Unrenaissance

Pick your way through the ashes of a city, like a fly in an ashtray looking for the lump of pork that shouldn’t be there. You move with purpose, in a straight line over the rubble, your feet finding their toeholds instinctively, as nimbly as your ancestors did in the forest, which rings the city on all sides, as if waiting patiently for the collapse.

There’s a woman in the patch that used to be a building; she lifts her eyes and they narrow; her ears go back and her tail bristles. Proud, she rights herself from pawing at the garbage. She resents your presence because it makes her feel like a beggar. She ranks you; you salute. Times were she would have done likewise, but the discipline of the nation has eroded with its own stature. The end is near.

There aren’t even shellings anymore. The enemy — enemies — are enfeebled, and another long, general lapse is commencing. There were hints of this in history class. Civilization has risen and fallen here myriad times and left not a trace. The only things remembered are blood and semen. You carry both. You are the thread of memory; your body is a word in a sentence. The only question is if there is a period after yours.

And this is the question that haunts your mother, above all. She sits in the darkness, nursing a cub that is not your father’s, for he is long dead. Or practically so, at any rate. Once the home abounded with offspring; as the Party decreed. Gone for soldiers, every one, your brothers; your sisters pulled one by one from the streets to sheltered breeding camps. As if the nation could hold its breath for fifteen years for the next crop of soldiers. As you enter with the small cache of food under your jacket, she smiles, cups your face in her paw. “If they come for you,” she tells you again, “take off all your clothes. Run to the forest. Don’t look back. Don’t come back.” It is deadly treason for her to say this. You can tell she wants you to do that now, but hasn’t the courage to lose the last of her company. And she needs you.

The web-shattered mirror in the hall regards you with a dozen clones. You, like everyone else, wear the uniform of your nation, the pale grey canvas jacket and trousers, your junior-level insignia faded and torn now. There are no civilians. Your nose and eyes glisten in the gloom; in another world, in another time, you might be said to resemble an Arctic fox, or a white wolf. Here, you resemble what you are: a defeated member of a dying society surrounded by dying enemies.

The forest beckons.

With the sunset comes the full blackness. Animals — both sentient and not — prowl the streets; full-capable-murder.

You sit up in bed. There is light on your wall.

An army. An army is in the city. Whose? At this point, it doesn’t matter. Friend, foe alike; it’s danger. You haul on your uniform and make for the door.

Your mother is there, the scent of fear thick on her like a bath of molasses. The baby squawks. She clutches your shoulder. “Remember,” is all she says.

Remember what?

Silently you pad down the crumbled stairwell and ease your nose out into the street. Keeping low, you creep from ruin to ruin, drawing nearer, reading the indications. Search lights. Distant cries. Lamentations. A gunshot; your ears fold. Evidence is it’s a round-up; the army looking for the last few bodies to throw at the enemy. Or to make more bodies to throw at the enemy. Your heart ices as you think of your mother. You rise to warn her.

“You! Stop!”

You don’t. You hear the bullets fly before the concussions that loosed them. Panicked, you turn corner after corner. You hear feet scrambling over brick; they will not stop. This is the last sweep. They mean to have it all.

Panting in the moonlight, in an alleyway poised at the edge of the forest, her admonishment comes back to you. Remember. Remember her? Or remember her advice?

Or both?

You peer at the forest.

You peer at the dark shape that is home.

Was home.

Your uniform is shed; you blaze in the moonlight like a falling star as you streak towards the nothingness of the wilds. There are tears in your eyes. You will never see her again. But you will know, even if she never will, that you carried forward the thread. Or tried.

The branches are cruel; the trees and brambles close in around you. But after a lifetime of pavement and then broken masonry, the clay underfoot is strangely friendly and oddly familiar somehow. Raspberries feed you; muddy streams quench your thrist.

There are scents in the air. The odd sound. People.

Timidly you seek them out.

In a clearing below you, you see them. Several dozen people, a longhouse, fields. Huts.

“Alright, turn around.”

You look into the faces of two men, clad only in archery. One touches the point of an arrow to your chin. “Please,” you beg. “My mother told me to run to the woods.”

One of them nods to the other, and takes you by the upper arm. “Come on,” he says.

Down through the forest he leads you. Your frantic questions and assurances of peace are met with mutterings, non-committal, but not unfriendly. He leads you into the village. People stop, eyes following the newcomer and his guard. Like you, they are naked. There is not a uniform in sight. Not a vehicle, not an engine, no hint of electricity, civilization, or war. No hint of rank.

In the dark longhouse sit three elderly women, cross-legged, laughing, repairing fishing nets. “I found him in the hills; he says he’s from the city,” your guard tells them.

The one in the middle has a strange, foreign accent. She says, “What is your name, boy?”

You tell her.

She smiles. “Serinka and Naross are just getting started here. They lost their eldest to the army. I’m sure they could use some help. And I think you could use a home. Why not see how it goes.”

This is the decision. It’s offered softly, a suggestion, not the sort of steel and iron command to which you’re accustomed. Still, you snap to: “Yes, ma’am.”

“My name is Heressa, child.”

And the guard leads you, free now, out into the sunlight, and across the compound. Again to the edge of the woods, now guarding rather than skulking. A man and a woman work a field, helped by a couple of cubs. The guard brings you up, and introductions are made. There are smiles, tails wag; it seems sincere.

“We sure could use some help,” Naross agrees. The guard eases away, back into the forest to patrol, leaving you with… your new family.

“Come take the hoe, son,” Naross says.

All around you, cities die. One by one, they flicker out in the night like failing stars. But out here, where the night is filled with real stars, sleep is deep.