Exit Kingdom

Mose,says Abraham. Things are gonna start gettin rapey around here if that girl don’t leash herself somehow.
    Moses kneels down and splashes water in his face. It is cold, like melted ice, and the sound of it running over its rocky riverbed is peaceful.
    Stow it, he says to his brother. Come on, let’s take a look at that leg of yours.
    So Abraham strips off his pants, and they wash the woundin the river – but his thigh is still swollen and painful, and there’s an ugly brownish-grey colour in the skin around the
hole where the bullet went in.
    Hm, Moses says.
    What is it? asks his brother.
    I ain’t sure about this.
    Forget it, Abraham says, grabbing his leg back and splashing some more water over it. I had worse. Everything heals give it enough time.
    Not everything.

    Never mind.
    So Moses strips naked too and submerges himself in the icy water of the river. When he rises, the water streams out of his beard. He sits in the shallows and plucks the nits from the coarse hair
all over his torso, squeezing them between his fingers and then drowning them in the river and letting them wash away on the current. He must look, he realizes, like a massive infant– a big
hairy baby or a corrupted orangutan or something else not quite right. It’s one of the happy things about a world gone so wrong: your personal freakishness don’t stand out so much.
    When the Vestal Amata wades back from around the bend to where the Todd brothers are, her lower half is sunk in the water and she is wearing a brassiere on her top half – which is
something in the directionof decency.
    Hey, she says and points to Abraham’s wound drying in the sun, that’s not lookin so good. Is it going rotten?
    We’ll find somethin for it on the way, Moses replies.
    It ain’t anything, Abraham says and begins wrapping it up again to keep it from solicitous eyes.
    The three of them stay for a while longer, wading in the small river. They should be travelling, they know,and yet they are reluctant to leave. Overhead, a breeze rustles the leaves of the
trees, and they shiver in the cold – and still they do not wish to go, as though dozing under some spell of nature, the classical form of the earth itself that they sometimes think of as lost
and gone.
    After a while, they emerge from the river and let the air dry them. The Vestal Amata peruses her companionsas they sit in the sun.
    Are you sure you two are brothers? she asks. One’s a big hairy bear and the other’s a skinny, runty little thing.
    We had different mothers, Moses says.
    I guess you did, the girl replies. Maybe not even from the same species. So what were you two up to before you embraced the duties of holy protectorate?
    We wandered around a lot, Moses says.
    Seein theworld, huh? she says.
    There’s a lot of it to see, Abraham says.
    One thing a plague of death does, Moses says, is rip down a lot of borders that people used to put up to keep the likes of us out. Now there’s no place that’s off limits to us.
    True enough, the Vestal says, nodding her head. The world is wide open now. All those builders and maintainers of society – they’re dead and gone.So who rushes in? I guess us. The
rules are gone. Is that happymaking or sad-making?
    It ain’t either one nor the other, Moses says, rising to his feet and beginning to dress. And the rules ain’t gone – they’ve just took up a new home on the inside of your
brain rather than the outside of it.
    He walks back to the car and smokes a cigar while waiting for the others. It’s peaceful here,all right. So peaceful it makes you long for things you don’t know the names of.
    *
    She was beautiful, Moses says, addressing those members of the caravan still awake to hear his story. Some have slunk off and some have fallen asleep on their own arms by the
fire. The sky is deep dark now and no one has spoken for a long while save the large one-eyed man himself. The fire islowering. A few listeners toss twigs and brush into the flames, but more for
the brief flashes of consuming light than to keep the fire alive. The face of the large man is becoming difficult to see – but by the momentary light of a handful of burning weeds, it is
possible to make out his features, his grizzled beard, his downturned mouth, his liquid staring eye.
    Beautiful, he says again.That’s what you ain’t able to see. Her face. Her hair. Her body. These things, too, these images – they’re the prisoners of language, and I
ain’t speaker