Stone Seeds (21 page)

“They're burrowing under the OneFolks' village?”

“Yes.”

“What the hell are they?”

“Dunno.” He looks up. “Ask your father. Don't he work in the sewers? So maybe he saw something already.” And then, “You got bit.” Zorry looks at her hand.

“Yes.”

“You should have said, Zorry. You don't want to show up at the general's feast tomorrow with that'un, Zorry.” Jengi curses. “You should've been more careful.” He's mostly angry with himself.

“I'm sorry. Must'a happened in the tree, when I was distracted.”

He wraps her hand. “Remember next time,” he says. “They're in the tree moss. They were the real danger all the time we was both looking down at that clown of a hyaena.”

“I'll remember.” And then, “You got bit yourself,” she says. He seems to see his small wound for the first time. The colour drains out of his face. “I must have took it sliding down the killing tree. I didn't feel a thing.”

“Some of them plants contain anaesthetics, precisely so you'll ignore them. Wait.” She blinks. “Thought you was s'posed to be training me?”

“The forest isn't never the same way twice, Zorry. That's all you can learn. Anyone can make a mistake, you can't never really train for the killing forest on account the killing forest learns you too. Changes it up.” Jengi looks at her grimly, and then down at his hand. The pizen spreads so fast that he
quickly finds it hard to move his fingers. Gently, “Help me.” He says.

Zorry examines his hand. The effect of this tree bite is a thing she's not seen before. Black vine-like branches are spreading out under his skin. It looks different to Mamma Zeina's plant bite, which was mostly inflamed. Green and red.

“These kind of nipping saplings, you can catch em iffen youz quick, and they deliver stings as you go,” Jengi explains to her now. “No one is dangerous on its own, but you gots to figure out a way of not collecting ‘em.” He glances down at his feet. His voice is weak now, drifting, “You need to tie it with something.”

She rips a strip out of the sleeve of her maid's uniform. Makes a splint. Checks his pulse. “You'll be alright. Just keep breathing.” And then looking down at her handiwork, is pleased with herself.

Zorry walks ahead along the fence now, back towards the lights of the village and her mother's cottage. She's been noticing a heavy, sliding sound for a while. It's the other side of the fence. Zorry turns towards it. The light on the creature's head blinks on and off. She thumbs left, points it out to Jengi.

“Is it a spy?”

“You asking me? Training day is over, Mother Cupboard. I already told you about everything I know.” Jengi is impressed, also sulking a little. He didn't plan on being rescued twice today.

The fence seems to undulate towards Zorry, soft webbing breathes in and out.

It takes her a moment to realise that Jengi's stopped walking altogether. She goes back for him. “Your hand?”

He bends his neck, looks down grimly.

There are small black veins still spreading out from Jengi's plant bite, just above the bandage. Zorry binds it tighter, making Jengi wince. “They'll turn into tree vines, if we don't stop the blood to ‘em. Gotta cut off the flow for a bit, it's what them sinews need to grow I reckon.” She explains. “You need to loosen it soon as you can, or you'll lose that hand.”

“Thank you.”

She nods. “We're even.” She says.

“There is one more thing I can tell you before you go back in alone, Zorry.”

“Aye. What's that?”

“If you see the shape of a man, or a woman, then drop. Hide. Get out as fast as you can.”

“Who …?”

“I ain't figured that yet. Runaway Sinta from the last era? The old forest workers, or stragglers from the old time? Egg Men sent in by the general in some new guise? One thing's for sure, the killing forest has changed them. What I saw …” He shakes his head. He stops talking for a moment. Grimaces. “But I don't care iffen you's in a patch of evil stingers when you see that kind of a human, you just drop, Zorry. Understand me?” Eyes her. “And then you get out.”

“Alright but …”

Jengi rubs his head with his right hand. He's thinking. “You may never see even one, iffen you never go into the dark mouth of the killing forest, Zorry. Most Mother Cupboards don't go there. There was only Mamma Zeina. We won't see her like again.” Jengi eyes Zorry curiously now, to see how she takes this challenge.

“You said that already. Holy baobab, Jengi. Do you ever stop trying to play folks? What has Bavarnica done to you, Digger? You might try being direct for a change.”

He eyes her gently swaying back as she walks away. “Play it straight eh? Maybe I will.” He says, low. Breathes out.

Zorry is looking toward the forest, looming up over the gently rippling fence. It's like a dark mouth, she thinks. On a night like this. The whole thing, a snake's body from tip to root. It seems to expand and contract at the edges. Zorry shudders. Looks away. Premonition washes over her. She can't say what it means, only a bad feeling. She tries to put it away.

THE EGG MEN

FATHER IS ON A mercy mission to his sister's house at the edge of the village. Her crop didn't come up this year, some kind of blight. Food sharing is strictly banned and getting even vegetables to her is a dangerous mission. He'll be gone all day. Zorry has gone to the allotment to see what Father has left them.

Mamma Ezray is alone in the house with Zettie when the Egg Men come. Watches their huge heads bobbing just above the hedgerow beyond the cottage. Mamma recognises the batch 47 Egg Boy, Antek. He stops to lace his boots on the path out front, forcing the two huge Egg Men to wait for him. This gives Mamma Ezray a precious moment to prepare.

“Run!” Ezray tells Zettie. “It's now, Child.”

Zettie pops her thumb out of her mouth. “No.” She says, firmly. And then Zettie, in her infant stubbornness, wastes crucial moments resisting being pushed toward the back door by her mother.

“I'm staying with you.” Zettie starts to cry.

“Zettie.” Mamma Ezray says, “Zettie, you've been trained for this. Be a Big Girl. Right now. Go and wait by the fence. Nobody will look for a child there at this time, except those who know to. Don't you want me to proud of you? Don't you want Zorry to be?”

Zettie thinks about this. Sets her mouth in a line and eyes
her mother stubbornly. “I don't rightly like to, there's a man in that forest. He's got slugs in his ears. I am going to stay here with you, Mamma.” She pops her thumb back into her mouth. Now her eyes are wide.

“Run.” Her mother hisses. Twists her hands. And then in her desperation, “I will be there. That's where I'll be. Zettie. By the fence. I'll be coming right behind you. You just got to wait for me. Now go, go.”

Zettie examines her mother's face. Then she heads for the kitchen and the back door beyond it. Closes the kitchen door behind her just in time.

Things unravel fast.

“It's now.” Ezray thinks.

She hears the back door softly open and then close. She believes Zettie's gone. Probably half way across the back yard by now, she calculates, counting down the steps. Or in the copse running around the back of the house, under the leaves. Zorry or Jengi will pick Zettie up by the fence when they hear, which will be soon, the Sinta grapevine being what it is. Mamma Ezray breathes out. She believes Zettie is safe.

Sound of boots in the gravel outside the front door now. Something comes to Ezray then, watching the door. Knowing that it will bust out of its hinges in just a moment. She has prepared for the possibility of this moment for so long that now it's here it's like a kind of dreaming feeling descends on her. She feels untuned and strange, standing here by her mother's wooden table. The door seems to her to glow with a strange life. Cold unravelling feeling in the mother cupboard's stomach. Now Ezray holds on to the wooden table with both hands.

The door bursts, just as though, she thinks, just as though it were made out of cardboard or paper.

“Witch.” The Egg Man says. And then his heavy boot, crunch, across the door jamb.

Ezray looks down at his boots on her newly mopped floor. For a long, unreal moment she can't imagine what they could be doing there. On her floor tiles. She looks slowly up from the floor.

“Witch.” He says again.

And then, taking two steps forward, knocking over a lamp and picking up Zettie's small doll. Looking into its face with a bemused expression and then tossing it to one side. “Look around you, Men. Look. Dirty paint-signs, voodoo dolls, smell of boiled plants. These Sinta are filthy animals, I tell you.” And then, “Search this room first.”

A moment later Mamma Ezray is laying cracked and broken on her tiled floor. Her mind is washing in and out. These are the tiles, she thinks, still looking at the Egg Man's huge boots on her newly mopped floor, these are the tiles my father painted and laid with love. Mixing and scraping cement carefully into the gaps between them. He finished his work so carefully, you'd think that it could last forever.

“Filthy Sinta witch.” The second Egg Man says.

Mamma Ezray notices that The Egg Boy Antek eyes her, small checking gestures. Unreadable expression. She can't see what he sees.

There is no point resisting, she thinks. Mamma Ezray is still looking at the tiles.

“Dirty witches.” Antek's father turns toward the second egg man and, in a conversational tone, the second Egg Man
replies, “They ain't strictly speaking human, the Sinta.” He says. “It's all been scientifically proven by the general.”

The Egg Men are pulling patched clothes and knitting, jars of preserved cactus chipotle, woven scraps and hen eggs from the drawers and under the floorboards. Paint pots. Seeds. Smashing all that they find without looking at it. “Witches. All of ‘em. We'll burn this lot after.” Points to the heap on the floor. “And we'll keep this pile, in case it comes in useful. Even the scrolls.”

“Burn it.” Says Antek's father quickly. “Burn it all.”

“It's poetry,” says the Egg Boy, looking down. “You do not do …” He reads.

“Let that Witch stuff alone, Boy.”

The Egg Boy takes a step back from the pile, though signs and symbols tend to draw his eye, he looks away from the scrolls. But the boy seems to stumble around now. He gets in the way. When Mamma Ezray gets up slowly, feeling her teeth with her tongue, the second Egg Man moves swiftly toward her but Antek, seemingly clumsy, trips and staggers across his path for the second time. Causing the second Egg Man to shove him, hard. “Wake up, Dunce. You're getting under my feet.”

“Yes, Sir. Sorry, Sir.” The Egg Boy stands up slowly, he is rubbing his arm.

“Keep out of my way, Egg Boy.” The second Egg Man says.

“He's a clumsy kid, that's all.” Says Antek's father. “Batch 47 are badly made, as you know. It ain't the boy's fault.” And then, “Well you heard him, Boy. Make yourself useful some way. This ain't training no longer.” Rubbing the back of his huge skull. “This here is it, Boy.”

It comes to Mamma Ezray some way, watching her hard-won possessions piling up around her. Her forehead against the floor and trying to feel her teeth in her mouth, Ezray remembers that she is loved. It's a curious sensation, like being washed with warm air. For a singular moment she feels sure that she is. Loved. A little light filters in at the edge of the patched curtain. The sunlit moment passes over, and is gone. Now her head throbs. There's a little blood running down the side of her temple. Vision blurring on the left side. Ezray goes on looking at the floor tiles for a long time. Up close to it, the way she hasn't been since her childhood, when she'd lain on the kitchen floor on her stomach every morning. Watching Father work. Painting the swirls and the arcs. Paint the curving feathers and the gem colours with his homemade paintbrush. Dragons with scales and fish bones, dogs, crows and rats, castle moats. And now the disjointed pictures on the blue tiles curling into a kind of slow sense. Blink, blink. It's as though Ezray sees the picture as a whole for the first time. Looks away from it quickly. No one saw what she saw.

Mamma Ezray had only seen her father cry one time in his life, although he'd lost so many loved ones in the reckoning era. He'd dug up something in the vegetable patch. Something he'd buried for safekeeping, under the slow growing root vegetables in the back yard. Whatever it was, he'd wept over it and then simply put it back. Covered it over with dark soil.

When her father had come back to the house there had been no sign in his face of what had just passed. Whatever it was he didn't ever seem to want to talk about it. Some relic, from the time before the purge, Ezray had always assumed. There were many Sinta who'd lost people in The Before and
there were so many of Ezray's uncles, aunts and older siblings who'd tried to flee to the mountains. Were caught by the Egg Men in the mouths of their own half-dug tunnels. No. Whatever it was her father had buried, dug up and re-buried in his back yard, he did not plan to share it with her and Ezray had accepted that, like a good Sinta daughter. He'd started painting the floor tiles around that time. A distraction from his grief, she and her mother had assumed. But he'd painted with such intensity, such concentration. He'd painted this last thing as though their lives depended on it now or would do soon. The mapmaker's very last map.

And then smiling to herself, recalling how Jengi spends his visits looking down.

Jengi saw it first, she thinks. Bless that Digger boy. He'll have it all in his head by now, the map to the general's version of Bavarnica. Its soft interconnecting parts, all the fish bones in Bavarnica's throat. Ezray rolls painfully on to her back and she looks up at the cracked ceiling above her. When it comes, the laughter starts up in her belly. And then seems to run up toward her throat, stopping there.

That sound.

A rattling at the back of the house. Ezray freezes, and then the understanding running through her body, unravelling her in slow parts. Zettie is still in the house.

The Egg Men heard the sound too.

“I'll see to that,” Antek says firmly. And then eye to eye with his father. “I need the … Killing practice.”

“Good. Make sure you do, Antek,” says his father, surprised. “Whatever it is …” He says sternly. “Whatever it is … Deal with it decisively. It's just like the calf, Antek. Nice clean kill.”

The Egg Boy makes no reply, turns to go. His face is unreadable. Antek takes three noisy steps toward the door to the kitchen then a brief pause at the door, as though he hesitates to leave the room. Catches Mamma Ezray's eye and something seems to pass between them. Antek blinks. He stares down at the door handle. Takes a breath. And then he opens the door to the kitchen. Closes it behind him softly.

Now Antek pulls off his helmet, so as not to alarm the child. Ruffles his hair and it stands up like feathers or a jumped in hay-pile. He puts his finger to his lips, smiles weakly. “Don't cry.” And then, “Shhh!”

Antek pads around the room, examining the exits. And then eyeing the closed adjoining door behind him. Now he moves toward the back door quickly, intending to open it, but Zettie scatters away from him toward the far side of the room.

In the next room, Mamma Zeina is dragged up by her collar. She is pinned to the wall. Eyes swivel right toward the door to the kitchen. And then looks away quickly. Puts her right hand on the cool wall behind her. Something comes to her, as she hears what she thinks are Zettie's tiny fingers battle with that grim latch on the back door of her house, as she fights with the lock to get out and Mamma Ezray can sense without seeing it that the lock becomes slithery, sweating, invincibly shut. She believes Zettie needs more time. She needed more time than I gave her. Mamma Ezray's eyes become wide.

Something comes to her. She can't say what it is.

Antek's not sure what the child did to the lock, but he can't open it just now. He checks behind him. Zettie is leaning against the rough, hard wood of the cupboard under the kitchen sink, and now, seeing the Egg Boy stare, she puts one
small arm up. She's nervously fingering the wood-knots, the curling traces of woodworm, the sharp rusting edges of the keyhole.

“The door latch is broken,” she says quietly. As though understanding without being told that he's trying to help. And then, “Mamma said that I have to go.”

“Yes. Yes, you have to go.” Antek gazes at the window. “You have to go to the copse and then go to where she told you to wait.” Puts his hands over his ears. “Don't tell me where that is. Don't. Okay?” He takes his hands away from his ears again. Smiles at the child, tries to smile. Zettie points to the latch at the top of the window. “I lost the key.” Antek reaches up and rattles the lock gently, to test it. “No,” he says quietly. Curses. And then he tries one more time, breathing heavily. In a bit he gives up. Turns back to face the room. He's trying to think.

Now Zettie watches Antek take the three steps back toward the kitchen door, pull the latch silently across it. Then ease the kitchen table over, quietly, skilfully, wedges it under the handle. That'll give her three seconds, he thinks. I might hold them three more. And then eyeing the window, the door, with increasing desperation. Breaking the window will be noisy, it'll bring them running. Six seconds isn't enough time for a child her size to cross the yard and dive into the copse.

The child seems to sense something. She slips underneath the table, curls herself into a ball. Closes her eyes. Hands over her ears, the way Mamma Ezray taught her to do when there are Egg Men searching for food in the cottage. Blink,
blink
. Opens her eyes again.

Antek pulls the child out gently, by her right arm. Scoops and plops her into the kitchen sink by the window. Casts about
for something to use to break the window, settles on his elbow. Something causes him to pause. He looks down at the child.

A scrap of a chance is better than no chance but something makes him stop here, by the window. And then it comes to him. He looks up at the sky. The changeover of the generators is coming. It will be dark soon. Antek briefly recalls that his father was always very insistent about the timing of this raid. Antek puts away the thought quickly. Now the child hears him softly counting down in twos, just under his breath.

The wind is blasting into the valley now, and the tree just beyond the back door is heaving at its roots and throwing its vast arms in the air. It seems, to the small girl in the kitchen sink, that it rolls its swelling belly knowingly, leans in menacingly toward the window. Zettie is squinting through her fingers at it. Waits.

Mamma Ezray spits. On the floor. Right on the Egg Man's boot. Just like that.

Time, she thinks, and now Mamma Ezray is holding the Egg Man's gaze with a clear cold eye.

And she could never quite work that lock, Zettie, always locking it when she means to unlock it, dammit, Ezray thinks, durnit, that thick sharp piece of metal, damn the thing for always and forever. Curse it now with all the night that you can draw toward it, burst it, rust it, ruin it, Draw Fire. Draw Fire. Draw Fire from that child. She sends an ancient Sinta curse toward the lock, although she hasn't believed in the Sinta curse since childhood. She believes in it now, at the end. Ezray rises to it.