TWENTY-TWO
We see lights among the trees when we leave the burned facility—three pairs of headlights—and we dash for the security of the tree line. The cars stick to the road, and it's easy to stay hidden among the trees as the trio drive up to the facility and fan out into the open ground around the building. As the engine noises stop, we hear voices—men shouting at one another—and a flurry of smaller lights bounce toward the building. They find the open door, and a number of men go inside, while teams of two start to sweep the perimeter.
I tug Mere away from the tree trunk we're hiding behind. “They'll find the laptop,” I whisper. “We don't need to be here.” Mere had wanted to keep it, but I had argued that it was better for us to be invisible than to hang on to the video file of Nigel's dismemberment. Especially if the video file was meant for Secutores.
She doesn't want to go, but she lets me pull her away, and we follow the road back to the edge of the crater. Mere is tired and not used to running in the dark, and after a while, I pick her up again and carry her. The access road turns south once it reaches the crater wall, and I follow it even though it is going the wrong way for Hanga Roa. I could climb the crater wall, but doing so with Mere in my arms would be tough. She's still enough that I suspect she's fallen asleep.
The road bends back on itself fairly quickly, turning into a series of tight switchbacks that lead up to the rim. It ends in an old dirt road that runs north to south. I turn left, north, and start jogging toward the distant glow of the airport and Hanga Roa.
It's nearly dawn by the time we get back to the hotel. I wake Mere up so that she can climb the stairs under her own power, and she does so listlessly. Once we reach our room, she kicks off her shoes and falls down on the bed, letting her exhaustion pull her back into dreamland.
The recent exercise and inhaling Mere's scent over the past few hours have made me restless, and if the sun weren't coming up, I would go back out again and prowl around the tiny town of Hanga Roa. But nothing good would come of that. The thirst is there, at the back of my throat. My body is still fighting the toxins. I had been hoping to get some dirt time at the spa, but with that option no longer available, I'm starting to consider Plan B.
It's not a long-term solution. Blood brings other complications.
Mere is sprawled on the bed, and I adjust her position slightly so that I can lie down too. I fold my hands across my stomach and stare at the ceiling, trying to ignore the steady beat of her heart. She turns onto her side, a mumbled sigh slipping from her parted lips…
I close my eyes so that I don't see here anymore, and when I hear her exhale again, it doesn't sound the same. It sounds like wind on water…
And I'm not lying next to Mere anymore. I'm on the boat again, fleeing the ruin of the fairest city ever built. Fleeing everything I ever knew and loved.
“We are no longer who we were,” Aeneas says. “We were men who stood our ground, who swore to fight to the last for our king and country. Now, we are nameless scoundrels, running across the dark sea that will surely swallow us before the sun rises again.”
The men are scattered on the deck—exhausted, wounded, close to death. No one is rowing, and it is up to the captain and me to hold the tiller straight, to keep us on course—the only course available we can take. The wind is behind us, and our sails are full. The timbers of our boat are our most valuable possession. Everything else is broken and worn.
“We will become something else,” I tell him. “We will find new names.”
“Have you seen this?” he asks me. “Have you heard such a prophecy from the birds?”
I shake my head. “That is all behind me now. Like everything else.”
He laughs, a cold laugh of a man who feels he has no future. “So be it. Let us never look back again. We are Dardanoi no more, you and I. We are men of the west, and we will go as far as these timbers will carry us.”
The wind blows us away from the war, and we try to forgot how to be soldiers, but our bodies know nothing else. The short list. Kill everyone else.
I sigh, and the boat vanishes. I am standing on a cliff now, and the sun is a blazing fire in the west, its flames licking across the surface of the ocean. The people of the clans are behind me, chanting and beating their drums. I am naked but for a headdress of white feathers and a pair of wings made from palm fronds strapped to my arms. The ocean is far away, but I leap anyway, spreading my wings. I dive gracefully, and the cliff rushes past me. The updraft is warm and strong, and when I spread my arms, my palm-frond wings fill with air. I don't hit the water—not yet—the air carries me across the waves. Away from the volcanic cliff behind me. Toward the tiny spur of rock, jutting from the sea.
I am flying.
I am not afraid of the waves beneath me. They will grab me soon and try to drown me, but I'm not afraid of them anymore. It has been a long time since I fled Troy; crossing the Mediterranean seems so easy compared to the distance I have traveled to reach this rock, to stand before these people and show them how to fly. To show them their gods are real.
I pull my arms in, and dive into the water. When I surface, I am not at sea anymore. I am in a bed with a woman. She is on top of me, her lips against mine. Her skin is warm and her mouth is wet. Her hands knead my arms and chest, and I wrap my arms around her. Her legs part, and she gasps lightly, her teeth pressing against my lower lip. My hands sink to her hips and I hold her close. We move back and forth, like waves against the beach, and she crushes her mouth to mine, our teeth clicking together. I want to bite her, but she won't let me go and so I bite her lip instead. She bites me back, and I moan as our blood mixes.
I am hard inside her, and her fingers are raking across my skin now. I want to bleed for her…
I sit up.
When I look in the bathroom mirror, I see a face covered in sweat. There is blood on my lips. I taste it, and it isn't mine.
Arcadians don't dream, and what I told Aeneas was the truth. I gave up being a seer when we left Troy.
There are too many holes in my head. And they're growing.
You're just a grunt. You follow orders.
What have I done?
I find my optics and head out to get some air before the sun gets too high in the sky. Outside, the scrub grass glistens with dew and the gulls are calling out to one another across the bay. I walk through town, not really paying attention to where I'm going. I'm letting other factors guide me. The air, the light, the distant sound of surf and seabirds. This is how I used to do it when Aeneas asked me to seek guidance. If the birds and the wind were not forthcoming with insight, there were other, bloodier, methods that were, as a result, prone to violence and darkness. After our flight from Troy, I no longer wanted to use the old methods.
I watch terns flit across the sky, trying to discern the patterns in the flight paths. A fat gull with gray pinfeathers squawks noisily at me from a wooden post as I pass. I walk on, and eventually I realize my destination is one of the moai. It sits on a low bluff near the edge of town, looking over the shallow depression of the bay and valley. There's a tiny café at the bottom of the hill, and a well-worn trail meanders up the slope behind the tiny building. I make the climb and stand next to the giant head. Seeing what it sees. How many are left? I wonder. They were the guardians of the island; they watched over the trees and the clans. And the outsiders came. The cult of the Bird Man came to the island—the tangata manu—and the clans found something to fight over.
The Bird Man brought them jealousy, greed, and avarice—the age-old sins that could never be completely forgotten. How quickly they had fallen into savagery. And the moai were toppled; the clans did not want them to see what was the clans were becoming. They did not want the old gods to look upon the shining white feathers of their new god. Pull them down, the Bird Man had said to them, they may not look upon me. I am for your eyes only.
A large airplane shatters the quiet morning as it comes in for a landing at the airport behind me. It is a different airline than the one we came on from Adelaide and Tahiti. This is the connecting flight that goes east, all the way to Chile.
“Which way should we go?” I ask the sullen moai, which does not respond. Mere's words last night stun, more so because there was great truth to them. I'm not a planner. That was never my role. I would read bird sign once in a while, and the rest of the time, I simply followed orders. I did not question. I did not deviate. I was the one who could be counted on to complete the mission and come home.
I did it for hundreds of years. Across many continents. Under countless banners and generals. I served Mother, wherever she needed me. I did what she asked; in return, she healed my wounds and took the pain away.
The plane taxies down the runway and slows to a stop before the tiny terminal. There are only two gates, servicing the two directions the planes fly. East or west.
When Troy burned, we fled west. We had no choice. West was where the open water lay, where undiscovered regions awaited us. We fled the burning wreckage of our past, and became something new. The sun set in the west, and we followed it until we found a new home.
And where is my home now? Arcadia is closed to me. Troy has been lost for millennia. Home is where the hearth is. Where the family is. I have neither. “What does that make me?” I ask the giant head.
I rest my hand on the cool stone of the moai, feeling the texture of the weathered surface. It is a reminder of a different age. One that has atrophied and become fossilized over the last hundred years. The old gods are gone; the new ones did not dwell long among the people either. The island has been abandoned. The soul is gone. All that remains is an empty husk.
We become strangers, in the end. The world changes and we slip out of place. Nothing more than solitary wanderers who don't know where to go. Or who they are anymore.