‘Shhhh,’ Mai hissed as he ran up behind her, pumped with fear and ready to hit the ground and roll, taking out the three wolves directly ahead. ‘You’ll scare them.’
‘Scare them?’
Mai nodded and knelt briefly beside a corpse, closing the eyes on the body of a man who had one leg chewed off at the knee and was wearing his small intestines draped round his groin like a withered grass skirt. ‘They’re cleaners,’ Mai said reaching for a grey shadow. Instead of taking her hand off at the wrist, the wolf whined like a puppy and pushed its narrow skull up into her palm.
‘Fucking great,’ said Axl, ‘they’re all God’s creatures and you’re fucking St Francis.’ He stared at the broken body of a child, little more than ragged scraps of dark flesh on bones picked nearly clean.
‘You like this?’ Axl asked.
‘I don’t have a problem with it,’ said Mai. She stopped a few seconds later, put her head up and sniffed the air like one of her shadows. ‘Too much,’ she insisted, ‘too much for the horses. Cut them free ...' Behind him, Axl could see Rinpoche already slitting straps that fastened on saddles and slicing through bridles and reins.
‘That’s...'
‘A good idea,’ Mai told him. ‘Unless you plan to be a sitting target?’ She smiled grimly. ‘As opposed to a walking one…’ There wasn’t an answer to that.
‘Does all this really make sense to you?’ Axl asked Mai, feeling so tired he found it hard to think.
She nodded, smiled broadly and pointed to a blond toddler lying naked on a stone slab, his small arms and legs broken to give the vultures a head start.
It was Mai, not Axl, who led the exhausted group towards the centre of the charnel ground, walking ahead oblivious to the increasing number of bodies and their stink. The wolves stayed strung out in a line along either side of the party as if they were acting as outriders.
Mai appeared not to notice the wolves, except when one thrust its wet nose against her hand, but then she didn’t seem aware of anything really, apart from Father Sylvester’s glass blade warm between her breasts and a soft voice muttering in her head, and much of the time she didn’t even notice that. It was the daydreams that went with those mutterings that made her gasp, shake her head and shiver…
Unrelated, intense but not mine. At least, Mai didn’t think they were hers. What she liked best was the feeling of calm so deep it made her relax just to think about it. She really liked that. Liked the way her heart slowed and the knot in her stomach untied itself and faded away.
What surprised Mai most was the discovery that just because Kate had told her how lucky she was to be brought to Samsara didn’t mean it was a lie.
‘Mai?’ She felt rather than heard the question. At first she thought it came from the silver monkey now circling overhead higher than the vultures. Mai couldn’t really see Rinpoche, not by looking, but sometimes he was in her head and other times she was the one looking out through his eyes. She liked that, too.
Most of all, she liked watching herself as a tiny dot who moved slowly across a great expanse of rough grass, skirting bushes and small ponds. Mezzanine, said a voice in her head. It’s a mezzanine between Samsara’s broad central valley and the high passes. But she didn’t know that word and no sense came attached to it so that didn’t help her much, not that Mai minded.
‘Mai?' There was that question again, the one she’d forgotten she’d been asked. The kid looked round her, saw nobody speaking and wondered if it was one of the wolves. Then told herself not to be stupid.
‘Stupid is good if it helps. Crazy is better… But, do I look like a wolf?’
The bald man sitting ahead of her on an altar was wrapped in a thin orange robe. His mouth didn’t open and there was nothing to say he was the one who had spoken, but she knew it was him from the smile on his face. And besides… she just knew.
‘Like a wolf?’ said Mai, ‘No, you look like you should be cold.’
The man laughed. It sounded like echoes fading inside a prayer drum.
Chapter Forty-Four
Lo-fi/Fidelity
Slap bass, the real thing… impressively fuzzy analogue. Slow as a heartbeat, only looping four notes not two, repeated endlessly. Axl couldn’t remember the song it had been stripped from but he recalled the original fly poster. A blonde Scandinavian framed topless against a pantone sky, white flannel shorts pulled up so tight they probably explained the idiot grin on her face.
He hadn’t liked the track back then.
Axl watched Kate approach, keeping his own face impassive. It was the first time in two days she’d come near him, and Axl had long since stopped trying to draw her aside and explain. Mainly because he wasn’t too sure explain what? And besides what on earth made him imagine for a minute that she’d believe him? Axl wouldn’t have done if he was Kate. Hell, half the time he didn’t believe himself…
As rest stops went, here was better than anywhere else they’d found and infinitely preferable to where they’d been a day and a half before, sitting by an altar as Mai wandered aimlessly closing the eyes of the dead.
But a whole day’s light had gone and, because he hadn’t told them, none of the group understood why Axl refused to leave the slope above the woods that edged Samsara’s central valley. And when Ketzia had forced herself to ask him two hours earlier, he’d just snapped that he was watching time go by.
Axl stood, Kate opened her mouth and the slap bass slid into silence, a straight fade.
‘You can’t take Mai back.’ Kate didn’t bother to pretend the conversation was about anything else. Nor did she slide into it gently. Nothing but worry for Mai would have made her cross the patch of grass from where she sat with Louis and Ketzia to where Axl sat alone.
He could, quite easily. Provided neither of them got killed first. Whether he should was a different question, but that wasn’t what she’d asked.
‘I can,’ said Axl demolishing half a tiny apple with a single bite. They had food now. Two rabbits killed with a slingshot by Tukten. And sour pippins from a row of trees that looked as if they’d once been cultivated but had long since been allowed to grow wild. ‘Quite easily.’
They were watching her, the others. And it was obvious Kate realised the fact from the tension whipcording her neck and the way her fingers wrapped into fists that pushed hard into her hips. If Axl hadn’t known better he’d have said Kate was doing her best to stop herself from shaking.
‘She’s ill.’ It was as close as Kate had come to pleading and closer than she liked.
‘I know.’
Mai was, too. Shakes like he’d never seen and night sweats that left her skin mottled and slick. The fever had come on immediately after the charnel ground and Axl was trying very hard to ignore the thought that she’d infected herself while tidying the corpses. Either that, or she’d caught some disease saying goodbye to her shadows when the wolves began to slobber all over her face.
‘And she’s a child,’ Kate hissed at him. They’d been there before.
‘That child,’ said Axl, ‘is a kinderwhore.’ He flipped out his hand to grip Kate’s wrist, stopping her from turning away. Here was somewhere they’d been as well.
‘Sit down,’ Axl snapped at Louis, then jerked his head at Tukten who’d dropped all the firewood he’d been collecting except for a large branch which he held like a club. ‘You too.’
Neither moved.
‘You can sit down,’ said Axl, ‘or I can kick seven shades of shit out of you, do it in public and sell tickets ...' Both the boy and Louis sat down. And why not, thought Axl. Those were the words that always worked for Black Jack.