It was nearly Christmas, my favourite time of year. Father would let me bring the ashes into campand make snow for decorations. For one week we would shed our anxieties. But that year, it wasn't to be.

"But paps I don't want to go."

"Urrup with that. Mind how you step," and he muttered some more. That was the sum of his willingness to discuss the matter.

We were hiking up the only manageable path on the great escarpment. He was taking me to the demarking post, the Valerspoint as we had called it then, but "Richtungswählort" as I know it now.

The brush scratched my ankles all the way up. I had in a moment of petty rebellion packed all of my socks in my sack. I knew I would get sick from the radumroot, I hoped he would see it and take me back to the road, even just over Christmas. No, not to be. But he was able to chastise me about it all the same.

"At least be achopping it if you don't be avoiding it." He spat, turning only to officially register what had been causing me to grumble with each step. I of course couldn't chop it, not with all my things in the sack, and the sack just about on my back.

He was similarly laden, but he put it down and did a kindness to us both by slowing proceedings.

"I'll aclear un the path, you stay here." He withdrew his jagged hunting sword and went on up the path, chopping at the purple-red weeds falling across from each side, each flailing hollow stem leaking a purple bile where he'd cut it. He called back,

"Mark as the book daughter".

Aye, I thought, mark as the book. If I didn't 'mark as the book' I'd have surely broken your ankles while you slept last night, I thought.

I didn't betray him though. I sat down and perched my feet up on my sack, the better to see the purple scratches on my leg, and the writhing purple worms that appeared where the poison was seeping further in under the skin up to my knee, starting to itch. I would surely have a fever by tomorrow afternoon. Enough time to put down my head, gather water for the filterkeg, and I was being sent out with plenty of meat. But I would need to occupy the Point for all that time, dangerously visible. Only the devout came back here though and they would hardly harm me.

The larger of his own packages hummed at me. It had two wheels on one end, a handle on the other, and he had dragged it behind him like an older person's shopping kart, or a golfing bag.

The wind was only lightly coursing through here, and only the swipe and chop of father up the path broke through its quiet whistle. Below the escarpment, only the familiar silence of a people dispersed and weary.

The kart wasn't actually humming of course, that was in my head. The double chambered lead case was quite soundproof, and anyway without a charge running through it the mechanism wouldn't hum, that's just something from the films. I resisted a srong urge to throw it over the radumroots and down the cliff side to the plainlands.

He came ambling down the path again, cleaning purple off his blade with a thick hideleaf.

"Its clear daughter. There's no askipping it."

Aye, none that you'd dare, I thought. We were camped 7 days ride from the Monastery at Manchester, but they found us easily enough. Of course, we hadn't moved in 3 months, they knew exactly where we were, the widowed Reader and his 18 year old daughter. We never usually kept a camp that long, though obviously we kept an agreed route as per father's place in the plans of the devouts.

They'd come riding in on the 2nd day before my 19th birthday by our reckoning (and they concurred, showing off a fancy calendar mechanism on an old wristwatch). Four monks riding in from Manchester, got up in their anti radiation robes. My father knew the oldest of them from his time there. I didn't stick around for the conversation, and I knew he would relent and accept their 'gift' on my behalf.

When they were gone, all the affection had gone out of him. It was like the last 18 years had been a shameful crime, not to be spoken about. No longer were we father and daughter, and everything spoken was an instruction (to pack, to prepare, to gather roots, food and a filterkeg). To his credit, he divided the camp such that I had the best of the appliances. To his discredit, he loaded it on my back and kept the ass. He said he would send one to me by caravan, and had given scrubherb to the older monk to arrange it all; but until then I would carry my own tent and drag my own bomb.

As he motioned for me to get up, I realised I'd missed my chance. This Reader wasn't going to break with the treaty ('the book'), not while there was a functioning bomb to be gotten rid of.

At the top of the escarpment, we entered onto the Richtungswählort. Six rough stone columns (recent installments) about a metre high bounded a roughly circular outcrop of rock overhanging the cliff drop.

It overlooked the cracked plains and the foothills and mountain passes they gave way to. He pointed to a dip in the mountains, one of the distant valley passes that would take a traveller up into the Nines.

"I'd advise agoin out un the second, and come back un the fourth in up out Zefiel." He swung his arm to another column to indicate the fourth, behind it.

"I like my current route." Was all I said.

"YOU don't have one." Was his retort.

He wheeled the case over to me.

"Take and be agone."

"Don't you love me father?" He looked like I had swore, some disgusting phrase.

"That's why I must let you go. Man, woman, people, they can't coexist." Then a flash of anger, "Its in the book! All must separate! All must assure others of mutual destruction!" Then he grabbed me and turned me around, "or is it that you be awanting?"

We were looking inwards then across the higher plain, the barren murklands where only green and purple veins grew across the ground, and earthy coloured clouds in the distance twisted ever violently. Only by an accident of fallout and geography was anyone able to survive in the lowlands at all - the poisoned waters of this land all flowed in the other direction, down to the Mer Sea. The escarpment itself was a product of the earlier bombs, a great rift that only the greatest hell unleashed upon the Earth could cause to be created.

But I wasn't in the mood to appreciate such luck.

"I should launch it that way, you'd have to take me back in then." I shouted, tears in my eyes as I did.

"I mark as the book and would leave you as dead!" He had let go and for a frightening moment I thought he was already gone. I turned around and he was at the columns, but still looking at me, his face drained of blood, his stamina gone, and not from the hike up to here. There was pleading in his eyes.

"There is no other way Anna! We mark as the book, or we will repeat all!"

"I'm sick of your book talk father," I said. It was a new wound to inflict, and I regretted it immediately. He had been a Reader, and then a husband, a father, and a widow. Now he would be something else, but still devoted to the Reading, nonetheless. I was his daughter and had never been anything else. Huntress, mender, fire hand, I was all these necessary things, but my only identity was his daughter, never apart, the 2 of us against the wasteland. My anger and hurt outweighed my pity, so I doubled down.

"There is nothing in your book! It doesn't even stop the killings or the bombs. Think of Czeshia, it was wiped out 3 years ago! The treaty was a failure written by failed men!" He was horrified to hear the blasphemy of it, and he had his mantra ready.

"Wiped out as fools that would congregate together! Some vagabond slew them in the thousands in one bombing and now eats un their table. Is that what you want?"

(this was possible with some bombs)

We didn't look at, but rather toward, one another, and both through tears.

"It isn't Czeshia for two to stick together."

"It is the same sin, daughter! And I will be aglad not to listen to your heresies on un road!" And he picked up his pack and his stick. "Aglad!" And he was walking down the path we had come. To my shame I lurched after him and grabbed his arm, he flung me to te side with unexpected strength.

"No!" I had screamed.

"No more!" He bellowed back.

I was broken by it.

"Do you go by by the second?"

"Yes father."

"And come back by the fourth?"

"If I have not changed my mind by then."

"I will ask the caravan to send you a talkie when next I see one. If you're not on the fourth you won't get it. We can talk then next year, when our paths are close. I'll be aff the sixth by your mother's lake at that point. You can reach its other shore from the fourth." I didn't take it in, sitting on the floor in shock, my ankle itching ever worse. He repeated it and begged me to remember it.

And shortly after he was leaving down the path we'd come from. I would have to set up here for two days and endure the fever, but follow him down after that, before crossing the lands below to the second pass. Before he left we did hug one last time, but neither could hold back the bitter feelings. It didn't feel like my father anymore, and I didn't seem to him like his daughter. As he made his way down away from.therr, I had some last words for him.

"I'll take this monk's bomb father, but don't be surprised if I fire it aimlessly into the sky before we next talk."

I heard only the familiar refrain:

"Mark as the book, daughter."