A movement across the iris startled him. But it was only a reflection, the fingers of a palm branch fidgeting. Her lips, though parted, would not speak again.

He heard hoofbeats coming from behind him. He urged his mule forwards, into the shadow of the palms and out along the grass that sloped down to the water. Once concealed, he let the mule dip her head and drink. He watched the stranger passing, a hunched figure on a pale horse. He waited until the paleness was lost among the trees. The mule’s neck arched; she was still drinking. Ripples moved out across an otherwise smooth surface. As if the lake were being peeled.

Under the palms, in that evening stillness, he could feel her against his back. No heart beating, just a warmth that would not last. A weight that would diminish. He slid out of the saddle. Grass beneath his feet after an age of dust and stones. Sweet, yielding grass.

When he reached up for her, she toppled sideways, down into his arms. He carried her to the water’s edge. Returning to the mule, he collected his rifle, his pickaxe and his spade, and uncoiled the rope from the saddlebow, the same rope that had bound them together, the same knots that her life, like some contortionist, had slipped. He carried the rope and the tools to where she lay. It was only then, as he kneeled beside her, that he noticed how swollen her ankles were. He unfastened her shoes and eased them slowly off. She would not be needing shoes, in any case. The floors of heaven would be soft. He laid the rifle and the tools lengthways on her body, then he reached beneath her with the rope and pulled it through. She had never weighed much; they would be more than enough to take her down. He folded her arms across her chest. She seemed to be holding his rifle, his pickaxe and his spade for him. They were her charge, in her safe-keeping. Now and for ever. He lifted her again and, stooping among the sedge grass, laid her on the water as if it were a bed and took his hands from under her. She seemed to wait there for a moment. She could have been lying on solid ground. Then, smooth as clouds across the sun, the water moved to cover her. And chattered as she sank. Washed the dirt from her. The dirt of the wrong loves. The dirt of his lack of faith in her. Washed it all away. Wrapped her up in what she had dreamed of. Better than any sheets or arms. Now she would be cared for, honoured, pure.

He lifted his eyes from the place where she had been. The night was still new. Dogs barking, a child’s laughter. Stars prickled in a sky that had sent, miraculously, rain.

Use the hours of darkness.

His mind torn loose. Cut from his body, floating, separate. It did not seem to be his own. All he could see were women with their shaved heads painted white. Sorrow beyond weeping, grief beyond tears. The relentless violence of stones. The mask and cloak of blood.