The Vapours of Caldera
by David Brookes
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 The Spirits of Caldera |
conclusion
No, said a voice in Leanna’s mind. She jerked, startled by her own thoughts. In the fugue of her shocked paralysis, her mind noticed the increasing pull of the draining water. Now the realisation hit her: if they didn’t move as far away from the broken Ridge as possible, they would all be sucked out into the arid darkness beneath the Reach. There was no moisture there, nothing to sustain their water-dependant bodies. They would all die.
‘No!’ she screamed after her father. But he was already too far away from her to hear. She considered chasing him, but then remembered the sudden, fearful evaporation of the Vapours and the lesser spirits. This will be the end of us all, she thought, and turned the opposite direction to run.
As though pulled by a vacuum, the draining water sucked at her legs and slowed her. Others understood the danger presented by the crack in the Ridge and were also running. When they were at the edge of the village, the water was only up to their waists — much lower than before — but the pull was more insistent.
‘Come on!’ cried Leanna, waving her arm. ‘We’ve got to swim!’
Not everybody followed. It was also dawning on them that the previously submerged crystals around the perimeter were now a deadly threat. Like spears of ice, the rigid salt crystals would cut them to ribbons if the rumbling tides pulled them hard enough.
She hurled herself against the tide. With spume dragging on her shoulders, she pushed towards the opposite Ridge. The perimeter was now a ring of water around the dry central dome, no longer “deep.” With her eyes open to focus on her target of the rock wall, she could see in the shallower pool the sleek growths of chlorine.
Onward with each stroke. She seemed to make no progress against the pulling streams, but she closed her eyes and her muscles burned all through her body and then she reached out and touched stone.
The black rock was slick with moisture and discoloured from generations of mineral-rich water. Leanna pulled herself up, shivering, now totally out of the water.
A powerful sharklike form heaved itself up alongside her. It was Aban, several wetsuits tied in knots around his shoulders. He pulled one loose and shoved it into Leanna’s hands.
‘Now,’ he said.
She climbed into the suit, conscious of her naked body in the dry air. It made her feel ridiculous and selfish to feel exposed, when the city was pouring down the mountainside.
Hooking the overlapping straps around the suit’s stone toggles, Leanna asked, ‘What about the others?’
Aban stared at the gleaming water spilling through the tear in the Ridge. The stones of the demolished structures had been dragged into the perimeter to crush salt crystals. The village was gone and, apart from the few stragglers scaling the rock below them, there seemed to be nobody else left.
He shook his head, ran the sleeve of his wetsuit roughly across his eyes.
‘We’ve got no choice now,’ said Leanna. ‘We have to go south. Toward the ocean.’
Six others made it. That number did not include her parents.
‘We could skirt around the Ridge,’ she suggested suddenly. ‘Find the others, help them back until we find the ocean—’
‘Lea... They fell down the mountainside.’
‘It can’t be so steep—’
‘There’s no water down there, Lea, even if they survived the fall. Only the puddles of what’s left of Caldera, and to get to them would take so long as to—’
A rapid exchange of emotion flickered across Leanna’s face, and tears of grief and frustration rolled down her cheeks. The valuable moisture fell from her chin to the wet stone she stood on, at which point she turned on her bare feet and began to climb higher up the inside of the Ridge.
‘Leanna, wait! We could still rest!’
‘We don’t know how far we have to go,’ she called back, her voice carrying the hard edge of her father’s. ‘And the longer we’re out of the water, the less likely we are to succeed.’
She scaled the wall of smooth stone, higher and higher, until she felt the wind in her hair and the blessing of the Ventra Zeneth Ori.
* * *
The hunters, when they used to venture into the Reach to catch food, were sometimes gone a day. They left in the early evening, when it was dark and cool, and would normally return before sunrise. Sometimes they came back early, if there had been an accident or plenty of food already caught; sometimes they would return after the sun had risen, the skin around their eyes and mouths cracked from desiccation.
The longest anybody had ever survived away from Caldera had been eleven hours. Richard — Jason’s brother and also a hunter — had once made it back after twelve with a damaged suit, injured from falling on his ankle when chasing a running-bird. Even though he’d been quickly submerged upon his return to the village, Richard had never recovered and died that same morning.
Leanna looked up at the sun, from where the Great Spirit Sol was pouring all his heat. Or so she’d always thought. Hadn’t Duncan said that Sol was in the ground, not in the sky? Or was Sol in two places at once?
Duncan. The Vapours were gone now, never to return. There was no longer a veil through which to peer into the spirit world. She would never hear Duncan’s voice again until the day she died.
* * *
They had been travelling across the Reach for eight hours.
The grey wasteland stretched out for miles in every direction. From where they were, even the Ridge was now lost from sight behind them. No matter where she looked, Leanna could see only the slightly undulating stone on its gentle downhill slope.
Her feet bled. The stone was not smooth like the volcanic rock of the Calderan Ridge, but sharp and uneven like chips of bone. It made sense that it should be that way now that Leanna had learned the nature of the Reach: the tiny spurs and shards were petrified leaves. They were walking on top of a canopy of ancient trees turned to stone by the raging fires within the mountain, all water sucked from them in a cataclysmic event maybe a thousand years ago, maybe a million. The real mountainside was far below this platform of rugged stone.
As they traversed the endless grey landscape, the sky grew faintly lighter. The farther away from the obfuscating steam of the crater they moved, the brighter the stars shone like pinholes in the fabric of the night. Leanna thought that she had never seen such beauty — nor felt such coldness.
Their bodies had long since absorbed the water from their wetsuits, and Leanna could already feel the skin of her face pulling taut and dry.
There was no moisture in the air; it crackled with electricity, black clouds rolling from south to north above them, and this only made the air drier. The rain, if it fell, was nowhere nearby. The clouds passed and left the moon hovering near the horizon, where there was the faintest threat of sunrise to the east.
With not one hunter amongst the eight of them, they soon felt the desperation of hunger without hope of food. None of them could catch one of the darting grey lizards that lived in the deeper crannies of the stone vegetation, even with the reptiles sleepy and sluggish. The large white birds that sailed high overhead were far out of their reach without bolas or spears. Obtaining anything to eat was impossible.
‘Is it hopeless?’ Aban gasped, sucking fruitlessly on the sleeve of his suit. ‘Hopeless, is it?’
And hours or minutes later: ‘Your father was our best hunter,’ he said to Leanna, thinking only of food. Something about the way he said it suggested that, being Jason’s daughter, Leanna should also be able to hunt, as though it were now her responsibility.
‘If I could get us food, I would,’ she said. ‘Or make it rain. But I think only a hunter could feed us. And only the Great Spirits can save us.’
* * *
It went on.
Clennis, a harvester of the sodium chloride sludge for the prene their wetsuits were made of, kept saying that he could see the edge of the Reach.
‘I can see it,’ he murmured hoarsely, pointing with a trembling finger. ‘The horizon, see? It’s closer.’
‘It’s your eyes,’ Aban protested, becoming angry at first, but later too tired to anger. ‘It’s your damn fool eyes drying up, hardening and contracting.’
‘No, I see the edge! It’s a shoreline!’
Leanna couldn’t see anything. It was all grey sky above and grey stone in all directions, merging into the grey of fog. Her tongue was swollen in her mouth. Her lips had contracted like shrunken leaves against her teeth, which ached in her gums.
Her condition was worse than mere thirst. Her entire body was gasping for water, dehydrating in the thin sunlight. There was a terrible iciness out there on the Reach that made her stiff and ache deep in her joints. There would be no warm Vapours rising into the air back home, she thought. There would be little of the hot, rejuvenating water sitting in the perimeter now, having drained down the mountainside.
And the others — without wetsuits — would all be dead by now.
‘I swear I can see the edge,’ Clennis insisted, and then rapidly his voice began to rise in pitch. ‘No, I can! I can see it! I can see the shoreline!’
He began to run, his feet falling heavily on the spikes and spurs of the petrified plantlife, his big arms swinging with tired determination. Calderans had long ago lost the ability to sweat, but his tongue lagged from the side of his mouth. His hands clenched reflexively.
And it was true: the horizon was nearer! Clennis would wear himself out running towards salvation, but Leanna wasn’t sure she had the energy in her; and Aban, whose intimidating mass was now working against him, could barely stand.
She propped him up and they struggled on, toes picking around the worst of the sharp stones. Clennis would tell them the second he saw water, and maybe this would revitalise Aban, give him new strength.
They drew closer to the grey border, stumbled closer still. It was a gentle slope that descended to a shallow crest.
Clennis collapsed there on the crest, fingers splaying forward as though to pull himself forward across the new wasteland of endless dry stone.
‘I told you,’ murmured Tenelade, one of the peacekeepers of the village. She dropped to her knees beside Clennis, the springiness gone from her wasted flesh. ‘It’s too far... There is no shoreline.’
Clennis died, gasping with his cracked eyes turned to Sol. The slackness of death softened the look of betrayal that lined his face, and his limbs relaxed forever on the spurs of frozen forest.
* * *
Leanna could not keep her eyes from the insubstantial colour in the sky. They were not even real clouds. Wordlessly, she called from her soul to the Great Spirits of water: to Precipicia of the rain, to Fluvé Por of running water, and Callus who controlled the storms.
Further down, inside the dried-out cage of her ribs, Leanna felt her heart twist. The Great Spirits — were they even there? She had seen the lesser spirits with her own two eyes: Duncan and the other faceless ghosts. But Stattus? Preto Ventrus of the mists? Had they created these spirits for their own comfort, only to find themselves spiritually destitute in their time of greatest need?
Even if Sol was not real, his heat certainly existed in the eternal sun in the sky, in the fire beneath Caldera that had warmed its waters and formed the Vapours. The effects were true, even if the causes might not be, but that didn’t stop her body from shrinking like ancient fruit from extreme water loss. It didn’t stop her corneas from turning to rigid and painful diamond in her eyes, clouding her vision.
She pleaded to the lesser spirits to guide them, for Duncan to just let them know that they were heading in the right direction.
It was full morning. Sol turned like a wheel of fire in the sky, burning away the thin, high fog and further reducing their chance of moisture from the air. It was truly hopeless.
‘My ears,’ Aban was muttering. ‘I hear white noise in my ears. I must be dying.’
‘Clennis thought he saw the end, before his eyes cracked,’ Tenelade wheezed.
Aban nodded. ‘It’s death I hear, coming for me.’ He sounded half-mad from dehydration.
‘We’ve got to keep moving,’ Leanna told them, but she didn’t even believe it herself.
No matter whether they sat on the stone and perished, turning to desiccated husks, or walked on in any direction — each as good as the other — they would die in any case. It was only death that awaited them, not water. Duncan, if he had truly existed, was wrong.
And then: ‘I can hear it too.’
Leanna turned her aching neck to Tenelade.
‘Noise... Like rain? No...’
Frustration showed on Tenelade’s face. She wasn’t familiar with the sound and had nothing to compare it to.
Then, at the very edges of her hearing, barely tickling her ears, Leanna heard it for herself.
It was indeed a little like rain, which came in sheets when Callus was at his most generous. But it was a constant, soft scrape, like sheet over sheet of flowing water scratching against stone.
She was so dry, she felt her body was made of only bones.
Beyond the grey Reach, Duncan had said, is an ocean.
It was there. Below them. At the edge of the Reach, where stony branches protruded like grasping limbs, there was only clean, moving air. And down, down past the spiny branches and widening trunks many thousands of feet high, was the ocean Duncan promised.
It reflected the dull silver of the sky, but it seemed fresh, vibrant in its rhythmic pounding of the blunt shore, white-crested, full of life and energy, pulling back, throwing forward again with a crash of sound. The white noise that they had heard was now the terrific smash of a great weight of water against enormous pillars of stone.
And it came all the way from the distant horizon, an ocean to make Caldera’s lake a drop of spit by comparison.
‘The foot of the mountain slopes right into it,’ Aban said, amazed. ‘And there’s mist...’
‘It’s warm,’ breathed Leanna. ‘And look there: a reef just above the surface.’
‘It is as the spirit said.’
‘But—’
The edge of the Reach stretched very high above the water, and looking down from the thin, brittle branches filled Leanna’s head with swirling fog. Dizzy... Like when Duncan and I used to breathe in the Vapours, before we knew what they were.
‘We can’t climb down.’
‘I don’t think I could,’ Tenelade said weakly. ‘My arms...’
‘To jump would kill us,’ said Aban.
‘We’ll be dead anyway,’ protested Leanna, ‘if we don’t.’
After a pause, Aban pulled back his shoulders with a creak, then clapped his large hands together. ‘Right. If one of us has to go first...’
Leanna wanted desperately to say that he needn’t — but she couldn’t lie to Aban or to herself, and in truth the thirst of her body was the most painful thing she’d ever experienced. A part of her doubted that she would survive even if she were tenderly submerged in the seemingly warm, living waters of that ocean.
She would see.
Aban leapt. He was not a hunter and had never needed to climb the Ridge; as such, he had never learned to dive. His body plummeted like a stone, and his arms were pressed against his hips by the pressure of his descent. He fell for an age, down and down, becoming a speck of a man until, at the last moment, he brought his arms in front of him like an arrowhead designed purposefully for penetrating the cresting waves.
He disappeared beneath a layer of white froth.
The tide drew back, exposing the black slope of the mountainside and the sediment brought and deposited there by the sea’s mysterious currents.
Then the water rolled forward once more, and in its sweeping rinse a pale, shrivelled shape showed above the surface. Aban’s body, his limbs floating jerkily beside him.
Leanna’s hands sprung to her mouth. A sharp gasp issued from Tenelade and she burst into silent tears, her arms shaking. The others crowded at the edge of the drop, their silence thick with shock and grief.
‘We’ll all die,’ Tenelade sobbed, echoing Aban’s words. ‘This is it.’
Almost crippled by heartache, Leanna could not tear her eyes from Aban’s floating body. He was the one who’d backed her up when she tried to convince her parents of the danger to Caldera. Had he not shown her the records and defended her, she might have been on the wrong side of the village when the Ridge had broken. She could be dead right now — but she was alive, because of Aban.
A warm wind rushed across the Reach, and for a moment she believed she heard the wordless voice of Duncan in her ear.
She didn’t speak. With her bare feet, she picked forward to the edge of the stony platform, until her long Calderan toes clung to the very edges. The breeze rippled through her hair, bringing it forward in blonde undulating streamers; it was through this veil that she saw the grey and white of the ocean tilt on a hidden axis, then slowly rise to meet her.
Her hair pulled back and whipped at her shoulders, where she had peeled back the now-useless wetsuit. Her face chilled quickly, her eyes dried out as she dove like a seabird, and in the drawn-out moment of descent she sensed an opposing wind embracing her from above, laced with promise and praise from spiralling lesser spirits.
Leanna turned, gently closed her eyes, and reached out with all of her mind and spirit.
Before she hit the tumultuous water, she felt the touch of Duncan guiding her with ephemeral hands, pulling warmth all around her until the world was nothing but spume and streamers and the crossing of deep currents.
Copyright © 2019 by David Brookes
