The Emergency, page 15
“Serpents,” her father muttered. A minute later: “Do they really think we did this to them?”
She had never heard him sound so dispirited, and it made her nervous. “I tried to tell you. Man-eaters.”
“They’re not man-eaters,” he said. “They’re deluded. Which is worse.”
“Why?”
“You can reason with man-eaters when they’re full. Those farmers want revenge. They’ll never get enough.”
The road straightened and flattened as it passed between ragged hedgerows of yew and hawthorn. Selva always thought of this stretch as the beginning of the end of the trip.
“What’s our plan, Papa?”
He took a breath to gather himself. “Camp at the Place, then go to the pig farm in the morning, see if the Cronks can give us any information. It’ll be different talking to them. They know us, they won’t—”
He hit the brake hard. Selva, gazing out her window at the dappled light through the hedgerow, was thrown forward. She looked up and saw what her father had seen.
Twenty feet ahead, a dead tree limb the thickness of a man’s thigh lay across the road. On Selva’s side, half-hidden by the hedge, a figure was sitting in a chair and pointing a rifle at the hauler. It was impossible to tell if the figure was old or young, male or female, or even fully human, because it had the shape of a bull. Black horns grew from a furred scalp. Severed ears and hooves dangled at its sides. The body was wrapped in a shawl of brown hide, and the face aiming the gun had the inflamed eyes and flared, gold-ringed nostrils of a bull mask of painted wood.
The bull struggled to get up on its hind legs. It was naked below the waist, displaying a young man’s loins and a plainly human penis. Standing, the bull wobbled, knocking over the chair and spilling liquid from a clay pot, toppled backward to the ground, and fired a single shot straight up into the sky.
“Yeeeaaarrrg!”
The noise came from the far hedgerow. Another lavish figure ran out to the road. It was a wolf—a very tall one—also armed, also half-naked. The wolf dashed across the road in front of the hauler and stood over the fallen bull and jammed the stock of its rifle into the other’s belly.
“Get up! Damn fool! Burghburghkillems!”
While the bull groaned and tried to get to its feet, the wolf ran to the hauler, waving the gun overhead. Selva’s father wrapped an arm around her shoulders and with his other hand made an effort to cover her eyes. She pushed his hand off her face.
Just before reaching her door the wolf tripped, nearly fell, and righted itself. “Fuck!” It lurched toward Selva’s open window, and she recoiled from the sour stink of millet beer and human sweat.
The wolf’s face was not a carved wooden mask but the furry features of the animal itself, with pointed ears and open predator jaws and cutouts that revealed bloodshot eyes. The eyes roved over Selva and her father and Zeus, who was baring teeth and barking louder than he had that night in the park with the hooded figure. “Come on, Burghburghkillems!” the wolf yelled. “Gimme gimme give!”
“What do you want?” her father asked.
“Pay toll.”
“How much?”
The wolf quoted a fee that was equal to half a chief surgeon’s annual salary. It was drunk, Selva realized—too drunk to notice the bags in the hauler’s bed.
Her father leaned under his seat and pulled out the carved bone. “We have this.” He drew his finger along the machete engraving. “See? We’re approved.”
The wolf reached through the window across Selva, brushing her chest with a hairy forearm. Zeus growled as the arm withdrew with the bone. The wolf made a show of studying it. “No good.”
“It’s from Leader Gandorig. Safe conduct through Yeoman land.”
“Gandorig! Yeeeaaarrrg!” The wolf tipped its head back and let out a howl of rage that set Zeus barking again. “We control here.”
At that moment the bull arrived by the wolf’s side, and they fought over the bone. Both were standing too close to Selva’s door for her to see more than heads and torsos, but she couldn’t help thinking of what was down below. It wasn’t their nakedness that horrified her but the fact that neither the wolf nor the bull seemed to care, or even know. They were beyond human reach.
The wolf regained possession of the bone, took it between its teeth, and shook it like rodent prey, then hurled the bone high over the hauler into the far hedge, prompting a squeal of laughter from the bull.
“Hey!” her father cried. “We need that!”
He was doing everything wrong again—talking, engaging. She knew they had to get free of these two right now, their breath and bodies smelling like death. On impulse she pulled the goggles from under the seat and waved them in front of the wolf and the bull. “Look! They’re magic!” She tossed the goggles into the hedge and watched the two scramble after them, the wolf in front, the bull stumbling and thrusting its horns at the other’s hairless buttocks.
Selva leaned across Zeus. “Go!”
The tree limb jolted all four wheels front and back but wasn’t big enough to stop the hauler. In half a minute they were out of range. Selva waited for the sound of gunshots, but none came, and no village appeared—only road and fields and strangled trees in the setting sun. The wolf and the bull had set up their checkpoint in the middle of nowhere.
“Highwaymen,” her father said.
“Highway animals,” Selva said. “Happy? I got rid of them.”
“We’ll get another set.”
She had meant the wolf and the bull, not the goggles. “I don’t want another set.”
“Bones and masks,” her father said. “Animal worship. Kask had a name for it—I can’t remember.” He pulled off the road and came to an abrupt stop on a narrow grass shoulder. In the woods below there was a stream. By now it was too dark to see, but they could hear water running over rocks. Selva gave her father a quizzical look. “Call of nature,” he said.
When he returned, he sat with his hands on the wheel and stared through the windshield.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
He took his hands off the wheel and pressed them to his eye sockets. “Mama was right. I made a mistake, Sel, a big mistake.”
In the dying light she saw on his face a look of defeat that she’d never seen. What she had always taken for a deep, quiet knowing of things she didn’t yet know but would learn from him turned out to be mere comfort in the surfaces of a vanished life—table talk about school and work, a city without Strangers, plum wine. Take those away and he was lost. The realization terrified and thrilled her.
“What mistake?”
“I thought there’d be someone in charge that we could deal with out here. Every checkpoint is going to have its own boss.” He began to hit his eyes with the heels of his hands.
“Papa, please stop.”
“I’m sorry, I should have listened, why don’t I listen to you?” Selva understood that he was talking to her mother. Then he looked up as if seized with a new idea. “We have to go home.”
“What?”
“At first light. We’ll find a back road.”
“I refuse. We came all this way. We’re doing fine.”
“Sel, maybe you’re too—”
“Just drive.”
4
They left the hauler where they always parked, at a bend in the road, below a derelict water tower whose wooden supports were smothered in vines that climbed as high as the metal tank. But along the trail into the forest where sunlight didn’t penetrate, the hardwoods were still visible. Zeus, liberated from his daylong confinement, galloped ahead, nose to the ground, sprinting after a scent and then returning to the trail. Selva followed behind her father, who pointed his torch at roots and rocks and a trickle of muddy stream. It was almost full night, and the path took so many turns that they would have gotten hopelessly lost if not for Zeus’s memory of earlier visits. She knew the lake was near by the sound of the river running, the rising noise of frogs, glimpses of stars.
The Place was a flat clearing covered in pine needles between the woods and the ground’s slope to the water’s edge. They had happened on it one summer when she was eight or nine, during a family hike (Pan was still riding in the homemade carrier on their father’s shoulders, constantly pulling off his hat). Selva, the dauntless pathfinder forging ahead, had been the first to see the lake. It wasn’t very big—if you yelled loud enough you could almost talk with someone on the far side—but the tall pines ringing it all around were reflected on the sunlit surface, and its silver blue was the color of deep water, and the sight had brought her up short. She had stood in silence and held her breath, feeling that she had come upon an unknown land. She named it the Place because any other name would have diminished the sense of magnificent isolation, which not even the discovery on a subsequent trip of an abandoned hunting cabin in the nearby woods could take away.
Her father set his pack on the ground and pulled out the contents. He lit the paraffin lamp, and Selva poured a bowl of food for Zeus. They went through the procedure that he’d taught her years ago and she knew by heart: spread the canvas tent flat with its opening turned so that on waking they would see the lake, hammer the metal stakes all the way down with rocks, assemble the bamboo poles and thread them through the loops (when she was little she always got this part wrong), raise the structure so that tension on all sides kept the tent standing. While he hunted in the woods for dead branches and stones, she walked down to the dark water and filled the cooking pot. Then she crawled inside the tent and laid out the bedroll for herself and a blanket for him. She lay in the bedroll and watched her father make the campfire and chop potatoes and beans.
She should be helping, but it was so pleasant to lie here in the shelter of the tent with her face by the opening. The moon was a diminishing sliver above the lake, the stars profuse, and as she looked for the constellations he’d taught her to see she found herself slipping into a trance from the smell of cooking oil over the fire and the long drive and the strange encounters on the way. Her father was working in his fishing jacket, the rapid precision of his pocketknife, the stiffness in his lower back, shoulders a little hunched as he once said hers would also be after years in the medicine guild. He was humming tunelessly to himself, a habit when he didn’t think anyone was paying attention.
All day she had found him annoying, as if he were a helpless child and she the parent. But now, watching him by the firelight, she was eight years old again and hungry from a hike and her father was cooking dinner for them. In a few minutes they would be sitting together with the crackle of the fire and forks scraping tin plates. If he was no longer the most perfect man in the world, she loved him all the more. And when he called her to eat, she knelt beside him and wrapped her arms around his neck.
“Oh, Papa.”
By the time they had finished and washed up at the lake, the night was cold. He took the blanket from the tent, and they sat with it wrapped around their shoulders by the embers glowing in a ring of stones. He poured a cup of grain whiskey and speared a coal with his knife to light a cigar, while Zeus lay snoring at his feet. The familiar smells made Selva sleepy. She fought it off.
“What do you know about Better Humans?” she asked.
He drew on his cigar. “Not much,” he said into a cloud of smoke. “Almost nothing.”
“But what?”
“I saw a sign in the Warehouse District and asked a man about it.”
“Who was he?”
“The type of odd character you find there.”
“What did he tell you?”
“Something about being like gods. Perfecting our humanity. I didn’t press him.”
He waited, but Selva said nothing. Leave Better Humans alone. Talking about it would ruin it, the way her family had come up behind her after she’d discovered the lake and made banal comments about the pretty view.
“Where’s my Sel tonight?” her father asked.
She stared into the campfire’s orange glow. “Your Sel wishes she could light a match and burn the past. Just burn it all up.”
After a silence he said, “Why would you want to do that?”
She wanted to destroy this mood that she had allowed to wrap her in its arms, the comfort of firelight and Zeus asleep and her father’s soft voice in the dark. “To feel like I did today, with the Yeomen.”
“How did you feel with the Yeomen?”
“Like I knew what I was doing.” She didn’t say: Like I didn’t need you.
He took a sip of whiskey and set his cup on the ground. “If you set fire to the past, I’d lose a few things that are very valuable to me.”
“Name one.”
“The bones museum.”
She had been nine years old the summer he took her by riverboat to visit the capital. Just the two of them—her mother was caring for her grandfather after his stroke, and Pan was too young for such a journey. Three days of sunning in her father’s full attention, the trip planned to her wishes: a guided tour of public rooms in the old imperial palace; cheese and tea in a famous girls’ clothing store; an outdoor performance, with music, of the folktale every child of the empire knew—the story of a Burgher girl who loses her way in the woods and meets a Yeoman boy watering his goat by a stream. Adventures with witches and wildcats follow, and along the way each saves the other’s life. The tale ends in a meadow outside the walls of the girl’s hometown, where a bullfrog jumps out from under a log and instructs the children to hold hands and repeat an oath (the more poignant for their imminent parting and the inevitable divergence of their lives) that the whole audience, including Selva, recited with the performers: “Let man nor beast come between us two, let Burgher nor Yeoman divide us. Friends today, friends for all days.” This founding story of the empire made Selva and her father cry.
But the surprising highlight of the trip was the bones museum—the name she gave to the Imperial Museum of Man and Life. It had been her father’s idea, on their last day in the capital, and to make him happy she’d feigned eagerness, expecting to be bored. But years later she still remembered the museum’s smell of old cedar cabinetry, and the long dark hallways of the ground floor lined with glass cases that contained mounted animals, all amazingly lifelike—horses, wolves, falcons—and the assembled bones of giant mammals that no longer existed, skeletal birds suspended from great wingspans. The second floor held the human collection: an ancient skull fractured by some blunt weapon; the complete skeleton of a five-thousand-year-old child. There were scenes of early inhabitants of the region, with one family of clay models dressed in sheepswool and leather sandals. The papa stood facing the back of the case, legs apart, aiming a primitive rifle at a fleeing stag, and the mama squatted amid gourds of millet. In the foreground a boy of about Selva’s age, nine or ten, sat cross-legged on the dirt, his close-cropped head bent over something in his lap—a wrinkled sheet of yellow goatskin, covered in writing that looked like rows of tiny pictures. On the boy’s face was an expression of deep concentration, and Selva had assumed the same look as she tried to make sense of what he was reading. The brass label fixed to the bottom of the case said EARLY BURGHER FAMILY.
“How do we know they’re Burghers?” she had asked her father.
“We don’t,” he had said. “There were no Burghers then, or Yeomen. Those groups came later. It might just be the museum’s way of getting us to see the connection to ourselves.”
“But what if we were Yeomen?”
He gave her hand an affectionate squeeze. “Good question! I imagine the museum gets very few Yeoman visitors.”
That day there were few visitors of any kind. They had the hallways almost to themselves, and her father turned those two hours into an education in nature and man, explaining about the structure of bones, the classification of species, the rise of civilization, the principles of scientific inquiry, the values of curiosity and objectivity and common humanity. The museum described the establishment of the empire and its most successful creations: the imperial palace and its guards, the system of Good Development, the trade routes, cities, guilds, comprehensive exams. It was a story of gradual, continuous progress, and Selva imagined the city by the river and her own family as the pinnacle in the final room. She found herself thinking for the first time about the world as not simply there, something given, but as a subject for study and appreciation that could bring purpose to a whole lifetime.
As they walked out into the park by the river, her father—his voice breaking with emotion—said, “There’s nothing higher than what is human, Sel.”
“Why, Papa?” At that moment she’d been picturing the fractured skull.
“We build museums, we collect relics, we study and order and name them. What other creatures do this? Everything we saw in there is a tribute to the human spirit. Without it the world is just killing and eating.”
As they had strolled along the river, she had become aware of a secret he was passing on to her and her alone: This is how to live. And now, remembering by the campfire, she again felt the wonder of that gift, bound up with a father’s love.
“You’d burn the bones museum?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because it was a lie.”
“What do you mean?”
“All the things you were talking about that day. Progress and the glory of man. Life isn’t a museum.”
“Of course it isn’t.”
“But you still want me to live like you, when there’s so much wrong with the world.”
“Live like me how?”
“Like everything is the way it should be. Like if there’s vines, we can’t do anything about them.”
“The vines aren’t anyone’s fault. There’s no Conspiracy. The Yeomen didn’t get organized, they didn’t have the right tools.”
“But the vines are unfair. So many things are unfair.”
