The Vorrh

at its centre: it is numbered ‘1’. I am using this ragged thing to gain some alignment to the new country, which is, of course, just another blank on the map. But there is a tiny arrow in the lower corner, which suggests direction of some sort.
    There is nothing to lose; all ways are good. I turn the fluttering paper, marking the distant features of landscape that align with the arrow.
    Without warning, the paper gives up the ghost and shreds into the wind. My last sight of it, just before it disappears and is blown from my hands into the dark mass, makes me think that it might not be a map at all. It flashes before the sun and its afterimage burns in my eyes. Its negative reveals a crude, mocking face, the countenance of one startled eye, a morbid grotesque, gawping at me. Its features are scarred; its mouth has fallen open. It glares in cartooned astonishment. I blink and it begins to fade; my lids wipe it away as the paper is blown into nothing, tattered and dissolved by the gusting air and the damp earth.
    Now I know: it is time to leave this place of amnesia and illusion forever.
    * * *

    She clasped her hands across her belly, feeling the movement beneath; the blunt nudges and kicks, the stretching and the turns. It was difficult to walk now; there were long periods of the day when she could only rest.
    Abungu was greatly swollen with the child. It had grown much in the recent months; her pregnancy could no longer be hidden. She still had far to go, so she made an asking charm, one enmeshed with all her will and love. She asked the child to be patient, to hold on and snuggle back inside her; to sleep longer, curl deeper and grow slower until they were home.
    So impassioned was her asking, and so powerful was the child’s response, that its age would be held back throughout its life. Her own people would always understand this as a blessing, a sign of the power and uniqueness of the child.
    The journey had taken over a year. During that time, she had started to speak: not out loud, and not in the ugly tongue of the whites who had owned her parents and so abused her, but in the language of her mother and father, the singsong words they had whispered together in that cold, filthy land. The words came through the child who nestled inside, rising up through the shared blood that looped between their brains and hearts. She spoke every day, until she was unsure who had instigated the asking charm; had it come from her or the little one? Not all things were known to her. There was a confusion about it, a fog, as there was about the old, white shaman who had put rightness in her eyes, he whom she had harvested.
    The rightness guided her; such doubts and forgettings were discarded, unimportant. It led her home; the child and the time were growing. But when she reached the great forest, the time was heavy and could wait no longer. To be born here was unknown – the meaning and force of the Vorrh was beyond the understanding of all people. But this birthing was ordained; the trees were waiting, and something was waiting in them.
    In the depth of the forest, on her way to the True People, her daughter was born. Wondrous omens heralded the event: snow fell through the tropical night; violet seas were seen to shimmer in the twilight of the far western shores; luminous insects clustered into balls and floated above the villages. Some said the Erstwhile awoke and brought the pair out of the Vorrh, into the human lands of the True People. Others said that the infant belonged to the Erstwhile and had been sired by one of them, as in the olden days.
    The only known truth was that the dying Abungu and the sacred Irrinipeste were found on the edge of the village, by an old warrior on the night after the day of the feast, when the sun was eaten by the moon and reborn in crescent fragments under the black sea. The mother was recognised as one of the tribe by the scarification her parents had inscribed by dismal candlelight, in the slums that clung to the mud banks of the River Thames, far beyond London’s city walls. Before she died, she gave a crown of gold and mirrors, encrusted in mud, for the safekeeping of her daughter, along with a picture of a shield, which bore the same sun fragment as those beneath the waves. The dawn of the next day took her, and the child received the light that lingered in her dead eyes for hours.
    * * *

    His pink, scrubbed hands were in her bed. She felt them parting her legs. She turned slightly.