White and Other Tales of Ruin

“Faith is as personal and as private as a thing can be,” Della once told me. “If you understand someone’s faith, you know their soul. But most people aren’t very comfortable with the idea of personal faith. Sometimes, it’s just too much effort, too challenging. They have to ascribe to some pre-ordained vision of things, where there are books and preachers and teachers to lead them through the minefield of knowledge. Prophesies tell them what they need to know, words written millennia ago by some holy-man drunk on monastery wine and eager to bury his cock in the young girl from the local village. Then they wonder why their faith lets them down so much, and causes so many wars and death and hatred. Simple reason — it’s not their faith. It’s a ready-made idea of faith. De-humanised. Just add belief.”

It was a hot summer’s day, only a couple of years before the Ruin really took hold and threw people back two hundred years into anarchy and poverty. Della sat in a garden chair, reaching over every now and then to snatch a sweet from the table next to her. I was lying on the lawn, mindful of insects and ants, feeling the sun cook my exposed scalp but not really caring. The sunburn would be a brand of the day, a reminder of what Della was telling me. She was a wise woman, and I knew nothing. I loved her.

“You have faith? “ she asked. The question surprised me, but I felt I recovered well.

“Of course.”

“Good.” She said no more. I was afraid that she would ask me where my faith was set. She’d know if I lied, she’d read me like a large-print book held under a magnifying glass. Because in truth, my faith was based solely in her. I wondered whether she really ever knew that.

“You may need it one day.”

She did not look at me. She stared into the eye-blue sky, a strange smile on her face. A smile I did not like. She carefully took another sweet from the table without looking at what she was doing. She could just as easily have snatched up a bug.

“Why?” I said, finally.

She glanced down at me, then nodded up at the sky as if the fluffy white clouds could explain everything. “Bad days coming.”

Fuck, was she right.

II

Jade leads me through the warren of alleys and side streets until we emerge onto a main thoroughfare. The rucksack already feels heavy against my shoulders, pressing against my back and slipping my shirt back and forth across damp skin. The cream I had applied is already redundant, and I feel as though my skull is growing ready to split the skin from my head. There’s no real protection any more other than staying out of the sun altogether, and skin cancer is the least of my concerns.

The streets are surprisingly quiet, and the few people there are seem to be milling aimlessly rather than actually going places. I see several people who are obviously not Greek. None of them appear sane. They scrabble in the dust for dog-ends, fighting over a few flakes of rough tobacco. Growths have turned their bodies into grotesque parodies of people, walking warts that gibber and leak from various orifices, both natural and disease-given. I catch up with Jade and walk by her side, her presence giving me a comfortable sense of safety. She’s seen all this before, she knows what to expect; she can handle herself.

I wonder whether these people came to be cured.

“They’re all wasters,” Jade says in answer to my thoughts. The expression reminds me of the uniformed man who had helped me from the boat, the way he had spoken of the piled corpses. “Some of them were given the opportunity, apparently, but they wasted it. Now, they’re down to this. They even worship the Lord Ships.” She seemed to have slipped into her own personal conversation, excluding me even before I replied. “Strange how we regress so easily.”

“But they must know about the Lord Ships?” I say, confusion twisting my voice into a whine.

“Hmm?” Jade looks at me as if she’d forgotten I was there, and a brief pang of resentment stabs at my chest. She wasn’t like this last night, not when she was riding me, sweating her lust over me. “Oh, yeah, they know,” she says. “That’s what I mean. They know the Lord Ships are unmanned, automatons, pilots dead or gone. But they’ve been here for a while, and I suppose in their state the fears of the locals drive their certainties back out.”

We pass a group of young men and women who regard us with a mixture of anger and fear. I can understand what they have to be angry with — aliens in their country, invaders in a world shrinking back to almost tribal roots — but what do they fear?

“Why don’t the locals know about the Lord Ships?” I ask.

“Oh, they do. They just choose not to believe it.”

I can scarcely credit this myself. The fact that a civilised people can let themselves be controlled by ghosts from the past, willingly prostrating themselves at the feet of dead gods, knowing all the time that their actions are a sham. I ask Jade why this is so. I do not like the answer I receive.