The Emergency, page 20
“You always were a little Burgher bitch. See how you like sleeping with yams.”
He climbed back up the steps and reached with his free hand for the bulkhead door. As he started to swing it shut, Selva caught a glimpse of something on his forearm, an image that had never been there before, like a tattoo. The barrel lock slid closed overhead.
12
All night long she didn’t seem able to fall asleep, but she woke up with her head propped against a cubby full of turnips and slivers of light around the edges of the bulkhead and a desperate need to pee. The root cellar was cold. She shivered inside her blouse.
She had slept enough to dream. All she could remember was anxiety, but the dream’s residue made her think of her mother—of the time when she was seven and her mother brought her to the Market District to buy Pan a toy. Selva demanded to explore the stores by herself and got hopelessly lost in the crooked old streets for what felt like hours until she ended up wailing in a crowd of shoppers, where her mother found her. She had thought she’d lost her mother to this needy new child, and instead of trying to displace her baby brother she had punished her mother by striking off on her own, only to learn what true need was. Her mother’s enfolding arms told her that she was safe because she was loved, would always be loved. All her adventures with her father depended on this anchor. But she never knew it until now, in the Cronks’ root cellar, more alone than on that day in the Market District, farther than she’d ever been from the mother she’d abandoned, and she felt the anguish of her own selfishness.
From the first days of the Emergency she had tried to construct a version of herself that would be equal to the new world and every new thing that happened to her. At times she had succeeded, at other times she had miserably failed, but all along there had been a strain of self-creation—like the body and face she’d seen by lamplight, Little Cronk turning himself into Gard the Strong. But the ache in her neck and the moist smell of soil and roots told her that this danger was real in a way nothing else had been. She feared what it might reveal about herself. She could let it destroy her or else try to meet it, not by assembling a Selva of metal and clay, but by being herself every moment of it. If she must cry, then cry. But the tears had receded.
She pounded her fist against the bulkhead doors for a long time. Finally the lock slid open, the doors were lifted, and Gard stood above her, in the same clothes as last night but wearing heavy boots now, and without the gun.
“I need to use the bathroom,” she said.
He seemed to consider the request and its possible answers before motioning for her to come out. He led her around the barn toward the farmhouse. As she followed him up the path, she studied his shoulders, his neck, the smooth knobs on the back of his skull, and found the view both intimidating and a little funny, so that her lips were forming a half-smile when he suddenly stopped and turned around.
“How did you sleep?”
She wasn’t sure if he was mocking her. The question was ridiculous, but his tone was utterly neutral.
“I’ve slept better.”
He nodded as if to note a semi-important fact and kept walking.
The sun had risen just above the tree line, and long morning shadows were moving across the fields. The bathroom—she had used it before—stood behind the house under the giant oak, an outdoor stall surrounding a latrine and a hand pump that brought water from the well into a basin. It was somehow reassuring to find everything clean and orderly as always—a trademark of the Cronks. She wondered if his mother and father had been told about the captive on their premises. They’d put an end to this farce as soon as they knew.
When she came out, Gard was leaning against the oak tree, running his fingers through the strands that hung from his chin, watching her. His gaze fell to her chest. Selva’s blouse was made of thin cotton, with a drawstring around the neck. It had fit last summer but now pulled tight across her breasts. He looked away from them, then back, and away again, as if he didn’t know whether looking was forbidden or his right. She wished that her body was still straight and flat the way it had been until the last two years. She wanted to keep him and herself calm, but the soft lines produced a field of crackling tension all around her.
“You got a tattoo,” Selva said to turn attention away from her body to his own.
“It’s not a tattoo. Feel.”
Gard held out his arm. The image on the back of his forearm was a crude pig’s head in profile, with a snout and pointy ears. She could tell without touching that the figure was a ridge of raised pink skin.
“It’s a brand,” he said.
A vague nausea came over Selva. “You mean you burned it on?”
“We all did. We have a forge at the quarry.”
“You all?”
“Me and my unit. Human branding is an ancient custom for Yeomen—Natives. But you kept it from us. It’s all written down on the wood slips I found. You’ll see at the quarry.”
He was obviously enjoying the effect of these revelations. Selva was unable to reply.
“My mother made you something to eat.”
Mrs. Cronk was coming around the side of the house with a cloth-covered bowl and a steaming cup. She was as shapeless as her son was finely sculpted, buried alive inside rolls of flesh. Her shift reached just below her knees, exposing veinous calves and ankles crammed like firewood logs into a pair of dainty slippers. She lowered her head as she held out the bowl and cup to Gard, who snatched them away and handed them off to Selva.
“Tell Papa I need the hauler,” he said sharply. “Tell him to bring it to the pasture.” Mrs. Cronk nodded and waited. “You can go.” He waved her away—her presence seemed to embarrass him. As Mrs. Cronk started to leave, Selva caught her eye, unable to believe that she would allow her son to address her as a house servant, and was met by a look of clenched resentment—not of him, she sensed, but of her, the intruder, the captive.
“Look at her,” Gard said, watching his mother waddle back to the house. “That’s not the way our women are supposed to look. In the Golden Age Yeoman mothers didn’t go to hell. You just have to look at her to know something went wrong somewhere back there.”
“She’s your mother,” Selva said.
“She doesn’t know she’s alive. Most of our women don’t. Heads up their pussies.” He scrunched his nose in some profound disgust. “Not just women—my father can hardly fuck. He has to drink boiled goatweed. The Yeoman people have been cursed.”
It took her breath away, but she said, “Are you trying to shock me? Because I’m older, too.” This was the way: meet his frankness with her own.
He laughed his unpleasant laugh, which she had begun to recognize as a cover for uneasiness, like the tic of stroking his beard. “You live in the city,” he said. “Everything in your head is a lie. Eat that and let’s go.”
The hauler was parked outside the sheep pasture. Big Cronk was standing by the driver’s door with the bone saw in his hand. His face was shaded by the brim of his leather hat, but his posture told Selva that he wasn’t happy to see her again.
“What’s your plan today, son?”
“Going to the quarry. Training with the unit.”
Big Cronk nodded at Selva. “What about her?”
“I’ll show her the exercises, and the wood slips. Not every day I get a chance to teach one of them the truth.”
“But you won’t…?”
“Yeah, we will. We have rules.”
Gard was talking in a new way—like a man with responsibilities and ambitions, in charge and in a hurry. A rifle lay across his seat, and he moved it to the passenger side before climbing in behind the wheel. He hadn’t mentioned a trial; Selva wondered if it had been postponed.
“Lock her in back,” he ordered his father.
Big Cronk took Selva by the wrist and helped her into the bed of the hauler. “Give me your hands,” he said, and pulled her to the rail where a pair of metal rings hung. He fastened them around her wrists, then gave the key to Gard. The sound of the metal click had the same effect on her as the ache in her neck after a night in the root cellar. She was in trouble and alone.
The hauler engine started with a cough and rattle and an angry roar as Gard gunned it. Under the noise Big Cronk whispered, “Why did you come back?” She looked at the bone saw where he’d set it on the ground. “Did you tell him I saw you before?” She shook her head, and relief swept over his broad face.
“But Papa will—”
Big Cronk glared to silence her. He gave an almost imperceptible nod as the hauler lurched into gear and tore off, spitting dirt in his face.
The drive took just five minutes, but by the time they had flown through the hayfield, swung back and forth around peach and ginkgo trees, bounced across a streambed, and skidded down a rocky hillside to the edge of a steep pit, Selva’s wrists were burning, and she thought she was going to throw up.
The quarry was an oval hole in the earth, about the area and height of a typical Yeoman house, walled all the way down in rough stripes of limestone. The bottom of the pit sloped into a pool of algae and green water, but the higher end was dry, and this was where Selva, still tied to the hauler’s rail, saw two figures bent over shovels, turning the gray crumbling soil, throwing it aside, turning again. The men were shirtless and barefoot, with lean backs and long hair, and they moved awkwardly, shuffling as they dug. She noticed that their ankles were tied together by a short length of rope, and she knew that they were the two Strangers who had come with young Monge to raid the farm and been captured. Something thick and dark ran across the naked lower back of each man—an identical mark in the shape of an X. The Strangers were branded.
Three Yeoman boys about Gard’s age were standing along the lip of the pit, wearing shorts and undershirts and boots like him despite the morning chill. They had been talking as the hauler pulled up, but when Gard got out they shut up and stood at attention, arms at their sides, one of them clutching a rifle with its butt planted in the ground.
From the woods nearby a mourning dove was calling, hoo-OO-hoo-hoo-hoo. The only other sound in the still air was the chug-chug of shovels hitting dry dirt. The Cronk farm, the Stranger encampment, the Place, the city by the river, the imperial capital, all seemed to have disappeared over the edge of the Earth.
Gard came around to the back of the hauler. “I’m going to free you,” he said. “Don’t try to run away, you can’t.”
He had never touched her before. When he unfastened her wrists, her hand jumped and he laughed. He left the key hanging in the metal rings’ lock. As she climbed down from the hauler, he was looking at her chest, openly now, with a sort of angry frown, and afterward whenever she caught him staring it was in the same way, as if he were brooding over something that troubled him.
“Why did you bring me here?” she asked.
“I want you to see. I know what you think of Yeomen.”
“Don’t you call yourselves ‘Natives’ now?”
“Yeah, because we’re the—you know, the first people on this land.” Selva stopped herself from helping him with “indigenous.”
She followed him away from the quarry, up a footpath into a small meadow where there was a platform built of rough old boards, probably stripped from a barn. The platform was about thirty feet square, and at each corner a flag on a pole hung limp. The still air smelled of fresh sweat from boys engaged in physical exercises: a few doing push-ups against the platform or pull-ups on a crossbar, others lifting big lead balls overhead, one boy shinnying up a rope that was tied to a pine branch next to a large disc of bronze metal, another shooting arrows at a target nailed to a tree fifty feet away. In the middle of the platform, two boys were squaring off with cloth stripping wrapped around their raised fists and blood trickling from noses and lips.
Some of the boys were lavishly muscular, others still bony in the way of young boys growing too fast, and on a few lumpy bodies folds of fat hung from waists. None had honed himself to the deliberate refinement of Gard, who was the tallest of them and the most dominant, not just in strength but in presence. They all had their hair shaved in ways that gave an impression of furred skulls rather than heads, and they all wore the uniform of shorts and undershirts and boots. Selva noticed branding everywhere—on shoulders, thighs, necks, even scalps.
At one end of the platform there was a wooden crate, and when she drew closer she saw that it was full of animal heads, like the wolf’s and the bull’s—animals of every kind, deer and bison, lizards and wild boar, foxes, birds with long beaks and staring eyes. At the top of the pile lay a pig head with a prominent pink snout. These weren’t wood carvings or clay casts; they were made of animal skin and fur.
Gard came up and stood next to her. “We all chose an animal spirit to be like a personal model. There’s an ancient Yeoman word for it: Manimal,” he said, with pedantic pride, and Selva had to keep an incredulous laugh from exploding in her mouth. “There’s a bear burned onto that boy’s neck. The one doing pull-ups has a viper on each shoulder. They’re making progress.”
The boys took in Selva’s arrival the way wild animals become aware of a human intruder: not stopping their activity but suddenly alert, an eye shifting, a muscle twitching.
“These guys are all in my unit,” Gard said. “You’re the first girl I’ve allowed here. They know not to talk to you.” He folded his arms across his chest and waited for her reaction.
“Who are they?”
“Farm boys from around here, village kids. We’ve been training since the Conspiracy started. You should have seen what they looked like then—wild turkeys, scrawny chickens.”
“Congratulations,” she said. It was truly astonishing that stifled, obedient Little Cronk had done all this. Watching the branded boys at their exercises, she wondered if she’d been brought to the quarry not to be tried but to be impressed and shown off, as she’d wanted to display young Monge to her friends.
A breeze kicked up and fluttered the flags on their poles. Before it died, Selva had time to study one: a pair of vertical red stripes on either side of a white stripe, and in the middle the profile of a strutting rooster. Off in the meadow, in the shade of a spreading plane tree, smoke was rising from the chimney of a stone-walled hut.
Gard followed her gaze. “Our forge,” he said significantly.
“Where are all the girls?”
“We don’t allow them here.”
“But you brought me.”
“That’s different. They don’t think of you that way, you’re not one of us. Yeoman girls would kill unit morale.”
“What do you mean, unit? Like in the military?”
He gave her a dark glance. “Some things I’m not going to discuss with you.”
“Will you discuss those two Strangers you’ve got in the quarry?”
“No. Follow me.”
He led her away from the platform, across the meadow to the edge of the woods where there was a small structure, no more than a large shed. It looked newly built, but young vines from the closest trees were already reaching through the air for its roof. The shed was made of the same knotty pine boards as the platform—up three steps to a narrow front porch, window openings with no windows on either side of a doorway with no door. On the doorjamb a long pale snakeskin hung from a nail, and inside, pieces of bone and horn and feathers and fur were mounted on the walls and scattered around the floor. The only furniture was a simple wooden chair at the back wall. On one side of the chair there was a small wooden box closed with a brass hasp, and on the other side, propped against the wall, a piece of black slate was chalked with phrases scrawled in the same brutal handwriting that Selva had seen in the leather notebook: “Citys are full of Human Werms,” “Words lye, Dirt is true,” “They hate you because you are strong and they are week,” “Who is your Manimal?” Along with the same crude drawings of animals there were two human stick figures with terror-stricken balloon faces, connected by arrows to the labels BURGHER and STRANGER.
Behind the chair a banner was nailed to the wall, dyed red and white like the flags around the platform, with an uneven fringe as if it had been sloppily cut from a shawl or nightshirt. The image of a bird skeleton was extending its wings upward to embrace the words DIRT THOUGHT.
“This is our classroom,” Gard said. “Sit down.”
He took the chair, leaving Selva nowhere to sit except on the floor, cross-legged and looking up at him like the first day of primary school. And yet she had been his teacher. She had given him those books, the Child’s History of the Empire and the folktales, and read alongside him line by line, encouraging him through every dismal mistake. She’d done it to please her parents, and to feel smart, and maybe because she felt sorry for Little Cronk, but she never believed he would get to the most basic level of comprehension that she had long ago passed. Now he was going to instruct her in ideas half-made from smashed bits of the words she had given him.
13
“Listen to me, because you can’t be tried until you understand,” Gard began. “Everything you think is true—it’s a lie. Two hundred years ago, when Yeomen owned this land, there was a Golden Age. Our women were beautiful, even mothers and grandmothers, not fat sows like today. Our men didn’t need to drink boiled goatweed to have children—they stayed hard all day long. We lived off our crops and herds and made everything we needed for ourselves. We had nothing to do with people in other lands. We already had things you think you invented, like engines and—and medicine. We had our own Yeoman writing. You’ll see! Our leader was named Gard the Great. We didn’t elect him—we followed him. Yeomen only had one law—”
“The Law of the Strongest,” Selva said.
Gard nodded, but confidence deserted his face, and for a moment he was Little Cronk again. Selva was sorry she had interrupted—a habit from school when she knew the answer.
“Where did you learn all this?” she asked, to keep him talking.
