me that killed Mardew. I had took away one of Mythen Rood’s best weapons against the raging, hungry world, and right then I could not find no solace for it.
38
I sunk to the ground and cried a whole lot. It was not a safe place, nor a safe time, but I done it anyway.
Death wasn’t wholly strange to me. I had hunted a few times each season when my turn come round, and sometimes made a kill (though more often I missed my mark, to be honest with you, whether it was a bow or a spear I was carrying). And children’s deaths in Mythen Rood was a tragedy that come round like Salt Feast and Summer-dance, every year without fail: I could reel off four or five names of boys and girls I used to play and run with, and then went to their wakes and spoke their names as they was put into the ground.
What was new to me, and not welcome, was killing. I could of told myself it was not my doing. The cutter was on Mardew’s hand, not mine, and the choosing to murder me was all his too. But that didn’t make a difference. Not one that was wide enough to grab onto anyway. When I told Monono to hit him with the personal security alarm, I knowed full well where the thing had got to end, with his blood on the ground or mine, and I did what I could to make it be his.
Sometimes crying makes a sad thing better, but oftentimes it only pushes the sadness harder into you. When I seen that this was the second kind of occasion, I made myself stop. I was just sitting there for a while after that, holding onto Mardew’s hand and knowing he wasn’t on the other end of it no more.
“You okay, Koli?” Monono asked me, having left it a good long time.
“No,” I said. “I got a stone in my heart, Monono. I didn’t think nothing could make me sad again when you come back, but here I am, faceless and four miles out of gates. And now I killed a man. I don’t got no words for it.”
There was silence between us for another while.
Then I heard a sound start up that I knowed was a piano. It was a beautiful sad tune that rose up and then sunk down again. There wasn’t no words at first, but then they was wove in, most sweet and perfect. I can’t do no better than to say them here. Saying them without the music is like painting a picture when you only got the one colour, but still it will have to do. It was a man’s voice that sung, not Monono’s, but still it was her speaking to me.
I misremember the words, but they was mostly concerning a bridge. The man in the song said he would be like a bridge, if it come down to it and a bridge was needed, to get me across the troubles that was in my life and set me down on the other side of them.
I didn’t feel right then like I deserved any such bridge, but the words and the music done what they was meant to do. I was solaced, and the beauty of it filled my heart so there was a kind of a right balance there again, or at least a promise that there would be one. By and by I calmed and was able to see past the sorrow and the waste of it, where before there had seemed to be nothing. And I seen something else too, or maybe it’s better to say I heard it, a little late but clear as a tocsin bell.
“Dopey boy,” Monono said. But I knowed she meant it kind.
There was so many things I wanted to say to her, and had wanted to for the longest time, but I never imagined to say them in a village I didn’t know, that didn’t have no people any more, with Mardew lying dead on the ground next to me.
I said one thing only, for it seemed to matter:
“How come you got my name right?”
“I never got it wrong, Koli-bou. It was right there in my registry. I only said it wrong because of how the DreamSleeve’s sound files work. But that’s a long story. I think you might want to save it for another time.”
I think I told you Monono’s voice sounded different at