The Lost Village(97)

I feel my way around her neck and find the delicate gold chain. The clasp is small, and it’s hard to open in the darkness. I have to use my nails to get hold of the small catch.

Then I fold the sheet back up over her head, so she can rest away from this world.



* * *



Once the fire starts to take, Tone curls up exhausted beside it and immediately falls asleep. Her chest rises and falls steadily under the blanket. At first I hardly dare take my eyes off her, but after a while I feel some of my tension release.

Robert is gazing deeply into the fire. I clear my throat.

“Robert,” I say quietly. He looks up at me.

“I have something,” I say. I reach into my pocket and fish out the necklace with the gold heart.

“I got it,” I say. “Up there.”

His eyes follow the swinging heart in the glow of the fire.

“Her mother should have it,” I say quietly. “I thought that … that you should give it to her.”

The words sting in my throat.

At first he says nothing. But then he holds out his hand, and I let the thin necklace chain wind down into his palm. He holds it carefully, like something fragile. It almost disappears in his big hand.

Robert looks at it for a long time. I wrap my arms around my knees and sit in silence.

He closes his hand.

“She regretted it, you know,” he says eventually. His voice is slightly claggy from the swelling in his nose. “She never stopped regretting it.”

I try to swallow the tears that well up in my throat. My voice doesn’t want to carry. I purse my lips and stare into the fire until my vision cracks into a thousand sparks.

“I know,” I say, biting my cheek hard.

Then I say quietly:

“She saved my life.”

The faint breeze blowing across the square is surprisingly warm, almost mild. Summer is on its way.

An unexpected sound from above makes me look up. It’s light, almost warbling. It takes me a few seconds to place it, but then I see the slight break in the school’s silhouette. There’s a bird sitting on one of the gutters.

“That’s the first bird I’ve seen since we got here,” I say.

“Yeah,” he says. “Me too.”

It twitters again. I wish I were the sort of person who could identify birds by their song alone. I have no idea what type this is.

But it’s beautiful.





EPILOGUE


I waited, but no one came.

I waited and waited, and I fed the child, but they never came back. So in the end I went to our church’s entrance, climbed, shaking, down into the tunnel, and followed the path in the darkness. I refused to take any torch or lamp with me. Only he was allowed to do that, for he was our lightbearer.

He told me to stay above ground with the child. He told me that she was important, and that I was to stay with her. That I was to wait for them, and that they would be back soon. When I reached the rubble I didn’t understand what it was; I thought I had gone the wrong way, accidentally climbed down into a different tunnel that had collapsed, and gotten myself lost. I started to panic. I thought I would die down there, alone in a secluded tunnel, with only the sound of dripping water for company.

But then I found my way back, and the exit was where it was supposed to be.

Four times I walked back and forth before I understood.

The days passed. Cars came driving into town, and I left the child to them in the school. Perhaps it was her fault that they hadn’t returned, that devil-spawn. If they just took her away with them then he would have to come back to me.

I hid down in the tunnels, for I remembered what he had said: that those outside God’s grace would take me from him and destroy our paradise, for they knew no better. That the woman who had been my mother would surely have fed them lies about us.

They would never understand. No one could understand.

But then the water started to rise over the rubble. And I remembered what my father had said, back when I still had a father: they used to have to pump away the groundwater, to stop the passages from flooding.

I wanted to stay down there and let the water take me, but I knew I couldn’t do that. To take one’s own life is a sin, and those who waste themselves are the ones who burn most furiously in hell.

I had no choice but to wait for them. I had given my word.

I knew that he would come back to me.

After a while the food ran out. I had to go into others’ kitchens and start eating from their pantries. But I could never bring myself to go back into her house, my false mother’s house. I had a feeling in my bones that this was all her fault, or at least in part. She had always loved that witch more than she loved me, in spite of everything.

I let the rest of the congregation look after me. I slept in their beds and ate of their food. We were all one, and what belonged to one of us belonged to us all, I tried to persuade myself. That was what he had told me. But it felt wrong, and I started to feel sad. At night I would cry.

Sometimes I felt the doubts creep up on me, like stinging little devils. What if they didn’t come back? What if he was wrong?

But I beat them off, fiercely and furiously. He had promised. He was God’s chosen one, and he had told me we would be together for all eternity. That we would create paradise on earth.

I went back out into the forest, to the path that led to our church. I took a lamp with me this time: perhaps their light had gone out, and they had gotten lost in the darkness. He used to call me his light. His divine light. His angel.