Euphoria

17

They awoke to one long scream, followed by a barrage of others. She had no idea what time it was. The sky was black, no edge of light.

In a crisis Fen became even quicker — and feline. He disappeared in one motion down the ladder. She hurried to catch up. The turmoil came from up the women’s road. Fen said something but she couldn’t hear him.

When they turned the corner, it was as she’d feared, a shrieking mass of bodies. They stopped twenty feet from the outside edge of the crowd, which was facing inward, toward Malun’s house. In the dark she could make out the long back of Sanjo and Yorba’s thick arms and the little head of Amun, but only briefly. They were all moving, churning, and shouting so loudly it affected her vision. Many had ripped the necklaces and bracelets and waistbands and armbands and hair wraps from their bodies and thrown them on the ground as they hugged and wept and hollered and pressed toward the center, toward whatever was happening through the thicket of bodies.

Fen took her hand and inched closer. He gripped her tighter and pushed into the crowd. ‘We have to—’ he said, but she lost the rest. Then she lost his hand. Everyone was pressing inward and she was pushed and shoved and poked along with them. She tried to push back, hold her ground, but it was no use. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see whatever was happening. But she was being forced toward it, a great muscle of Tam kneading her forward. She couldn’t understand why she recognized so few people, why no one recognized her. People were hysterical, and the breath and sweat of so many frenzied bodies was a sour buried-alive smell. She felt certain there would be a dead body in the centre. She hoped it was not a child. Please dear God no more dead children. She wasn’t sure if she was screaming this aloud. She tasted vomit and blood but didn’t think it was hers. Ahead firelight flickered. And then she saw them, Malun and a man in green trousers. They were standing but he was curled over her and she held him with great effort, his full cumbersome weight, keening as if over a dead body. But he was not dead. There were long deep scars across his bare back, fresher and far cruder than his initiation scarring, lashings without design, but he was not dead.

Come as soon as you get this, Nell’s note to me read. Xambun has returned.