The Vorrh Read Free Page A

the garden day and night. When she returned, she was thin and strained.
    The bow is turning black now, becoming the darkest shadow in the room. Everything is very still. I sit holding the two wrapped arrows in my hands. Out of their turnings comes hunger and sleep, forgotten reflections of my own irredeemable humanity.
    From the cupboards and the garden I juggle anticipant food, flooding my senses with taste and smell. Citrus and bacon rise in the room, sage and tomatoes, green onions and dried fish unfold. Separation has been hewn by the essential, and a long, dreamless sleep waits to sanction it.
    My hands tremble holding the bow and the morning door, the arrows between my teeth. The exact moment has come, and I wrench into dazzling light, the ancient wood sucked inwards and falling from its twisted hinges. Overwhelmed, the house gives up, showing its previously unseen squalor as an act of submission. Heat, buffeted by a bright wind, wakes me to this world and seals the shrivelling house to a hollow.
    I untie the dark, dry leaves from the arrows while holding the bow cradled to my chest. They are white; an infinite, unfocused white without any trace of hue or shadow. They absorb the day into their chalky depth and I grow sick looking at them. I lift the bow, which I must have strung in my sleep, and knock one arrow into its contrast. The other is wrapped away and saved to be the last. I would make many in between. This is the moment of departure, her last instruction. I draw the bow back with all my strength, and feel this single gesture brace every muscle of my body, feel the tension lock in as the grace of the string touches my lips. Pulling the great curve silences the world and even the wind stops to hold its breath against my energy and the release. For the first and lasttime, the bow is silent, except for small, creaking sighs that echo my taut bones. I raise it skywards, perpendicular to the track that runs over the low foothills in an almost vertical scar from our home.
    It lets itself go, vanishing into the sky with a sound that sensually pulses through me and every other particle of substance and ghost, in or out of sight. I know I will never see that arrow again. It is not to be my guide; I will have to make that one differently.
    That first white arrow is still travelling the spirals of air, sensing a defined blood on its ice-cold tip. For a moment I am with it, high above these porous lands, edging the sea, its waves crashing endlessly below. Above the shabby villages and brutal tribes, leaning towards the wilderness and the dark forest which cloaks its meaning.
    The pain calls me back as I stand before the track, dazed in the garden. The inside of my arm is raw from where the bow string lashed it, removing a layer of skin with the ease of a razor, indifferent and intentional. Stepping forward, I pick up my sack and quiver, steady my looping stance against the bow and walk forward into the wilderness.
    The land has become depopulated. Too much effort is needed to keep the parched fields active enough to grow clinging tomatoes and dusty, dwarfish melons; it is a country of the old, tending their patches of earth out of habitual purpose, the last days of the clock ticking through daily ritual, the weights almost unwound from their creaking spool. There are no young people to reset it, no one to wind the well each day and sprinkle the ravenous earth into function. The young have left for the cities and for slave labour abroad. They are underground, digging fossils for other people’s heat. They are in venomous sheds, weaving chemical cancer. They are automata in chains of industry which do not need identity, language or families. All their saved money is endlessly counted as escape. Some come back to the fields to help the old and infirm raise the dented bucket and spade; others attempt to return as princes, buying expensiveand bland new homes in the crumbling villages of their origin. This will fail, and their