Stone Seeds (25 page)

THE GRAIN QUEUE

SINCE THE NIGHT OF the fire and the chair, something seems to have been released in Zettie. All the leftovers that no-one else can see a job for, Zettie finds. Together them throwaway things can be more, Zettie knows that. Wind worn glass shards. Bones of a cat. Grind ‘em. The dried out skin shed by a lizard. Burnt things. Bloodied stones. All these things can make paint. The way Mamma Ezray used to make paint. Only Zettie thinks of things Mamma Ezray hadn't thought of.

She considers the nails and screws in the burnt up chair. Pulls them out of the cold ashes. With a thing like that Zettie can build something that stands, or something that can be fixed high and is hard for the Egg Men to take down, giving folks a chance to take a sideways look at it. Soon everyone will know what Zettie knows, that's the plan. They will know the new lizard's safe to eat. And that's when Mamma will come home. The thing has become very clear to Zettie.

Before sun up, Zettie is chalking lizards on the busted-in doors of the Sinta cottages. She's scratching lizards into the sides of broken bricks and on to the rubble of the tumbledown Sinta allotment buildings, mud daubed lizards along the tree trunks and low branches in the long copse which runs along the back of the cottages.

The child's gone mad, an effect of her medication, is the
general feeling in the Sinta households, as they scrub off the chalk swirling tails and chalk scales, the wide chalky eyes of the eating lizards. Mamma Ezray's lost youngest child has gotten their attention.

The sign takes a long time to finish carving with the small kitchen knife and, when it's done, then it's heavy to drag to the village centre, and much too heavy to climb the side of the village shop with. Also Zettie has a slight loss of nerve, looking up. In the end she leaves it tipped up against the side of the wall, in the dark alleyway beside the shop. But by sundown, Zettie has made around forty-seven small lizard drawings beside the grain queue, outside the shop. Nobody notices anything at first, just a small bent-over child, by the queue. Scribbling in the dirt with a stick.

“Sand paintings, Zettie? Have a slurp of rainwater from my flask, Zettie.”

“The poor child. Are you lost? I've got some crumbs in my apron pocket.”

“Oh wait, me too. Here, have these, Zettie. To keep you going, that looks like hard work.”

By the time Zettie gets to the last lizard, then she's had a little practise. This one is the best one, she thinks. Staring hard at a wide eyed infant, peering at her over his mother's shoulder. And then she takes a small twig out of her apron pocket, sharpens one end. Plants the pointed end of the stick in the hard sandy ground outside the shop. Leaf for a flag, to warn folks it's there.

The leaf flag is soon ripped, the sharpened stick twisted and bent. Zettie's last lizard sand painting has been trodden in by one hundred Sinta mothers and their offspring and the feet
of more than a thousand edge farm fathers, all jostling and irritable with hunger in the grain queue.

The grain queue dwindles as the general's curfew approaches. The dark seems to come down around Zettie softly.

Zettie is gazing down at the ground where her flag stood. And then looking up toward the shop. Brief shrewd stare at Gaddys, staring blindly out from behind her counter.

And then pushing out her small chin, Zettie pops her thumb in her mouth.

I need paint, she thinks. Eyeing Gaddys' coiled hair. Paint. And I need something good to paint on. Zettie looks down at her skin. And then she knows it, knows it suddenly. Zettie knows what to do.

Zettie runs home as fast as her small legs will take her.

Gaddys watches, nodding slowly. The child seems to her to be fleeing. Well, that's a good start. Gaddys smiles.

It's time to get ready, Zettie thinks, running. Ready for Mamma. Trees and shrubs are whizzing past her. She's making tiny footprints in the dust road all the way home.

Mamma will be pleased when things are … Ready. She thinks. Mamma will see and know, Zettie tells herself. Zettie has not dared to go back to the fence since that night. But every night when the child dreams, Mamma is there. She is waiting for Zettie to be brave enough, good enough, to come, Zettie thinks. And then seeing Mamma Ezray, in her mind's eye. The cobweb thin white fence to the killing forest pulses and undulates behind her.

When Zettie reaches the stone wall outside her cottage, she stops. And then, to avoid her father and aunt, Zettie slips
around it and into the shed at the back. Mamma Ezray's paint pots are still there, untouched since she left.

A strange feeling of delight is growing in Zettie, looking around at the paints. Mamma Ezray did not normally allow Zettie near her precious paints, except under careful instruction, when she might allow Zettie to mix some herself. Zettie's forgotten Mamma Ezray's training, of course (Mamma Ezray herself was trained by her father, the mapmaker). I can't remember, Zettie thinks. Skewering open a lid, finding the paint pot empty. Then again, some of the work is instinctive.

Red earth, mixed with a little moisture from the rain barrel, makes orange. The rows of leaf stems and the sap from the vines that creep around the back of the cottage, drape themselves over the shed roof like basking snakes, they make a blue-tinged dark green. As it turns out. There is some dried up, turquoise coloured paint at the edge of one pot lid, and on the ridged underside of another one, pink. The kind, Mamma used to say, that makes you think of seashells. Zettie has never seen a seashell. But on the back of her hand there is a deep, bright blue colour, when she looks. It's softly mottled with black. She must have picked it up by accident, messing with the pots.

The more that she explores, the more colours she makes.

Next morning, Zettie finds her way into the shed before sun up, when the air's still moist and cool and the hens are clucking sleepily in the henhouse. Zettie paints the scales first, arms and legs. She has no mirror, so her face is harder, must be painted by feel. When she's done with the scales, eyes and nostrils, more or less replicating the species colour of the lizard, she goes back and with a chunk of coal makes smudged
black lines and circles, to indicate the special markings of the new lizard. The eating lizard. Zettie's feet seem to make their own way back toward the grain queue. Zettie looks down at them often, blue and green and grey, strange. She doesn't feel like herself.

“Wow! What are you doing, Child?”

“Eating lizard.” She explains. Popping her thumb out and then in.

“Ah, Zorry. Lizards won't eat you. Don't be afraid of them little lizards.”

“What's she doing?”

“Oh she's thinking about them killing forest lizards. I've reassured her. Mad little thing. Motherless thing.”

“Oh those. Reckon they's pizen Zettie. Don't be touching those things, Zettie.”

Zettie watches as the queue moves away. She feels her mother getting farther from her. It's a rising feeling of panic. Now Zettie moves to the front of the queue, blocks the door to the shop with her tiny body. And then lays down across the door jamb. Holds up the line. The villagers begin to step over the child.

“We get it, Zettie.” An old edge farmer says, leaning over, scratches his ancient ear. Taps the side of his round nose. “Eating lizards. Spread the word, eh? Got it.” Tugs his long silver-black straggled beard. Zettie sits up. She looks dangerously pleased and the old man glances briefly at Gaddys, gets up, wincing, from his crouched position. “Ancient knees,” he says, making a distracting show of tipping sideways, leaning on the shelves. And then looking at Gaddys squarely, “I gave her a sweet. Guess she's crazy happy about
that.” Someone hisses at Zettie to scram. She doesn't see who it is.

“Do not feed that lizard child again.” Gaddys stares the old man down.

There are whispers running up and down the grain queue all day.

CRACKDOWN

THERE WAS A BOMB last night. At sun-up Antek was one of those called up for rubble clearing duty.

“Foreign bomb.” The tannoy said, on repeat. Its high pitched reproachful tone rising up over the barracks.

It's unusual to have a drone attack at the heart of the OneFolks' village but not unheard of. Whoever sent it apparently didn't know Bavarnica too well, and the officers' barracks even less well, Antek notes. The prisoners' wing was the most badly hit, and the side of batch forty seven's barracks a steaming pile of rubble and metal. The torn sides of the main building like a dollhouse. Meantime the batch 46 guards somehow had enough time to entomb themselves inside the steel bomb shelters. The general's top officers in their reinforced towers remained completely untouched by the blast.

The surviving prisoners, the walking wounded, are made to clear up and rebuild. That's Bavarnica's policy. Make them hate the bombs and the bombers and the foreign powers who sent them. “See what they do to you?” The message comes out loudly over the tannoy, clear across the barracks. “These foreign folks aren't anybody's friend. They are only bombs and death. Long death from which only the general can protect us.”

Several of the officers hadn't been in reinforced towers at
all, but had been called to a single building for a meeting just moments before the blast. That building was simply scorched ground now. In addition, a handful of the batch 46 Egg Men had found, at the last moment, that their keys to the bomb shelters were missing. Antek's father was the only survivor of these. In any case, he'd headed towards the batch 47 barracks when he heard the siren, he was looking for his son when the drone hit.

Antek was called in late last night for an extra duty. He was to provide an hour of overtime to the general's wife, scrubbing the mould off the windows to her orangery and that's where he was when the first blast sounded. Antek hasn't seen his father for several hours. He sweeps up the bomb-dust, hoses down fires. Clears up the bodies before the rats and crows finish clearing up the bodies. Sweeps up fingers and toes, other body parts and, with the help of the prisoners, hauls out the dead from underneath the rubble. Drags them toward the gas-lit smoking pyres in the corner, where the old batch 47 barracks used to be.

From time to time Antek turns around and eyes his barracks. It's just a hole in the ground now, a pile of rock and dust beside that. The drones clean took batch 47 all out. If Antek hadn't been sent on his strange work rota before sun up, he knows he'd have been in the barracks too. Dead.

When the clean up was almost done and before the rebuilding had started, Gaddys came to examine the scene. She ticked boxes on a chart, mostly. Made red marks against a long list of names. Poked at pieces of rubble and eyed the broken buildings, sniffed.

You can't clear it all away, Antek thinks, sweeping, clearing,
mopping, stacking and re-stacking. Pouring cement over scorched ground. There are always things remaining. A small brass button in the corner of a prisoner's half wrecked cell, non-uniform. The faded photograph of a long-ago child, laughing. Raising up her arms to some unknown new thing.

There are melted candles in the rubble of batch 47 barracks. An ancient postcard with rat-chewed edges, cafe scene with a musician, parasol and a woman. Hatless. Veil-less. These things had broken Antek up more than the blood and gore had, the burnt limbs. The dead remain not in grotesque butchered pieces but in their mementoes. The things they hoard and keep for years and will die to do so, thrown up to the surface by the bomb now. Like small dreams, sprouting out of the rubble.

Now Antek is standing at the very edge of the bomb crater which marked where the prisoners' cells had been. His eye is strung to the one green patch in the grey scene. It's on the other side of the crumbling wall to the batch 47 barracks.

Smoke still twists up from the remains of the building. There are grey mounds of rubble, and then, farther away, unfathomably green swathes of the killing forest appearing over the damaged fence just behind it. Antek eyes the fence carefully. Notes it's being rebuilt quite fast using what looks like swathes of cotton but on closer examination appear more like layers of cobweb. The fence seems to swell until the green forest vanishes once more behind the white veil of fence.

Night seems to fall quickly. The sky is now starless. One purple cloud of bomb-dust seems to him to open and swallow the old moon in a seamless gulp. And then give it all back, unfurling its lips and rolling out its long smokey tongue. Held
the moon for a moment, held it there on the tip. Strange sky. Like a wordless warning.

A long, skinny cat skims past Antek's foot, too large for a Sinta domestic and too small to be from the OneFolks' village. Antek blinks, recognises the black markings, huge tufted ears of the caracal. Blinks again and it's gone.

“Did you hear?”

“Hear what?” Antek turns. He is gazing into the face of the only other surviving batch 47. Remembers the red-headed Egg Boy had a tendency to sneak out before dark. Nobody knew why but the batch 47 soldiers tended not to inform on each other, and apparently he wasn't home in time to be caught.

“The general's wife has been arrested.” The red-headed Egg Boy says. Rubbing his luminous red hair between his fingers. The Egg Boy stalks away as quickly as he appeared. Disappears behind the rubble near the only remaining busted part of the fence to the killing forest. Antek waits a moment but the red-headed Egg Boy does not reappear. Antek quietly wonders how long he can last in the killing forest, batch 47 weren't trained for it. It doesn't bear thinking about too much. Then again, no need for an Egg Boy to worry about the snakes.

And in a moment, “You, Antek.” A batch 46 Egg man taps his clip board. “We're rounding up batch 47. Any survivors?” Peers at Antek. “I mean anyone but you?”

Antek looks squarely at the man with the clip board. Brief glance toward the fence. “Just me.” He says.

“Right.” The Egg Man checks his clipboard, makes a mark on the page. Taps it with the end of his pen. “Right, Boy. You are on duty at the fence.”

The Egg Man watches Antek go.

When Antek rounds the corner, he finds the next block is quite different, worse. Bomb rockoned buildings, smoke, rats scattering over the road, slipping in and out between the rubble. There is a small group of Sinta crouching in the ruins of their cottage, mostly old folks and children. There are several Sinta houses built on the periphery of the soldiers' barracks.

No-one turns toward Antek as he passes. They are counting their dead.

An ancient wooden rocking horse, peeling paint and one eye missing, is upturned in a pile of bricks. Its one remaining eye is wild and elated.

Antek looks away and down.

He notices that his boots are coated in brick dust. Something cold and slick's sliding in his gut.

Antek makes his way steadily toward his father's house. He wants to check in on his mother. This is what Antek tells himself. He gets as far as the gate outside the house. Pauses. The farmhouse wasn't hit, but it seems changed somehow. Firstly, there's a thick fence all around it, which is usually only used in the case of house arrests. His father's house behind the fence seems faded somehow. Smaller.

Now Antek turns and looks at the Sinta house next door. Zorry's house. There is a fence around that too. Glinting in the early light. Perhaps she will be there, he thinks.

The second fence looks sharp and new, set against the peeling paint of the cottage. Antek notes its recently broken gutters, boarded up windows. The fence like a cage that grows as the Sinta cottage sinks behind it, and the fence oddly tilting upward with the rising land. Making the fence seem larger
than it really is. Incompetently made (Antek makes a quick and unforgiving appraisal: Misfit hinges. Lolloping gate. A steel trap of a latch that's sharp and rusting quickly). And the gate is properly stuck. It takes Antek a moment to realise that he really can't open the gate.

He goes back to his father's house.

Now he's gripping down on the latch, grabs the gate between his hands, strains against it. Hauls and twists and pulls at it again. Stuck. And then it's like he's holding one end of a rope and pulling it through space, not expecting anyone to be holding the other end of it. Antek sits back on his heels. He puts his hand to his chin, feels the soft groove of the scar there. This seems to release something in Antek. He remembers.

He must have been hiking with his father, as a small boy. Headed out for The Reach together. He looks up toward the mountain's sheer rock face. Remembered how his father used to hide from him in the rocks overhead, dip behind tufts of scrubby grass. Unravel and let go the boy's safety rope. What was the lesson? There was always a lesson. “Trust no-one.” Father would say. “No-one, Boy.”

Antek had fallen several feet down that day, and he can still recall his left cheek sliding down the rock. The boy had slipped down hard and fast, saved himself just two feet from the mountain base. Tumbled the last part and broke his left arm.

“Better than your head, Boy.” His father got down safely moments later, stood over him.

And when he closed his eyes at night, in the weeks and months afterward, Antek's recurring dream: of the frayed end of the safety rope that was meant to hold him. The side of the
mountain slipping away from him fast.

Antek holds on to the gate to his father's house. He stops pulling. He leans against the gate. I can't go home, he thinks. I can't go forward or back.

Antek slides his rusted flask up from the ground. He wraps the leather strap of it around his palm, slips away. The morning light dips and shudders. The dawn comes right before the dip, and then the general's sun rises. A search beam or a giant pumpkin. First light, Antek thinks.

On an impulse, Antek digs under the fence to the Sinta cottage, slides through the gap. He takes two or three steps toward the Sinta house. Raps on the front door which has been newly mended by somebody. In theory Antek knows he's entitled, as an Egg Boy, to do this. To be here. But it feels wrong to him.

Antek waits. Seeing from this close how Zorry's house decays. The curving wooden arches round the outer doorway and one hundred tiny loops the woodworm made. In patterns seeming orderly, strange. He realises the door is mended with rough hewn wood from a killing forest tree. There's a painted lizard on it. Orange paint. Like a warning.

Zettie pokes her small head out the window, points to the side of the house. “Father made Zorry live in the shed.” She says. Intuiting what Antek wanted to know.

Antek raps abruptly on the shed door. One, two, holds his breath,
three
. Then he puts his palm against the door. He raps too hard then. Raps violently. Now he is concerned that he's scared her, caused Zorry to flee under or around the back of the shed. There's a long silence, but it's filled with life, that quiet. He knows that Zorry is inside, listening. Trying to figure
the knock. Who it is. What it means. She sees the shadow of an Egg Boy in the glass pane of the shed door. Freezes. Egg boy, Antek thinks, looking at his own reflection in the mottled glass. He turns abruptly to leave.

And now mechanical sounds, at a distance. Metal loose in metal, low thrumming, insect sounds. They're rebuilding the barracks with machines now. The clean up must be over. Soon it will appear as though nothing happened there.

Zorry opens the door softly behind Antek. She steps out of the shed. Antek looks down at his arm and sees Zorry's hand there. Small shock of her touch on his skin. She says his name. And then,

“Are you the last of your tribe?”

Antek holds up two fingers. “Two.” He says. “There are two of us.” Zorry nods. “I thought I saw red hair at the edge of the killing forest,” she says. And then, “What will you do?”

She looks at the side of Antek's head. Points. Your head wound is healing. Eyes the clotting wound knowingly. And then,

“What's that?” Zorry's eyes widen. She points to a place both above and behind him.

Antek turns. He looks in the direction that she's looking.