Episode Eight

Dalyon tracked along the passage between the surface and the cave many times, taking care each time he reached the bottom to avert his eyes from the gaze of the forward-looking dog. Sometimes he took a peek from the corner of his eye, but the dog never stopped looking at him. He learnt to close his eyes so that the dog could not see him, and he found that he learnt the indentations and position of the steps more clearly this way. He felt the dimming of light as he moved away from the cave room, felt it by the way the steps were placed and dented as well as by the changing colours inside his eyelids, then sensed the lifting of darkness through another series of steps and opened his eyes there to see what was coming towards him. He felt the emptiness of the cave when it was just him walking through the passageway, and he felt Jilda’s presence, and Lucan’s different presence, even when they were standing still and holding their breath. The darkness helped him. Once he sensed a small animal in the darkness, that froze until he passed by. It scurried out of the way as soon as he had passed.

At first Dalyon thought of returning home, but Ma was close and willed him away.  It was too late to go back. He knew that she was gone from there, and so was the cat.

Four - Mountains

Ma’s body may or may not have been breathing.  If they’d cared to do so, Terry and Bob would have needed a mirror to find if her breath would leave a mist. Her heart was so quiet that it would have taken someone with better ears than Bob and Terry to find it. To their eyes it looked as if she was lying heavily in her bed, unaware that the cat was crying with hunger, and the boy was gone.

They were wrong. Ma was aware of everything all at once. She was aware that Terry and Bob’s story had already been written and that all that was left was the telling. She was aware that Bob would kill the cat now that the boy was gone and she was aware that to their eyes, she was lying in her bed, unable to rouse herself. She was aware that when Bob killed the cat that Terry would turn his face away from its struggling, but that he would take its flaccid body and drop it into the flowery pillowcase afterwards. She knew that Terry and Bob would get the short-handled shovels that they carried in the saddle-bags on the back of their bikes, and that they would dig a narrow hole into which they would drop her body, throw the pillowcase with the dead cat, and cover them both with the earth. Terry would place a cloth over her face to avoid its immediate contact with the dirt, because he considered himself to be a decent man. He would stand and say some words involving an ancient deity, while Bob looked around the house for things that he could steal. She knew that before they could do all that, they would have trouble with the network of tree roots that ran beneath the earth, less than a meter down. After they had buried her and the cat in their shallow grave, Terry and Bob would wash, take a long drink, eat, and when they could wait no longer, begin their long journey back. She saw that they had been in contact with the home compound which knew, and was monitoring, Dalyon’s whereabouts. She knew that they would do nothing about him at this time. She knew that her boy was travelling with two companions who would guide him, that there would be one who would actively pursue them, and that Dalyon and his companions would be each other’s strength.

None of this held any importance at all. Things would come to pass. Things had come to pass. Ma was flying far, far north, over a cold country that she knew well. The destiny of Bob and Terry was already written. Dalyon’s destiny was already written, as were those of the other children. So was her own. There was someone, or something, else of importance. It was all woven together to create what no-one, not even Terry and Bob, could foresee.