Stone Seeds (10 page)

THE PLANTING

MAMMA ZEINA MUST DIE outdoors, under the sky. The laws of Mamma Zeina's religion are quite clear on this matter. More importantly, it's what she wants most.

“Last work, Mother Cupboard. Finish the job.” Mamma Zeina mutters softly to herself, under her breath. Grits her teeth and tries to move. Her left arm is paralysed for one long moment, grips the cage enclosing the vent and holds her there, vine like. As if her curled hand has a mind of its own.

“Holy baobab,” she says to herself, “give me strength.”

“Strength.” She says again. Throwing herself away from the wall and then staggering forwards, three steps, four, and now she's falling. Slaps the palm of her left hand on the wall for support as she goes down. Saves herself, only just.

And now, sweat steaming from her brow and face twisted, hauling herself along by the pipes on the wall. Staggers against the air conditioning system, grips it with both hands. Rests for a moment. Satisfied that she's stayed on her feet. Now she eyes the door handle, lunges and grips it. Right hand. Left hand. Pulling herself along slowly.

Zorry stands watching her come with a rising sense of panic. She feels strangely unable to move.

“Zorry Child, help me. Don't stand there looking at me with wide eyes, help me, damn it.”

When she gets as far as Zorry, Mamma Zeina grips the
girl's wrist hard. Pushes her pained face up and into Zorry's. “It's you.” She hisses. Struggling to speak now.

“What do you mean?”

“I'm passing you the baton. I pick you. I am reseeding.”

“What? Holy baobab, Mamma …” Zorry wants to object but the words seem to stop in her throat, choke her.

“I ain't got long so I hereby reseed myself and name you Mother Cupboard Zorry, henceforth Mamma Zorry.”

“Mamma …”

Mamma Zeina then thrusts her hand into her apron pocket. Pulls out a small cup with a lid. Lifts it slightly, checks behind her. Zorry looks down at the plant root nestling inside. It's rippling gently.

“This has been my life Zorry. This here. It's a water plant. I entrust it to you.”

Zorry's eyes become round and afraid, she is bursting with questions. “Mamma … Mamma Zeina …”

“Hush! There's no time now, don't be mithering me with questions. You've seen the work.” Mamma Zeina looks at the girl, sternly and warm at the same time, as the best kind of general can be sometimes with her troops. “Do not slow me down now, Child.”

“Why'd you pick me?”

“You picked yourself, Zorry. Your nature picked you. I've lived a hundred years and I've seen the likes of you, Zorry, borned and died many times over, and I know it to be a mistake to over protect young women like you. You will die of
that
sooner. You need the resistance as much as the resistance needs you, submission is pizen to a …” Zeina smiles sadly. “I wouldn't be able to put you in harm's way iffen I didn't believe
…” She peers into Zorry's face. “Bavarnica won't change and nor will you. The double life, Zorry. It's the only way for a Sinta girl like you.” She grips Zorry's wrist.

“I need more time.”

“There is no more time, Zorry.”

Pain overcomes Mamma Zeina. It's like a wave of contractions in her legs and stomach. As her body resists the plant inside her, the long roots and vines growing up and outward. She grips her throat, groans, there's a larger contraction in her stomach that feels to her like birthing. She curses. Spits up a drizzle of poison. Yellow sap runs down her chin. And then blood. She doubles over with pain, “Take this cup from me …” The cup is tipping from her fingers. Zorry reaches out to catch it before it falls.

Mamma Zeina rises. Her face seems gargoyle-like once more, and strange. Haggard. She's sweating, panting, Zorry thinks she sees death moving underneath Mamma Zeina's skin. A snaking shadow and then it's gone. The old woman is gritting her teeth. Holding on.

“Mamma …” Zorry says. Now her eyes fill. “You are in pain.”

Mamma Zeina gathers herself. Her colour returns for a moment. She looks the girl in the eye, a shrewd direct stare, “This next thing will …” Her voice falters again. She holds on to the wall.

“What do I do?”

Without looking up, “You got to take the water plant to Jengi, Zorry. He's the only one who can get it to the other side, over and under both fences, through the killing forest and to the right person on the edge farms.” She grits her teeth again.

“I don't trust him.”

“Zorry. We have to trust him.”

“Why?”

“Because there's no-one else.”

Zorry catches her breath. “Jengi … Mamma Zeina …” Zorry wavers. “Jengi's in the heart of the village. In the shop, Mamma Zeina.” Zorry casts about in a panic. “If I'm caught they will kill me. Or take me to the labs, the long gaol, there's no worse fate for a Sinta woman.”

“No. There isn't.” Mamma Zeina says heavily. She goes on gazing at Zorry. “You think that I don't know what it is I'm asking?”

The girl sets her jaw, “Yes.” She says. Not remembering the question, if there even was one.

The old woman looks around her, eyes the window. Sighs. Then looks toward the door to outside. The corridor leading toward the exit seems longer to her just now. The door seems to her to glow with strange life.

Wind rattles the hinges. Desert sand beats against it.

“Help me outside?”

“Yes.”

Zorry takes Mamma Zeina's elbow.

They walk the white-lit corridor together, Mamma Zeina's strong right arm thrown over the young girl's slender shoulders. They walk a little zig-zag at first, find a pace.

“Nearly there.” Mamma Zeina says. Looking grim, determined. Stops and groans. Zorry waits until Mamma Zeina is steady enough to go on. The girl looks down, examines the root of the water plant. It has one leaf unfurling from it already.

“I'm dying.”

“Aye.”

They both appear to consider this. Neither speaks.

And in a bit, “That plant has great promise, Child. It might save many lives someday. As far as I can make out … It attracts rain,” she says. Stops again and grimaces, holds her stomach. “And pulls moisture from deep in the earth. Its roots grow a hundred feet, more. Stores what it collects in the leaves and roots, vines. It might bring back the rains. It needs more work but … Jengi.” She says. “Jengi. He'll know what to do with it. Who's the best …
gardener
to give it to. And if he can't find no-one to finish the work on it then he'll see it's planted out by the baobab. At least that. On the fertile soil of the Sinta graves there. Let the water plant do what it will then, out by the baobab.”

At the exit, Mamma Zeina easing down the door handle, steps outside and then pushing Zorry back over the door jamb, inside the house. “Don't be seen with me here, Zorry. I am done now, dangerous to know. Don't speak of me. All of Bavarnica will be watching now. Tell them you barely knew me, Child.”

A squeeze of the old woman's hand.

Mamma Zeina closes the door firmly on Zorry. Then she leans against its hinges.

Clutching at the ivy strewn outer wall, Mamma Zeina makes her way over the drawbridge and beyond the garden lights to the outside.

Mother cupboards like, if they can, to die in the natural sunlight, the last lights of the old sun, when it's time. She is just in time, night's not fallen yet. Mamma Zeina just catches
the moments after curfew,
blink
, and the general's sun is switched off. Mamma Zeina will have less than two minutes of natural light, and she knows this too.

Last light, she thinks. Breathes out. She'd never even hoped as far as to end her days cast in natural sunlight, and yet … Here it is. The old sun. She remembers it from when she was a girl. Normally the punishment for being here, now, under the last rays of the old sun after curfew, Well. The punishment for this would be death. Mamma Zeina smiles wryly. And then a grimace of pain.

The sun dips and then glows behind the row of baobab trees on the long horizon, it's like an invitation, she thinks. Gives her the strength to take more steps toward it, to get clean of the shadows by the general's back door before she stumbles. Catches herself, only just, then holds there for a moment longer.

Two of the general's worst killing organisms, the slug poison and a nipping sapling, are working their way through her one hundred year old system.

Mamma Zeina is still standing. At least for now.

And then turning slowly toward the baobab.

Sees the line of the trees.

She is considering the baobab.

These great trees with roots upturned and swelling, arms outstretched toward the sky, strange limbs making curving silhouettes against the last light. Splay-fingered branches, raised up. The baobab which cannot be stopped by the desert. The baobab endures. What better plant for the Sinta mother cupboards to hold on to. We were right to choose it for our sign in The Before, Mamma Zeina tells herself. We were right
about some things. You can't be sure of it all. Crosses herself, whispers ‘Downbutnotout.'

The mother cupboards have endured more than most, the last one hundred years.

‘Down but not out' is The Last Prayer and also the first one of the mother cupboards.

Nobody can remember what it means now, if anything, but run the words together, add strange intonations, quirks, according to the aspect of your particular congregation or family, the way they turn toward the light when they pray to the baobab, to the left or the right. Forwards or back.

There is the down bet … Not owt

The downbutt … Net art, the

DownbutnotOw … Ttttttttt, sounded out at the end by a long stutter, emphasised by the swishing of birch leaves. It doesn't matter, she thinks. It ain't about how you say it, it only matters that you say it: We are down but not out.

But no matter what their creed or origin story, the mother cupboards in both tribes, the Sinta and the edge farmers, have the same singular aim of keeping the childur safe and fed through the crackdowns, the riots, the droughts, by way of a thousand ingenious small schemes. There ain't nothin' else to the mother cupboards' religion, and nor should there be if you ask a true mother cupboard. That's all, that's it, that's everything. The whole of Bavarnica ranged, it seems, against the edge farm childur. The sinta childur. And only the mother cupboards on both sides of the fence standing between the childur and long death. There's nothing simpler or more complicated than a mother cupboard's work.

Mamma Zeina looks down at her right hand. She pulls her
glove off, with some difficulty. The skin of her hand is reptilian-looking. She's been greened.

The goal of the general's greening programme has been to make the Sinta mother cupboards and other rememberers seem inhuman. Dehumanising is usually stage one before a purge, a crackdown on the rememberers on the Sinta farms. The ones who aren't taking their medicine. There aren't too many folks in Bavarnica, the general has learned, who'll risk much to defend the rights of a thing they believe isn't ‘truly' human. A witch.

The greening makes the rememberers look a little reptilian, strange. Not entirely inhuman, but ‘off' just enough that they make a natural target in the country lanes, where they're often stoned by a passing farmer, or on the streets of the capital city where, they say, the OneFolks might simply take a potshot at them from a high storey window. OneFolk children are told terrifying bedtime stories about witches, just to prepare their minds. They are taught to scream, ‘Witch!' If they spot a little patch of green behind their nursemaid's ear or on the family gardener's thumb, a tendril of green hair twisting out from under their slave Sinta cook's headwear. There have been even worse things. Unimaginable cruelties since the greening began.

Mamma Zeina has a moss coloured tongue, which she dyes red using beetroot, whenever she can get some, and the white of her right iris, underneath her black eyepatch, is emerald coloured, crystallised and quite blind. And with the glove on her right hand, sewn so tight to prevent any slippage that she generally struggles to remove it at nightfall, it seems amazing even to her that she's remained undiscovered so far.
A Sinta rememberer, member of the mother cupboard cult here in the general's own kitchen, and for all these years. It's enough to give Gaddys the village shopkeeper a heart attack.

It has been Mamma Zeina's greatest triumph, hiding her greening. But she understands that her corpse may be a problem for those left behind her. Once the Egg Men discover she's greened, they'll try to rout anyone who has helped her. They will look for her friends. The general's paranoia has been deadly to his people many times over, and he has been obsessed with outing the mother cupboards ever since he took power.

A new pain enters her eardrum, right side. Mamma Zeina thinks about Zorry. She regrets what she's done to Zorry. No mother Cupboard relishes reseeding herself. It cannot be helped.

Mamma Zeina breathes deep on the desert air. Lifts her head up, for the last time. Her past one hundred years seem to tumble inward, memories jostling up against each other. She remembers her children's faces, every one of them, many of whom she didn't happen to have borned. There will be no tears, at the end. She tells herself. Not one. She will not allow the general any manner of victory over her, not even in dying.

Mamma Zeina asks the baobab for one last thing. At least … she opens her mouth to speak and “Zz …” She says. “Zz …” Something seems to take her voice away.

She falls. Crashes heavily onto her knees, and then her chin hits the earth. She groans.

I have led with my chin all my long life. She tells herself. This thought lessens the pain that encases her skull from the impact. Her jaw is thrust forward and up. There's a slash in
her tongue where she bit, there are several cracked teeth, but Mamma Zeina's borned twelve childur, including three sets of twins. Alone in a birthing hut, severed the cord with her teeth. Most of her childur were lost when the Sinta fled after the last revolution, caught hiding out in the forest or running toward the mountain. One lasted three days longer than the others, he was her youngest. Hid in the sewers and then dragged out by his heels, right in front of his mother. The others were gaoled or taken by the desert.