Читать книгу The Forever Ship - Francesca Haig - Страница 14

Sally, Elsa, Xander and I sat in the front room of the holding house as the town’s evening noises rattled past the window. Soldiers off duty; the more orderly footsteps of those still on patrol; the voices of passing townsfolk. When I was last in New Hobart, it had taken me a few days to realise why the town sounded strange. It wasn’t only the aftermath of the battle that had left the town damaged and the residents nervy and furtive. Even after the repairs had begun, and people had returned to the streets, the sound of the city remained different. Eventually I’d realised that it was the nearly total absence of children. At Elsa’s house, around the market, and in the streets, only adult voices were to be heard. There was a whole layer of noise missing: the high voices of children’s chatter; the crying of babies; the sudden shout of a child ambushed in a game. The town was far from silent now – thousands of people lived here, and went about the business of their days – but like a dented bell, New Hobart didn’t ring true.

My gaze kept straying to where Xander sat, leaning against Sally’s chair with his eyes closed. I thought of Zach, locked in his cell at the Tithe Collector’s office. Zach was my past, Xander was my future. And ahead of us all: the blast, which would be the end of Elsewhere, and the resistance, and any futures that I could envisage.

Below the large window, another patrol passed – twelve mounted soldiers on their way back from the wall.

Sally saw me watching them.

‘We’ve increased the size of the patrols, since the Council seized Wreckers’ Pass and started picking off the convoys. We’ve set up some permanent outposts on the supply routes, too.’

It wasn’t the size of the patrol that had caught my attention, though. It was the two men in the centre of it, who didn’t wear the same uniform as the rest of The Ringmaster’s soldiers. They wore the blue of the island’s guards, and they were Omegas. The first man’s left arm was a stub, a clawed hand protruding directly from his shoulder. The taller man, behind him, had a hunchback that forced him to lean forward over the pommel of his saddle.

‘They’re patrolling together now?’ I said to Sally.

She nodded. ‘Neither side was that keen on it – The Ringmaster’s men in particular. It was never a decision we made. It just happened. There was the fire in the northern quarter while you were away, and everyone had to pitch in together, to stop the whole town going up in smoke. And at times, they were a few hands short for some of the Alpha patrols. Drafted in a couple of our troops – not without some muttering, on both sides.’

‘But they’ve kept doing it?’ I said, my gaze following the last of the riders as they turned the corner at the top of the hill.

‘Don’t get dreamy-eyed about it,’ Sally said. She took a deep pull of Elsa’s pipe, held the smoke in her mouth for a few seconds. ‘Nobody did it because they wanted to. Like I said: it just happened. Still only happens when a patrol’s shorthanded, or there’s some kind of emergency.’

I nodded, and leaned my face against the window frame to hide my smile. This was how it happened: daily familiarity, not grand gestures. You could only pass a fellow soldier so many times, at shift handover, and see him unbuckle his sword, and grunt about the weather, before you learned that he was a man just like you, no more mysterious or terrifying than that. The Council’s policy of segregation had been a key part of its attempt to stoke tensions between Alphas and Omegas. Sharing a latrine might do more to bring the two together than any inspiring speeches could have done.

‘It’s not all been smooth sailing,’ Elsa said. ‘There’s been bickering, and some big flare-ups, especially since rations got so tight. While you were away at the coast, some of The Ringmaster’s men tried to claim the biggest well, in the market, saying it was for Alpha use only. They were trying to get everyone worked up about it. Muttering about contamination.’

Sally rolled her eyes. ‘We share a womb, but they reckon they’ll catch something if we share a well?’

I knew what she meant, but I also knew that it was because we shared a womb that they flinched from us, not in spite of it – I’d learned that from Zach. Nothing frightened them more than the realisation that we were not so different after all.

‘There were arguments,’ Elsa went on, ‘and more than a couple of fistfights.’

Sally nodded. ‘The Ringmaster came down hard on both sides – he was fair about it, I’ll say that. Didn’t take any nonsense, not from his own soldiers any more than ours.’ She gave a slow chuckle. ‘It was laziness that put an end to the idea though – not discipline, let alone principles. Most of the Alphas quartered on the eastern side of town were too lazy to go across town to the market for water. The whole thing petered out after a few days.’

She still spoke of them that way: his soldiers and ours. But for the first time since Zach’s arrival I permitted myself a moment of hope that in this half-starved town, we were building something new. In its own small way, the sight of those riders, Alphas and Omegas together, felt as monumental as Elsewhere itself.

*

Sally came to the dormitory that night, when I was alone. I heard her distinctive gait across the courtyard: a slow step, each movement precise because it cost her so much pain.

‘I’ve seen you watching Xander,’ she said.

His name was enough to make me stiffen. What she said was true. I didn’t like to be near Xander, but when I was, I couldn’t stop watching him.

‘I don’t mean to stare,’ I said. ‘But I can’t help it. When I see him, I can see what I’m becoming—’

She spoke over me. ‘I don’t have time for your platitudes.’ She waved a hand impatiently. ‘You’re a seer and I need your help. I can’t reach him any more. Tell me what can be done for him.’ I thought of Xander’s face, blank as the burnt-out buildings that still lined the streets of New Hobart. ‘He’s barely said a word, for weeks,’ Sally went on. ‘Not even the usual fire-talk.’ His old refrain: Forever fire.

‘What’s the point of him saying it, now?’ I said. ‘You don’t stand in the middle of a burning forest, shouting, Fire! The blast is upon us. It’s too late for warnings. He knows it. We know it.’

‘So how can I help him?’ she said.

‘You can’t,’ I said. ‘I mean, not any more than you already are. Talk to him. Keep him fed. Let him go to the Kissing Tree, if it helps to calm him.’ All the hundred things that she did for him each day. That same morning, from the dormitory window, I’d seen her kneel on the gravel to trim Xander’s toenails, though kneeling seemed to take her minutes, both hands on the small of her back as she lowered herself.

‘Does he even know what’s going on around him?’ she asked.

‘He’s living in the blast,’ I said. ‘It’s all he sees now.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘I think he’s aware of things passing. He hears what we say. But everything that isn’t the blast doesn’t count. Everything else …’ I paused, trying to find a way to describe what I felt each time I saw Xander. I remembered what Paloma had said, when she was telling us what had happened to the mines and oil wells when the blast came: Everything that could burn, burned. ‘Everything else,’ I said to Sally, ‘is just fuel. It burns away.’

*

Orders had been sent for the ships to be readied. The General held most of the coast, but The Ringmaster had two ships at a garrison to the south, and they were to be sailed to the north-west coast to join The Rosalind. It was dangerous – the Council had increased its coastal patrols, even that far north, and mooring the ships at deep anchor meant exposing them to the storms. And we all knew that the Council would attack New Hobart at some point – if they didn’t starve us out first. But it was some comfort to know that if we could survive for a few months, the fleet should be ready. As soon as the last of the northerly winds carried spring away, Paloma could lead us back to her homeland – if the Council hadn’t found or destroyed the Scattered Islands first.

Although he’d given the orders to prepare the fleet, I noticed that The Ringmaster was still wary around Paloma. If we sat around the table in the main hall, he always made sure he was at the far end, opposite her. When the rest of us asked her questions about Elsewhere, he just watched her, arms crossed over his chest. He was silent when the topic of the medicines was raised.

Piper noticed it too. ‘You have an objection?’ he asked.

‘I’ve already said I’ll provide the ships, and do what I can to protect Paloma,’ The Ringmaster replied. ‘But I can’t make a promise that will expose my people to taboo medicine.’

‘You won’t even offer them the choice?’

‘We Alphas have preserved proper humanity for four hundred years. You want to undo all of that.’

‘Proper humanity?’ I said. ‘You mean Alphas – ideal people like Zach, or The General?’

‘You know what I mean,’ he said impatiently. ‘Physical perfection. Strength. It might not be the Long Winter any more, but this is still a hard world. We need hardy people to survive it.’

From the other end of the table came Paloma’s voice. ‘You really think everyone was perfect before the bomb?’ She was leaning back in her chair.

The Ringmaster stared at her. ‘We know the blast caused the mutations. We’ve always known it – and the papers from the Ark confirmed it. They talk about the mutations, and how they developed after the blast.’

‘Yes,’ Paloma said, leaning forward. ‘I can’t deny what the blast did. But do you think all bodies were the same before then?’ She bent, chin almost to the table, and there was a clicking sound as she twisted her false leg free of the socket. ‘This technology,’ she said, placing the leg on the table, ‘was from before the bomb.’ The Ringmaster’s nostrils narrowed as he watched the leg rock from side to side, and then settle. ‘At home we have other technology taken from back then as well,’ she went on. ‘Wheelchairs, and artificial hands. The doctors only managed to preserve a fraction of what they used to have, but it’s enough to know for sure that there were people born then like we are today.’

‘They had the words for it,’ I said. ‘In the Before.’

‘What are you talking about?’ The Ringmaster’s head snapped around to face me.

‘In the Ark papers, when they were writing about the mutations,’ I said. ‘They already had the words to describe them.’ It had been a jumble of syllables to me: polymelia; amelia; polydactyly; syndactyly. But it had meant something to the people who wrote it. They were horrified at how many people had mutations, since the blast, but the conditions they were witnessing were already named, already known. These were things that had preceded the blast. ‘They knew what these problems were,’ I said. ‘They had names for them.’

‘And medicines, for some of them,’ Paloma added. ‘We haven’t been able to preserve many of them, but there are some conditions that can be improved, or managed, at least, with the right medicines. My youngest sister has seizures, or she used to. The doctors gave her a medicine, to take every day. She’s hardly had a seizure since.’

The Ringmaster shook his head. ‘Just because there used to be a few freaks, in the Before, doesn’t mean it’s right. Doesn’t mean that we should just give up, and let everyone here become like that.’

I started laughing. Paloma looked at me as though I’d gone mad. Perhaps I had. But I could see it all, now. I’d seen it with Zach, and now again with The Ringmaster. How frantically they shored up the walls that collapsed around their beliefs.

‘Freaks?’ I said. ‘You’re just drawing a line in the sand. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s arbitrary.’

As the argument continued over the table, I kept thinking about how things used to be clearer. The clear line between Before and After had been blurred by the discovery of the Ark, and Elsewhere, and what we had learned about the past. And the line between Alphas and Omegas was fading, despite the best efforts of Alphas to maintain it.

But what about the line between me and Zach?

*

That night I woke with a shout of pain, clutching my forehead. Across the dormitory Zoe gave a grunt, and tugged at the blanket that Paloma had dragged to her side of the bed.

At first, I made the same assumption as Zoe: that the pain in my head was a vision, or a dream. I lay in the bed and waited for it to dissipate, but it grew worse, and I curled tightly, knees to face, hearing my own moan. When I sat up, Zoe was kneeling in front of me, her face a mixture of irritation and concern. Paloma was behind her, blanket wrapped around her shoulders. The courtyard door banged open and Piper ran in, but I closed my eyes against the agony in my forehead. It had the insistence of a burn. I hadn’t felt anything like it since I was thirteen, the day that I’d been branded, the Councilman’s breath on my face as he’d pressed the brand into my skin. Then the sound of skin extinguishing fire.

‘Show me,’ said Zoe, peeling my hands away from my face. I fought her – as if pressing my hands against my forehead could somehow contain the pain – but she was so much stronger.

‘There’s nothing there,’ she said, looking around at Piper.

He guessed first.

‘Zach,’ he said.

*

By the time we got to the Tithe Collector’s office, The Ringmaster had found him.

I’d stumbled through the darkened streets, one hand gripping Piper’s arm to keep me steady, the pain so hot that I had to bite my lower lip to stop myself from shouting.

Beside the Tithe Collector’s office, six soldiers stood with their backs to the wall, heads lowered. Two men wore the red of The Ringmaster’s soldiers; the others, three men and a woman, were in the blue of the resistance. Facing them stood The Ringmaster, a lamp raised in one hand. He kept his anger tightly contained, which only made it more frightening.

Sitting on the ground by the wall, a few feet from the soldiers, was Zach. His hands were cupped over his forehead, just like mine.

The Ringmaster saw us. ‘Simon was off duty. Four of them jumped Zach on the way back from the privy,’ he said. ‘Two of his guards were escorting him. They didn’t do their job.’ Each of his words was as tightly clenched as a fist.

‘I tried to stop them,’ said the woman. I recognised her: it was Meera, one of Simon and Piper’s senior soldiers, whom I’d spoken to often enough.

Piper stepped forward. ‘How hard did you try?’ he said.

She gave no answer. Her tunic was ripped at the neck, but there were no bruises or wounds on her – however hard she’d battled to protect her ward, it hadn’t been enough to mark her. Even while my teeth were gritted against the pain in my forehead, I didn’t think I could blame Meera. Hadn’t I swung my fist at Zach myself, only the night before?

‘If they’d got carried away,’ Piper spat, ‘Cass could be dead. You understand?’

‘Yes sir,’ Meera said, head lowered. I didn’t know whether she was hiding her contrition, or her lack of it.

The Ringmaster turned to give a dismissive glance at Zach. ‘I think no more of him than you do,’ he said to the soldiers. ‘But he’s under our protection. And any attack on him is an attack on our seer. She’s valuable to us.’

He looked carefully at each of the soldiers, memorising each face.

‘Get back to your barracks,’ he said. ‘But this isn’t over. There will be consequences for each of you.’

They left in silence. I looked at their retreating backs, red and blue tunics together. I had not wanted it to be this way; I didn’t want hatred for Zach to be the one thing that could unite our fractured army.

Piper grabbed Zach by the back of his shirt, and hauled him upright. Only then, when he came within range of The Ringmaster’s lamp, could I see what they had done to him.

They must have planned it in advance, because they’d made the brand. It lay on the dirt by the wall, just a piece of metal, crudely bent, the farrier’s tongs fallen open nearby. Zach must have struggled, so the burn sat crookedly on his forehead, a lopsided  with no crossbar. It didn’t matter that it was barely intelligible – the message was clear enough. Already, one side of the Alpha symbol was a fattening blister; the other was a red indentation, black at the edges. I remembered my dream: Zach, his forehead branded like mine. When I leant in to look more closely at his wound, he flinched away.

‘Pull yourself together,’ Piper said to Zach, releasing him to stand on his own. ‘It’s only a brand, no worse than nearly every Omega gets as a child.’

He led Zach into the main hall, and let him sit down. Elsa had followed us up the hill, slow on her bowed legs; she came in now, looked at Zach with distaste, then rummaged through her medicine bag to find a salve.

‘Put it on his burn – it’ll ease the pain,’ she said, giving me the small jar. ‘For you, I mean. I couldn’t care less about him.’

On the far side of the room, the others were talking quietly and urgently around the big table; in the corner, I stood over Zach, but he didn’t meet my eyes. The salve smelled of lard and rosemary, and it was so thick that I had to rub it between my hands to warm and soften it before I could apply it Zach’s wound. He was sweating – a hot, urgent sweat of fever and panic, dampening the underarms of his shirt.

He flinched when I put the salve onto the burn.

I looked down at him. ‘I know how it feels.’

We were both remembering the same thing: the brand on my flesh, while the Councilman held me down. Zach standing with my parents on the other side of the room, watching. I remembered him giving a grunt of pain; he must have felt, back then, a taste of my own agony. Now it was truly his.

‘I dreamed you would be branded,’ I said. ‘Weeks ago. It didn’t make any sense, back then.’ I picked up a cloth and wiped the last of the salve from my fingers. It left a greasy film on my skin.

‘I would never have come to you, if I’d known you can’t even control your own soldiers,’ Zach said.

I shrugged. ‘It was your choice to come to us. You want to leave now?’ I looked at the doorway. Even if there were no guards behind it, we both knew that Zach would never dare to go. If she got hold of him, The General would not stop at branding him. The soldiers who had just attacked him were the only thing keeping us both alive.

*

It wasn’t only pain that kept me awake that night. Piper had stayed up at the Tithe Collector’s office to guard Zach himself, and even though Zoe was close by, I found it hard to sleep without Piper’s breath in the next bed, or his silhouette at the window, when he sat overlooking the courtyard.

I had been afraid, in different forms, for as long as I could remember. Afraid, when we were growing up, that Zach would expose me and I would be branded and sent away. Afraid, in the settlement, that Zach would come for me. And when he had come for me, and I was in the Keeping Rooms, I was afraid that I would never get out, and never see the sky again. The six months since my escape had been a collection of different fears: pursuit, hunger, imprisonment, battles.

For a long time after Kip’s death, I had cared little for my own life, or for anything else. But now I had fought my way through that, and found there were things in the world that I wanted, and relished. So when I’d seen Zach huddled on the ground, and felt his pain in my own skin, my fear had a new simplicity: I did not want to die. I did not want Zach and his enemies and treachery to snatch this life from me, just when I’d learned to occupy it again.

The next day, the soldiers who’d branded Zach were whipped. Piper had warned me, first thing in the morning, when he came back to the holding house.

‘Is it really necessary?’ I said. ‘Most of them are Omegas. They joined the resistance because they wanted to fight the Council, and they’ve found themselves taking orders from The Ringmaster, and now seeing Zach here too. It’s hard for them.’

‘If we can’t control our army, we’ve no hope of beating the Council’s,’ said Piper.

I couldn’t argue with him. I knew that it wasn’t only my own life, or Zach’s, that depended on our army holding together. But through those long morning hours as I worked with Elsa in the kitchen, Zach’s brand still pulsing on my forehead, the sky outside was smeared grey, as if the news of the whippings had spread an ugliness over the day.

I refused to watch the whipping. Paloma, too, had scrunched her face with distaste when Zoe asked her if she wanted to see, so she waited with Zoe in the holding house, while I went to the Tithe Collector’s office to check on Zach.

When Piper and Elsa and I passed the square on the way, the whipping post was being fixed in place. Months before, Kip and I had witnessed a man whipped bloody by Alpha soldiers in the same square. The raised platform they’d used had long since been torn down, and probably burned for firewood. Now, two Omega soldiers were sinking a thick post into the ground. With each pound of the mallets, the ground spat back dust. I walked faster, yanking on Elsa’s arm as she craned her neck to see. The soldiers who weren’t on patrol had all been summoned to the market square. They were gathering already, the crowd thickening as we shouldered our way through.

In the main hall, The Ringmaster was waiting, along with Simon. To my surprise, so was Zach.

The Ringmaster stood as we entered. ‘I’m leaving him here with you,’ he said. ‘Piper and I are needed in the square, and I want you both properly guarded.’

I knew I was being protected, and that I wasn’t wearing shackles like Zach, but I still looked to Piper for reassurance.

He nodded. ‘Simon will be here the whole time. And three guards, hand-selected, on the door.’ He gestured at the doorway, where soldiers waited. Two of them were The Ringmaster’s, but I was relieved to recognise Crispin, too.

At first, after Piper and The Ringmaster left, the massed soldiers in the square beyond the northern window were a background hubbub of noise. But at noon they fell silent. The cries of the market traders, too, were hushed. And even from where we sat, with the shutter closed, we could hear the strokes of the whip. Ten strokes each for the four soldiers who had attacked Zach. Five strokes each for Meera and the other soldier who had been guarding Zach, for failing in their duty.

Simon sat by the door. He was leaning back, arms crossed over his chest, but one of his hands rested on his axe hilt, and he didn’t take his eyes off Zach.

Zach and I sat on opposite sides of the room, and heard each stroke. It seemed to take a very long time: a pause after each blow, and then the crack of the next. The noisiest thing of all seemed to be the silence between me and Zach. We stared at each other, him on a chair at the table and me on the windowsill, my back against the closed shutter. Zach fidgeted from time to time, reaching up to his burn, and prodding gingerly around its edges.

‘Don’t touch it,’ I snapped. ‘You’ll only make it worse.’

There was another stroke of the whip. I couldn’t stop myself from wincing, a sharp intake of air through my closed teeth.

‘You can stop glaring at me,’ Zach said. ‘It’s hardly my fault that your soldiers attacked me.’

I kept my expression blank, my eyes on his. ‘It’s your fault that they wanted to.’

‘And your army’s weak discipline that meant they went ahead with it.’

Another thwack. I didn’t want Zach to know how I felt. That his arrival had left me exposed, as though the walls of New Hobart had fallen.

‘He’s whipping them himself, you know,’ Zach said. ‘Piper.’

Yet another whip stroke cracked the silence.

‘You didn’t know that?’ Zach said. His voice was like a knife, probing flesh.

‘I knew,’ I lied.

Zach just raised an eyebrow.

I ignored him. We sat there together, under Simon’s gaze. The pain in my head had lessened already, just a reminder of last night’s searing, but periodically Zach would ignite it again by touching the burn, grimacing as he tested the tautness of the blister.

When the whippings were over, Piper came back. He let the door slam behind him. He was sweaty, but I was relieved to see no blood on his clothes, or on the leather whip that he tossed to the ground. Whatever he’d done, it had not been as brutal as the whipping I’d witnessed with Kip. The length of plaited leather lay on the ground between us.

Zach had stood as soon as Piper entered; he moved to the far side of room, eyeing the whip as though it were a snake that might strike at him.

‘You can stop cowering,’ Piper said. ‘I’m done for today.’

He came to stand by me at the window. I kept my voice low, aware of Zach watching us from the far side of the room.

‘Couldn’t it have been The Ringmaster who whipped them?’ I said. ‘Or couldn’t you have got one of the other senior soldiers to do it? What about Simon?’

‘I don’t ask my men to do things I’m not willing to do myself,’ he said. ‘And it had to be me, not The Ringmaster. Can you imagine the response, if we put The Ringmaster up there, to whip mainly Omega troops, in defence of The Reformer?’ He exhaled. ‘It had to be me.’

He was probably right. But when he put his hand on the windowsill, close to mine, I couldn’t help thinking of the whip.

‘This isn’t what we wanted,’ I said in a whisper. ‘This isn’t what we’re doing this for.’ I didn’t want to say it in front of Zach – didn’t want to show him the cracks that I could see, spreading everywhere. But I was thinking of what I’d said to Piper and Zoe, back in the deadlands: that if we didn’t find Elsewhere, we would build our own. That we would find a way to make a better world here. This wasn’t what we’d dreamed of: the whip on the floor, the beaten soldiers outside.

‘You’re not different from me, Cass, for all that you’d like to think you are,’ Piper said. He was leaning forward over the sill, his weight on his arm. ‘You’ve made the same choices I have, to survive, and to do what has to be done. You think that because you can’t throw a knife, or wield a whip, that you’re somehow innocent?’

I wasn’t angry because I disagreed with him. I was angry because everything he said was true.

‘I have done only what’s been necessary,’ he said. ‘I am what the resistance has needed me to be.’

‘I know,’ I said.

‘Then what do you want from me?’ he said.

What could I have told him that wouldn’t have sounded wistful, impossible? A different world, in which he didn’t have to be those things. In which neither of us did.

‘Nothing,’ I replied.