The girl and the wall

I was on my own. Everyone tells this from their side, where there were five of them and a hill and a thousand years of quiet. On my side there was me. A young girl, alone, at the edge of all that silence, giving off so much love and affection that a snake which had watched a war from the rafters without blinking went still.

That's like being told you snore.

They couldn't say no to me. None of them. The blind one said they took me in the way you'd take in weather, which is wrong. You don't take weather in. It comes in. You stop pretending the door was shut.

Then they found out what I was.

I'm not going to tell you. It's mine. What happened next is that the five of them, with the other elders, the ones from the far side who'd come to the pact late and still talked like guests, built a wall around me.

A protective one. They were clear about the word. Not to keep me in. To keep me safe.

"Those are the same shape from where you're standing," I said.

"They're the opposite shape from where you are," said the blind one. "I know."

He's the only one who said that. Whether I forgave the rest the difference, I'm still deciding.

···

Here's what a wall is like from inside. It has seams.

Where it meets the ground it isn't quite closed. And after a while things came through the seams. Small ones, at the edges. Spirits, the old ones called them when they came to look; I'd watched them gather at the joins for a month, like dust at a skirting board. The first sign of something on its way. I said so. The elders read it as weather. That's the mistake you make after a thousand years of quiet: you think everything is weather.

Then the water went.

Slowly, first. A stream past the north side, and then no stream. Then the wells. Then the rivers. Then the rain.

The five met on their hillside and did the only thing they could think of. They bought time.

They froze the world.

I felt it. Everything held mid-step, the way you stop a clock to work on it, and the five went to find an answer where the clock wasn't running.

"Where?" I said, through the wall.

"Another reality," he said, the way you'd say the next village.

···

They had a visitor by then. I only heard her. She'd come through the wall from the wrong side, and stayed, and she knew the enemy, because she'd come from where it was. With her help they learned its technology: what it did, how it reached, where it was blind. Old people learning sound like furniture being moved.

And they built a second wall, a mightier one, outside the first. It was meant to give them, finally, rest.

It didn't. Nothing does. But it held long enough for the blind one to calm things down at home, and then he came and sat with his back against my wall, and I sat against it on my side, and the snake came through the seam and lay between us, which only a snake can do.

"I'm going," he said.

"Where?"

"To stand in front of it."

The snake had been telling him to for a thousand years, he said. It wasn't enough to be safe at home. Wherever they hid, it would never end. Not on its own. A thing that comes for your water comes for your walls next, then for whatever you built the walls around, and the only way to stop it is to go where it lives and find out what it is.

"You're very old," I said.

"Older than my uncle ever got."

"What if it's worse than you think?"

"Then I'll find that out, and think something else."

He got up, which took a while. The snake went back through the seam onto his shoulders, and I heard him walk with his hand out in front of him. He'd done that at ten, he told me once, in a field.

"Old man," I said. "It's a wall. You know where it is."

"It's not for the wall," he said, and went.