The Semaphore

For a long time Pontis did not move.

He lay on his back staring up at the lights in the sky. They stretched overhead like smoke, green and purple with bursts of red, pulsing and flowing. He wondered if he had died, if this was where people ended up, on this endless expanse of ice beneath these dazzling, twisting lights. But if he were dead then he wouldn’t feel pain. His fingers and toes wouldn’t burn with the cold. His teeth wouldn’t chatter.

He forced himself to sit up and check on Varia. She lay unmoving on her side and he rolled her onto her back. Her face was blue and her eyes were closed. She clutched the green coat to her belly with both hands. When Pontis leaned forward and put his ear to her lips he heard her breathing, faintly.

Her hands were colder than his—as cold as the snow beneath them—and there was ice gathering in her hair and on her clothes. Pontis pried her hands away and moved the coat to get a look at her wound. It bled in a slow, steady trickle, like a tap that someone had failed to close. Pontis did not know much about medicine—his Ma sometimes told him things, but he rarely paid attention—but he did know that once blood left the body, it was very difficult to get it back in.

Frigid wind rose up, whipping snow and ice. Pontis covered Varia’s body with his own. While he did so, she began to shake beneath him. Not the rapid chattering like of Pontis’s teeth, but full, violent convulsions. Her hands gnarled and her arms bent. She rocked back and forth as if someone invisible were shaking her with all of their strength. Pontis held her until the convulsions passed, his face buried against her shoulder.

When she was still again he unfolded the green coat. There was no blood on it—a strange detail he did not have the wherewithal to scrutinize—and guided it onto her body. It was made of a thin material, and would do little, if anything, to block the cold. But he needed to try something. He could see in all directions that there was nowhere for them to go, nowhere for him to carry her. So he needed to try something. He needed to try anything he could.

The lights danced overhead, green purple blue. Intermittent gusts of wind tore across the tundra, cutting right through Pontis’s skin and deep down into his bones. Varia moved not at all, her arms at her sides, the flimsy coat riffling in the wind. Pontis remembered her holding Headmaster Jong’s hand. He remembered her cradling Harper to sleep. He remembered her reading by candlelight in Pontis’s kitchen, waiting for his Ma to return from work. He remembered her upright, smiling, warm. He remembered her voice.

The next time he checked she was no longer breathing. A layer of ice had formed across her skin, and her hands and arms were stiff. Pontis looked at her wound, which had finally stopped bleeding. He lay down next to her and took her stiff hand. He thought about Lowood Den. He thought about how, in some ways, with Varia beside him, it was like he had never left.

#

The lights eventually dissolved, lowering the tundra into a murky darkness. On the horizon, briefly, there was a faint blue glow, as if the sun was finally ready to rise. But the glow faded away as quickly as it appeared, and the night persisted.

Pontis shivered uncontrollably. His fingers throbbed as if they’d been broken. His nose and ears ached. At some point in the underground fortress he had lost his bag with his matches and his gourd-hide jug. When his throat got so dry that he could no longer swallow he ate some snow. But it only caused him to shiver more violently, and he avoided eating any more.

The wind came in irregular gusts, roaring over the tundra and driving snow and ice like daggers against any slivers of exposed skin. Then it would die down, leaving a shocked quiet.

Pontis still had his voice pad and ethergrain pen stored safely in his front pocket. Though his fingers throbbed and he felt sluggish, he set about writing letters to his Ma and his sister and to Ien. He found he didn’t have much to tell them—he’d told them everything he wanted in the last letters he’d written, which Laszlo had taken with him back to Lowood Den—but it felt important that he tell them something now, so that they knew he was thinking about them in his last moments. Even more so, it gave him something to do to distract—somewhat—from the vicious cold and the body of his best friend hardening beside him.

He told his Ma that he wished he’d paid more attention. Not just in school but also to her, when she mentioned something about how the human body worked, how to treat an illness, what to do to stop bleeding. He gave Harper step-by-step instructions on how best to climb a tree—stay close to the trunk; always have one hand on a branch at all times; never look down, will yourself higher—and promised her that he would always be with her, in some way. He told Ien that he wished they’d had more time, that if it were up to Pontis they would have had all the time in the world. He told him that he should try to find someone who made him as happy as he made Pontis, and to live as long as he could. He ended the letter by asking Ien to watch after Harper for him, and to spend time with his Ma when he had the chance. He took the three letters and folded them into his pocket just as a ferocious gust of wind roared over the ice. He shielded his face and ears as best he could, but the wind found every available gap through his fingers and assailed his skin like fire.

The question now was simply how long it would take. He imagined sitting out here for hours or days—though it was impossible to know the difference given that the sun appeared never to rise—and the prospect of waiting that long terrified him even more than the prospect of death itself.

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Varia was buried in a layer of ice. It pained Pontis to disturb her, but he was driven by an instinct for warmth much deeper than sentimentality, and he knew Varia would understand. With his numb, aching fingers he removed the green coat from her stiff body. The snow that had gathered on the coat slid from it the moment he lifted it off of her. The same way the dust had slid from it when he lifted the coat from the chair in the tower. The same way Varia’s blood rolled off it like water down glass.

Pontis put on the coat. Its material was so thin he expected next to no protection from the cold and wind. It was long, and he folded it across his legs. There was a hood, which he pulled over his face. It would not save his life, but it in fact provided some minor insulation. It would have to be enough. Because there was nothing else. Pontis lowered his head against another brutal gust, and waited to die.

#

He dreamed that he was floating high above the summer woods. He held a long string attached to the sun. The sun shined down on the glittering leaves and the glistening creeks and the wide, breathy meadows. In the distance, soft green hills speckled with all colors of wildflowers. Birds called up to him.

Pontis opened his mouth to welcome the soft, warm breeze, which tasted like the grass and the woods and the water and sky. Weightless, he allowed himself to drift in the breeze like a leaf, turning this way and that, swaddled and cradled by the air. His hair fluttered around his face, longer than he remembered it. When he looked at his hands he found they were also not as he remembered; they were lither, and worn in different places.

Off across the rolling land, a distant crest of mountains reflected the sun like a bleary eye in their icy faces. Dark clouds formed around their peaks. The birds below fell suddenly silent, and the warm breeze died.

Then a flash of light.

Pontis went blind at once. As his vision swam back he beheld a wall of fire, rushing down from the mountains, consuming the supple green hills and meadows, turning the trees and everything that lived in and below them to ash.

Pontis tried to flee, to fly up into the sky, but without the breeze he could not move. He felt the maddening heat of the encroaching inferno. The sound followed behind it, a thundering roar. Pontis let go of the string to shield his eyes with whoever’s hands he wielded, and when he did the sun floated off, no longer tethered to the earth, its sweet light replaced by a lashing glow as the wall of fire tore through him.

He opened his eyes on the desolate tundra. The murderous heat of his dream was replaced with an equally murderous cold. He looked at his hands. They were his, though they were chafed and bruised around their tips, and he could not move them. He tried to return to the first half of the dream—the woods and the creeks and the shimmering hills—but it refused to come.

It wasn’t my dream anyway, he thought. It was someone else’s dream. Someone I’ve never met. And it was not meant for me.

Varia’s body was gone beneath the shifting snow. As if it had never been there at all.

#

The lights reappeared in the sky, though Pontis did not notice them, his face cradled in his folded arms, the green coat fluttering around him like a rag in the wind.

#

Again the sky lightened briefly at the horizon. It was a cruel trick—a false promise of daylight before the light again faded and the tundra resumed its battery of wind and ice and darkness.

Pontis stared out at the snow from beneath his hood, his eyelashes caked in ice, his body so frozen he could no longer move. It was taking too long, he decided. He almost envied Varia for her quicker passing. Then he thought of the girl from Arborvale.

Pontis apologized—though he didn’t know exactly for what. Or to whom.

The patch of snow where Varia died was now indistinguishable from the thousands of miles of snow around it. Should Pontis have done something more? Buried her properly? He didn’t know how. And the frozen ground would not have yielded to him even if he did. Still, to have just left her there felt despicable. He should have done something. He should have talked her out of going down the hole in Arborvale. He should have talked her out of leaving Lowood Den. But instead he’d encouraged her—he’d abetted her, enabled her—and now she was gone, and Pontis was soon behind. Their errand was failed; if Lowood Den was in danger—if his Ma and Harper and Ien were in danger—they remained in danger. Nothing had been accomplished. Only death and cold.

I’m so sorry, Pontis thought. I’m so, so sorry.

‘Will you quit with the apologizing already?’ Varia said, her voice so clear and present that Pontis, despite his frozen limbs, leapt up and spun around, his eyes wide against the endless tundra.

‘We’re in this together,’ she said. ‘Quit acting like you got us here all by your own.’

Pontis looked down at the patch of ice beneath which Varia’s body lay. It was undisturbed. He peered into the dark. Had he been wrong? Had he imagined her death? Had he dreamed the whole thing? Was she here, just behind his back, alive and well?

Varia… Pontis thought, the green coat whipping behind him as he turned into the wind.

‘I’m right here,’ Varia said, her voice so close he expected to feel her lips on his ear. Though when he reached up and touched them he felt nothing but icy skin and the soft fabric of the coat’s hood.

‘Let me try something.’

Pontis braced against another gust of frigid wind. As it died down, he was left with a silence so complete that he understood at once that he had imagined Varia’s voice, that she was dead and he was alone. And that he would spend his final hours insane.

A green glow reflecting on the snow. Pontis looked up at the sky, expecting to see the lights pulsing overhead. But the sky was dark.

‘You see that, right?’ Varia’s voice asked.

Pontis looked down. The green coat cast a soft green light that splashed across the ice. He ran a hand along the coat’s material.

Then it started to move.

‘I can’t believe it’s working,’ Varia said, her voice alive with excitement.

What’s happening? was all that Pontis could manage to think.

The coat fluttered around him, as if suspended in water, its glow intensifying until the tundra, for hundreds of yards in all directions, was awash in green light.

‘I feel it,’ said Varia. ‘I feel myself moving. I feel myself breathing!’

Pontis outspread his arms, gawping at the coat as it billowed around his body. At the same time, warm air began to flow through it, down the arms and back and inside the hood, thawing Pontis’s frozen limbs. Its magnificent green grew brighter and brighter until it reflected off the low clouds overhead.

And then all at once, as if exhaling, the coat went still and the green glow extinguished. The tundra fell back to darkness. But the warm air continued to rush over Pontis’s body, issuing from unseen vents in the coat’s interior.

Pontis took long, deep breaths.

‘What do you think?’ Varia asked, her voice crisp in Pontis's ear.

Pontis could only nod, his fingers and toes tingling back to life.

Varia laughed. ‘And that was nothing.’