Stone Seeds Read Online Free PDF Page A

he’s moved his head in his urgency. Stones clatter down, the right side of his head, a small surge of gravel, more dust.
    Tomax knows he can’t make another sound, if he wants to or not.
    And then Jengi’s face. Looming close in the crack. Tomax and Jengi are eye to eye for a moment. Blink. Jengi heaves away again and disappears behind the rubble.
    Now he is trying to move the debris above Tomax, gently as he can.
    Jengi finds the dog before he finds Tomax.
    He has to use a brick to kill it. Tomax hears the soft whine as the dog greets Jengi, soft thump of tail wagging, long pause and then a sickening thud, one low dog whine, another thud then nothing. The dog’s silence swelling back to Tomax.
    The fire is at Jengi’s back now. His limbs are black lit against it. Tomax can’t see his face.
    Some edge farmers come and pull Tomax’s mother back from the fire. They pin her to the ground. “Stop,” they say. “Stop. Your boy’s gone.”
    Tomax feels the heat rising around him.
    There is a deep keening sound. Now he sees his mother struggle against the pinning arms, fail. She sees the flames rise. And then her mouth is thrown open like that. No soundcoming out, not for one long moment. The flames go on rising. Her body bucks and heaves. Then lurching, hitting, scratching, filled with a strange life, she rolls away from her neighbour’s hands, their arms and elbows. She becomes unpinned for several moments, scrabbling determinedly toward the flames. Toward the wrong spot, toward the place she imagines that her boy is. And now yelling his name, his name, his name like that, down into the flames, and dragged back again. Pinned by her limbs. Body lurches skyward. Now a large-built neighbour kindly sits down hard on her stomach to hold her. She looks up. Bomb-dust rolls across the sky and smoke, a gap forming in the cloud above her like a great set of jaws, she thinks. Opening slow.
    Jengi glances behind him. “Hold her,” he says. And then to himself, “We’ll see what’s left of him in a minute.” He goes on digging. Sweat streams down the sides of Jengi’s face. He stops again and listens. He gets closer to Tomax. Jengi picks up a brick. He looks back just once at Tomax’s mother.
    Night fell that suddenly, Tomax thinks. He thinks he hears his mother’s voice, and then Jengi again. He also thinks that this is dreaming. There’s a burning sensation down his left arm. Smoke seeping down from the beam above him, it’s peppered with sparks. Flame lights up the whole of one end of the wood.
    More shouts, hiss of water on heat and the burning slows down. Jengi used the precious water on the flames. Meaning one thing only, Tomax thinks … Jengi knows I’m alive.
    Tomax passes out.
    When he wakes it’s the cold that comes with the desert night, the blackness of lights out, so Tomax knows that it mustbe after curfew. There are scratching sounds, things move around him. Desert rats, Tomax thinks. There’s a determined scrabbling, then a gnawing at the brick behind him. Something slides into the cracks, wriggles the gap wider. The rats are getting close now. Tomax is that gathered by the dark, that tightly gathered by it.
    Now Tomax believes that nobody is looking for him. They think he’s dead. For the first time since the bombing, he wishes he were.
    Scrabbling sound but there’s a different rhythm to it, not rats or mice but large brusque hands. Debris tossed in a haphazard fashion. Human sounds. And then Jengi’s knuckles, thick veined and blood streaked, veering in and out of view. Moves the rock by Tomax’s head and then eases both his hands in. First he makes a space around Tomax’s ears. Tomax watches Jengi’s fingers working. They’re covered in dried blood. “There you are, Boy.” Jengi says in his low voice. And then “Now,” he says. “Now. Try to move something,