The Scorpion Rules (11 page)

Shouldn't take an oracle to interpret that one,
said the Utterances.
These Children are
mine.
Touch them and people will be talking about you for centuries.

Grouuuuuu,
Charlie howled, and the Royal Visitor sounded his trumpet:
Graaallll!
The woman holding the visiting billy took a few stumbling steps forward as the goat surged—and the lead broke.

The Royal Visitor was a good-size animal, a black buck with white blazing, and fine curved horns. He took off for us with his head down, fast. Bonnie Prince Charlie bellowed, Han yelped, Grego grabbed Han, Thandi shouted, Xie raised her hands as if in divine dismissal, Atta stepped in front of Xie, and Elián—well, Elián, of course, gave an earsplitting yell and ran forward. He caught the Royal Visitor in a flying tackle. Goat and boy and proctors went spinning in a tumbleweed of black and white.

When the dust cleared, Elián was sitting on the goat's back, with his hands tight around one horn. He was sporting a bruised eye and a ridiculous grin, and laughing.

With his heroic credentials as goat-catcher firmly in place, Elián introduced himself to the family of trommellers, and was shortly fast friends with them. That evening saw them sitting together in the refectory, where Elián did a routine about the differences between sheep and goats that had our visitors—frightened and subdued as they were, to be caught in the strangeness of the Precepture—laughing into their roasted cauliflower. The old woman had a laugh that ended with a snort like a deer blowing. Uncivilized, certainly, but a free and wild sound. She laughed until she had to push her plate away and lay her head on the table.

We lingered over dessert—we children did not often have visitors who had not come to kill us, so we had the urge to feed them well, though it would mean later reduced rations of honey—and Elián's conversation grew deeper and quieter. I could not get close enough to hear, because the trommellers were in awe of me. To them I wasn't just a hostage. I was the daughter of their queen. The adults kept glancing at me with reverence and a kind of knowing pity. One of the little ones had actually curtsied, spreading her bright and tattered skirts. When she called me princess, it sounded like a thing to be cherished.

So I was reduced to watching them from across the room. I noticed that Elián's hair was growing out. It made small curls at his collar and behind his ears.
Don't do anything stupid,
I thought, trying to beam the thought at him. Though, frankly, it seemed too much to ask.

Xie saw my gaze, and gave me a smile I could not quite read— Was it indulgent? Sad? She took my hand, and drew me out of the refectory and then out of the Precepture hall altogether. The sun was setting and the full moon was coming up in the east, over the river.

We were almost out of time.

Elián was going to try to escape. I was sure of it. And I was sure they'd catch him. Sure they'd hurt him, and not only him.

“It's strange in there tonight,” said Xie. “It's strange to see people bow to you.”

“The little one was so sweet. But the adults—they look at me as if I'm a sacrificial virgin.”

“Well, now that you mention it . . .”

Xie caught my eye and suddenly we were both laughing, for a moment forgetting all about the Panopticon, about Elián, about the thirst of Cumberland and the coming war—about everything. These dark thoughts came back only slowly, and even then they seemed lighter.

Xie walked along the top of the stone wall between the lawn and the lower terraces—walked in the air with her hands outspread, a mountain child, a mountain god. It was a warm evening, ruffled with breezes, beaded with lightning bugs. At the end of the wall she reached down for my help, and I reached up to help her. She swung down on my hand. Her fingers wrapped around mine, and hand in hand we picked our way along the edge of the lawn. “You know,” she said, “if you are concerned, we could probably find a way to deal with the ‘virgin' part.”

I blinked at her.

“I'm sure there would be volunteers.” Her voice was warm, but there was something freezing up in her face. I could usually tell what she was thinking, but not now. “Elián—inside, you were watching him.”

And she knew why. I'd felt her attention swing around me on hormone day, when I'd tried to warn Elián: Saskatchewan will kill you. The Precepture cannot be escaped.

I could think of nothing to say to her now, nothing that was safe. “I was, I guess. I was watching him.”
Help me, Xie. What should we do?

“Elián, Elián,” mused Xie. “He's compelling, I'll give him that. And you have no idea what to do with a compelling boy, do you?”

“Yes I do,” I protested.

“You do?”

“I don't know why people assume classicists are prudes,” I said. “The Roman lyricists, in particular, can be quite bawdy.”

Xie made a little noise in her throat, like a dove. “As it happens, I wasn't thinking of your reading material.”

We came to the end of the wall. Xie sat down on the round back of a stone and hugged her knees to her chest. I sat beside her, and glanced at the Panopticon. Its lifted sphere was still lit pink by the sun, though on the ground, shadows were gathering. Let it think we were talking about boys. We were—but also, we weren't.

Xie brushed the hair out of her face. “Do you remember Denjiro?”

I did; of course I did. Denjiro had been in one of the older cohorts when Xie and I were smaller. His country had been slipping toward war, as mine was now, and he had . . . He'd used a pitchfork to do it. There had been a lot of blood.

“We're all running,” said Xie. “Sometimes we fall.”

“If Elián—” But there was no safe way to say it. If he ran away . . .

Denjiro. The popular theory, vis-à-vis the pitchfork, was that he'd planted it tines-up in the watermelon beds, climbed onto a terrace wall like the one we were on now, and then—

We were all running. Denjiro had fallen.

If Elián ran away . . . I could not say that aloud, but I could trust Xie to follow the jump of my thought. “If he does, it will be terrible.”

Terrible for him. Terrible for all of us.

For a moment Xie just sat there, watching the moon, the breeze off the river making strands of her hair dance above the mass of it, like the plume of snow off a mountain. “Still. It is his to do.”

And it was.

He was going to die. He deserved a chance to do it on his terms. No matter what it cost us.

W
e came to the day on which the trommellers were due to leave.

Elián was there at breakfast. He was looking at his food as if it were an algebra test—equal parts concentration and desperation. He had his head tipped down and his eyebrows knotted up and his free hand in a fist on his knee. It was not the world's most inviting posture. We were all afraid to touch him, lest he snap at us, or shatter.

When the bell rang to send us out into the gardens, he got up with a huge scrape of bench on floor. I saw him take three apples from the bowl by the door.

He strode out in front of everyone.

I took Xie's hand and we followed him. Her fingers were tight. We were both afraid.

But by the time we reached the gardens, Elián was nowhere in sight.

The trommellers were taking down their tents, packing up their bags. There were not so many of them, and yet there seemed in those moments to be a thousand. And my fellow hostages, too, seemed multiplied. There were children helping our visitors, children tending to the trommellers' goats, children just stealing a moment to sit in the shade as the day began to open and blaze.

Where on most days I could have seen at one glance that there were seven of us, and we were all where we should be, on this particular day it was hopeless.

It was Elián's perfect chance, and I knew he'd take it.

Still, I looked at each face and hoped I would find him. Hoped at the same time that I would not find him. Hoped that he had taken something better than three apples.

The trommellers were wrapping their heads, pulling on their smoked goggles, shrugging on their coats and packs. I looked at them one after another, but I did not find Elián. Slowly things were settling, the trommellers gathering together, and the Children of Peace finding their groups. Slowly it was becoming clear: Elián was gone.

“Where is he?” hissed Thandi.

We were gathering baskets from the toolshed, going out to pick apples. The six of us. It was now spotlight-obvious that we were only six. Thandi had squeezed out the question while in the shelter of the lintel, but it still made all of us sneak looks at the Panopticon, checking the sight lines.

“It doesn't matter if they see me ask,” said Thandi. “Do you really think they haven't noticed he's gone?”

“But where is he?” said Han.

“None of us know,” I answered. For surely if Elián had not (quite) told me, he would not have told anyone.

Han looked puzzled, Grego frightened, Thandi furious—another of our prefabricated moments. We were pressed together, tightly knotted in the doorway, as if that would protect us. We knew it wouldn't, but it was hard not to hope.

“We should get the Abbot,” said Han, even as Thandi said: “We should turn him in.”

“That would not spare us,” said Grego.

And Da-Xia turned her face to the open air and said, “Let him have whatever time he has.”

As she said it, bells started to ring overhead, tolling like disaster, like fire, like a call to arms.

“Yeah, time's up,” said Thandi.

“Indeed,” said the Abbot, coming around the corner. “If you would all come with me.” He made his mouth curl up a little, a cool parody of a smile. “We have a guest.”

The Abbot had us sit on the lawn. The trommellers were nowhere in sight, but they had to be around—the Royal Visitor was eating our watermelons. Proctors were herding the rest of the Children of Peace inside. It was high morning. The sun beat down. The bells stopped, and still we sat there, motionless. My stomach felt tight and sick. The Abbot stood in front of us with his hands folded. No one said anything.

Then, suddenly, movement. One of the trommellers came stumbling toward us, across the lawn. At her heels was the big scorpion proctor. We could see from the way she leapt and staggered that it was herding her with electricity—pushing her along as if she were a goat.

She came up to us, panting. Her eyes were wide and her mouth was pulled open in pure fear. “I didn't do anything!” she gasped. “I didn't!”

“This is Hannah,” said the Abbot mildly, and mostly to us. “It seems Hannah is missing her shoes.”

We looked at Hannah's feet. They were bare. And big, for girl's feet.

“I didn't, I didn't. Please—” begged the child. She was our age, but without our training she did seem a child. There were fresh little blisters up and down her bare ankles—electrical point burns.

“You are missing your shoes, and I in turn am missing a hostage,” said the Abbot. “It seems an odd coincidence, Hannah.” He was looking not at Hannah, but directly at us.

I looked at my own feet, clad in their tabi. Finally, finally, I saw the point of tabi: one could not go far with so little protection for one's feet.

“What else is missing, I wonder,” said the Abbot. “Wipe your nose, Hannah, dear. I need an inventory.”

“Father Abbot,” said Xie tentatively. The proctor lashed out at her, making her cry out and lean backward, breathless. No kind, brave words would be sparing anyone this time.

The proctor minced forward, pushing itself into the skirts of Hannah's traveling coat. One of its multi-jointed arms lifted the coat aside, then insinuated itself around her ankle, wrapping it like a cuff. The girl stood, frozen and shaking. From where we sat at her feet, we could see the urine stain spreading down one leg. “Now, Hannah, do try to think,” said the Abbot. The grip of the proctor was growing tighter. Tighter. “There aren't so many of you that you don't know. What else is missing? Water skins? Packs? A map?”