“Pedryuvka, go,” he whispered, stretching his left arm in front of him. Pedryuvka flew straight for the window of the guests’ room. As Ishul kept watch from the shadow of the broken-down outer wall, the girl appeared in the window at the sound of her flapping wings. When he saw her there, with a shawl in their tribe’s special pattern wrapped around her frail shoulders (maybe Ner’s mom had given it to her?), his heart leaped a little in his chest without his permission. She opened the window and looked left and right. When she saw Pedryuvka perched on the eaves, she blinked a few times and then smiled softly. “Hello,” she said, as naturally as if she were talking to a person and not a bird at all. Ishul was a little surprised. There’d never been anyone here who talked to Pedryuvka besides him. For a second his mind went blank, and he almost forgot the next part of the plan before hurriedly pulling himself together. Now, Ner. Ishul signaled from his spot in the shadows of the outer wall, waving toward the girl’s back. Ner and Paul, who’d been watching from the doorway, crouched down low and slipped into the room, creeping up to her bed. When Ner reached out toward the radio by her pillow, it suddenly let out a grating burst of noise. Ner and Paul freaked. The girl looked as if she was about to turn around, so Ishul immediately put his fingers to his mouth. Pedryuvka! When he whistled softly to her, Pedryuvka took off from her perch on the eaves, drawing the girl’s attention again. Ner and Paul took advantage of the distraction to snatch the radio and make their escape. They gave him the “success” signal from the doorway. He signaled back that he understood. Time to retreat, Pedryuvka. He put his fingers in his mouth and gave a long whistle, and Pedryuvka flew away high above them. The bewildered girl was left all alone at the window. Ishul grinned and hightailed it out of there. He met up with Ner and the others behind the quee shed. “It worked.” He and Ner grinned at each other and bumped their gloved fists together. “Where’d you hide it?” “In the watchtower at the ruins on the hill.” “Perfect.” The “ruins on the hill” meant a collection of ruined buildings on top of a low hill about a kilometer north. It was in seriously bad shape and not livable, but the kids used it as a place to play (mostly war games and hide-and-seek). Of course, the grown-ups told them they weren’t allowed to go in there because it was too dangerous. “Hey, this is stealing, right…? Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this…” worried Paul, the chicken. Way to throw a wet blanket on everything. Ishul grunted in annoyance. “Oh please. He’s a Demon of War. If he gets scared of the maze in the ruins, that just means he’s a fake.” “Right, but he’s a Demon of War! If we make him angry…” “What, are you getting cold feet?” Paul looked as though he wanted to say more, but he stopped at Ishul’s glare. When they went back to the spot along the outer wall where they could see the guest room window and took a look from the shadows, the man had come back and he and the girl were talking about something. The girl was explaining something with frantic gestures. She drew a rectangle in the air with both hands and then waved them wildly…even Ishul could tell she was trying to say that the rectangular thing was missing. He smiled to himself. The man’s expression changed instantly. His face lost way more color than Ishul thought made sense (who got this upset over losing a beat-up radio like that?), and he ran out of the room with a gesture to the girl to stay where she was. Once Ishul had seen him leave, he whispered, “You come later,” to his friends and left the shadow of the wall and jogged toward the building. “Come, Pedryuvka.” When he gave a short whistle, Pedryuvka stopped circling in the air and settled onto his shoulder. He bumped into the man just as he came running out of the building. Literally, too: Ishul ended up right in front of the taller man and got knocked to the side. The man, who’d seemed about to keep right on running, slowed his steps as if he’d just now noticed Ishul there. “Oh, sorry,” he apologized gruffly, and steadied Ishul’s arm as he stumbled. Pedryuvka had taken off right before the collision. Now she came back down to perch on Ishul’s shoulder again. The man started to breeze past him without another word, so he called out, a little flustered, “Um, are you looking for a radio?” The man stopped again and turned to look at him. Ishul flinched before he could help himself at the glare the tall man cast down at him, and then felt annoyed with himself for it. He didn’t let any of that show on the surface, though. Faking a good-boy attitude, he said, “I’m sorry. My bird—her name is Pedryuvka—likes to collect junk, and I think she stole it…” Sorry for sticking you with a bad rap, Pedryuvka. I’ll give you some sausage meat later, okay? Your favorite, he apologized silently, ducking his head. The part about Pedryuvka being a junk collector was true, though. She’d hidden lots of things from them before: Ishul’s shoe, Litta’s doll, Ner’s hat, all kinds of stuff. Not that that had anything to do with this particular instance. The man stared down at Ishul for a while without changing his expression, but after a bit he relaxed his scowl. Maybe he’d decided to believe him. Ishul breathed a sigh of relief. That scowl had fixed him in place where he stood. “Where’d she take it?” “She keeps her treasures in a hiding place in the ruins on the hill. I’ll show you the way there.” The plan was as good as half-complete. As he started walking the man toward the ruins, he winked at the other kids standing by in the shadows and signaled with a hand behind his back for them to follow. “They say the ruins on the hill are cursed. That’s why none of the grown-ups go in there,” Ishul said while they walked, randomly making up the ghost story as he went along to try to really get the guy spooked. The ruins on the hill were the remains of buildings surrounded by a town wall. The ceilings had completely caved in and the walls were crumbling here and there, which meant some of their passages were blocked and the place was a little bit of a maze now. It was the kind of place that gave you a sinking feeling at your first glance, with the smells of mold and dust settled over its gloomy paths, which made it pretty much the perfect place for a test of courage. Pedryuvka took off from her perch on Ishul’s arm and soared away toward the watchtower. Only a glimpse of the very top of it was visible from here over the wall. The loud beating of wings made the whole atmosphere even creepier. “Pedryuvka hides her treasures in the watchtower in the middle. So nobody else can go get her things. But you’re tough, right, Mister? I heard from the grown-ups”—read from a book, actually—“that you were super-tough during the War. So stuff like this doesn’t scare you, right?” Ishul egged him on casually. The man narrowed his eyes and sort of glared down at Ishul for a while. This guy got an amazingly ugly look in his eyes when he looked at someone’s face. A little intimidated again in spite of himself, Ishul waited for his response. Eventually the man abruptly broke eye contact without saying anything and began walking deeper into the ruins. As Ishul jogged to catch up with his long strides, he darted a glance over his shoulder. When he’d confirmed that Ner and the others were tailing them from the shadows, he gave them the thumbs-up and followed after the man. The inside of the ruins was closed in by walls on both sides so that it wasn’t too easy to see anything, and the thick smell of mold and dust attacked your nostrils when you went inside. Those things made it eerie enough on their own, but on top of that, the place had traps here and there that Ishul and his friends used when they played war. When Ishul darted another glance behind him as he walked after the man, even Ner and the others were looking around them with slightly fearful expressions. Ishul hunched his shoulders irritably. What’s the point of you getting scared? It’d been their playground since they were little. The whole curse thing was a lie, obviously, and Ishul knew this place like he knew his own bedroom. “That way.” Ishul slipped past him to lead the way. The man followed along at his own pace, taking his own sweet time and trailing his hand along the wall as though he was scoping out the feel of the mossy concrete. Ishul kept jogging a little past him and then stopping to wait as he led him deeper and deeper into the crisscrossing ruins. The dimness and the dusty, sour smell both got stronger as they made their way farther. I guess this is just about right… Timing it so that he’d just led his victim deep into the maze, Ishul picked up speed and turned around a corner and out of the man’s sight, then dived into a crack in the wall hidden in a dark shadow where it was hard to see. The crack was just big enough for Ishul to fit through. Even if that man found it, he was too tall for it to do him any good. Ishul hunkered down inside and waited, holding his breath, until the somewhat unsteady footsteps along the wall approached his hiding place, passed in front of it, and kept going. “Ishul?” Ishul covered his mouth with both hands to keep himself from laughing. Once he’d heard the footsteps turn the next corner and grow farther away, he crawled out of the crevice and back into the corridors again. He gazed down the hallway and grinned. “Okay, now the games begin. Let’s see Mr. Demon of War cry.” He took a shortcut to the watchtower at the center of the maze. When he got there, Ner, Paul, and Litta, who’d arrived first, giggled and stuck their heads out of the tower’s little window. “Shh!” Ishul warned them, putting his finger to his lips. “Keep your heads down.” He was grinning, too, though. The top of the watchtower had collapsed a long time ago, so it wasn’t very tall now; just five or six meters. A little room near the top was their secret base. The window of that room had a panoramic view of the maze. Ishul climbed up the ladder to join them. “Well?” “He’s lost, all right,” Ner answered him with a laugh from where he peeked outside from the edge of the window. When Ishul walked up next to him and looked out too, he could see the man’s red-brown hair far down below. He looked small from this distance. He was wandering around lost with his hand trailing along the wall of the maze. Ishul and Ner giggled to each other at the sight. As usual, only Paul periodically looked troubled and said things like, “I wonder if we’ll get in trouble for doing this to a guest…” “It’ll be fine. The grown-ups want to kick them out anyway.” “Yeah. If you’re scared, just go home.” Once Ner backed Ishul in his taunts, Paul buckled under the peer pressure and clammed up. Litta was sitting on the bed of hay playing with the stolen radio. The beat-up old radio with its crazy warped speaker was apparently as broken as it looked, because no matter how much Litta fiddled with the tuner, it only leaked gritty static. Pedryuvka perched on a post at the edge of the hay bed, tidying her feathers with her beak. The truth was, all kinds of junk Pedryuvka had collected was buried in this hay. The concrete blocks that made up the floor of the ruins had crumbled unevenly, and the footing was pretty bad. As they watched him from the tower, the man tripped over cracks every so often and reeled forward. “Look, he fell!” Ishul and Ner laughed together, and Paul moaned. “Any minute now,” said Ner. “Yeah.” Ishul nodded and tried to control his own enthusiasm, staring hard at the man. He’d almost reached the trap they’d set up for playing war— The man walked straight into the thin thread stretched across the passage at ankle height and fell over, making a bunch of empty tin cans clank together overhead. “Ahahaha! He walked right into it!” Ishul and Ner rolled around on the floor laughing, clutching their stomachs. A Demon of War getting caught in a simple trap like that? This guy was no big thing at all! And he’d read in the book that there’d been a ton of traps like that in the field during the War, too. Eventually the man got to his knees and pushed himself back up to his feet. He looked back and forth between the thread at his feet and the tin cans threaded above his head for a while. That was all, though. Otherwise he didn’t show any particular reaction as he stood up, put his hand against the wall again, and started walking along the uneven floor of the maze again. The watchtower looked pretty close from there, but it wasn’t actually easy to get to. Ishul might know these ruins like his own bedroom, but if you came in not knowing the way and just walked around willy-nilly, you’d end up going in circles. Sure enough, after he’d walked for a while, the man was about to make it right back to that same trap. “Think he’ll fall for it again?” Ner whispered. “No way,” answered Ishul without taking his eyes off the man. Yeah, right. As if a Demon of War would get himself caught in a dumb trap like that more than once. What he really wanted to see was how a Demon of War would get through the traps to beat this maze. He watched in eager anticipation, but the man got caught in the same trap as before and fell down again. The cans rang noisily. Ner clutched his belly and laughed again. Ishul stifled a laugh of his own, too. He did it again…This guy might be a real idiot. But after that, the man circled the same path over and over again with his hand still trailing the wall, and stumbled over and over again on the broken floor, and walked into the trap and fell over and over again. Each time, Ner rolled around laughing, and Paul dithered, and the smile on Ishul’s face faded a little more. What’s the deal? Ishul silently growled in annoyance. His excitement steadily wore off until it wasn’t any fun to watch at all. Ishul stared fixedly down at the man stumbling around the maze. When he saw him trip for the umpteenth time, he abruptly stood up and walked away from the window. “Eh, forget this.” The laughing Ner and dithering Paul both turned and gave him puzzled looks. “This is boring. I’m going home,” Ishul barked as a parting shot. Then he started climbing down the ladder. “Ishul?” Ner and Paul started to follow him, flustered, but Ishul didn’t even glance at them. He jumped violently down the last few rungs of the ladder in his irritation and stalked quickly down the road home. What’s the deal? He gave another silent growl. He’d never thought a Demon of War would be so helpless and pathetic. The truth was, deep down Ishul’d had high hopes. He’d been so sure that a Demon of War must be really tough and cool. That his ancestors, the First People, hadn’t just run away from the War because they were scared. And yet…What’s the deal with this?! He rapidly lost all enthusiasm. He’d always wondered what it was like Below. He’d always longed to go see for himself someday. Now he felt as though even that dream had been smashed, and it made him feel pissed off and disappointed. Ner and Paul were busy being confused behind him at how steamed up he was, and now Pedryuvka was coming after him from above. Ishul kept right on walking without even offering his arm to her. She circled the air above him, looking lost. The feel of the wall beneath his left hand changed slightly. When he raised his head to look up, his cloudy, narrow field of vision caught that the tower wall here was taller than the walls he’d been following so far. Hey, I’m here… Harvey was just the teensiest bit impressed with himself for making it here on the strength of his instincts after being so lost. Ugh, and then there were those dumb traps… He’d known he was walking in circles by the second lap, but he hadn’t had much choice but to keep on circling until he found a different route by touch. His sight wasn’t good enough to distinguish little differences in the walls anymore. Stupid brats… He wasn’t especially pissed about the kids’ prank, but he was tired. Anyway, the important thing was that he had to hurry, or it would be too late. He found the ladder on the wall of the watchtower and climbed it one rung at a time on unsteady feet. Probably some of the tower was missing now, because it wasn’t too tall, only about five or six meters. His anxiousness made it seem much taller. His foot missed the top rung, and for a moment he thought he was going to fall, but he somehow managed to throw himself into the space at the top of the structure. It was basically just a small room. The thing about this place being a cursed maze that nobody ever entered was a lie, of course; the scent in the air told him that more than one person had been here not too long ago. He could hazily make out that a bed of hay took up almost half the floor. When he plunged his hand into the hay and rummaged through it, all he could find was junk: a lone shoe, a leather glove without its mate, a chipped cup…Little by little by little, he started to panic. “Corporal?” he called out loud. Fzzsh…bzzzzzt… A faint hum of static answered him from underneath all the hay and pieces of junk. The tension drained out of him, and his face relaxed. He felt his way through the hay, looking for the radio. Then he felt the rusty casing against his fingers. Oh, good… If he hurried, he could probably make it back to Kieli before it was too late. Harvey started to dig out the radio. “Hmm?” The strap went tense and started to drag something up with it. It was caught on something…Harvey lowered his gaze and squinted. He saw something move languidly at the bottom of the pile of hay, and then he heard a tiny yawn. “Ner! Ishul!” Ner’s mom yelled furiously at them the second they got back. Paul backed away, his naturally pale face going even paler, and Ner dived behind Ishul to hide. Which meant that in the end, Ishul was left standing there facing her head-on. “Wh-what? We cleaned up the shed like we were supposed to,” Ishul shot back in spite of his nervousness. The girl visitor peeked tentatively around the woman’s large body. She seemed a little weak still, but apparently she was well enough to leave her room. “You’re the ones who stole from our guests, aren’t you? Only the worst kind of people steal things!” She put her hands on her ample hips and glared down at them. “We didn’t steal it. That was Pedryuvka—” “Don’t you blame this on the bird!” The force of her yell knocked Ishul back a step. Ner gave a little cry as Ishul’s back collided with his nose. Ner’s mother treated everybody’s kids with equal caring, just the same as she treated Ner, but she was also equally scary to all of them. He liked her well enough, but there were plenty of times when he wished she’d give him a break. “So your name is Ishul?” The girl stepped forward, holding the patterned shawl around her shoulders. She was a little bit taller than Ishul. She stooped down a little to look him right in the eye. “Do you know where it is? Please, it’s very special to me.” Ishul squirmed uncomfortably. She sounded so earnest. He traded sidelong glances with Ner, who was standing behind him. He wavered a little, but in the end he gave in and came clean in a mumble. “That man went to the ruins on the hill to look for it…” “You took him to that maze?! I just can’t believe you little runts!” Ner’s mom shouted at them and smacked each child on the head in turn with her palm. By the time she got to Paul, he was half-crying and mumbling incoherent apologies. “It’s a maze?” the girl asked the older woman, some of the color draining from her face. Auntie sighed (whenever she sighed, her ample chest bounced up and down) and said, “Well, it’s a place where kids play. So it’s not a very hard maze…” “Ishul,” the girl said. Her voice and the expression on her face were both mild, but it felt as if her deep-black eyes were sucking him in and reading his mind. They transfixed him, and he couldn’t move or look away. Since Ishul wasn’t actually innocent, something about them stung his heart hard. “He can’t see very well. Didn’t you notice?” “Huh…?” Ishul was speechless. That was the last thing he’d expected to hear. He hadn’t noticed, not at all. Now that she mentioned it, sure, the man had narrowed his eyes really fiercely whenever he’d looked at Ishul’s face (Ishul’d guessed he was just naturally sinister-looking), and he’d always trailed his hand along the wall while they were walking through the maze, and he’d fallen for the same trap over and over again—but Ishul didn’t remember him showing a trace of fear or hesitation when they’d been walking through places with nothing to hold on to. If Ishul couldn’t see…he knew he’d be too scared to walk. …Maybe these Demons of War really were tough after all. Was that why they weren’t scared even when they couldn’t see? “Please, take me there.” “You shouldn’t push yourself, miss. You’re not well yet,” interrupted the old lady, but the girl shook her head, never taking her eyes off Ishul. “Please. They’re very special to me…the radio and him both. Take me there.” He didn’t hear any blame in her voice. What did come across, though, was exactly how much she cared about that man she was with. All of a sudden Ishul felt totally childish. He was ashamed of himself. He’d lured their visitor into the ruins because of the stupid urge to pull a prank and then left him there because he was pissed at the man for not living up to the picture he’d built up in his own head. He started to feel like a really disgusting person, and all that disappointment and annoyance suddenly subsided. Ishul gave in; he was convinced. He dropped his gaze uncomfortably, unable to look at her. That was when Ner’s mom squeaked, “Hey! Wait a minute; where’s Litta?” Ishul raised his eyes and looked at Ner, and then they both turned to Paul. After all, it was his job as Litta’s brother to keep an eye on her. Paul stared dumbly at them for a second when the conversation turned to him and then let out a little squeak. “I forgot her!” “I’m beat…” Harvey muttered, leaning the back of his head against the wall of the ruins and looking up at the sky. With what vision he still had, he could more or less make out what color it was; streaks of copper were beginning to take it over. He could smell the twilight coming. The sun would set soon. Meanwhile, he was currently sitting with his legs flung out in front of him and a little girl on his lap, listening to her peaceful breathing. She seemed to be having a nice nap. When she’d crawled out from under the hay, yawning, she’d said she knew a shortcut back home, so he’d asked her to show him, with the result that now they were even more lost than before. Harvey had a fairly decent sense of direction, so he at least knew which general direction the exit was in, but with the paths twisting and turning and crisscrossing like this, it was still hard to find his way out now that he had to pretty much feel his way forward by hand. He wasn’t completely blind, but his left eye hardly worked anymore, and his range of vision in his right eye was extremely narrow. Whenever he tried to use his sense of sight to check on anything, his eyes naturally narrowed to an ugly glare. Slumped back against the wall, he gazed at the sky without thinking much of anything about it. The radio’s feeble static permeated the air. For a while now, the noise had been slowly but surely getting weaker. Still, its sound so thin it seemed forced, the radio kept on playing its final static. If he didn’t hurry back, he wouldn’t make it in time. The girl had gotten tired out from walking and had fallen asleep; Harvey felt himself getting anxious, but he couldn’t just drag her along by the ankle while he walked in circles again. “Sorry, Corporal…I’ll get us home to matter what, so hang in there a little longer for me…” He crouched forward, embracing the tiny sleeping girl on his lap from above to bring his face close to the speaker of the radio she refused to let go of. The radio answered him with a little kind-sounding static. “It’s okay…” it seemed to say. “You just let her get some sleep,” it sang, the static lilting like a lullaby for the little girl. Without warning, Harvey found himself smiling. Even now—even now, when he was about to leave this world—the ghost possessing this radio was still a sucker for little kids. It was just so very him, and the him-ness of it made Harvey happy, somehow. A warm feeling spread through him from the center of his body outward. “Yeah, Corporal. It’s okay now, isn’t it…? It’s enough, it’s all finished now…” His voice shook a little, but his heart was quiet inside him. “Yeah…Man, I’m tired,” the static seemed to say. There was a laugh in its tone. Harvey thought for a moment he could see a thin soldier’s face quirking up in a friendly smile with just a touch of irony. “Thanks…for hanging on all this time…” Kshht. “You did too,” the static said. “Heh, I guess I did.” He pressed his forehead to the warped speaker in a sort of little bow. “I owe you a lot. I’m grateful…” Harvey closed his eyes and gave thanks from the bottom of his heart: for this ghost in the radio who had undeniably been their guardian, for how he’d brought Harvey and Kieli this far, spurring them on and pulling them along, for their meeting in that plagued town, for his many scoldings, for his hearty laughter that could so easily dispel a gloomy atmosphere, for all the music he’d hammered into Harvey’s head whether Harvey liked it or not, and for the many, so very many human feelings he’d taught him… Fshhhhhhhhhhhhhhh… There was a noise like the sound of a quiet rain falling on an abandoned battlefield. Little by little, it grew weaker. Eventually it broke off. That was the last noise the radio ever made. Drained, Harvey let his back rest against the wall and gazed vacantly at the sky. The girl in his lap stirred and lifted her head a little. He heard the sounds of muffled voices and jogging footsteps approaching. Harvey saw several small forms come running toward him from beyond the ruined walls that looked dark in his fading vision. The one in front was probably that boy Ishul, with the other kids following him. And bringing up the rear, he made out a girl in a shawl. The children stopped still when they caught sight of him; only Kieli kept going, brushing past them and jogging up to him. Her ragged breath came to a stop a little ways in front of him. He could tell that she was struggling for her first words, her shoulders heaving a bit as she panted. Even if he could hardly see anything else, he could tell what expression she was wearing right now with a strange clarity. Just as he’d been able to hear the radio’s noise as the words behind it, she stood out against the darkness like a soft guiding light even now that almost all the rest of the world’s light was gone. He could always see exactly what expression she wore on her face, whether she was smiling or trying not to cry. The little girl sat up from his lap. Kieli traded looks with her, and she held up the radio to give it back. As Kieli accepted it, she bent her knees and plopped down to the floor in front of him. “Sorry,” Harvey murmured to her. His voice sounded a little hoarse. “I wanted to hurry back to you, but I didn’t make it in time…” Before he finished, the girl’s pale, slightly chilly palms cradled his cheeks. She looked at him with watery dark eyes, smiled slightly, and shook her head. “It’s okay…” she said in a teary voice, softly drawing his head into her embrace. Harvey let her. He rested his forehead on her shoulder. “Rest in peace, Corporal…” Her voice cut very quietly through the twilit ruins. “Yeah. Rest in peace…” Harvey repeated against her shoulder in a muffled voice. Those were their final words of farewell to the ghost in the radio. The radio would never interrupt the two of them again, never encourage them or scold them again, or ever play old music for them again either. But if they closed their eyes, they could see that open-hearted and cheerful ghost in the radio, the one who always complained nonstop while watching over them anyway, whenever they wanted.
Chapter 126
26 min read