Post by Shade on Jul 8, 2011 15:58:59 GMT -8
She digs under the bulging half-moon, a blur of clotted crimson and camo in the night forest. The clothing lies beside her, white and blue and empty. Beautiful. White as bone on the mast of the forest floor, perfect as a corpse. She is weeping; weeping as the sweat gathers under her arms, stains her back, her sides, her chest, her hunched shoulders, slicing through the soap and light perfume. Clean again. Real again. Dirt under her nails. Good, strong earth.
She wobbles, wavers, almost falls; but she snarls in rage and agony and plants herself on the soil, digs her small bare feet into the good earth and stands firm while her muscles strain and knot against inevitability. Never. Never. Her movements are savage now, killing blows, hatred and anguish expending themselves on the yielding earth. The good, strong, yielding earth. Rat's earth. Her earth. Mother, forgive me.
Somewhere, there is a woman who is always beautiful and always sure, who shines like a lantern in a dark and dreadful world. Somewhere, that woman is dancing with her children, making love to her husband, standing proud with her father at her left hand and uncle at her right. Somewhere, there is a woman who made the world safe. But not here.
Not here.
Here there is a woman with bloodied hands and dirt under her nails, sobbing and digging in the silence of the forest, in the half-light of the choosing moon. Here there is snot running down her face, great heaving embarrassing hiccuping sobs, agonized cub-mewlings high-pitched and twisting. Here there is a pile of white and blue clothing lying like a corpse on the good, strong earth, and a woman in clotted crimson and camo, digging.
Here the blue and white clothing (spotless and beautiful and lying) falls lightly into the ditch, crumples accusingly at the bottom. Here there is a song playing in her head, a love song that the woman and her children and her husband dance to in a room full of endless summer, full of perfect light. Here there is the ragged breath tearing from her lungs as she leans against the shovel and tilts her face to the merciless stars.
Here. Now.
Here there is the lighter in her hands and the mute accusation of the beautiful perfect corpse-clothing in the ditch and she knows she is a murderer, again. Here is her gloved hand, dirt under the nails, and the lighter that gleams faintly in the heat of the stars. Here are her fingers fumbling, stumbling, once twice thrice and the snap-burn of light piercing the night forest. Here is her hand, shaking. Here she is hesitating, one last time, because the dream was so beautiful, so right, so sure.
Such a lie.
The flame catches, surges, leaps, and the clothing crumbles and curls in on itself. Dye pools and runs. She's bleeding, that other woman, burning from the center out; her heart catches fire, then her limbs, then her children and her husband and the castle and all she's built, destroyed in fire. In fear. In shame. She's weeping, that other woman, weeping in the ashes and the cracked, dry stone.
But the real one – the real one, solid and aching with dirt under her nails – she is choosing. She is choosing fear, she is choosing uncertainty, she is choosing doubt and failure and disappointment and all the awful real things of a world that never was perfect. She is taking her love and her ache and her yearning and laying it on the altar, letting it burn. She is choosing freedom, hard and raw and searing. She is choosing – choice, and responsibility for those choices, the terror of freedom and it is selfish and glorious and dreadful, that freedom, that knowledge, that choice.
“This I choose to do,” she whispers into the crackling fire, terribly alone. “If there is a price, I choose to pay it. If the price is my death, then I choose to die.” Her eyes never leave the bleeding clothing, the leaping flames, and she sees the woman and her children and her beautiful sunlit world dancing farther and farther away. “Where this takes me, there I choose to go. This I choose to do.”
Here and now. And she was so beautiful, the other woman, so beautiful and calm and sure and right, but she was a lie. So she does not choose the lie. She chooses the truth, and the truth burns, the truth kills, the truth is so much more dreadful than that beautiful, beautiful lie. Because she is Rat's galliard, and her task is to face the black stinking heart of the world and never flinch, to look it in the eye and dare it to make her turn away. She is Rat's daughter. She is the gibbous moon. And finally – finally – she begins to grasp the whole of what that means.
She gazes into the leaping flames as the sparks dance out into the dark and fade on her gloves, in her hair, on her clotted crimson coat. She aches. She grieves. And she chooses; for herself, for the world, dooming it or saving it, for better or for worse, she makes her choice. And if her choice kills them all – oh mother, forgive me – but she cannot choose otherwise, and perhaps they might have pinned their hopes on someone stronger, but they didn't and it comes to her and she is choosing, as is her right, her duty, here and now as the fire dances up and up to the truthful half-moon and the silent stars bear witness.
Forgive me. Forgive me. Oh mother, uncle, Falcon, forgive me.
But never.
Never, never, never.
