‘I know I should be frightened by the dream, but I was just so happy to wake and know that I was alive. That you were alive.’
I turned my head so that I faced her. I could feel the heat of her arm against my own and it lifted the hairs upon my neck.
Thea laughed. ‘It was just a dream.’
We smiled at each other, then turned back to the sky, tattered with light.
‘Why did you want to come here?’ Thea whispered.
‘I wanted to say goodbye.’
‘To the forest?’
‘Mm.’
Thea sighed. I felt her head rest against my own and the forest seemed to shudder at the sweetness of it. The soil depressed beneath us. I imagined we might fall into a web of outstretched hands, outstretched roots, become part of the forest, sprout mushrooms and home ants. Bones becoming one long exhalation of earth.
‘I can’t quite believe we are leaving.’
‘We will never see this place again.’
Thea smelled of vinegar and smoke and her own skin. I leaned into her side and was surprised to feel my eyes quicken with tears.
Thea propped herself up on one elbow and looked down at me. Her face was in shadow but her pale hair, wound in a braided crown about her head, was lit with the moon.
‘You have a halo,’ I whispered.
Her stare was deep.
I felt my breath catch. ‘What is it?’
She kissed me, then.
Her mouth was warm and soft and sweet, and in the brief moment when her lips pressed against my own, my heart leaped with perfect understanding, perfect recognition. It melted with the heat of her, was sealed under a new covenant.
The forest was still. The trees guarded us.
Thea pulled away, eyes wide. Said nothing. She was trembling violently. I could hear her teeth chatter. It wasn’t cold.
Neither of us said anything.
Eventually I reached up and touched her shoulder and gently pulled her back down to the soil. She lay still beside me, staring into the canopy. If it weren’t for the rise and fall of her chest, the tremor of her body, she might have been dead.
We lay there for years. The moon waxed and waned over us, and our hair knitted into the forest floor. Our open palms grew skins of moss.
‘Goodbye, trees,’ I whispered finally, to say something. To say anything. ‘Goodbye, bark and moss and birds. Goodbye, Kay.’
Thea said nothing. She was a fire burning into my side.
‘Goodbye, moon. Goodbye, stars. We will remember you.’
‘Remember us.’ Thea’s voice was a rustle of leaves.
‘Yes. Remember us.’
I did not sleep that night. As each hour passed, I remembered and felt again the pressure of Thea’s mouth on mine, and the immediate answer of my own body. The yes, this, sweeping through me like breath, like water, like the spirit of God. And then, again and again, the remembrance of Thea’s expression of disbelief and something else. Hunger. Revelation.
I did not know what it meant and I was afraid to ask.
I thought of Thea’s dream. The burning flesh. Beams alight.
Let us burn together, I prayed. If that is what is coming, let us burn together.
song on the river
Blackbirds announced the dawn as fatigue finally pressed upon me. The room was still dark. I heard Papa’s heavy tread down the corridor, his knocking on the beams to wake Matthias in the loft, and thought again of Thea, of her mouth on mine.
I was awake. I was older than the sea.
Early morning light crept across the wall as we broke our fast in the bare kitchen, gathered around the table that Papa had built inside the room, too large to be removed. Papa was excited, talking of the journey ahead as a blessed adventure. I said nothing, hoping to sit unnoticed, unspoken to, so that I might let my thoughts wander back to the forest. At one point, Mama narrowed her eyes at me and pulled a pine needle from my hair. She pointed it at my face like a knife, like a question, but said nothing. I crammed bread into my mouth, pressed my hips against the table’s edge. I knew she could not guess at what I had done, what I was thinking about, but my cheeks coloured anyway.
Outside the morning was dew-heavy, cold and fresh. The lane through Kay was filled with village families, some with wagons to carry their trunks, others with handcarts. I could not see Thea and her parents, but the road was thick with people, and I guessed that they would join the end of the procession, their being so removed from the centre of the village.
‘This is it then,’ said Papa. He pulled Matthias and me to his side. ‘Today marks a new life. We cast off our chains and are freed from our suffering.’ He squeezed our shoulders. ‘“For so is the will of God, that with well doing ye may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men: as free, and not using your liberty for a cloke of maliciousness, but as the servants of God.”’ He breathed deeply. ‘We shall live as free men.’
We stood a moment in the bustle, watching as everyone said goodbye to those who had chosen to remain behind, who felt their bodies too frail for the journey or who had embroidered themselves too closely into Kay and could not bear to burst their stitches and leave, frayed and unattached. I watched as Magdalena Radtke threw her arms around her sparrow-boned mother. She cried silently, her whole body shaking. The old woman stood there, patiently bearing the weight of her hefty daughter, the lace fringe of her bonnet trembling under Magdalena’s sobs. ‘Go in God’s grace,’ she said. ‘I will see you in glory.’ The five Radtke children watched on from their wagon, faces twitching, until little Franz suddenly leaped over the side and ran to his grandmother, wrapping his arms around her legs and burying his face in her apron. The other children followed suit, and soon I could not see their grandmother at all, so enveloped was she in the clinging limbs of her family. Only Samuel Radtke watched on, reins in hand, digging at his front teeth with a thumbnail.
‘It’s time,’ he said eventually. No one paid him any attention.