The Window
One-hundred-and-twenty-some-odd years after the six-hundred pioneer parents were massacred, Alizard, tasting the blood of the boy whose ear she bit off, re- membered that distant night when she last cried.
It was one year ago, when the finest structures in New Eden were still the modest terra cotta huts of the Named speckling the outer perimeter of the condensed field of tents deep within the Scar where the Stained lived crammed together like pigs. In those days, the Glass Tree was a simple tower of skeletal beams built from the durable metals brought down from heaven. The scaffolding caging the new structure glimmered beneath the red sun as its nails pinned the Earth’s poisoned red flesh. The angels’ gifts had become more frequent that year, each more marvelous than the last. All with such weight and brilliance that the Named struggled to name them, and could only behold them and put them to use as the angels taught them to.
The gift was a window pane. A strong angel gathered the Named to the furnace square, where they witnessed the spectacle. The angel tore open the stomach of the heaven bird and proceeded to drag out the rectangular object, much larger than himself and wrapped in a hide of spotless white. When the object’s corner slid from the bird onto the cobbles, the angel lifted it off the ground. Despite his strength, the angel struggled beneath its weight, and the audience could not bring themselves to help him carry for fear that the unknown object might inflict burns or cause some other ailment or calamity. The Named followed the angel with their eyes as he trailed excitement and fear in his wake until he became satisfied with the distance he’d walked and carefully set the covered object down.
“Under the right circumstances, most things can be made tough,” the angel proclaimed as he wiped sweat from his forehead. “Others must be treated as the frag- ile things they are.” He removed the white hide and the crowd fell into chaos.
The Named had never seen glass. Some ran in fear that the sun reflecting off of it into their eyes might cause them to go blind. Others pleaded with the an- gel to release those trapped within the glass who had been standing opposite them only moments before.
But Thenewt, whose unbridled curiosity coupled with the necessary courage in his position as War- leader, was the first to touch it. He let his hand rest upon the glass for a long while, feeling its cold. It was a relief from the air—heavy as steam. The angel spoke to Thenewt. “See that these are wiped clean of fingerprints.”
Over the months, as more and more windows fell from heaven, they lost their effect of fear and wonder. Soon, miles of windows towered above New Eden, covering the entire surface of the Glass Tree. Many Stained died because of those windows and for every window broken—ten lashes. Often, when the offend- ing Stained was of failing age or carried an empty stomach, the beast would die of heart failure before the tenth lash. The dead beast’s blood would fail to dye the deep red of its fur or the red sand beneath its lifeless paws. Thenewt killed many Stained over broken windows. He kept no tally, for why would any Named tally the Stained he’d killed?
When the red smog settled over the endless red desert beyond the curtain and the copper tones sunk low to the horizon, Thenewt led the war dancing. The leather tails of the warriors whirled to the drumming of red clay pots turned upside down and beaten with red stones and reddened bone. All lit by the roaring red glow of the furnace.
On the eve of his generation’s thirty-sixth birthday, the eve of their Breed Day, Thenewt believed himself destined to never sire as he had still found no match.
At the fringe of the dance, he saw a huddle of men, shoulder-to-shoulder, shouting. He thought a fight had broken out. He pushed through the crowd and laid eyes on Arat. She was seated on a merchant’s stall of pig skulls where one of the men had picked her up and set her. Thenewt knew at once the importance of her family by her undyed dress and platinum hair— the hair and dress of the candle family.
A lithe man strutted the length of the circle on his elbows before somersaulting to land with his hand out- stretched to Arat. Because of where she sat, the man’s hand appeared to beckon her navel. A second man pushed the lithe man off balance, and the lithe man somersaulted again, though against his will. The sec- ond man was a perfumer and carried three small bottles on the shelf of his belly. He removed the lid of one and misted the air around Arat, and she closed her eyes and settled into the cloud of a small daydream. The man spritzed a second bottle, and the huddle broke into laughter as Arat gagged and coughed and fanned it from her face with her hand beaded with red stones. The perfumer sank back into the huddle.
“Why are you cruel to my father’s men?” Thenewt spoke as he cut in front of a man carrying a well-bred piglet atop his head.
“Have you come for my bones?” she asked, mo- tioning to the dangling pig femurs framing her like a beaded curtain.
“These are not yours to sell. Get down, or I’ll take you.”
“And take me where?” The crowd of men listened intently to the young candle speak. Some squinted as though her words might illuminate from her belly where the purity of angelic light was known to reside.
“To the top of the curtain, where I’ll drop you into the Wastes.”
Arat hopped off the counter and stood before The- newt. She stood only to his breast. She looked up at him, hands upon her waist. “Why climb the curtain when you could toss me from here?” She took his hand and led him through the crowd of defeated men.
They danced through the night while the rest of the Named slept in their drunkenness, and then they ate the special red potatoes grown to celebrate Breed Day. The rising sun bled its red morning light across the city.
Arat dared Thenewt to climb the First Tree. He refused. She scoffed and ran barefoot up the sloping metal base as far as she could until she slid back down the warm surface to the red sand where Thenewt sat upon crossed legs. “You’ve stained your dress,” he said.
“No matter,” she said. She stood, undid its clasps, and let it fall. Thenewt looked away, as red as the ground where her dress lay. “Look up,” she said.
“I cannot,” he said, “for we are not bound.”
She climbed onto his lap. “The sun rises on our Breed Day and, as the next Candle, what I say is so, and I say we are bound, so allow me to bind you.”
He was silent as he fought to unfeel. “I will,” he said. He looked up at her.
Her mouth dropped. “Your eyes... Did you know they’re green?”
He shook his head. “I knew not. What am I to do with such knowing?”
“Oh. I see.”
She took him beneath the First Tree for all of Breed Day until the last permissible moment before the sun rose upon the following day and the angels would forbid them from touching the rest of their lives. They kissed one last time, knowing they would have to wait until they met in the long after beyond the Pink Sea before they could kiss again. They prayed. Thenewt unfurled the leather of his tail—the metal serpent gauntlet that adorned his forearm. He took Arat’s hand in his and wrapped the leather tail tightly around them until both of their hands turned red from the constriction and lost all feeling—just as the angels taught them to do. He flexed his arm, and more blood constricted from their hands. He could not look her in the eye. “I am full of shame,” he said. “I have sinned and not memorized the scripture. The words of the angels escape me.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Arat said. “All my life I’ve studied nothing else.” She led them in the prayer of fertility, and Thenewt repeated each line she spoke:
“Angels above and beside.
Grant us your wisdom, love, and governance.
As we relinquish ambition.
We pray you light our way through this day.
Keep the toxic blood at bay.
Let this act, in rhythm with the heartbeat of our
ancestors, bring a Named to lift you. We two are bound to each other. We two are bound to you.
We two are bound.
We are bound.”
Nine months after, they met again at the ceremony where the angels bestowed a name upon the fruit har- vested from Breed Day. As Arat rested from the ordeal, Thenewt could hardly unfeel as he first held Alizard, so small and so red.
Though it was customary for Named children to reside with their father in the Father District, newborns were to stay with their mother in the Mother District until the age of five—the age when they could train or carry work. Alizard’s birth, however, coincided with the month that Arat was to lead her first pilgrimage to the Pink Sea under the guidance of the Candle—her mother. This left Thenewt to raise Alizard during the girl’s first weeks of life. Alizard was the first and only baby cared for by a Named man.
Thenewt held her atop the curtain and watched Arat and Candle lead the procession of the second gen- eration, all the age of seventy-two, from the curtain’s gate out into the Red Wastes. The rear of the procession was brought up by two dozen angels carrying shepherd staves to protect the flock through the dangerous Wastes on the journey to the sea. The Named were fascinated by the angels, as there were rarely more than a handful on Earth at any time, and even then, they kept to the plateau of trees. Thenewt could not help but stare into the light reflecting off the angels’ luminous skin. Their brightness burned his retinas to purple, but he knew not that there existed a word for such a color nor a word for a mere piece of the eye.
Thenewt watched the procession until they could no longer be seen in the distance through the heat mirage. He took Alizard back to the clay slums of the Father District. He held her in his palms. He prayed to the angels that he would not accidentally break her as she nursed on pig milk from a severed udder. The only fatherhood he had known was his own, and as was the way of the Warleader family, he instilled strength. Each day, he lay Alizard on the clay floor of his modest hut, walked ten steps away, and stood and watched as she writhed in her pig-skin blanket. He unfelt the urge to gather her as she screamed and cried and soiled herself. She would overheat in her blanket only to kick it off and cry from the cold. Only after the passing of hours, when she stopped crying on her own, would he pick her up and care for her. “Unfeel, Aliz.”
New Eden was near to chaos, and Thenewt near to heartbreak, for Arat had not returned for many weeks longer than the pilgrimage was intended to take. At long last, Thenewt watched as the curtain’s reflective white gates opened to her standing alone in the sands of the Wastes beyond. To his surprise, Arat was not at all saddened by her mother and the rest of the second generation’s crossing into the long after. She seemed to be in a state of peace. He attributed her euphoric mood to the weeks of starvation on her lonesome journey back from the Pink Sea.
She walked past the chained Stained beast present- ing her with a basket of gizzards and potatoes and instead took Alizard from Thenewt’s arms and admired her daughter. She turned to Thenewt. “How strong was she?”
“Endlessly, Candle.” He unfelt the strangeness of her new name. Though he knew it was the same woman, and that only the name Arat had died with the crossing of her mother into the long after, he sensed even then that she was no longer who she had been.
“Where are the angels?” a guard asked.
“They gave themselves protecting me,” Candle said. “The Godmonster gorges on their light.” She carried Alizard toward the Mother District, leaving the men to stir in the shadow of her words.
