The constant changes in the earth beneath my feet makes me forget about my suffering. Uneven, stony earth, then flat, dusty earth covered with tree roots, followed by earth covered by thatches of thick grass. The different surfaces light fires in my thoughts, but the grass is most pleasing, its prickles scratching my soles pleasantly, easing the turmoil on my feet. We have some grass in Clabby, where the sheep graze, but nowhere does it exist in such dense quantities.

  I think about Cullen. About how our eyes briefly met that day in the Barr Hut, when the Mister announced that I would be going to Chiram. He had dropped his glance quickly, and I looked at his lowered head, hoping he would turn his eyes up at me again. I wanted to send him some meaning with my look. A look that said that I would be back soon with the medicine. A look that assured him that he hadn’t been passed over for a second time.

  There is a moment when I think Honrick is going to kiss me. He wanted to, I could tell, from the way his eyes moved from my lips to my eyes and back again. I wanted him to, just to see what it would be like.

  He explains his Munlore. In a quiet voice, almost a whisper, as if confessing a secret. The story of how the Munlore had created our Earth, and that we were in competition with other Earths and that we should act only to please him, is so silly to me that I laugh. The idea that he had worried that I would somehow abandon my own way of living once I heard about it! I ask him teasing questions as we set up our camp. ‘Have you ever seen the Munlore?’ and ‘Is the Munlore a man or a woman?’ By the time we are bedding down, he is no longer speaking to me.

  The weather changes as we continued. Further up the mountain, the mist had settled on every surface and the sun struggled to find a path through the clouds. The further down we went, the drier grew the earth and greenery. The sweat gathers beneath my garments, and the baking mud falls from my hair in brittle clumps. I consider adding a new handful from the ground, but I know that it would not stick. The loose city earth would not tarnish the pure Clabby earth on my head.

  The earth has been stony and dusty and without life since that morning. Suddenly it changes again, so that it is now completely without feature. Like ashes. It caused my feet no pain, yet I suddenly feel more at risk than I ever had since leaving Clabby. We have many types of earth up in Clabby. Many words to describe it. Clarry, Glar, Mees, Slam, Soup. If it is wet, hard, dry – we have words for it. But this stuff? I can’t describe it.

  I smell the city long before I see it. The smell is smoke, but not like any smoke I know. I raise an arm to my face, keen to only let in the smallest possible.

  I suddenly decide that I need to put on the shoes. Protection – I need it. At once. Whatever about the Magward - this earth is nothing. Dead – completely and utterly. It has never been alive.

  ‘Give me the shoes. Quick!’ I say.

  I am fidgety, now nipping at the neckline of my smock, then knotting my fingers together.

  ‘Really?’ He says. ‘But this earth is so soft. Your feet can’t hurt now.’

  I try to slow my breathing. I feel as if I’m about to drain out.

  ‘Quick, Honrick. Help me put them on.’

  He sees my hurry – it is the first time I have ever addressed him by his name. He removes them sharply from their sack, his eyebrows raised in a big show of not understanding. Then he sinks to his knees in front of me and takes my foot in his hand. My foot leaps backwards in response. No-one has touched my foot since I was a youngster.

  He sighs.

  ‘I’m trying to put your foot in the shoe,’ he says.

  ‘Yes. My feet but. Don’t touch.’ I knew that this is a stupid thing to say even as it is coming out of my mouth.

  ‘Right,’ he says. ‘What if I just hold them open and you put your foot in? Then I’ll tighten it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  Somewhere quiet I hear a voice say wait. I watch him free the binding from the shoes below me. I want to put a hand on the lank hair hanging on his shoulders beneath me, just to steady myself, but I resist. He opens the dark gaping mouths and invites me to put my feet in, toes first. My heart rattles like a loose curtain in a storm.

  As he knots up the threads, my toes twitch in their new homes. It is the first time I have hidden them from the outdoors. A sad heat grows behind my eye.

  I dip my hand into my mala. The foot scrapings are clumpy and dry now but touching them is a comfort as the hill drags us down to the city.

  I feel taller. Straighter-backed.

  ***

  As the city comes into view, my eyes begin to itch and the burning smell covers my face like a blanket. My body tells me to stop, just to sink to the floor and give it a moment to regain itself. It is all I can do to draw air into my chest and keep one leg in front of the other. My weakening apparent, Honrick places a hand on my shoulder.

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  The scale of the place. The buildings. Enormous, stout oblongs. Five, six storeys. Higher.

  ‘The buildings are made from-’ My mouth is so dry I could barely speak. ‘-bricks?’

  ‘Yes, I believe so,’ says Honrick.

  ‘Fired in a kiln?’ I say.

  ‘Yes.’

  You would need hundreds of people to make the bricks alone. And how sturdy - the heaviest rainstorm would not shift them even an inch. The Gaffer would have seen these same buildings before he left the city, all those eras ago.

  ‘Look down the river,’ he says, quietly into my ear. He was still holding my shoulder, enjoying my wonder. ‘See the buildings down there.’

  With effort, I coax my eye to follow the river down into the valley. A clutch of tall, thin constructions loom into view, narrowing as they ascend. Buildings. But for what purpose? The materials are not of earthly creation - no person could have made this. They shine unnaturally, like a river’s surface. When I see that the top of the buildings can be seen behind the dirty clouds, I have to grip Honrick’s elbow to stay on my feet.

  ‘Those are not buildings,’ I say, wheezing. ‘People could build something so high.’

  He stands behind me now, holding me upright under both armpits.

  ‘You’re tired, Erna,’ he says. ‘This is too much for you now. We are close to the lodging. Just one last effort and we can get some rest. You will be fine.’

  I close my eyes and start a count. When I reach one hundred and fifty, I am ready to move again.

  There is burning on every street, in every window. Great barrel fires on every corner into which passers throw their refuse. Honrick explains it to me, his arm still on my shoulder.

  Each building has a tall brick stack as an ornament, burping lively clouds of grey smoke into the atmosphere. The sky is so thick with the stuff that I can look directly at the low evening sun without shielding my eyes. Useless, exhausted soot and dust cover every surface. My two hands are in the mala now. I don’t dare remove them.

  Underfoot, the earth is hard and black. It had died a very long time ago and then had been worked and reworked over and again. An everlasting, restless death. You could come back in a hundred years and it would be in an identical state. The shoes shield me from the horror.

  I count twelve people on the path, walking past smartly, on both sides, their various shoe types making diverse clicks and scrapes on the overworked earth. There is variety in the garments – tightly wound trousers, jackets without sleeves, head coverings. Every colour you can think of. When I ask Honrick why there are so few people, given the number of fires burning, he explains that this is a quiet zone, where people simply live. Most people are off working somewhere.

  ‘Fire works for us,’ he says. ‘We like to have one ready at all times.’

  The lodging, when we finally reach it, is further strangeness. We know what white is in Clabby. We have the word. But no Mudder has ever seen white like this. The floor, the wall, the roof, all blank and empty. Above the empty hearth there hangs a sooty shadow, but the rest of the place is featureless white, like the nothingness you see behind your eyelids.

  Honrick leaves quickly once he has shown me to the door, leaving me instructions on how to proceed. Perhaps he does not want to be seen entering the lodging with me.

  I hesitate before exposing my feet to the cold death of the empty floor. I try to imagine people working on the floor, making it suitable for the size of the room and so on, and the room no longer seems so dead. I bring my face down low to the slabs to try to understand their nature, to see how they were worked. I see dim crescents, gold and yellow, leap out from the blankness. This was a natural formation - that was clear. No person, Mudder or otherwise, could have made such random, faint additions. I remember the words of the recitation, describing the Gaffer’s early years in a labour camp, removing enormous, human-sized hunks of milky rock from a mountain that furnished the homes of prosperity seekers. Is this floor made of bordonite?

  The thought that the Gaffer may have worked with such material is a comfort and I am emboldened to explore the boundaries of the place, my bare feet making pleasant, rebounding thuds as I walk from wall to wall.

  When I find the tap, where Honrick told me I could get more water, I fill my skin to brimming with the curious silvery liquid. I don’t understand where you would find water in such a place, and how it would be carried to this opening, this tap. I dab a testing tongue at the lip of the skin, then take a mouthful. It is water, I think, but totally flavourless. In Clabby, the flavour of water changes with the weather – grassy in springtime, stony in summer, earthy in autumn, and hinchy in winter. This tastes of nothing, as if it has never known the tumbling insides of a river. Still I slurp it back and let it silence my thirst.

  There is a yellow sack in the corner. Full of gardener’s earth, as Honrick had called it. A gift. After seeing a bit of this city, where nothing natural survived, unless under complete Chiramite enslavement, I see that to gift someone earth is a kindness worthy of note.

  I nudge the sack with a foot, then I kneel beside it. After a moment of footering, I manage to pull open the thread at its top, and the bag coughs out a mouthful of earth to the white floor. It is fibrous - little clumps drawn to each other on thin threads of matter. Black. There are little pieces of tree bark shared amongst it. I take a pinch in my hand and rub it between my fingers. It is moist - a surprise in this land of fire.

  I fear that the earth would be unlike any I have known, but I scatter another handful to the ground, and it looks just like the earth at home. The loose clumps are like those found two or three feet below the surface in Clabby, as winter becomes spring. I swallow the last of the water and step my feet into the sharing of earth, my eyes closed.

  I clench my feet and absorb the wet crumbs between my toes, savouring the feel of real earth for the first time in days. I settle into it, like hugging a loved one. Perhaps it would not be so bad here in Chiram, I think, if there is good earth like this to be found. At least there would be some respite from the unresponsive surfaces of the city.

  Then, there is a sudden alarm. A tremendous heat at my feet. A disordering, a chaos. Somewhere, I sense footsteps. Running. Panicked shouting. A smell. Poisonous, choking flames. I try to remove my feet, but I am held there, urgent bells ringing at my knees. I fight. I will my feet to lift themselves. Finally, with a great, heaving effort, I break free. I fall in a heap on the white floor. I sit, noisily snatching gasps into my lungs, sweat sizzling on my brow.

  I test the floor with my hands, looking for hidden depths to the surface. A long moment passes before my breath returns. Where did this earth come from?