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I was tiny when I first heard of it. It was a warm night, and I was lurking at the bottom of the staircase, innocently eavesdropping while Dad barred the front door. My parents spoke low, even though they must have thought me fast asleep, and there was nobody else to hear them for a long way.
‘Verde River.’ I can hear it now. I loved the way that Ma said it, those soft syllables tumbling off the rolled Rs. 'Water. Think of it.'
'Green Valley.' Dad said, ‘I suppose it could really be green. Algae, or something. Or duckweed.’
Ma’s voice was sharp. ‘Does it matter what colour it is? And do you think there's really a river there? And would you go, if you knew?’
He sighed. ‘You know I wouldn’t care, if only we could be sure that we’d go with them, and that they’d be looked after properly.’
That was the only time I heard them speak of it, and it hung in my memory, together with a thin, high, sobbing that instinct told me never to mention.
We lived in what had been, before the Devastation, a handsome house in an obliterated wood, as far from civilisation as was prudent. My parents were first cousins, though they didn’t mention that much. You wouldn’t have thought it would bother people any more, but I suppose these ideas stick. My family kept itself to itself. As I grew up, I began to understand why that was.
We lived. That was all there was to it: we had lived, even I, who must have been a tiny scrap when the Devastation came. Ma, and Dad, and I: a memory of what a family had looked like, once. Ma and Dad kept us apart to keep me from the jealousy.
We could still die. Though we had survived the Devastation and the Pestilence, we could still die. The first time I understood that when Dad went, his back arched, and his eyes screwed shut with the pain, and gasping for a breath that he couldn’t find in time. Teebee, the doctor said grandly, as if knowing its name made any difference.
Ma seemed to close in on herself after he went, and sometimes I caught her looking at me with such sadness and fear in her eyes that I wondered whether going up all at once in the Devastation would have been as bad as all that, after all.
I was seventeen when it became obvious that she was going, too. The doctor came and couldn’t do anything this time, either, still not knowing how to treat an illness that wasn’t the Pestilence. It was not even as if anybody knew how to treat that. There was booze, if you could afford it. That was about as far as it went.
I sat at Ma’s side and held her hand. She told me all the things that mothers are meant to tell their children: never share a stranger’s drink unless they take the first swig, and even then be careful; eat no meat you haven’t killed yourself; never go to sleep with somebody after having sex with them.
(I thought of Caroli, my first, and, at that time, only lover, and the way she used to break with a little sob, and fall swiftly asleep in my arms. But I knew what Ma meant. Caroli was different; I’d known her all my life, and trusted her as much as I trusted anybody. She was three or four years older than I was, and we were the youngest people in the area by a good dozen years. The rest died, quickly in the Devastation, or slowly of the Pestilence. Caroli held on longer than most. After she died, there was nobody, and I was the future.)
'Mel?' Ma said, and I squeezed her hand.
Then she said something strange. ‘Never walk more than twenty kil in a day,’ she murmured, and coughed. I held the cup of water – expensive, filtered, water – to her mouth, and she drank a little. ‘If you have to do it, rest the next day.’
I began to understand. 'You want me to go somewhere?'
'The Green Valley,' she said. 'You have to find the Verde River.' And memory flared in me.
'Where is it? What's there?'
‘There's a map. They sent a map to all the parents. I don't know what's there.'
And so, the day after we buried her, I left. Nobody tried to talk me out of it. Why should they?
There was nothing worth staying for, and they knew that as well as I did.
I walked, mostly. I didn't carry much; I didn't have much to carry. I was careful about water, and I was lucky that it was spring. In the first town I came to there was a bicycle, and nobody but me to claim it. It got me a hundred kil or so before the chain snapped and I had to abandon it in turn. After that I walked again.
The worst of it all was the solitude. Walking, resting, finding food and water to keep myself alive: that was all hard work, but travelling alone across that deserted continent was what sent me half-mad. I talked to myself, I sang to myself. It might have been as much as a month before I met my first stranger.
His name was Pal, or perhaps Paul; I never saw it written down, and his accent was strong. He seemed a good sixteen years older than me, but perhaps he was just very tired, or lonely. Everyone seemed old, anyway. Pal lived in an abandoned condom factory, and survived by bartering the leftover stock for food and clothes.
‘I wouldn’t have thought there’d be much call for them, these days,’ I said.
He laughed. ‘You’d be surprised. I might not be able to get someone accidentally pregnant any more, but there’s plenty other inconveniences that people are glad to avoid. Prevention’s better than cure, that’s all I’m saying.’
He worried about my going on. ‘The Green Valley? No such place. Or, if there ever was, it’s not green any more. Nowhere’s green. I'd bet you don't even know what green looks like.'
'I do so,' I said with dignity. I'd had a picture book when I was little, about all the animals who lived in a great green wood. 'My ma believed in it, and that's good enough for me. I'm sure it's green.'
He frowned. 'If it is, it'll be because of the radiation. It'll glow green at night. You won't be able to miss it, and when you find it it'll kill you.’
'None the less,' I said, 'I have to go and see.'
Pal let it go at that. He was a good man, kind and gentle, and sweetly diffident about having sex with me. 'You're so young,' he said. 'You could be the Last Child.'
I had heard a lot about the Last Child, and the possibility of its being me, at my parents' funerals and elsewhere. I didn't see what was so special about the idea. Someone had to be the last one born before the Devastation, and we were all born to die.
I said, 'Does that matter? You might be the last person I ever see.'
So we had sex, and I wept as I broke, and felt foolish about that. He pretended not to notice; he just held me.
I was sad to leave him, but he was just the same as everyone I had left: he was going to die, and I would be alone anyway. He sent me off with a pocket stuffed full of condoms. ‘Just in case,’ he said.
I didn't meet anybody else for ages, though. I passed shacks and ruins, but they were all abandoned, and when I went in to raid the larders, picking up a can here and a water bottle there, I could find no clue as to how the occupants had gone. The landscape changed. The endless plains of my childhood gave way at last to gentle rolling hills, still bare and parched as the plateau, but with an interest to their shape that heartened me. I pressed on.
Once I found a fountain, its marble bowl cracked from side to side but still, miraculously, bubbling with fresh water. I drank greedily, filled my containers, and drank again. I had leisure, now, to look at it; I scraped the yellow moss away with a fingernail, and found a dedication, and a date centuries past, and I marvelled that this could still stand and function while the town it had served lay in ruins.
I wondered, too, why nobody had come to exploit it. Surely, if I could pass through here safely, somebody must have survived. Water was precious. Someone ought to have smelt it. I could only think that nobody here had been able to withstand the Pestilence. Had there been a Last Child here? They could not have lived long, if so.
I took a good look at the buildings, thinking that I should rest here. They were crumbled and rotten, but Pal's fears were unfounded; it was only the wear and tear of generations that broken them down. Behind one door I found a skeleton. Impossible to tell its age or sex. Not the Last Child, but the Last Adult, whom there had been nobody to burn or bury. Too late I wondered if the water itself was bad.
I lay down to sleep under the tattered roof of a different house, thinking it all too likely that I would never wake again. When day broke, however, I seemed no worse than I had been when I lay down, and so I refilled my bottles at the fountain and walked on.
When I came to the first tree I could have wept. I could not identify it: it was a scrubby little pile of twigs – from which a couple of blessed green leaves stuck out like a hand of greeting. I went on past it, and, little by little, the green spread all across the way in front of me. A day, a week, and I found now that I was following a path that other feet had trod. Not, I thought, many, but the mere thought that other people had gone this way lifted my heart.
The way grew greener.
‘Hello, stranger.’ She was sitting next a gate. Not on the gate; it was sagging and rickety and didn’t look as if it would take anyone’s weight. She had her back to the gatepost, smoking. I watched the plume of smoke curling upwards against the leafy wall of mountain behind her; I was afraid to look into her eyes.
She laughed, and did not rise. ‘You’re the Last Child. Don’t look so surprised. They all come here. They come from the ice forests, and the glass desert. They come from the dusty plains and the deserted towns. All the Last Children.’
I nodded, acknowledging the truth of at least part of what she had said.
‘My name,’ she said, ‘is Rain.’
'Mel,' I said.
‘You have come to look for the Green Valley.'
'Have I found it?' If this was not it, I thought, I never would.
'First,’ she said, ‘you must tell me your story. Sit down, and rest. You will need to.’ She opened a sturdy cloth bag, and took out a bottle of clear water. She drank from it, then passed it to me. Next she brought out a pair of round yellow fruit, and a slab of meat with an infuriatingly familiar taste. What was it? All the meat I had ever known, a few scraggy chickens aside, came out of tins. This stuff had me buzzled.
She smiled at me, amused. 'It's fish,' she said. 'Fresh fish.'
'So we are near a river,' I said.
'Eat,' she said, 'and then tell me who you are and what brought you here.'
So I told her. I told her everything I knew, from the very beginning.
Rain lay in the grass and smoked. (Where, I wondered, had she found such a ready supply of cigarettes? Perhaps there was a factory somewhere, like Pal's, its produce swapped or stolen, more precious than rubies. Perhaps tobacco grew here – I remembered, dimly, that it was some sort of a herb. If there were live fish, there could be anything.) When I had finished my story, she nodded, as if in satisfaction.
'Now you must tell me,' I said, as if I had the right to insist on anything in this strange place.
'It's getting late,' she said. 'Come with me.'
My limbs were tired and sore, and I stumbled as I got up. She took my arm and led me to a little hollow in the hillside, just large enough to be called a cave. Once there, she made a great business of uncovering a little fire in the entrance and blowing it back into life. 'This is where we sleep tonight,' she said. 'Tomorrow...'
'The Green Valley?'
'Oh, you're the impatient one,' she said. 'Yes, but you have a long way to get there, and there is nothing at all that you can do to say that you will be permitted to go on.'
'Whose, then, is the decision?' I suppose I sounded as if I were desperate. I was.
Reverence lit Rain's eyes. 'Her Majesty, the Verde River.'
She would tell me nothing else, though I coaxed and begged.
In the middle of the night, I woke suddenly; Rain was awake, watching me.
‘You’re her, aren’t you?’ I had to say it, now, while it lighted on my mind.
She rolled over and lit another cigarette from the remains of the fire. ‘I’m who?’
I watched the red tip glow in the darkness. ‘You’re the Queen of the river.’
‘Does it matter if I am?’
Was that an admission? I didn’t know. 'Well?'
'I'll tell you. It doesn't matter who I am. It matters who you are. Are you the Last Child, or did you come after?'
'What?' My mind thick with sleep, I could make no sense of her question.
She waved the cigarette in frustration. ‘It’s incredibly important. Were you born before or after the Devastation? You must know.’
‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘I thought nobody was born after the Devastation.’
‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘Think about it. You thought you might be the Last Child, other people think you might be the Last Child, and yet your parents had another child after you.’
I began to contradict her, but as soon as I opened my mouth I knew she was right, and cursed my own slowness.
'If you came after,' Rain said, 'you will likely pass. Now, sleep.'
She woke me when it was still dark, shaking my shoulder gently to rouse me. ‘It’s time,’ she said, and her voice sounded very loud in the silence.
I got to my feet and took her outstretched hand. She led me out of the cave and towards the gate. The grass was thick and lush under my bare feet, so different from the parched tufts I had known, and it soaked my legs with dew. The sky was becoming paler. ‘Come on,’ she said, and drew me towards a path. I could just make out where it led, beyond the meadow, through the forest, up towards a pass, skirting the shoulder of the mountain.
It was a hard climb, and I had to follow close behind her to see where she put her feet. Mine were sore and scratched by the time we neared the top, and only curiosity and excitement drew me on the last few hundred metres, to rest at the summit and see spread out before me a great shining sheet of water.
I sank, gasping, to the ground. She laughed. ‘See,’ she said, ‘there it is. The Green Valley.’
‘The Green Valley?’ I said, stupid with fatigue and disappointment.
‘It’s still there, under the water. It belongs to the river now. It was hers, and she claimed it.’ She lay down on her stomach and looked down towards the lake. I followed her gaze.
‘What was it like?’ I asked.
She shook her head, whether in ignorance or warning I do not know. 'If you are favoured, you will know as much as I do. If not, what's the point in your knowing?'
'There are fish there, I know. And the Queen, the river. Buildings, drowned buildings?' I guessed. 'And you've been there. Often?'
'Very well,' Rain said, sitting up, 'I'll tell you. It would have been better had you just trusted me, but I don't know. She may be magnanimous.'
'Why threaten me?' I asked. 'I am at your mercy, and you want to tell me anyway.'
She ignored that. 'Long ago,' she said, 'before what you know as the Devastation, there was a first Devastation. Radiation, mutations, all that.' I saw that she understood no more of it than I did. 'That's when the glass desert came to be. That Devastation changed us. Humans. It changed us, but we didn't know. We couldn't know, because there wasn't enough water any more.'
'So how do you know?' I asked.
Rain bowed towards the shining water. 'Her Majesty claimed the valley. She filled it. In all the world, there was no water but here. I don't know who was the blessed one who first found out. That name is lost.'
This told me nothing. 'How did it change us, that First Devastation?'
'It taught us water,' she said, as if that should have been obvious. 'When she claimed us, we found that we had become creatures of the water. We don't drown, now. The first blessed one leapt into the valley and found a new world indeed. We live there now.'
'So why were you not in the water?'
'One of us has to watch. All the time, one of us has to watch. None of the Last Children could find the way here, otherwise.' She smirked.
I thought that I could have traced that path over the hill, myself. 'But you smoke.'
She seemed surprised. 'That's one of the perks of watch duty. So: you will come with me.'
I shuddered. 'You think I will be accepted?'
'Your parents were fertile. You survived the Devastation, and you survived the Pestilence. You have come here. You have as good a chance as any of having that mutation. Come.'
We scrambled in silence down the slope. We stopped when we came to the water. I reached out to touch it, but she would not let me. ‘All at once,’ she said, ‘or not at all.’
‘You could be lying,’ I said. ‘You could be making all this up: the first Devastation, and the mutations, and the Queen, and everything. You could be the only person here. Nothing could happen at all. I could jump, and drown.’
‘I could be lying,’ she agreed. ‘How will you ever know, if you don’t jump?’
I could not know, and there was another question, too, that she had not asked: if I did not jump, what would I do? Could I turn back? Could I wander all the rest of my life, alone, with nothing left to seek? I looked at her face. It told me nothing.
And so, because I always was a coward, I jumped, and the water closed over me, and the sun's first rays broke through it in the green light of a different world.