Anarchaos

XX

I knew I was dreaming. I knew it, and yet everything that happened seemed real and urgent. I was loading an ore cart, down in the mine, and had to hurry, but instead of ore there was stacked a gray mound of severed hands. Both my own hands were missing, so I had to pick up each one between my forearms and raise it high and drop it over the side into the ore cart. Then Gar came and said, “You aren’t doing very well. I expected better things of you. Jenna and I expected better things of you.” Then Jenna was beside him, and he had an arm around her. She smiled as though to tell me it was all right that I was a failure, and a great river of water came washing down the tunnel, sweeping me away. Gar and Jenna just stood there, the water swirling around them and unable to move them. I wanted desperately to stay with them, but the water washed me down the long tunnel and out into an Arctic night, with icebergs floating by. I was freezing, and drowning, and I climbed out onto a block of ice and lay there, shivering and wet. Then a polar bear came along and stretched out on top of me. I grew warm, with the polar bear on top of me, but I was very frightened of it. My stumps began to sting and bum, and so did my feet. Then someone was cooking stew, and I was sitting at the kitchen table in the house where I’d lived as a boy, and I said to my mother, whose back was to me as she stood at the stove, “Where’s Gar?” She turned, not saying anything, and it was the polar bear. Then it was a man with white hair and a white beard, dressed in a long coat of gray fur, with heavy black boots on his feet. He had a spoon in his hand, with which he’d been stirring the stew, and he said, “So you’re awake,” and I realized I was.

I looked around. I was in a large, crowded wooden room figured by firelight. Flickering darkness and shadows hid the details of the ceiling. The walls were rough logs, the floor was logs planed smooth and the cracks filled with mud, and thick-haired animal skins hung everywhere, on the walls and from beams and draped over furniture. Almost everything in the room was wood, and rough-hewn, home-made: a table, some chairs, shelves on the walls, a trunk, a chest of drawers, a closet. The fireplace was of hand-fashioned tan bricks, with a great fire going inside, lighting the room and cooking the hanging pot of stew. How beautiful was the smell of stew.

I was lying on my back on something soft and deep, and over me were spread blankets of animal skins. I was very confused. I remembered being a slave, and I also remembered some son of journey spent clinging to the side of a truck, and I remembered a jumble of details from my dream. But what was dream, and what was reality?

And what was this place w-here I now found myself? And who was the man who had spoken to me? I was sure of little, but of one thing I was certain: I had never seen him before in my life.

He came forward, little drops of liquid falling from the spoon, and he said, “Could you eat? You want some stew?” His voice was rough-grained, as though he seldom had a chance to use it.

My own was worse, when I said, “Please. Thank you.”

“Good.”

I closed my eyes, trying to restore order to my jumbled brain. The truck? Yes, now I remembered it, traveling on it and managing to leave it, and that I’d been escaping from the compound in which I had been held a slave. My mind ran backward, encompassing Anarchaos, Ulik, Jenna Guild and Colonel Whistler, Gar (dead), prison, fighting, being myself in all situations, everything. All back. All secure.

I was me again.

I opened my eyes, and he was approaching me with a wooden bowl from which steam was rising. I said, with my voice as rusty as unused track, “You found me out there. You brought me in.”

“That’s right,” he said. He stood beside me, and somewhere inside his beard he was smiling, beaming at me.

“You saved my life.”

“More than likely. Can you sit up?”

I could, but only with his help. I could now see that I was lying in his bed, a home-made affair like everything else here, built into one corner of the room. I sat with my back propped against the rough wall, feeling dizzy, my body stiff and aching, but not too badly, not much worse than after a normal work period inside the mine. My rags had been stripped off me and I was wearing a bulky fur coat like my rescuer’s. Beneath it I was naked.

“Here,” he said.

I held out my cupped hand, palm up, and he placed the bowl in it. It felt heavy. “Thank you,” I said.

“Is it too hot?”

Acute heat drilled into my palm through the bottom of the bowl, but I welcomed it. “It’s good,” I said. “It’s just right.” I brought the bowl to my mouth, tipped it, tasted gravy and meat and vegetables. Gravy dribbled down my chin, making me smile with comfort, like a cat.

“You eat,” he said, “and then sleep some more. I’ve got work to do outside.”

I nodded, my mouth full of stew.

It was good food, and I think would have been good even if I hadn’t been starving. But it was too rich, and I couldn’t keep it down. I was alone in the cabin now, but I felt the roiling in my stomach and I refused to soil either the bed or the floor. I rolled out of the bed, my right hand clutching at everything for support, and somehow I staggered around the walls to the door and pushed it open and lurched outside.

Snow!

I fell face down into it, and emptied my stomach.

“What’s this? What’s this?”

I raised my head and saw him trotting toward me, bearlike in his heavy clothing, a large axe in his hand. He chopped the axe down into the snow and left it there, the handle angling upward for his return, and ran over to me, shouting, “What are you doing? You’ll kill yourself!”

He picked me up, and cleaned my face with a handful of snow. Past him I could see black peaks, snow everywhere, pale moonlight. Moonlight! Where was I?

He carried me inside and put me back to bed. “I didn’t want to make a mess in here.” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “But stay here now. Do you want to try biscuits?”

“Yes.” I was very hungry now, hungrier than before I’d eaten the stew.

He brought me three pale, hard, bumpy biscuits, and I lay on my back, covered by furs, the biscuits sitting on my chest. I nibbled at them, slowly, and they tasted of salt and soda. But they stayed down. I ate all three, and then I closed my eyes and slept.