Gehn’s bootprints lay heavy around the tiny pool, the lush, well-tended green churned to mud. At one end of the garden, beneath a narrow out-crop, he had dug a shallow grave. Now, as the dawn’s light slowly crept over the sands to touch the cleftwall twenty feet above, he covered over the young girl’s body, his pale cream desert clothes smeared with her blood and with the dark earth of the cleft.

From the steps above Anna watched, exhausted after the long night. She had done what she could, but the girl had clearly been ill for some months and the exertions of childbirth had eaten up what little strength remained to her. She had died with a sigh of relief.

Even now, in the silence of the dawn, she could hear Gehn’s howls of anguish, his hurt and angry ranting; could hear the words of blame which, at the time, had washed over her. It was her fault. Everything was her fault.

So it was. So it had always been.

He turned, finished, and looked up at her, no love in that cold, penetrating gaze. Nineteen he was. Just nineteen.

“Will you stay?” she asked wearily.

His answer was a terse shake of the head. Almost belligerently, he stomped across the surface of the garden, churning up yet more of her precious growing space, oblivious, it seemed, to the significance of what he did. She watched him crouch beside the pool, unable in her heart to be angry with him—for all he’d done and said. No, for she knew what he must be feeling. She knew herself how that felt—to lose the focus of one’s life, the meaning …

She looked down at her unwashed hands and slowly shook her head. Why come when there was nothing she could do to help?

But she knew the answer. He had come only because there was no one else to turn to. He had not wanted to come, but desperation had shaped his course. Knowing his wife was ill, he had remembered his mother’s healing powers. But he had come too late.

Too late for her, anyway.

Anna raised her head, hearing the baby’s cries. Stretching, she stood, then went down the narrow steps, ducking beneath the stone lintel into the interior. The baby was in the small inner chamber. She crossed the room and ducked inside as its cries grew louder.

She stood over it a moment, staring down at its pale blue eyes, then picked it up, cradling it against her.

“You poor thing,” she whispered, kissing its neck, feeling it relax against her. “You poor, poor thing.”

She went out and stood against the rail, watching as Gehn crouched by the pool, washing. She saw how the pool was muddied, its precious liquid sullied. Again there was a carelessness about his actions that angered her. He was thoughtless. Gehn had always been thoughtless. But she held her tongue, knowing that it was not the moment to mention such things.

“You want me to dress the child for the journey?”

Gehn did not answer, and for a moment she thought that maybe he had not heard, but when she went to speak again, he turned and glared at her.

“Keep it. Bury it with its mother, if you must. But don’t bother me with it. You saved it, you look after it.”

She bristled, then held the child out, over the gap.

“This is your son, Gehn. Your son! You gave him life. You are responsible for him. That is the way of things in this world.”

Gehn turned away.

She drew the child back. As she did, it began to cry again. Below her, Gehn stamped across the churned ground and quickly climbed the steps, pushing past her roughly to go inside. A moment later he was back, his glasses perched on his head. Anna stared at him, noting that he had discarded his cloak.

“Your cloak, Gehn…You’ll need your cloak out there.”

He turned from her, looking out toward the lip of the volcano, just visible from where they stood. “Keep it,” he said, his eyes moving fleetingly across her face. “I’ll not need it anymore!”

His words frightened her, made her fear for his sanity after all that had happened. She stared at the child in her arms, not knowing at that moment what was best. Even so, she was determined he would hold the child once before he went.

She made to give the child to Gehn, but he rushed past her and stepped out onto the rope bridge. In a moment he was gone.

“But you didn’t name him,” she said quietly, holding the baby tight against her. “You didn’t even name him…”

§

Within the great volcano’s shadow, the desert floor was fractured. There, in a crack some eighty feet by fifteen, the darkness was intense. The casual eye might, indeed, have passed on, thinking it no more than a natural feature, but for the strange lip—a wall of stone some five or six feet high—that surrounded it.

For a moment all was still, and then a tall, cloakless figure climbed up onto the lip of the cleftwall, stepping out into the dawn light.

All was silence; a silence as only such desert places possess. In the cool of the desert dawn, a mist rose from the warm heart of the volcano, wreathing it in a faint, mysterious veil. Anna watched as the tall cloakless figure climbed the volcano’s slope, the mist swirling about him, concealing then revealing him again. The heavy lenses he wore gave his head a strange, yet distinctive shape. For a moment he stood there, his head turned, looking back at the dark gash of the cleft a mile below him, his tall, imperious shape backlit by the sun that bled through the shifting layers of haze. Then, with a dreamlike slowness, like a specter stepping out into nothingness, he turned and vanished.

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