The Crippled God

then the worm cast off a part of it that had died, and these pieces were pushed out to the sides. Hands would reach down from those walking past, collecting up fragments of clothing which would be used during the day, stitched together to make flies – gifts of shade from the dead – and by the time those discarded pieces came close to her, why, they’d be mostly naked, and they’d have become marble statues. Because, when things fail, you topple the statues .
    Directly before her, the bared backs of the haulers glistened with precious sweat as they strained in their yokes. And the thick ropes twisted as they went taut and gusted out breaths of glittering dust all down their length. They call these soldiers heavies. Some of them anyway. The ones who don’t stop, who don’t fall down, who don’t die. The ones who scare the others and make them keep going. Until they fall over dead. Heavies. These soldiers .
    She thought back. The sun had been spilling out along the horizon. The day was going away, and it had been a day when no one had spoken, when the Snake had been silent. She had been walking three paces behind Rutt, and Rutt walked hunched over around Held, who was huddled in his arms, and Held’s eyes were closed against the glare – but then, they were always closed, because so much in the world was too hard to look at.
    This would be their last night. They knew it – the whole Snake knewit. Badalle had said nothing to change their minds. Perhaps she too had given up – it was hard to know for certain. Defiance could hold its shape, even when it was made of nothing but cinders and ash. Anger could look hot to the touch, when in truth it was lifeless and cold. In this way, the world could deceive. It could lie, and in lying it invited delusion. It invited the idea that what it was was true. In this way, the world could make belief a fatal illness.
    She stared down at the backs of the heavies, and remembered more.
    Rutt’s steps wavered. Halted. His voice cracked as it made a wordless sound, and then it cracked a second time, and he said, ‘Badalle. The flies are walking now.’
    She looked down at her legs, to see if they could take her up alongside him, and, slowly, agonizingly, they did. And far ahead, to the place where he was looking with his blinded, closed-up eyes, she saw swarming shapes, black as they came out of the sunset’s red glare. Black and seething. Flies, walking on two legs, one clump, then another and another, emerging from the blood-light.
    ‘The flies,’ said Rutt, ‘are walking.’
    But she had sent them away. Her last command of power, the one that used her up. And now, this day, she had been blowing nothing but air from her lips.
    Badalle squinted.
    ‘I want to be blind again, Badalle.’
    She studied the puffed masses filling his sockets. ‘You still are, Rutt.’
    ‘Then … they are in my head. The flies … in my head .’
    ‘No. I see them too. But that seething – it is just the sun’s light behind them. Rutt, they are people.’
    He almost fell then, but widened his stance and, with terrible grace, he straightened. ‘Fathers.’
    ‘No. Yes. No.’
    ‘Did we turn round, Badalle? Did we somehow turn round?’
    ‘No. See, the west – we have walked into the sun, every day, every dusk.’ She was silent then. The Snake was coiling up behind the two of them, its scrawny body of bones drawing together, as if that could keep it safe. The figures from the sunset were coming closer. ‘Rutt, there are … children.’
    ‘What is that, upon their skin – their faces?’
    She saw the one father among them, his beard grey and rust, his eyes suffering the way the eyes of some fathers did – as they sent their young ones away for the last time. But the faces of the children drew her attention. Tattoos . ‘They have marked themselves, Rutt.’ Droplets, black tears. No, I see the truth of it now. Not tears. The tears havedried up, and will never return. These marks, upon face and hands, arms and neck, shoulders and chest. These marks . ‘Rutt.’
    ‘Badalle?’
    ‘They have claws.’
    A ragged breath fell out from him, left him visibly trembling.
    ‘Try now, Rutt. Your eyes. Try to open them.’
    ‘I – I can’t—’
    ‘Try. You must.’
    The father, along with his mob of clawed children, drew closer. They were wary – she could see that. They did not expect us. They did not come looking for us. They are not here to save us . She could see their suffering