The Emergency, page 16
Zeus, stretched across her father’s feet, raised his head and cocked his ears as if he’d heard a noise. Her father stroked his flank and, after glancing back at his master, Zeus returned chin to paw.
“All right,” her father said, “torch the past and start over. I’m sure your generation will do better than mine. Burn all the things I’ve given you. But be careful, Selva.” Something in his tone made her turn to look at him. He was staring at the dying fire as if he was thinking of the saddest thing in the world. “You might need them someday.”
“I’ll have Together.”
“Really? Six far-fetched ideas that some self-org committee came up with the day before yesterday? Together will crumble under your feet. Then what will you have?”
“What do you have?”
He took a long draw on the cigar and held it in his mouth before exhaling a stream of smoke upward. “Science. Reason. Listening to the other side.”
“Oh—your humanism? That tired old thing? Humans aren’t so wonderful, Papa.”
“When did I say we were?”
“At the bones museum!” He had unsteadied her, but now she saw her line of attack. “We came out here because you thought everyone was exaggerating about Yeomen. ‘Don’t call them man-eaters!’ Friends today, friends for all days—that’s what you thought. Those two guys at the checkpoint—are they what you mean by listening to the other side?”
“Drunken fools. We have them in the city, too.”
“You wanted to go back home.”
“I have a responsibility to keep you safe.”
“I’m the one who kept you safe. You lost your nerve.”
As soon as Selva said it, a flush of regret washed through her. Somewhere on the lake a waterbird cried out. She shivered. Her father put an arm around her, and she laid her head on his shoulder.
“Why did you want to come with me?” he asked.
“Why did you?”
“I thought it would be another of our adventures,” he said. “And I had something to make up to your mother.”
“What?”
He shook his head. “It’s late. We’ll let the fire go out.”
When he didn’t move she stood up, trying to hold on to a picture of that other girl—not the frightened one behind the goggles or the weak one on the gallows, but the girl in metal and clay with a rifle at her eye.
“Why are we arguing, Sel?” her father said. “In the morning we’ll see if the Cronks know where the boy is.”
“Are the Cronks still our friends?”
“I hope so.”
He stubbed out his cigar on a rock and tossed the last of his whiskey into the hissing embers.
5
Zeus was barking. He was inside the tent on his feet, but Selva had sunk so deep asleep that she couldn’t move and only sensed the tautness of his limbs against her leg. “No barking,” her father ordered in a wide-awake voice. He climbed out of the tent and Zeus followed, quietly growling, and Selva slipped back into sleep. A few hours later, when the first bars of sunlight over the lake entered the tent flap and struck her eyes, she had no idea where she was.
Her father was already moving around outside the tent, feeding Zeus, getting breakfast together. Last night the Place had been firelight surrounded by darkness. Now Selva saw the blackened remains of the campfire, the needle-strewn ground sloping down to the lake, the low sun over the far ridge glinting silver on the water, and around the lake a wall of thick green gloss speckled yellow and red where the pine trees were smothered in vines with autumn berries.
She reached for her wrist and found the pulse with two fingers and silently counted. Her blood was running calm and ready, the air sharp on her face, the morning sun full of promise. She made a vow to say nothing all day that would hurt her father.
When she came out of the tent he said, “We had visitors last night.”
“Who?”
He pointed into the woods. Selva and Zeus followed him along a rocky path several hundred feet toward the sound of water and a clearing where, a stone’s throw from the river that flowed all the way to their city, the hunting cabin stood: a one-room shack of decaying wood siding, abandoned ever since they’d started coming to the Place. Now the open door gave off a smell of smoke and cooked meat and spices. Zeus bolted inside and began madly sniffing. Pieces of clothing lay scattered across the dirt floor, woolen smocks and shawls, flaxen frocks, along with an assortment of tobacco pipes, a toothcomb, a bracelet of woven fibers, a coil of hemp rope, a child’s hoop. In one corner sat the remains of a recent meal, dirty bowls and earthen jars.
Selva stepped through the doorway onto a sort of entry rug the color of the vine berries, yellow and red, and felt something hard underfoot. She lifted aside the rug. Beneath it there was a rectangle of wood recessed flush with the floor, like a small trapdoor to a hidden passageway. The panel covered a shallow hole the size of a wash basin dug out of the dirt. She crouched to examine what was inside. A carved, softwood board tightly strung with two lengths of catgut—some kind of musical instrument. A metal bell that farmers attached to the necks of sheep. A handful of imperial silver coins. Half a dozen brass bullets tied together with thread. A small notebook bound in green leather.
“Seems like they left in a hurry,” her father said. “Maybe they heard Zeus barking last night.”
“Who are they?”
“Strangers. They’ve been using the cabin.”
She showed him one of the coins and the packet of bullets. “Where would Strangers get these?”
“From Yeomen around here. Probably stole them.” He examined the bullets. “These are for a small-caliber pistol.”
Selva opened the notebook. On the frontispiece, in a pencil whose lead had kept breaking, roughly formed block letters that crowded into the edge of the page announced:
PROPERTIE OF GARD THE STRONG.
DO NOT READ. RETURN TO CRONK FARM.
RETURN THIS BOOK OR DIE!
Squeezed in smaller writing on the bottom of the page like an afterthought: “Rewerd.”
Slightly anxious, Selva turned to the first page. It was made of heavyweight paper and lined like a school copybook. Across the top, in the same fiercely gripped pencil, were the words: “The true history of the YEOMEN NATIVE people.” A short paragraph filled the rest of the page: “We were here before the Empyre. This Land is our Land. All others are Traspasers and Slayvs. Our Ansesters explaned all this in DIRT THOUGHT.”
Who was Gard the Strong? None of it made sense to her. She flipped ahead through the notebook. Some pages were empty, others contained isolated sentences and paragraphs in the same large, tormented script. She turned to the last page with writing on it, halfway through the notebook, and found words in an entirely different hand by a different instrument. The letters were spaced like separate pictographs, like the characters on the yellow paper of the boy at the bones museum, in small neat writing composed with a bit of slate or sharpened coal.
I f I d i e b y t h i s s t r e a m
C o v e r m e i n d i r t a n d l e a v e s
Y o u w i l l k n o w m e
W h e n t h e y c r y
U n d e r y o u r f e e t
“Find something?” Her father pocketed the bullets in his fishing jacket.
Before she knew why, Selva slipped the notebook inside a front pocket of her jumper. It excited her with something much bigger, heavier, than her own clever ideas and nimble instincts, bearing down hard as iron. “Let’s go find the boy, Papa.”
“Cronks first,” her father said. “Better to let them know we’re here than have them find out.”
He cooked their porridge in a hurry and left the pot and bowls to clean later. Rather than breaking camp, he stored their gear inside the tent and took only his medical kit in a day pack. Zeus led them along the trail back to the road. Up close at eye level the vines looked almost beautiful, young tendrils wreathing around lower branches with delicate stems and heart-shaped leaves.
On the road, below the derelict water tower, the hauler was gone.
“What the hell,” her father said. He pointed to fresh tire tracks in the dirt and stared at them for a long time.
The pig farm was two miles away, up and down country lanes, past orchards and woods and an abandoned cemetery, across the river that flowed out of the lake through the foothills all the way down to their city, and it took them most of an hour to walk. Her father walked at a brisk, purposeful pace, and she struggled to keep up, talking little, feeling the notebook against her hip. Her school shoes weren’t meant for hiking, and her left heel began to blister.
The bridge over the river was a high stone arch, and from its midpoint you could see across rolling fields all the way down to the barns of the Cronk farm, a cluster of red dots half a mile off. At the peak of the bridge Selva suddenly stopped. “We’ve got nothing to show them. No bone, no pass, no letter.”
“They know us. We can explain.”
The farm was isolated amid acres of yellowing hay at the bottom of a hill where the grassy lane ended. On one side of the lane there was a sheep pasture and a boarded pigpen and a collection of farm buildings: a small grain silo, a toolshed, and four barns—a hayloft, a henhouse, and two pig stalls, one for sows farrowing, the other for young piglets. (Big Cronk, the farmer, had explained all this to the Rustin children on their first visit.) Across the lane, set back down a dirt path and painted red like the barns, the farmhouse stood in the shelter of an ancient oak. Big Cronk had built it all with his own capable hands, including the chimney from limestone quarried in a nearby pit.
The Cronk farm had always seemed to Selva the prettiest human setting in Yeoman land. It made her think of an enchanted hamlet in one of the folktales from the collection on her bookshelf. Even as a little girl she’d sensed that these were prosperous, successful people, though their rough features and country speech were alien to her. The Cronks were the kind of Yeomen who had more wealth than some Burghers.
The two families had met years ago at an agricultural fair in the district center, where they had happened to share a lunch table. Her father had asked if the Cronks would send their son to one of the new Yeoman schools that the empire was opening around the countryside. Big Cronk had replied that he and Mrs. Cronk could educate him better at home, and then he turned the question around: How would the doctor’s city children learn to grow food and make things with their hands? He said that the Rustins were welcome to visit his farm any time they were in the region and promised the kids rides on his tractor.
Big Cronk was the kind of Yeoman who talked easily with Burghers; he had a gentle confidence that commanded respect. Mrs. Cronk was a warm, voluble, very fat woman who always sent the Rustins away with baked goods. The Cronks had only one child, unusual for a Yeoman family—a tall, awkward boy several years older than Selva whom the parents called Little Cronk. He always seemed to be doing chores—chopping wood, scything hay, feeding pigs—and he went about them with a mute obedience that was unsettling to a chatty Burgher child whose parents indulged her every opinion. Selva could never get Little Cronk to open up while he was showing her and Pan how to turn soil for planting or shear a sheep’s belly, but she sometimes caught him looking at her with a kind of desperation in his eyes, as if someone else were trapped inside this Yeoman boy, asking her to release him.
Her mother suggested that she could make the time together less excruciating by giving Little Cronk a book on each visit, reciprocating his farm lessons with reading lessons. His ability turned out to be extremely limited, despite instruction from his parents, but she sat with him and patiently listened as he struggled aloud through A Child’s History of the Empire or a volume of traditional folktales that included the one with the talking bullfrog. Little Cronk showed little aptitude but an ardent desire to learn, and one time, when she complimented him on his progress, a smile flickered on his lips before he killed it. But he remained utterly unable to laugh at, let alone make, a joke, and these sessions turned out to be just as painful as the farm chores. On the Rustins’ visit last year, Big Cronk had instructed his son to take Selva and Pan into the barn where a sow had just farrowed a new litter. The boy handed them each a tiny, squirming creature and held Selva’s gaze as if the piglet embodied some meaning too deep for words.
A few dozen sheep were grazing in the pasture, hens were pecking at the dirt around the silo, and an immense sow wallowed in a mudhole in the pen. The tractor stood at the bottom of the lane, but there was no sign of human life as Selva and her father, keeping Zeus close, approached the house. She noticed a pile of withered brown vines stacked beside the wood-shingle well and wondered if they’d been cut down from the oak tree or the barns. Otherwise, the property was free of the curse. But a couple of hundred feet back, the shrouded front line of the forest seemed to be massing for an assault.
Morning mist lay over the farm, and with it a strange silence.
“Everything looks the same as always,” her father said. “That’s a good sign. No vines.”
“No people either.”
The farmhouse door opened and Big Cronk emerged.
“Doc, Selva, what a surprise!”
He was a giant of a man, powerful from a lifetime of labor, but his muscular frame was sagging, almost collapsing inside his customary overalls and flannel shirt. He shut the door and limped toward them on the path, jamming his broad-brimmed, moth-eaten leather hat low on his shaggy head with one hand while extending the other. He arranged his mouth in a broad smile and at the same time glanced sideways as if someone else might be coming. Selva had an intimation that their appearance wasn’t a surprise.
“What brings you here?” Big Cronk reached for their hands and hustled them away from the house as his smile vanished under his bushy mustache. “Let’s talk over here, it’s more comfortable,” and he led them inside the dark farrowing barn where the smell of pig manure was strong and a sow even larger than the one in the mudhole lay breathing in the hay of her stall. Big Cronk pulled the sliding door closed behind them, leaving Zeus outside.
“What can I do for you, doc?”
“How’s the family?” her father asked. “Little Cronk must be what, seventeen?”
“We don’t call him that anymore. He got too big for that name.”
“What do you call him?”
Big Cronk gave an apologetic laugh and cleared his throat. “Gard.”
Without thinking Selva asked, “Gard the Strong?”
In a shaft of milky light from the edge of the barn door, under the brim of his leather hat, she saw Big Cronk’s sun-creased eyes momentarily fill with panic.
“That’s a name he likes to use. Got it from some history book. The boy’s all about learning new things—must have been your doing, Selva. Mrs. Cronk and I can’t keep up with him.”
“That’s excellent,” her father said. “I always knew he was a bright child.”
“What can I do for you?” Big Cronk asked again, and this time the question sounded urgent.
“Don’t worry, we don’t expect you to bring out the good tableware for old friends. Just a quick visit.” Her father patted the farmer on the back. “It’s good to see you. We’ve run into some strange things on the way—someone even took our hauler. But everything here is beautiful and peaceful like always.”
Big Cronk made no reply but looked at Selva as if one of them should get to the point.
Small talk at an impasse, her father began to explain their mission. She watched him slip into the condescending man-to-man way he always had when speaking to Big Cronk, touching the other man’s shoulder to emphasize a point, but the longer he went on with his story the more suspicious Big Cronk looked, mouth half-open, eyes fastened on her father’s as if trying to assess his sanity, occasionally glancing at Selva to see if she believed any of it.
“Who’s this Stranger boy?” Big Cronk finally asked.
“I don’t know him, but he’s badly injured.”
“Not by us.”
“Of course not! But we heard he’s somewhere in the area, and we’d be grateful for your help.”
“What kind of help do you expect, doc?”
In her stall the sow let out a long, tired grunt.
“Where do you think we could find him?”
“We don’t have anything to do with Strangers. We keep to ourselves.” Her father nodded to show that he understood. “Not that we have something against them. Just they don’t know us and we don’t know them.”
“Everyone’s a little uneasy these days.”
“What do you mean?”
Everything her father said seemed to make Big Cronk uneasier. Selva found her father’s jacket sleeve and gave a tug, but if he felt it he ignored her. “I mean, since the—” Rather than choose between “Emergency” and “Conspiracy” he left the sentence unfinished. “Since all this nonsense of my side against your side. When here we are, you and me, talking the same as always.”
“Why wouldn’t we?”
“Exactly. We’re not on a side.”
“Was there anything else, doc?”
“I don’t believe in sides,” her father went on as if he hadn’t heard the question. “All the years we’ve known each other don’t just disappear because of some new ideas.”
“I think we should be leaving, Papa,” Selva said. “Mr. Cronk has things to do.”
Big Cronk took off his hat and smiled at Selva. “It’s a sad day when a farmer doesn’t have time for old friends.”
The barn door flew open sideways with a squeaky jerk. Flushed and out of breath, her broad bosom straining against her apron, Mrs. Cronk was gesturing to her husband with flailing hands. They’re coming! she mouthed, before turning a frantic smile to the visitors. “Nice to see you!”
Selva sensed that Mrs. Cronk had known of their presence all along, and that they were a problem.
“Here’s my advice, doc.” Big Cronk took her father by the upper arm and pointed out of the barn door toward the lane. He began talking quickly. “Head back where you came. When you reach the bridge, get off the road. Take the shortcut along the river upstream toward the lake where you folks do your camping. You might find something in those woods upstream. That’s what I’d do if I went looking for Strangers, which I probably wouldn’t.” Her father started to express his gratitude, but Big Cronk cut him off with a firm pat on the back. “Better get going.”
