Song of the Betrayed — 8
Victoria boarded a train at the largest station in the capital. The train ran east, then bent into a long arc that carried it from east to southeast, and from there due south. South to southwest and then straight west would have brought her to Berne City, but Victoria did not turn that way. Once she had come far enough south she changed trains, rode farther south still, and stepped off at a station.
Even she glanced left and right as she took in the countryside, wearing the look of someone wondering whether this could possibly be the right place. It was a truly rural station: a platform laid in stone, and nothing besides but a tiny station house. Beyond it lay fields drowned in deep green, and past those a mountain range reared up — the same range that had stood to the east ever since the train's course had swung south.
Victoria gathered her luggage and left the station. There was a wet slap underfoot. She looked down to find the ground a churn of mud, already spattered up her legs and across her bag. She did not so much as frown. As I watched, droplets leapt from her clothes, scoured the mud clean, and drank up every trace of damp on the road around her. Then she looked about, and her brow tightened.
For no other reason than this: one corner was, at a glance, a dumping ground, and several broken clockwork machines lay tumbled there.
"It hasn't been long."
Victoria murmured it under her breath. At first I couldn't tell what she meant. By the time I understood she meant the state of the broken clockwork, she was already walking again, following a road that was not paved at all — earth, mud, and sand churned together. Now and then she drew out a letter and murmured the address to herself, passing beneath a sun that stung despite the dead of winter. And at last she reached her destination.
Set against the capital or Berne City, the wooden building could only be called old-fashioned. Victoria read the sign by the door, checked the mailbox once more, and went in. She knocked and waited, and an older man and woman with sun-browned skin came out. A great many feelings were tangled across both their faces as they asked Victoria her name. She gave it. They gave theirs, and then they said:
"So this is the first time we meet. Come now — wait just a moment."
With that they called Beatrice's name at the top of their voices. A little while later a woman came walking out in loose clothes, her face terribly drawn, her body covered in wounds. She was so changed from three months ago that she hardly seemed the same person, and yet she was Beatrice. Looking at her, Victoria asked, carefully, as if she could not quite believe it:
"Mom?"
"Oh? Tori? What are you doing here so soon?"
Beatrice was badly flustered. The old woman went to her and calmed her down, and one word in the midst of it caught my ear. Daughter-in-law. So the old woman was Victoria's grandmother. Then the man beside her was her grandfather.
Ah. This was Morris's family home.
When disaster strikes, the last place one can lean is a parent's arms. That is how it goes. Of course, most people have parents they cannot lean on in that way, and there is nothing to be done about it. To begin with, being someone's parent is already a small share of the population, and to be born, among that share, to parents who can actually help their child is like plucking a star out of the sky. Some have no property. Some come from a culture in which a child, once independent, is finished with the family. Some have all of that and are cast off anyway. Others are born into a house where the family one pictures at the words a happy home is nothing but a dream. That is not the child's fault. Simply by proportion, a world in which such people are the majority is the ordinary one.
Even so, if enough people believe they themselves can make a happy home, people will marry. Let that belief collapse, and they will give up on making families, the way one gives up on a world that survives only in faded memory. Even if the unhappy overflow the present, so long as people can dream of carving out a better future, they will go on making families. But if the society they live in, instead of selling dreams, calls the alternative cold reality and forbids them to dream, then the future disappears. When all one has ever seen is the past, how is one supposed to see a future? Investment, too, happens only because there is a future that might improve. Show someone every indicator plunging into the ground and then tell them to invest, and very few will buy.
In that sense, Victoria was lucky. She had not only a family in Morris and Beatrice, but grandparents she could actually meet.
"I came because it's break. But where's Dad?"
The moment the words left her, the faces of the family around Victoria darkened.
Oh? Has something happened to Morris?
"Yes. You've come all this way, so you ought to see your father."
Beatrice, her expression sunk in grief, came to Victoria and held her tight. Whether or not Victoria understood what that meant, her face went rigid.
"Mom, what on earth happened to Dad?"
Still holding her, Beatrice answered, barely above a whisper.
"He's a little... unwell."
With that she drew back, took Victoria's hand, and led her deeper into the house — deep inside, into a room that looked as if a boy had once lived there — and pointed to the bed.
A pale man lay there, groaning. The slightly plump figure he had once cut was gone without a trace; what lay in the bed was a man dried down to the bone. But Victoria's eyes did not go to Morris's face. They went the other way.
The leg. Where the right leg ought to have been, the blanket sank. A wretched state of things.
Now I understood why only Beatrice had written back, why there had been nothing in the letters about him, and why what did come was strangely short. She must not have known what to put down, or how much.
"Mom, what in the world happened?"
Beatrice went to Morris, wiped the sweat from him, and then brought Victoria out through the door. Only there, in the corridor, did she begin to talk. When the great riot broke out in Berne City, they had barely escaped. In the midst of it Morris had injured his leg, and he had hidden the wound, so that by the time they arrived the leg was already in a grave condition. The infection had gone too far. Worse, the wounded right leg had already necrotized, and so they had cut it off. That had carried them past the worst, but he had been laid up for weeks now, drifting in and out of the sickbed. Then Beatrice bit her lip and told her daughter to prepare her heart.
Those are words one says of someone who may die soon.
"Then why are you like this, Mom?"
Victoria asked it while looking at the wounds all over Beatrice's body. Beatrice only shook her head. She could not tell her. But the scars alone made it plain this had not been a simple injury.
Well. It is strange to endure, while merely fleeing, until a wound festers all the way into sepsis. Hundreds of memories flared alight. First, the wounds were not more than two months old. They were comparatively recent. And two months ago Victoria had gone looking for them in Berne City, which made it likely they had lived somewhere else and only later come here.
Hmm.
Come to think of it, the affair in Berne City had set something else in motion: the wrecking of the clockwork machines. Nor had it ended there. Along with it had come lynchings aimed at the people of that great company. There is an easy little game for working off rage. Would people have acted rationally? Anyone who looked as if they worked for a large firm would have become the object of the game. Let's play soccer! You're the ball! That is what they had suffered.
The scars all over Beatrice. The reason Morris had been forced to travel so far even while hiding his wound. And the grandparents were only now meeting Victoria for the first time. Would a close family have had so little to do with one another? Things must have been grave enough that they had to go to parents with whom they had no dealings. And parents that estranged are not the sort one runs to at once, even when one's house has been blown away. There was a fact concealed in the middle of it.
But Victoria did not seem to know. No — it would be truer to say she had no room left to care. She had come home to find her mother a wreck and her father dying, and the mother telling her these things was not carrying physical wounds alone. Her pupils kept widening and shrinking, and her hands trembled faintly. She was trying however she could to hide it from her child, but the harder one tries to hide a thing, the more clearly it shows.
Yes. This was the worst. Which is to say, in other words, that it was a wonderfully splendid situation for me to walk into.
I sorted my thoughts and got out of the car. I couldn't say whether something like a royal transit pass existed, but if one merely knew an address, they would take you there free of charge. I had changed cars several times, of course, but I was the one being carried, so it was hardly mine to complain.
"Thank you."
"Yes. Should you need anything, please contact this number at any time."
The one who had driven me held out a card. I took it, and they turned back to the car. Soon the military vehicle growled and pulled away, and I walked up to the house I had been watching. I knocked.
The door creaked and opened at once, and Victoria's grandfather came out. Skin moderately browned. Thick arms and legs. Muscle tempered by long labor. Paddies and fields lay all around, and from behind the house came the smell of livestock. Plants and animals. They did not look as if food were any hardship for them. In the great cities of this country, the number of people dying because they could not eat properly was on the rise. This place was lucky.
"Who are you?"
"I've come to deliver something unpleasant."
He made a strange face, but I ignored it and went in, straight to the corridor where Beatrice and Victoria had made a space for just the two of them.
"Hello, unfortunate humans."
I looked at Victoria and Beatrice, who were staring at me dumbfounded, pushed them aside, and entered the room.
"Bel?"
As I drew near the bed a foul smell rose. Rot. Victoria had not been able to bring herself close enough to know, but places like the armpits were already decaying, a thin foul discharge running from them.
The flesh all over the body swelled, hardened like porcelain, and then slowly became sand and scattered on the air. Beneath it, a blue-skinned man who had come to his senses looked at me in a daze.
"Bel?"
"Hello, Morris. It has become an unfortunate day."
And I turned.
"Isn't that right, Victoria?"
Victoria avoided my gaze.