The Rain Heron by Robbie Arnott

Author:Robbie Arnott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2020-04-19T16:00:00+00:00

36

IN THE YEARS that followed Zoe tried hard to forget the northerner. But he kept appearing to her: his torn face, the bloody thrash of his arm. She tried to push these images away, but they wouldn’t leave. Instead, she forgot little pieces of her aunt. She remembered what she had looked like, but not, except for her waterproof harvesting outfit, the sort of clothes she used to wear. She knew the patterns of her aunt’s speech, the lilt, the sarcasm, the rhythms, but forgot the words themselves. And her laughter—Zoe knew that the laughter had been there, inexplicable and constant, but what had it really sounded like? Rich and throaty? High and wheezy? A year after leaving the port, Zoe wasn’t sure if her aunt had laughed loudly or quietly, and after three years the laugh rang false and harsh in her head, a memory she couldn’t trust.

As her aunt dripped away, memory by memory, laugh by laugh, the northerner took up residency in the corners of her thoughts, and would not leave. Perhaps it was because she kept a piece of him with her. When she had returned to the dock, she found something in the boat that she’d forgotten about—the northerner’s pistol. Without thinking, she put it in her pocket. It was one of the two things she took when she left the port. The other was a single jar of ink, grabbed from her aunt’s table before she followed everyone else heading north.

There she stumbled into the clutches of a military poised to take control of a failing nation. She joined the army, although she wasn’t given much choice, and the northerner’s pistol made the shift to her hip. That was where it stayed, even when better firearms were made available to her. She didn’t try to understand the compulsion. She just kept it, and did not think about why. But while she held it, learned to clean it, care for it, became an expert in its use, she never fired it. Through protests and insurrections it hung idly at her waist, as the various other skills she acquired came to the fore: strategy, intimidation, subterfuge.

Zoe was a phenomenal soldier, a cold revelation in camouflage. She was promoted, again and again, and her life ripped by in a blur of ordered fear, without her ever having to squeeze the pistol’s trigger. First she was a private, then a corporal. By the time she was twenty-two she was a sergeant. As she rose through the ranks, as the coup she became part of surged to success, she barely ever pulled the gun from its holster, and never fired it: not until she became a lieutenant, and was sent to a distant mountain in search of a myth.

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