Episode 035| The Echo Under the Ice

[Fragment · Source Unmarked]

No timestamp, and no coordinates. Even the light is wrong — it does not come from above; it bleeds up out of the ice, blue as a fire about to go out, hugging the horizon, neither bright nor dying.

Only ice. The ice runs out to where the eye can no longer follow, flat as though someone had pressed an iron over the whole land, then scraped everything that had ever happened clean off its surface.

---

A woman kneels on the ice.

Her belly is large. One hand braces against the ice, the other presses to her belly, as if afraid the thing inside might fall out. She kneels with great effort, but she does not fall. Behind her is a row of bent backs.

The backs bend in a neat line, one after another, ranged out toward the far end of the ice plain, no end in sight. They do not move, do not draw breath, not one of them lifts its head. The wind passes between them and stirs up not a flake of snow — they have stood there too long, long enough that even the wind has learned them, and goes around. The ice has half-buried them, yet they hold that bent posture still, like men who have knelt so long they have forgotten why they first knelt.

These, once, stood. Once they had names, had belonging, had a reason to win a war. That war was fought a long time — long enough that the men fighting it could no longer remember why it began, only that it could not stop. In the end, the war was decided. But the winners did not stand, and the losers did not lie down. Everyone, and the reason along with them, bent their backs together and knelt down into the ice.

The woman does not turn to look at them. She has seen enough. She too is a part of this war — to put it exactly, she is where this war began.

She lowers her head and looks at her belly.

---

The empty hand lifts from the ice.

She begins to draw a mark on the ice.

Not carve — she has no blade. With her fingertip, stroke by stroke, she presses a trace into the ice. She draws the mark very slowly, each line as if wrestling against something. Halfway through she stops, and stares at the half-drawn mark.

The direction is wrong.

She knows the direction is wrong. She means it to be. A mark drawn the right way round, anyone can read; a mark turned half a turn, its direction reversed, only the one who knows how to turn it back can read. What she wants is for no one to be able to read it. No one — except one. Long, long after, the one who will lay his left arm against it, and let it align.

She finishes the mark. Her fingertip has lost all feeling.

---

Next comes the sound.

She opens her mouth and speaks a single sound.

The sound is very short, and belongs to no tongue still spoken by anyone. It is not a name — a name is made to be called, and what is called will be found. What she speaks is the opposite of a name: a sound that, once uttered, keeps you from being called, and from being found. No one goes digging through the ice for a person who has been forgotten.

She speaks this sound into her belly.

The second time she speaks it, the thing inside her belly stirs, once. Very faint. As if it had heard.

Her eyes go wet for a moment, but nothing falls — it is too cold here; the tears freeze on her lashes.

"Don't be afraid," she says. Her voice is very low, only enough for that one listener to hear. "It's me they're looking for. Not you."

The belly stirs again.

"When they find me, it will go very quiet here," she says. "Quiet enough that no one remembers anyone was ever here. Even I will be forgotten — that is a good thing. If I am forgotten, they cannot follow me and find you."

---

She unfastens her outer garment, bares her belly entirely, and lays it to the ice.

The cold makes her whole body shudder. But she holds it there, and does not let herself draw back. She wants that mark, that sound, to go along her skin, her blood, into the unborn thing inside.

In her heart, she says one last thing to it.

I will hide you.
Hide you until all of them are dead, until even this war is forgotten.
Hide you until even you yourself no longer remember who you are.

She knows this is cruel. To let someone live, yet forbid him to know who he is — that is harder to bear than death. She has lived long enough, long enough to have seen too many ways of dying, and long enough to understand this: some things, hidden on a dead body, will be dug up; hidden on a living one, will be spoken aloud by that one himself. Only hidden on a person who does not even know that he is hiding something can a thing truly be kept hidden. The price is to make that child walk a thousand years, two thousand, alone, slowly, through a dark where he does not know who he is.

But a child who is dead cannot be hidden.

A child who lives, yet has no name — that one can be hidden.

---

She presses that mark turned half a turn into her belly one last time.

The ice begins to climb.

From the knees she kneels on, inch by inch, it draws her in. She does not struggle. The row of bent backs behind her sinks one by one into the ice as well, as if to a place they were always meant to return to.

When the ice climbs to her chest, she is still speaking that sound.

At the last, the sound breaks off half-finished — not that she did not wish to finish it, but that the ice has sealed her throat. Half a sound lodges in the ice, and scatters out in every direction, thinner and thinner as it goes, like ring upon ring of an echo that can find no shore.

---

Long, long after, that half a sound will leap in another person's temple.

That person will hear it, will want to hear it clearly, will give up from the pain. He will not know whose voice it is. He will not know that the sound the woman spoke, in the half-second before the ice sealed her throat, was him.

He will remember only this: beneath the ice, a row of bent backs, a mark turned half a turn with its direction wrong, a sound spoken in a woman's voice that he cannot read.

The ice closes completely.

The ice plain goes still. So still it is as though no one was ever here.

【Ch. 035 End · Fragment · Source Unmarked】