Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth) (4 page)

Catelyn’s thoughts returned to the present momentarily,
and to the rooftop where she had come up to contemplate her
dilemma with the food cache, that was even now spoiling in the
heat. She could feel the afternoon sun slipping closer to the
horizon, and soon the temperatures would start to fall slightly. It
wouldn’t cool much, certainly not enough to affect her food storage
problem, but it would at least make it possible for her to think
more clearly about things, and about anything other than the
unbearable heat.

Remembering the terrible events of her past had a way of
sparking other thoughts in her mind. Flashes of memory surfaced,
combined with many nights since that day spent in contemplation
of what all of it meant. She set aside her thoughts about the food
cache and explored the deeper thoughts that were now stirring in
her mind.

Even by the age of three, Catelyn’s parents knew that she
was a special child; she had demonstrated to her parents
exceptional understanding, as well as the ability to read from
books and converse with her parents at a level far above what they
would have expected of a young child. There was no way for them
to know just how gifted their daughter was, but by comparison
with the other children that her family knew growing up they could
see a marked difference.

With child-rearing being so tightly controlled, the few
dozen parents chosen each sojourn in the Seat, among the two
hundred throughout the Empire, formed an ad-hoc support
structure for one another, communicating and meeting with one
another regularly. Because of this, Catelyn had a fair amount of
experience interacting with the other children and parents of the
Seat, at least the ones that lived within walking distance. It was
usually Catelyn who was put in charge during group play and she
regularly demonstrated substantial advantages over her similarly
aged peers.

However, in many ways Catelyn’s intellect and natural
curiosity was more of a burden to her own parents, which was
obvious even to her as a young child. Her parents were not simply
vigilant against other citizens of the Seat who had sought to take
her from them; they were also forced to be reclusive from some of
the other chosen families, who appeared noticeably interested in
taking Catelyn for their own. It was rare for chosen families to turn
on each other, but it did happen.

Without needing to maintain that degree of vigilance,
Tomas and Sera might have been able to give Catelyn the kind of
special attention she deserved to develop her mind. They tried
their best to meet her needs and give her every opportunity but it
was not without its drawbacks.

Still, they worked at it, even going as far as risking
Imperial attention and punishment by providing Catelyn with
illegal reading material.

Naturally, in an Empire built on a foundation of
oppression against its own people, thinking too much was the
hallmark of an enemy of the state. Consequently, all books were
forbidden by the Empire, and simply possessing a single volume
would constitute severe consequences. Despite such intolerance
for the notion of an educated populace, it was not a secret that
books could be obtained through the black market, for a high
price. The price was not high because there was a demand for
reading material, but rather for the danger it represented to
acquire and sell such taboo materials.

Perhaps as a small act of rebellion against the Empire that
had forced them away from their lives, her parents willingly paid
that price whenever they were able, but because of their fear of
attracting attention to their daughter or themselves, and of course
the extreme cost, their gifts were limited. Fortunately Catelyn was
quite capable of taking care of her own needs in this area as well.

In fact, while other girls and boys she knew were playing
games with sticks and rocks in the alleys and streets of the Seat,
Catelyn was secretly reading both the books that her parents
brought home, as well as other volumes that she found on her own
by scavenging through the ruins of old homes and burned out
buildings.

She had discovered six of them in a particularly derelict
shell of a building this way, and from them she taught herself
subjects even her parents did not know, such as language and
grammar, philosophy and ethics, science, mathematics and even
tactics.

Her parents, while not lacking in intelligence themselves,
found Catelyn’s ability to grasp advanced concepts and ideas to be
rather surprising. Despite her ability to understand a great many
things, Catelyn still struggled to understand some of the more
simple things like navigating the complex social dynamics of the
other children and parents she had known growing up.

Once she had read through them, she realized that the
books must have belonged to what the people in the Before would
have called a “teacher”. She read each volume over and over,
absorbing the knowledge from them over spans, cycles, sojourns,
until she could just about recite them from memory.

She tried to share what she learned with the other children
that she knew in her tenement block, but they simply weren’t
interested. Not only did it seem beyond their comprehension,
every one of them feared being caught with items and knowledge
which carried such heavy penalties.

In addition, Catelyn quickly realized that her intelligence,
and the knowledge that she acquired from reading these
contraband books, meant almost nothing to her day to day survival
in a place like the Seat. Out on the streets and slums, there was no
benefit to understanding arithmetic, no use for proper spelling or
diction, no philosophy to help her fend for herself against the
accursed environment or the criminals who inhabited it.

All that mattered to surviving on the streets was learned
on the streets.
Despite this, Catelyn was not afraid to learn everything she
could from the volumes she collected. In fact, she grew so
enamored with her finds and with the information contained
within them, and in particular she was inspired by some of the
teachings in the book on philosophy, that one day she decided to
defy the Empire as blatantly as she could with them, and she
marked them with her name. Her full name.
Catelyn was not supposed to have a full name, nor was she
even supposed to know that she had a family name.
When Uriel III took control of the Empire, one of his
earliest acts was to do away with all family names, part of a
package of laws aimed at equalizing the social status of every one
of his subjects, until there was almost no difference between one
citizen and another. He destroyed the history of the great families
and bade them to forget. He forbade both men and women to have
any individuality of gender, ordering all citizens to shave their
heads and maintain short hair, and refused women to paint their
faces, the exception to this last rule being those who, like Catelyn’s
mother, were sent to the soldier’s camps to satisfy them. He
required that all clothing be cut to the same bland style, and in the
same muted shades of grey.
All of this Uriel commanded, and set only one
punishment throughout the Empire for any defiance of his exalted
will; the pain of torture and ultimately death.
When families resisted, as they always did whenever the
Empire deviated so strongly from a widely held tradition, the
Imperial Army was sent in, as they always were whenever there
was even a hint of opposition to the Empire, to obliterate not just
them, but every living citizen that lived in a three block radius
from them. Entire neighborhoods were “cleansed” for one family’s
transgression; for the crime of keeping one’s family name, or
wearing clothing with any colors not on the Empire’s approved list,
or for letting their hair get too long.
As a result, to save themselves from such harsh treatment,
very soon the citizens of the Empire began policing themselves,
abandoning their surnames and exacting vigilante justice on any
who resisted. Given the state of the Empire and the way
individualism was stamped out, surnames carried little meaning at
any rate. When seen from this perspective, it was not difficult for
the citizens to quickly rationalize their way towards total
compliance.
Perhaps it was Catelyn’s exposure to other ideas in the
books she had read, but she couldn’t understand this kind of
reasoning at all. She saw the flaws in the logic, and had no
sympathy for those who willingly abdicated their own will to serve
that of another. She questioned how one man could have so cowed
an entire people, had made them forget themselves and their own
identities.
But they did. People moved on, and willingly forgot. And
so Catelyn and the other children of her generation were all born
with but a single given name.
Catelyn often wondered if there were places outside the
walls where people could still live with two names, or maybe even
three as she had read in some of the books, and she envied them
that small privilege. Both to honor that tradition, and to defy such
illogical rulings, whenever she discovered a new book to add to her
treasured library, she always wrote her name in the corner on the
inside of each cover: Catelyn Bereford.

Catelyn was six when she learned her family name.
Through her persistence, and with some gentle plying of her
parents, she discovered one afternoon that her family name was
Bereford, and that it was the name of a proud, honorable family.
Her family had been respected and hard working, when Exeter had
been a free nation.

She was so proud to have learned this fact that, even
though her parents had admonished her against telling the other
children, she made a point of promising herself that she would say
something the very first chance that she got, and she didn’t have
long to wait.

Every span, the chosen families around their tenement
block gathered together to socialize. The parents told their kids it
was so that they could have some time with kids their own ages, to
laugh and play together. And while that was of course somewhat
true, all of the children knew that it was really an excuse for the
adults to take turns watching the kids in a big group, so that their
parents could take it in turn to return to their homes to have some
alone time.

Because the harsh reality of life in the Seat precluded
parents from leaving their children alone, even for a moment, they
grabbed every chance they could to retain some of the intimacy
that had been lost by their unending responsibility.

The whole span after she had found out her family name,
Catelyn had been giddy with excitement to share her new secret
with the other children, and so after midday, when the neighbors
gathered together, she first approached Lydia, a girl who had seen
two more sojourns than her.

Catelyn rushed over to her as she sat in the dirt of the
deserted lot where they were meeting today.
“Lydia, you’ll never guess what I found out!” Catelyn said
excitedly.
Lydia looked up, her slack jaw open as she was filleting an
earthworm with a rusty needle she had in one hand. Despite being
older than Catelyn, Lydia was not particularly smart, Catelyn
knew. She had dull, vacant eyes and a distant look as Catelyn knelt
down in the dirt beside her. But though the two of them didn’t
share much in common, she was one of the only other girls that
was even close to Catelyn’s age, and Catelyn felt something of a
sisterly bond to her as a result.
She leaned in close to whisper in Lydia’s ear, a broad smile
of pride on her face, and she revealed her name to the girl. When
she withdrew and looked at Lydia’s face, Lydia was smiling broadly
as well, and her face cracked into a riotous laugh. Catelyn was
taken aback somewhat.
This was not exactly the reaction that she’d expected.
Lydia was laughing so hard and so loud that the other
children looked over to see what was so funny. Two of them
initially ran over to see what was happening, and like a flock of
pigeons, soon that prompted all of them to come over. Suddenly
Catelyn’s pride turned to ashes in her mouth, as she realized that
soon, all of the children would probably hear her secret from
Lydia, and then they would all be joining in on the joke. Though
Catelyn still wasn’t sure what that joke was, or why Lydia found
her name so funny to begin with.
The oldest of the children, a rather nasty boy of twelve
named Marton who Catelyn had never liked, ran faster than the
others and he stopped short and stood over Lydia, an expectant
smile on his pock-marked face.
“What’s so funny, freak?” he asked Lydia.
Instead of saying anything, Lydia stood up, revealing to all
the other children that she had laughed so hard that she’d lost
control of her bladder. The other children all started to point at her
soiled grey trousers, jeering at her for her incontinence, but
Catelyn was still watching Lydia, as she stood on her tip toes and
cupped her hand over her mouth, and whispered the joke to
Marton. Catelyn flicked her eyes over to him, and looked him dead
in the eye.
His blue eyes lit up and, almost as though she were
watching him in slow motion, a great big smile appeared on his
face and he turned to the other kids with arms outstretched.
“Hey! Cool it. All of you, listen to me!”
The other kids were still caught up in their mirth about
Lydia’s wet pants, but she was totally unaware, and instead was
looking at Marton’s face. Everyone knew that Lydia had a crush on
him for some reason Catelyn couldn’t understand.
Finally Marton had enough.
“Knock it OFF! Listen!”
Being the oldest, and being tough and fast enough to
thrash all of the younger kids if he wanted, Marton tended to get
his way a lot. The other kids stopped their teasing of Lydia and
settled down to pay attention to what he said. Unlike Lydia,
Catelyn knew that Marton was actually quite smart, at least when
it came to surviving and navigating the social hierarchy of
children. But she didn’t like him, because the only thing he ever
seemed to be interested in was bullying the others in their group.
The other kids looked to him now.
“What is it, Marton?”
“What’d she say, M?”
“Why was she laughin’ so hard she peed her pants?”
With a withering look, Marton looked straight at Catelyn
when he told them.
“You all know Catey over here’s just a big smarty pants,
right? Well now she’s gone and found out she’s a smarty pants
with a big smarty pants last name. But you want to know what’s so
funny about it?”
The other kids looked on expectantly, eager to join in on
the joke.
“What is so gods damn funny is that her family’s dumb
name...is Barefoot. Can you imagine the odds? Catelyn Barefoot!
How fitting!”
At this last remark, he pointed down at her feet, which
were in fact bare, and covered with the dirt from the lot.
The other kids all pointed as well, and started to laugh the
way that kids do when they find an easy target for ridicule.
“Catey Barefoot!”
“Ugh, pee yew, her feet must stink like dead dogs!”
“What a stupid name. Who names anyone Barefoot?”
Catelyn felt her heart shrink in her chest. She tried to
correct them.
“Not Barefoot, Bereford. Lydia heard it wrong!”
Marton and the others ignored her, and he wasn’t content
to simply let it go at that, either.
“Your parents are so poor. They can’t even afford you
shoes, stupid.”
“Yeah, she’s probably got some nasty toe disease or
somethin’!”
“Stay away, toe germs!”
Catelyn felt the tears welling up in her eyes, and that only
made the kids more emboldened, and soon they were picking up
handfuls of dirt and flinging it at her face.
“Here’s some more dirt for ya, filthy!”
“Get some shoes, loser.”
Marton then took off one of his own shoes and held it by
the lace and swung it at her. Catelyn ducked, holding her hands to
her ears to shut out the jeers as they all proceeded to take one shoe
off, and pummel her back with them, shouting insult after insult at
the state of her, and at her parents, calling all three of them
worthless and stupid and poor.
Catelyn wasn’t sure how long it lasted but finally her father
and one of the other kid’s fathers ran over to break up the fight.
Catelyn was so mortified from the assault that she didn't even
know how it had ended. One moment she was being pummeled,
the next, she was alone except for her father.
Catelyn leaned up from where she'd been huddled, looked
down in shame and sat in the dirt, trying to pull the legs of her
pants down as far as she could to hide her bare feet. Her father
stood over her, wiping the dirt from her clothes and trying to
console her with soft words that she was trying to ignore.
When he saw that she wasn’t responding, he asked “Are
you OK, Catey?”
“Don’t call me that,” she spat at him angrily, looking up at
him with burning eyes.
He shied back from her anger, and she could see that he
realized just how upset she was.
“I’m sorry.” He took a calming breath, and tried again.
“Catelyn, are you OK?”
She couldn’t look directly at him, so she hugged her arms
around her knees and sat silently. Being the kind of man he was,
her father knew just the right thing to do, and he simply sat down
next to her, hugged his own arms around his knees and stared off
in the distance. Without saying anything, he was telling her
everything, and she loved him for his understanding.
After a while, when her anger cooled, she looked over at
him. And he looked back with his warm brown eyes, the barest
hint of a smile on his face.
She couldn’t help but beam at him when he got that look.
It was a look he reserved for only two people, and she was lucky
enough to be one of them.
She saw no reason to keep her feelings a secret.
“Dad, how come you and mom never bought me any
shoes?”
Her father rarely seemed flustered by anything she asked
him, but this question was one he never expected apparently. He
looked at her, started to say something, then stopped with his
mouth hanging open. He closed it, then turned away and tried
again.
“Catelyn, we’ve all given up certain things, in order for us
to be able to save up enough to get certain other...things. Do you
know what I’m saying?” When he said the word “things” the
second time, he looked right in her eyes and she knew what things
he was talking about. Her books.
And then she knew.
“Your mom and I talked about this, and we didn’t want to
take things away from you if we could help it. She was actually the
one who decided you could do without shoes for a while, because
since you were little, your feet have grown half a size every span!
And whenever we tried to put shoes on you, you’d pull them right
off three breaths later. We honestly thought maybe you were going
to grow flippers one day!”
She laughed at this, and leaned into him and he wrapped
his strong arm around her. He reached out and scratched the top
of her scalp, the way he always did. She liked to pretend that he
was running his hand through her hair, but she had no idea what
that really felt like.
“But listen, if you would rather wear shoes, we can talk
about other things that we can…”
“No, it’s OK, dad. I don’t mind. I just didn’t like them
teasing me about it, is all.”
He looked at her with such compassion and simply said “I
understand. No one would like that. If it happens again, you tell
me, OK?”
And then he stood up, held his hand out for her and she
took it, pulling herself to her feet and dusting herself off.
“Whatd’ya say we get home and you read to me some
more?” he whispered.
She simply grinned up at him, nodded and they walked
home hand in hand.