Book II - Exodus (Chapter 11)

“Suicide?” Erich faced Essara as the morning sun cast its rays on them.

“The entrance is guarded by machines. Metal animals with eyes that can’t be killed, watching constantly. You pass them and they spit metal from their mouths, and you die. My great uncle Rendra was a child when his parents smuggled him in, and he remembered the metal animals especially. He watched them spit at everyone in their group, and only four of them got out alive, and his father had been hit in the back, but he didn’t die. Not for a week, when the white fluids poisoned his body and they had to bury him deep below the ground to escape the stink of his death. There were fifty in Rendra’s group, and only three of them lived.”

Erich did not understand, nor did he try to. Machines? It sounded like a baba’s tale, one the washer-women would tell. But it was true, and these machines were a new obstacle in his way. He would have to find a way around them.

"So we won’t go through that entrance. Where’s the next closest one?”

Essara gave him a look of disbelief.

“Erich, you do not understand. The machines guard every entrance along the wall. When the orginal Darks came here four generations ago, they went through the wall in large groups, some as large as a hundred. The ones who made it through the massacres were the ones who were able to live and thrive in Meil, creating the communities like they did. Our ancestors are all survivors, Erich. We are alive because our ancestors had luck enough to not be killed. I am surprised you don’t know this, it’s a common teaching among all the Dark communities, no matter which kingdom you come from.”

Erich flushed.

“I…my mother smuggled me into Meil not more than ten years ago. I was two years old, and I remember nothing of the outside world. A magician stole me from my mother when I was three, and made me his slave. I’ve only just been freed from him, and that’s when I started my journey.”

Essara began to walk again, and Erich took stride beside her. They angled themselves away to the left, so that they would not pass directly over the mountain, but travel along its sloping face until they reached the other side. All the while they continued to speak, and Erich’s face reddened more and more.

“I don’t mean to doubt you, Erich, but that your mother brought you in from the outside world that recently, that’s impossible. No Dark has breached the Wall in over seventy years. Which means either two things: that life outside the Wall has gotten considerably better since the original Darks fought their way in, or there’s no way to go through anymore. And after seeing the Dark men with black ovals over their eyes, I don’t believe the first possibility can be true. It makes sense that after a time when Darks filtered in to escape Mer’ka, the way would be closed by those who did not want further contamination. So forgive me if I have a hard time believing that you are from the other side of the Wall.”

Was it really that impossible? He’d never talked to anyone about his mother and his origins but to Krutt, and his policy had been to not talk about it. And yet he spent a year with his mother, maybe more, in this place, and she had told him many times where he had come from: a land called Mer’ka, from where every person in Meil eventually had an ancestor. She told him that she had smuggled him in, brought him into this land so that he might be kept safe, and yet he had no memory of it. Perhaps he would have, in his dreams, but for Erich there had never been any dreams. He had always believed his mother, and had cherished her memory. When had he been given a chance to doubt? When had he been given a chance to talk to anyone about the world he thought he knew until now? Never. As a slave, Erich had been cut off from his people, from the world. From what Krutt told him, he’d thought he knew the extent of goings-on in Meil. And yet from what Essara was telling him, he’d been very, very wrong. That meant there was still more he didn’t know.

“It is my memory, Essara, even if it is wrong. I do not know what you know, you tell me these histories as if they are things I should remember from my childhood learnings. But I don’t. Every thing you tell me now is a new thing. I am not meaning to seem ignorant.”

“I’m sorry, Erich. You’ve given me no reason to believe you’re anything but a Dark, as learned as those from my community. Yet I suppose I could have seen the scar on your cheek and recognized it as the marking of a slave.”

“I am not a slave any longer.” He knew she did not mean it as such, and yet he bristled. Is pride so heavy?

“So you have said. Indeed if you were free from your master or no, after what you’ve done for me it would be difficult to think of you as one. It was a mistake, whoever took you, for those with your strength should not be using it to lift and carry.”

No, just to kill without a blade or arrow. He struggled to change the subject as the peak of the mountain passed by over their right shoulders.

“Essara, I would know everything you know about…about our people and about the Wall. The histories I have not heard before, and to hear them would make me glad indeed. Why did wecome flee Mer’ka? Was it so bad? I have often thought of what the land on the other side might look like, and yet you may know so as to tell me.”

She sighed, and bargained one more time with Erich.

“I will tell you what you ask if you tell me what I ask. How did you save me from the seven knights? How did you come to be in Triga, and why do you think that you will have the power to stop the murder of the Darks in this land? Tell me, Erich, I want to hear all of it. Who are you?”

The boy who had so recently been a slave, weak and fearful, considered, and decided that it was only fair that she hear his story before he demanded any more out of her. But she will fear you, hate you, he thought. But he also thought, To think this way is the way of a fool. Any good person that will hear the truth and accept it has no reason to fear it. For the truth is good, and only good can come of good.

And so, as the mountain dropped behind them and they marched steadily on toward the Wall, Erich told his story. He started at the beginning and left no part out, telling Essara of the Market Fair in Hatha, and of the woman at his tent and Breyda, the knight who warned him of the threat facing the Darks. He told her of the boys who tried to kill him, and how he unwittingly defeated them. During this part he kept an especially watchful eye on Essara’s face, but she gave no sign of surprise or horror, and he went on. He told her of his confrontation with the pack of wolves, and of his meeting with the hunter in the forest. He told her of the dark green men who hunted him down, and of his efforts to lose their trail, and finally he came to his entrance into Triga, and told his tale carefully as it was the part that concerned her. He saw her eyes widen, but she nodded when he told her of the power he’d used to save her from the man on the horsa. She’d seen the other knights flying, she said, and had dismissed it from her mind as being due to the knock she’d taken. Erich concluded his story with the brief description of his battle to get her and himself onto the horsa’s back, and was at last silent.

The mountain lay many miles behind them, and the Wall loomed more ominously than ever before as the sun dropped low in the western sky.