Reckoning

Rajiv Moté

The war had taken nearly everything from Dozan, but by leaving him his little daughter Ayula, he also found something he’d lacked most of his life: a sharp, crystalline sense of purpose. As they fled the Char-ravaged flats for the foothills, all of Dozan’s will bent toward keeping his daughter alive, and keeping the war from seeping into her as it had into him, because surely the war couldn’t last forever. She would have to fit into the gentler world to come.

In the foothills, an Incidental Market—an opportunistic gathering of hand carts, ox wagons, Rovers, and even an aid truck—yielded an unexpected trove well-suited to his purpose. After he’d bartered his scavenged fuel cells for food, supplies, and ammunition, he kept enough credit left over for something beyond the merely needful: a toy, a book, a bite of something sweet.

The foothills offered few enough chances for comfort and indulgence, but when they came, Dozan seized them for his daughter. She had no memory of life before the war. Keeping the war out of her demanded resourcefulness.

“What is your heart’s desire?” he asked her grandly, sweeping an arm over the indulgences arrayed on the tarps.

Ayula misunderstood the question. “A safe place to sleep,” she said.

Until a few days ago, Ayula shared Dozan’s understanding of the word “safe.” Safe was a word for the moment—a rocket barrage ending, patrolling soldiers passing without incident, airborne drones deciding a gathering wasn’t dense enough to target, the slithering Char suddenly flowing to hunt in a different direction.

Safe didn’t stretch the length of a night’s sleep. Dozan kept them moving, away from blasted cities, through pillaged villages, away from fields burned to ash. They evaded the roving warlords hunting for labor or leverage, and the otherwise ordinary people who were driven to violent desperation. They kept moving even as they lost Ayula’s mother, brother, aunties, and uncles. There was no real “safe” on this side of the mountains.

Four days ago they’d found the High Pass through the mountains, where Ayula discovered a new meaning of “safe”—one that kept the war out. Now it was all she talked about.

Gossip held that once, refugees had escaped the war through the High Pass. Now, the soldiers who guarded it kept people in the east from bringing war into their land, which had already changed its name and flag during its own troubles. But scraps of their old customs and decency still held. Travelers with small children could rest two nights in the shelter of the mountains before being given provisions and sent back the way they came. But that kindness had hard limits. Those who wouldn’t leave, or tried to return, were shot. Bones lay in the ravine, far below.

Dozan allowed his daughter to see only their kindness, not their hardness. Not the bones. There was a price for adapting too much to war, just as there was a price for adapting too little. He could fail her in either direction.

The soldiers they’d met at the Pass seemed decent men, and spoke their language. A young soldier was charmed by the wildflowers in Ayula’s hair, telling her that such pretty flowers didn’t grow in the heights. He knelt and gently asked what each type of blossom was called, and Ayula, with the knowledge she had from her mother, told him the names and meanings. He listened intently.

This man is practicing for fatherhood, Dozan realized. Somewhere on the other side of the mountains, the soldier’s wife cradled her belly and selected among powdery pale color schemes for their nursery, rejecting her mother-in-law’s suggestions while pretending to consider them. No. That wasn’t the soldier’s family. Dozan’s hand batted the air, pushing away unbidden memories. Tend to the living, for the dead need nothing more. He forgot where he’d heard that saying, but he always recited it to ward off beckoning ghosts.

An older soldier, who could already be a grandfather with his iron gray mustache, kept aloof. He seemed to know he may have to do his duty and shoot those he was feeding if, after the allotted time, they didn’t turn back. Dozan understood this resolve. Still, the man’s eyes softened when they fell on Ayula.

Experience had made Dozan a canny judge of strangers. Either would shoot him in an eyeblink, an armed man whose scars and burns told of a life purchased with the lives of others. A man adapted to war. But there were limits to the horrors in which men like these would participate. Men who lived in prolonged safety had no desire to harm innocent children. Duty or not, they considered themselves above it.

But those two nights! Unconcealed campfires under a spray of stars, piles of soft, woolen blankets, and blessed quiet. No rockets, gunfire, or buzzing drones, and far beyond the reach of the Char. Ayula had never known such tranquility. Now it was something imaginable—and possible. A safe place to sleep.

“We have to keep moving,” Dozan said, gently but firmly. The Incidental Market would disperse soon. Too many people were gathering. He chose honeycombs from a wrinkled, unsmiling woman to round out his trade. Ayula’s newfound hope made them a bitter substitute for the safe place she’d asked for. Still, she sucked on a piece while he traded information with the vendors about the trails they’d followed here. Dozan chose a quiet-sounding path.

A dog emerged from under a wagon to make a fierce show of barking. Ayula’s sticky hand tightened in her father’s grip, but she kept her stride. She’d learned a little of real threats versus show.

“When I was a boy, I had a dog,” Dozan told Ayula.

This caught her full attention. “What was his name?”

When war was only intermittent, Dozan had asked his father for a dog. His father said that in the city, only rich men kept dogs as pets, and anyway, who would look after it? Train it not to bite? Feed it? Where would it sleep? Taking care of a living thing was a big responsibility, and Dozan already had responsibilities—to his studies, chores, and the family shop.

To prove his father wrong, Dozan cared for a stray dog who haunted a nearby alley. He lured her with food and clean water. He made her a shelter to sleep in with a canvas roof and a blanket. He brushed her coat to a shine and put a collar on her to show that this dog was no stray. She belonged to someone.

“I called her Lulu.”

“Was she a guard dog?”

“No, she was very gentle. But she liked to play. She could do tricks. I taught her how to sit, come, stay, and roll.”

Dozan watched his daughter consider this, fitting an animal playmate into a patchwork idea of a time when things were “safe.” He regretted bringing it up. He knew what she would ask next.

“What happened to Lulu?”

War was intermittent then, but eventually the rockets resumed. The buildings behind their shop, and the alley, were struck. Dozan’s father dug through the rubble, but wouldn’t let his son look. Dozan couldn’t remember if his father had actually accused him of selfishness—that would’ve been cruel, and his father wasn’t a cruel man—but for a long time after, he agonized over whether Lulu died because, in his pride, he’d bound her to himself, overriding the instincts she’d survived on before.

“Well, she had puppies, you see, and we couldn’t care for so many. I had to let them go live with the papa-dog.”

“Did you see them again?”

“Ah, no, but I was glad they were together and safe.” A happier ending. The past was the story you told.

In the foothills, keeping safe meant staying on the move. The Char hunted mainly in the flats to the east, flowing over farm and village, leaving only ash in its wake. The rolling, stony hills provided places to shelter and hide, but that could cut both ways, especially as more people fled to higher ground. There were both safety and danger in numbers; there were both danger and safety alone. Dozan knew it could change in an eyeblink, and the moment one’s instincts failed, all could be lost.

No, not instincts. Animals—those that remained untamed—survived on instinct.

People survived on experience. People had to learn. The lessons were nearly unbearable. His son. His wife. His sisters and brothers on both sides of marriage. His parents. His dog Lulu. Tend to the living, for the dead need nothing more. But a lesson that doesn’t take everything remains a lesson. Each loss honed him into a better protector of Ayula. That, too, was a story Dozan often told himself.

As the sun began to set, the mountains cast long, jagged shadows. Dozan had his daughter practice loading, unloading, holding, and aiming his rifle. He wouldn’t let her fire. Ammunition was dear, and noise could draw attention. Half measures. He was keeping her alive by teaching her war, but not so much that it would seep inside her. He could fail her in either direction.

He needed a better way.

They were back on the trail before dawn.

Halfway through the next day, the sound of loud, coarse laughter and intermittent gunfire came from ahead. Ayula wouldn’t be able to run fast enough to double back, and Dozan would have to abandon their supplies to carry her. Climbing would leave them visible. But they had just passed a side trail, perhaps small enough to be ignored.

Hidden behind an outcropping, Dozan whispered to Ayula, “Ignore the gunfire. How many do you hear?”

Ayula scrunched her eyes closed and listened before holding up three fingers.

Their hiding place had a narrow view of the main path. They waited, Dozan with his rifle ready.

Three men—barely more than boys, not much older than his son would have been—walked side by side, kicking stones. They wore civilian clothes, barked exaggerated laughs, and occasionally shot a round into the air. Making noise to frighten, because they themselves were frightened. Dozan took aim at the boy who had just fired. He kept his breathing slow. Frightened was dangerous. The boys didn’t even glance their way, and soon their laughter and gunfire receded into the distance.

“Why were they doing that?” Dozan asked Ayula.

She knew the answer. “To sound like there were more of them. To scare us.”

“And why is that dangerous?”

“They were telling everyone where they were. Someone could set an ambush.”

Dozan nodded. “What should they have done?”

“Stayed quiet and ready,” Ayula said.

“Well done.”

Ayula had a question of her own. “Could you have taught them?”

“What do you mean?”

“Taught them how to be safe, like you teach me. Had them travel with us.”

The notion hadn’t even occurred to Dozan. They had adopted strangers as traveling companions in the past. It never lasted long, and often ended poorly.

“Maybe,” he said. He was proud and terrified that she’d suggested it.

Dozan decided to continue on the side trail. It led back toward the mountains. An idea began to form in his mind, an idea that he wasn’t ready to acknowledge. Ayula had no sense of where they were going, and never asked. She trusted him to lead, to keep her safe. “Together and safe” was the happy ending of stories. But what if one had to choose between the two?

The trail broadened, became easier, and Ayula needed fewer breaks to rest. When it forked into northward and southward tines, they crept up a hill to see if either way offered an advantage. Then, a few kilometers to the north, the rockets fell. Streaking with tails of fire and white smoke, they vibrated the air with the roar of their passage. Flashes of fire and billows of gray smoke erupted where they struck, with booms louder than thunder. They struck in rapid succession, so quickly that Dozan lost count.

He and his daughter sat and watched. They could feel the hot wind even from this distance. When the gray smoke cleared, they could see what remained of the ground. Patches of blackened earth floated like charred scales over something purple and red, looking like a burn wound on an expanse of human flesh. It flowed. It moved with gravity—and against it—as unnatural as it was deadly. Shapes rose from the mass, lurched forward, and occasionally fell back, reabsorbed. Slowly, it spread. Once, it was only in the flats. Now it oozed through the foothills.

“Is that . . . Char?” Ayula asked. It had been months since she had last seen it, and longer since she’d seen it kill, but she remembered enough to be terrified. It moved almost like a live thing, and what it touched, it burned. Slowly. Charred people and animals went on for a time, shambling, rampaging, and burning until they finally dissolved into the purple-red mass. Tend to the living, Dozan thought, pushing away abominable memories.

He’d thought the factions had stopped using it. Maybe one of them had grown desperate. Maybe this was a new faction, untempered by loss. It might have been a bio-weapon, or some out-of-control containment technology, but as it consumed villages and farms in the flats, most thought of the Char simply as a curse on this war-ravaged land, the liquified rage of countless dead, indiscriminately spreading more death.

So. South, then. Back in the direction of the High Pass. Fate had answered the question Dozan dared not ask.

After four more days of walking, they found another Incidental Market where Dozan traded news of the road behind for water and provisions. He had to describe what he saw several times before the people there would accept the disastrous truth of Char in the foothills. It would spread. That was its nature. Truly nowhere was safe on this side of the mountains. That became part of the story Dozan told himself, steeling himself for what he must do.

The next evening they found the towering wreckage of a war-hulk, its armament and fuel cells stripped, the leg joints that allowed it to scuttle through the foothills blasted and broken. Maybe it had ventured too close to the defenses at the High Pass. Dozan judged it had been abandoned for some time. They made camp under its metal belly.

That night, by a tiny campfire shielded by the dead war-hulk, Dozan redistributed the contents of their packs. He had been carrying most of the weight and bulk: the food, water, blanket rolls, the things that could be traded. He gave Ayula as much as he dared.

“You should build up your strength,” Dozan told his daughter. He gave her the last honeycomb. “And hold on to this. You heard that soldier. No flowers—or bees—in the heights. Honey could be a valuable trade.”

“Are we going back to the High Pass?” Ayula asked. She was too young to disguise her eagerness.

The stars shone fiercely.

“Tonight, we rest.” Dozan pointed to a rocky trail illuminated by starlight. “The High Pass is that way, following the path. Not too far. Look. You see?”

“They won’t turn us away?”

He tapped his daughter’s nose with a fingertip, and then touched her round cheek, allowing his heart to break a little. “I think they liked you. I can’t believe they would really turn you away.” Not like they would an armed, grown man with too much war already in him.

Dozan stared at the starlit mountains and waited until his daughter’s breathing deepened and slowed in sleep. He rose to his feet without making a sound. A distance away from the trail that led to the High Pass, a smaller path led the opposite way, back into the foothills, to places unknown.

Dozan began to walk, his feet silent as a ghost. The night air was crisp, but not cold. His pack was lighter now. He felt light. He looked up at the stars and imagined floating away on the wind. He thought of his dog Lulu, and the old question he’d turned over throughout his childhood: Had he killed her? And the newer question: Had every loss since then made him a better protector, or proven that he was no protector at all? Both were stories that could be told of what brought him here, into the shadow of the High Pass. His purpose remained clear. But the story he told of his past could change what he’d do next. When she woke alone, Ayula would choose the trail to the High Pass. To keep her safe, Dozan must choose the other.

The young soldier who’d admired the flowers in Ayula’s hair, the old soldier whose eyes had softened to her—these were not child killers. The war wasn’t in them. War was the real enemy, what it forced people, and the land itself, to become. The mountains were the only proven protection. In the choice between “together” and “safe,” he owed her safety. True safety would keep her alive and keep the war out of her. Ayula could sleep in a powdery-pale curtained bedroom. Knowing that, Dozan would need nothing more. Ghosts beckoned him to join them, light as the wind.

But how would I know?

The thought stopped him cold. It wouldn’t be enough to imagine his daughter safe. He could be wrong. The guards might shoot her. They might turn her away, and she’d go wandering alone through the foothills, looking for her father. No no no. He had to know. Anything less would be just a story for his own comfort. Anything less would drive him mad.

Then he heard voices. Three men. Back behind him. Where Ayula slept.

They were the very same boys they’d dodged earlier, who must have been driven back by the Char. They rounded the fallen war-hulk and saw the camp.

Could you have taught them? But experience already moved Dozan like instinct. His feet, silent as a ghost.

The boys approached the fire.

BANG.

Shouting. Dozan’s blood was hot as Char.

“Papa?” came Ayula’s voice.

BANG. BANG. The gunshots echoed in the foothills.

It began and ended too quickly for second guesses, other possibilities, or better endings. All dying did, this side of the mountains. And once it was done, self-recrimination served nobody. The dead need nothing more.

Dozan held his daughter tight, keeping her eyes from the dead boys. They truly were little more than children. Children whose fathers had failed them. “Don’t look at them,” he said. “We’re safe now.” A word for the moment, but one nobody else could be trusted to give her.

Somewhere in the foothills, perhaps even in the High Pass itself, rockets struck, and the curse of war crawled over and burned the boundaries that sought to contain it. There was no safety anywhere, except in the moments he could give her. Perhaps the gentler world he dreamed of existed only in the past. The war had not always been in him. He’d learned. Should the world change again, his daughter would learn its ways, too. But until then, she had to survive. That was the story of their journey. That was the simple truth.

Dozan and Ayula broke their fast on the last honeycomb. There were many paths in the foothills, and it was impossible to know where they led until they walked them together.