The Alpha Threw Me To The Hyenas

Chapter Twelve: The Order

It was not a big knife.

That surprised me. I do not know what I had been expecting, but the thing he took out of that glove box had a wooden handle and a blade about four inches long with a slight curve on it, and it looked like something you would find in the third drawer down in any kitchen in the world.

He sat holding it, not pointing it anywhere, resting on his knee.

"Get out," he said.

I got out.

The cold outside was a different substance from the cold in the city. It came at you flat from every direction at once and it had nothing in it, no damp, no smell. I stood on the salt in a dead woman's coat and my shoes made a noise on it like walking on sugar.

He came round the front of the car with the headlights still on and stopped about six feet away.

"Do you want to know the order," he said.

"Yes."

"You are certain."

"I have been certain about it since the hut."

He nodded slowly, as if that had settled something he had been carrying for three hours.

"Halvard Varro gave it to me himself on Sunday evening in the small office," Ilyas said. "There were two other people present. It was given in the form of a request for confirmation, which is how that man gives every order he does not intend to have written down."

"Say it."

"He asked me to confirm that no person exiled beyond the salt line has ever been recorded as returning." He was watching my face. "I confirmed it. He asked me whether I understood that the integrity of the record was a matter of some importance to the house. I said I did. Then he said, and this is the whole of it, that he would consider the matter closed when I was able to tell him personally that the record was intact."

I stood there and worked it through.

"He never said kill me."

"He has never said kill anybody in his life," Ilyas said. "That is not a thing he needs to do. He has forty years of people working out what he means and doing it, and every one of them can tell themselves afterwards that nobody actually asked."

"And you understood him."

"Perfectly."

The headlights were making two long white tracks out into the salt behind him and they went about eighty feet and stopped, and after them there was nothing.

"Are you going to do it," I said.

"No."

I did not feel anything. I want to be accurate. There was no rush of relief, no give in the legs. I had been standing on the edge of my own death for about four minutes and the news that I was not going over it landed somewhere flat.

"Why not?"

"Because I do not need to," Ilyas said.

And that is when it came. Not at the knife. At that.

"Look around you," he said. "Go on. Turn round."

I turned round. Salt, and then more of it, and above it more stars than I had ever seen because there was not one light for a hundred miles to spoil them.

"We are one hundred and eleven miles past the hut," he said. "There is no road. There are two ruts back that way and by the middle of tomorrow the wind will have taken them. There is no water out here. There is no shade. There is nothing living that you could catch and nothing growing that you could eat, and in about six hours the sun comes up and this place goes from what you are feeling now to something you would not believe if I described it."

"Then why did you drive me out."

"Because I am not going to cut a girl's throat on the ground for an old man who cannot say the word," Ilyas said, "and because it makes no difference. That is the honest answer and you should have it. If I put you out at the hut you have a week, because there are men and there is a generator and somebody would eventually get soft. Out here you have three days. Four if you are stubborn."

"So you are killing me either way."

"Yes," he said.

He did not look away when he said it. He did not offer me anything to take the edge off it. He said yes, and he let it stand there between us on the salt, and in eleven years of knowing that man I do not think I ever once caught him making a thing smaller than it was.

"Then it was not mercy," I said.

"No."

"It was so you would not have to watch."

Something moved across him. It was the first thing I had got off him all night.

"Yes," Ilyas said.

The wind came up a little. It went across the flat and made no sound at all because there was nothing for it to go over.

He turned the knife round in his hand, took it by the blade, and held it out to me handle first.

I looked at it.

"Take it."

"What for."

"You have got four days," he said. "For the first two you will use it for the bandages and for cutting the coat down and for anything you find, and you will not find anything, but you will feel better for having it. On the third day you will start thinking about it differently."

"That is what it is for."

"That is what it is for."

I took it. It was not easy. My right hand would not close and I had to bring the left over and set the handle into the palm and fold the fingers down on it one at a time like packing something, and he stood and watched me do it and did not help.

"There is a bottle of water on the passenger seat," he said. "One. Do not drink it tonight, whatever your head tells you. Drink it tomorrow afternoon when the sun is off the top, and do not drink it in one go."

"All right."

"Do not walk in the day. Anything you do, do it at night."

"All right."

"And when it gets light," Ilyas said, "you will be able to see the ruts and you will want to follow them back. Do not. It is a hundred and eleven miles and you will be dead at nineteen of them and you will have spent your last two days going the wrong way in the heat."

I stood on the salt with a kitchen knife in a hand that could barely hold it.

"Ilyas."

"Yes."

"Am I supposed to thank you."

He thought about it properly. That was the thing about him. Another man would have laughed or said something.

"No," he said.

He went and got the bottle off the seat and put it down on the salt beside me, and then he walked back round the front of the car through the headlights, and got in, and shut the door.

The engine started. It was obscene. It was the loudest thing that had happened in three hours and it went across that flat and did not come back.

He turned the car in a wide slow circle, and for about six seconds the headlights swung across me and I stood lit up in the middle of nothing with my arm across my eyes, and then they went past and I was in the dark with the red of the tail lights going away.

He did not look at me as he went. I could see the shape of his head through the back window and it did not turn.

I watched those lights for a very long time. Longer than seemed possible. The flat is so level out there that a car takes almost half an hour to go, and I stood and watched two red points get smaller and closer together until they were one, and then they were nothing, and then I was not sure whether I could still see them or whether I had simply decided to.