Tomorrow, When the War Began

I went for a walk back up the track, to the last of Satan’s Steps. The sun had already warmed the great granite wall and I leaned against it with my eyes half shut, thinking about our hike, and the path and the man who’d built it, and this place called Hell. “Why did people call it Hell?” I wondered. All those cliffs and rocks, and that vegetation, it did look wild. But wild wasn’t Hell. Wild was fascinating, difficult, wonderful. No place was Hell, no place could be Hell. It’s the people calling it Hell, that’s the only thing that made it so. People just sticking names on places, so that no one could see those places properly any more. Every time they looked at them or thought about them the first thing they saw was a huge big sign saying “Housing Commission” or “private school” or “church” or “mosque” or “synagogue.” They stopped looking once they saw those signs.

Only humans knew about Hell; they were the experts on it. I remembered wondering if humans were Hell. The Hermit for instance; whatever had happened that terrible Christmas Eve, whether he’d committed an act of great love, or an act of great evil... But that was the whole problem, that as a human being he could have done either and he could have done both. Other creatures didn’t have this problem. They just did what they did. I didn’t know if the Hermit was a saint or a devil, but once he’d fired those two shots it seemed that he and the people round him had sent him into Hell. They sent him there and he sent himself there. He didn’t have to trek all the way across to these mountains into this wild basin of heat and rock and bush. He carried Hell with him, as we all did, like a little load on our backs that we hardly noticed most of the time, or like a huge great hump of suffering that bent us over with its weight.

I too had blood on my hands, like the Hermit, and just as I couldn’t tell whether his actions were good or bad, so too I couldn’t tell what mine were. Had I killed out of love of my friends, as part of a noble crusade to rescue friends and family and keep our land free? Or had I killed because I valued my life above that of others? Would it be OK for me to kill a dozen others to keep myself alive? A hundred? A thousand? At what point did I condemn myself to Hell, if I hadn’t already done so? The Bible just said “Thou shalt not kill,” then told hundreds of stories of people killing each other and becoming heroes, like David with Goliath. That didn’t help me much.

We’ve got to stick together, that’s all I know. We all drive each other crazy at times, but I don’t want to end up here alone, like the Hermit. Then this really would be Hell. Humans do such terrible things to each other that sometimes my brain tells me they must be evil. But my heart still isn’t convinced. I just hope we can survive.