The Second History Read online

  He pulls eight more eels from the lake in less than an hour. When all nine are wriggling on the ice, and he can see the fire blazing behind the snow wall Judy has built, he throws down the spear and lashes each eel in turn against the ice. Dead, they continue to twist and coil in the snow. Hooking his fingers under the gills of each one, he makes a circle cut around the head, peels back the skin and removes it in a single piece, as if he is stripping the eel of its clothes.

  “Okay,” Judy calls, and he makes a final cut down each eel, from end to end, and removes the organs and bones. By the time he reaches Judy, the nine skinned eels slung over his arm have finally ceased to move. Judy takes them from him wordlessly. Slipping a noose of twine under the gills of each head, she strings them up on a rack of green sticks over the fire, blanketing the rack with a tarp. Beside her, the dog, exhausted, sleeps on top of her pack, his body drawn into a tight little circle.

  “What did you find to burn, for smoke?” Eban asks.

  She takes a branch from the pile and hands it to him. “Crabapple,” she says.

  He runs his hand over the branch. “Delicious.”

  “Yeah.”

  He pulls his hands out of his gloves and rubs them together. He can see a mood settling in her, an ease, and he is afraid of wasting it. What can he tell her to make her smile, to keep her here beside him for this meal? “A good day’s travel,” he says.

  “Eban?”

  He waits.

  “You want to build us someplace to sleep for the night?”

  He stands up, brushing the snow from his pants. Her attention’s gone back to the eels. She scoops up one that has begun to slip from its noose.

  He finds a place, not too far from the fire, where the snow has drifted up against a line of trees. The trees will block the gathering northwest wind, and in the drift, there’ll be room to tunnel down like worms. He takes a step towards their packs, and then he stops.

  “What is it?” Judy calls. He turns to see her watching him.

  “The shovel,” he says softly. She cups her hand to her ear. “The shovel,” he says more loudly.

  Judy stares back at him for a moment and then shrugs. “So use your hands.”

  He hates that they don’t have the shovel.

  Shattering the crust of ice along the bank, he starts to dig. By the end, his gloves will be soaked and his hands frozen.

  He begins to understand what his mother felt. After they left their home in the outland, she carried the burden of her tribulation without setting it down until the day she died. She wasn’t interested in pity, and grew impatient with Eban if he was sentimental about the time before they came to the foothills. But at night, she would sometimes lie in the dark, cataloguing their one-time house, piece by piece. “Your father found that door. Steel it was. Rusted down an inch, would have went to dust in the dump he took it from, but he sanded it till it wasn’t bad to look at. Kept the wind out, didn’t it. Got a bucket of paint from a peddler, didn’t we. I didn’t like that colour. Used that same bit of paint on all the windows, so they wouldn’t rot. Remember them little bugs that got in, round the corners, where the paint wore off? Lyctus planicollus. You remember any of your Latin, or would I have done better to spend the breath on whistling?”

  His mother was a kind of genius, wasted. Waste was her word. She had her own names for everything, and in a certain mood she’d call the territory where they lived “the wasteland.” She had brains and knew it. Eban always figured her brains would have come up talent and purpose in the right soil, something that would make her and those around her happy, but in the outland, they sowed only suspicion and fury.

  As he works, and thinks of what he and Judy have left behind them, Eban feels something like his mother’s anger planted in the core of him, its roots coiling. Judy has led them far away from a safety she didn’t know to cling to, because she doesn’t know to be afraid.

  All Eban’s life he has heard rumours of what happens in the cities, and what is done to those found in hiding by the wrong people. Fear of that kind grows thick in these hills, blooming in the shade like moss beneath a tree. He himself has glimpsed the cut tongues of peddlers, but can only guess what happened and why. They belong to the unillumined world beyond the outland that his mother warned him of when she taught him how fear was something you could live within, like gravity or time.

  The lessons in fear began when he was still a child, as soon as he had passed the tests his mother set for him. As soon as she knew she could trust him, she taught him to trust no one else. He still remembers the lessons, and the tests. The first happened in the garden.

  The house they lived in then had been built long ago by someone else, years before Eban was born. It had three rooms, each with a window that had wooden shutters they could pull closed when the winds came. In the biggest room was a fireplace built of clay brick, which he found beautiful though in all his life he never saw it lit.

  On a shelf above the fireplace was a photograph in a tin frame of Eban’s grandparents, outland poultry farmers whom he had never met. Their clothes belonged to another time—a shining yellow cross hung from a chain at her throat and her hair was almost the same bright colour, which his mother said she used to buy from a store. He was thin and bent-shouldered. Eban’s mother told him the picture was taken three years before the drought closed her school and her parents wrung the necks of the last of their hens. In the picture they are poor but not starving, and their faces are lifted up to smile at the person who took their picture. Their teeth are as white and perfect as a child’s.

  Once there had been a second photograph, a yellowed picture of Eban’s father, cut from a newspaper. He wore blue jeans and a thin cotton shirt, sitting in the grass, late sun slanting from the sky somewhere behind him. He looked worried. The sentence under the photograph was torn off at the end. It said his name, and that he taught at a university. He had designed something for the computers they used at hospitals. Eban’s mother spoke only once about the university, where she had met his father. She showed Eban the picture, which had been taken from the wall years earlier, and she explained computers and hospitals. Her face and voice softened as she told him how, the year she turned seventeen, the university had been part of the first district to open in the newly consolidated cities. The voluntary relocation program had just concluded, halting all services to outlying communities. Eban’s mother was eligible to attend the university, but her parents and their church had joined the revolt in the outland, and they told her if she went to the cities not to come back. “What did you do?” Eban asked her, and she said, “I went.”

  Later, briefly, there was a third photograph.

  The first test came without a warning. Soon he’d learn to expect them. And always knew from his mother’s eyes that he had passed them.

  He was five years old. His mother led him outside by the hand and showed him something she had found. It was the frail shoot of a pear tree she had planted in their yard. She showed him the shining threads of a web strung between the branches, throbbing with the fly it held fast. Then she pointed to the spider waiting on one of the threads, and showed him what the spider did to make the fly stop throbbing, and what it did next.

  “Why,” she asked him, “wouldn’t the spider eat the fly?”

  He wouldn’t answer her. He was upset and wanted to go back inside the house.

  “The spider is hungry,” she told him. “That fly can feed its hunger.”

  He tried to shake her hands from his shoulders.

  “What reason could stop the spider, who is hungry, from eating the fly, who is food?”

  “Because,” he cried at last, angry with her, “the fly is hungry too.”

  “Good,” she said, and let go of his shoulders, going back inside and leaving him alone with the pear tree. And the spider, who was not hungry anymore.

  The other tests were more difficult
, but he passed them as well. When the lessons came, about whom to fear and how to hide and what to say and when to be silent, he understood they were a reward for having answered all his mother’s questions correctly.

  He never saw her take his brother into the yard or what answer he gave.

  * * *

  —

  Eban digs out a snow cave wide enough for him and Judy to sleep inside, puncturing the ceiling so they aren’t smothered in the night. Then he digs a tunnel on a downward incline, so their body heat will rise and be trapped inside the snow walls, instead of escaping out the entrance. It takes a long time to finish, and by the time he returns to the fire to fetch the axe from Judy, she is unstringing the eels.

  “Ready to eat?” she asks.

  He nods. “I’ll go get some branches for us to sleep on, while you finish that.”

  After he has laid several inches of boughs across the floor of the snow cave, he joins Judy by the fire. She has already cut one of the eels into pieces and she offers it to him on a tin plate.

  “It’s still hot,” she says. “It’s perfect.”

  They can’t find the forks, and so they eat with their hands, oil trickling down their fingers. The sweet crabapple smoke has sharpened the tang of the eel meat. His tongue is burned by the hot, greasy meat, but he ignores the pain. He has to restrain himself from eating more than he can swallow. Beguiled by hunger, his belly is convinced he has eaten nothing better.

  When they have finished eating, they look up, in surprise, at each other. He thinks the juices of the meat must be all over his face and hands. He feels embarrassed to have lost himself to his appetite like that. But Judy only laughs. “I think I forgot you were there,” she says.

  He can’t remember when he last heard the deep bark of her laughter, unsoured by grief or grudge. “Who would have thought we’d eat so well, so far from home,” he says.

  She’s still smiling. “My father said that in the cities they used to eat foods we couldn’t dream of. Every kind of meat and fish, whenever they wanted it. Cherries in winter.”

  He stands up abruptly, holding his plate and reaching for hers, but she doesn’t release it or even lower her gaze to his hands.

  “How far do you think it is, Eban?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But from the stories you heard.”

  “Everyone says something different. All I know is what I told you. Follow the setting sun below the barrens to pass between the two-horned mountains.”

  It has been weeks since the idea came to him, to tell her about Heaven colony. Though she knew about Heaven, of course. Everyone did. The rumours were the favourite gossip of every traveller who passed through the hills. She’d heard occasional things down in the allotment, but her fathers had been dismissive, and she hadn’t been interested then in what was back in these hills. So he told her everything he’d heard, even the most doubtful reports from the least reliable of tellers. And he made up what he didn’t know.

  “I wonder if it might be closer than we imagine,” Judy says. “The hills seem so vast, we’ve always assumed they go on for a thousand miles. But maybe they don’t.”

  A city in the wood, he told her. A people like them, who had come into the hills not to hide from the world, but to build a new one. Safely concealed from those who could harm them, but findable to those who sought them. “We just don’t know,” he says now.

  “But I’m saying we really have no idea. Everything might be closer than we think. If no one ever said how far Heaven is, only the direction to travel, it’s possible, isn’t it, that it’s not nearly as far as we thought?”

  “I think we should prepare ourselves,” he says slowly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It might be farther.” He hesitates. “Or…different than you want it to be.”

  She looks a long time at the fire and then says, something hardened in her voice, “It might not be far at all.”

  * * *

  —

  Together they pack up the remaining eel meat; between that and the smoked meat they brought from the hide, it will be days until they have to worry about food again. He washes the plates in a pot of boiled water and then stamps out the fire. Judy puts out some scraps for Beau and hangs the remaining eel guts from the trees.

  Finally they face each other, and Eban gestures toward the entrance to the snow cave. “You first.”

  She crawls inside and he hands her the sleeping bag to spread out. When she’s finished, he passes her the dog and follows after.

  He realizes he built the cave too small. There isn’t room for him to stretch out all the way, and they will be pressed to each other like two clasped hands.

  He slides himself into the sleeping bag and then lies down, his back to hers and the dog at her feet. After a moment, she turns and wraps her arm around him, tucking her chin over his shoulder.

  He feels something that makes his eyes sting. He tells himself to choke whatever it is or it will become awkward and difficult and she’ll turn away again.

  Her breath on his cheek is hot and damp. It stinks of eel. He wonders if he takes her hand, if she will let him. Through their gloves, he would feel none of her heat, the knots of her knuckles, the calluses of her fingertips.

  When he met her she had soft hands. She had lived at the outer perimeter of the resource allotment, in a house with two floors and glass windows. So much grander than the rotting, three-room cabin his mother would index in the dark. Judy has described it to him a thousand times, first proudly, when they met, and then with longing. And then she stopped speaking of it at all.

  Her father Daniel was the son of a famous entomologist. His mother had taught him to read insects like tea leaves. He tracked them in the woods and fields around their house, and noted changes in their habits and populations. He made surmises and predictions, and wrote a quarterly report that sold well enough to support his family of three. She never knew whom he sold it to, but four times a year a rider would arrive, with pannier sacks slung across their horse, and a stack of hand-copied reports would disappear into one of the sacks.

  Eban never met Dan. It was nine days after his death that Eban found Judy and her other father, Alphonse, camped out in a battered tent in the foothills.

  He approached them with caution, as he did all strangers in the hills. He first watched them for several hours. It was spring and he had been following the river, picking the heads of ostrich ferns. He saw their tent first, a ragged, bright-coloured relic, made of some synthetic fibre. From that, he knew they didn’t belong here. They didn’t know to hide.

  And then he heard her voice. “Dad, it isn’t here. Dad?”

  She appeared in front of the tent, unzipping the door to speak to the man who sat cross-legged inside. “I’m sorry,” she said more softly. “We must have left it behind.”

  Eban couldn’t hear the man’s answer.

  “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. We have the others, the first three volumes. But the fourth must have been somewhere else. Maybe he had it in his—”

  She sank to the ground and he thought she was about to cry. But she began to nod and he realized she was listening to her father. Her back to the tent, her knees to her chest, her body had a strange eloquence. She looked at first sorrowful, acquiescent, nodding steadily as she listened. And then the bobs of her head became impatient. And then she stopped nodding, her eyes darting around the wood.

  “I can’t,” she said, her voice now dissipated almost to silence. “I’ve told you I don’t want to…No. No, of course not. I would never fault you for…It’s just, I can’t, I can’t keep…” She made her hands into fists and pressed them against her eyes. “Stop!”

  Getting to her feet, she told the man inside the tent, “We have only twenty-two tablets left. Do you know what that means? And we have half that many jars of—”

 
Her father emerged from the tent. He was tall and lean, with long greying hair. He spoke with a trace of an accent—an extra, lingering attention to vowels—but his words were exact. “I know you are right. I know you are wise. I don’t want to stop you from doing what we must. But I can’t—I am useless to you. You are without help. You are without fathers…”

  Then the man, who was older even than Eban’s mother, without warning buckled to the ground and began to sob. Eban had not known it was possible to weep with such fervour. Without restraint of any degree.

  He thought the daughter would embrace him and offer some comfort, but instead she backed away as if she, like Eban, were frightened by the man’s grief. “We have to eat,” she told him. “If we don’t find our own food and water we’ll soon have nothing left. I have to hunt for us.”

  Eban hesitated, wanting to follow the woman and make sure she was safe. He wanted, also, to watch her longer. To see her from closer. But the man and his grief transfixed Eban, and he stayed for some time, watching the man, who continued to cry long after the woman was gone, and then sat without moving, in terrible stillness, as the sun began to drop.

  Eban knew he needed to leave then if he was to make it back to his mother before dark. It was clear that the man and his daughter posed no threat. If he left them, they would make their way or they would not, but they would harm no one but themselves. Maybe he could even visit them again. Leave things for them. Help. But for now he needed to return. And yet he waited.

  It had just occurred to him that maybe he waited because he hoped to see her one more time, when he heard the whisper of her voice in his ear.

  “I have a weapon,” she said.

  He swallowed. “I know.”

  “You know because you saw it. You saw me take it into the woods.”

  “Yes.”

  “You were watching us.”

  “Yes, but…”

  She stepped before him. He noticed, with surprise, that her shotgun was lowered, almost forgotten, by her side. She had long, narrow black eyes and freckled brown skin. He liked her face.