Genetopia (12 page)

She reached forward, and her rough little hands touched his face, his brow, felt the contours of his skull.

“Blind Jewel is a healer,” said Tallofmind, watching the woman’s face intently. She gave a small twitch of the head and he continued, “You may be sick, but you need not worry yet. You do not have one of the diabolic fevers. You told us yesterday that you have swallowed river water and passed through the jungle to the south. From the teachings we learn that there are many tiny machines and animalcules so small as to be invisible, each with a purpose in the Lord’s scheme. When they take refuge in our bodies they cause us to be ill.”

Flint felt another stomach cramp. “Can you heal me, Blind Jewel?”

She handed him the vine leaf wrap she had brought. He unfolded the soft green leaf and found two slabs of some kind of unleavened bread.

“Eat the bread,” said Tallofmind. “And the leaf, too. After she brought your blanket in the night, Blind Jewel told us you were unwell and asked Brother Seesthroughlies to give his blessing to help you.”

Flint did not feel like eating, but he raised a piece of bread and bit off a small piece. There were herbs in it, but he didn’t recognise their flavours. He took a larger piece and chewed.

“Eat well,” said Tallofmind. “For this evening is the time of your trial.”

~

The day passed in a sequence of confusing, disconnected images. In his more lucid moments Flint wondered if he had been drugged or was, in truth, more ill than Blind Jewel had appreciated.

There was a period when he lay paralysed while all around him was a blur of motion. It was as if he had been bound up so tightly that not a muscle could move against its constraints. It was as if time itself was flowing around him, distorting like reflections in a rain-rippled pool: the world speeding by, motion folding around him, and yet Flint unable to respond.

Later–or earlier? or at the same time?–his mother, Jescka, came to him. She was beautiful, he realised, and he understood that this was not Jescka as he knew her, but Jescka as she may once have been, when her hold over the men of Trecosann had been that of a hand within a glove. The power of sexual attraction was great indeed, he understood. She had never been slim, but now the curves of her body folded into each other with the beauty of a winding river, the purest creation of nature. Skin like the finest Ritt linen, smooth and flawless. No scars marked her features yet, no bitterness in her eyes.

But then her face changed before him: her lower lip split open, one eye closed up with swelling, the eyebrow gashed above it. Vivid red blood smeared her perfect skin, plastering her fine black hair to her scalp.

“You’ve been a bad boy,” she slurred, through broken mouth. “Now you’re in big trouble. You’d better do as I say, do you hear?”

Another time: the clearing around him filled with sudden noise and movement. Children’s voices raised high, singing and chanting. He sat shivering, wrapped in his night blanket, chin on knees, and watched as the children marched and pranced all around the square, all in perfect time to the irregular beat of a small hand drum, played with both ends of a small bone by a fierce woman with strips of raw flesh woven into her hair. He remembered seeing children practising martial arts the previous day, and saw in this display many of the same synchronised movements: high kicks and chops, and fantastically gymnastic leaps and twists through the ever-changing spaces between fast-swinging clubs and spears.

Another time: he was alone on the peak of a hill, ankles fastened to the rocks by a twist of quickfibre. All around him lay bones, some still draped with ribbons of skin, hair, leathered flesh. Rats crept through the bones, always tidying, always cleaning. Vultures soared above, and landed to scramble higgledy-piggledy over the corpses on the ground–untidy gentlemen of the dead, as he recalled Amber once calling them. They were waiting for him, he knew. Waiting for his time to come.

The Riverwalkers came for him as the sun hung low in the sky. Tallofmind and the one called Teller led a small group of men, women and children, faces solemn, reverential.

In response to Tallofmind’s signal, Flint stood. An old woman stepped forward and stooped to do something at his feet and he felt the sudden release as the quickfibre anklets fell away.

Another gesture. The cloak Tallofmind had brought this morning still lay on the ground in Flint’s small shelter.

“What is this?” asked Flint. “Why must I stand trial? What is happening?”

“We live in a time of trials,” said Tallofmind. “The Lord has answers for us all.”

Flint pulled at his tunic, dropped it in the dirt. His shirt followed, and then his breeches and shorts. At a signal from Tallofmind, he kicked off his sandals, too. Naked before them, he bent at the knees to gather the cloak and then he dressed himself in the clothes of the Riverwalkers.

They led him across the clearing to a street that passed near to the great river. The ground was hard beneath his bare feet, and he trod gingerly over the sharp stones, struggling to keep up. Passing through clustered podhuts, they came to a larger building made from wood and stone, some kind of hall. Others were gathered here, and immediately Flint saw that they were outsiders: young men and women dressed in the same simple cloaks. There were a dozen–no, fourteen, he counted–standing in the small square by the building. Some talked nervously to each other, most were silent, looking scared and excited and eerily calm.

“Welcome to the Communary of the Noviciate,” said Tallofmind. “Join the other trialists, Flint. Your time is nearly here.”

~

“What is this?” he said in a low tone to a pale young woman standing a little apart from the others.

She turned her gaze in his direction. “The time of trials,” she said simply.

The blankness in her eyes made him wonder again if he had been drugged, if they had all been drugged. He found it impossible to put an age on her now: at first he had thought her young, but there was something ancient in her look.

“I am Flintreco Eltarn,” he said. “I don’t know what all this is about.”

“Another Trecosi,” said the woman.

Flint looked at her. “You are Trecosi, too?” he asked, trying to place her.

She nodded. “Once,” she said. “No more.”

“Who are you?” he asked. “Where are you from?”

“We are nameless before the Lord,” she told him.

A gong rung out again, like the one that had woken Flint this morning. It came from somewhere high on the Communary building, but he could not see where.

Seesthroughlies emerged from the high arched doorway. In his hand, an oil lamp burnt bright in the fading evening light, its smoke coloured and softly fragrant.

Without word, he strode past the gathered novices and passed through a space between two tall stones. The novices followed.

Flint hesitated, but when Tallofmind gestured at him he decided to follow, not knowing what other option he had.

Podhuts clustered to the right, a dark barrier of thicket oaks lined the left of the path, trunks squashed shoulder to shoulder in thick clumps. He smelt nectar on the evening air, and the musty scent of damp forest floor. He was aware of the procession falling in behind Seesthroughlies and the group of novices.

They came to a ravine, with the sound of a stream somewhere below in the shadows. A precarious rope bridge spanned the gap and they processed across. The rope felt rough beneath his raw feet.

On the far side they came within sight of the northern span of the defensive stockade and Flint saw an array of low fires, people moving about.

A soft glow came in patches from the ground and Flint knew that they had come to a series of lagoons of a type he had only heard about. Much like the changing vats in Trecosann, these lagoons were filled with a thick brew of changing vectors, but these were natural formations whereas the vats were artificial.

Seesthroughlies stopped and turned, his head back-lit by the glow from the deadly changing pools. He raised his hands, palms outwards, his scented oil lamp suspended from a loop of fibre around the fingers of one hand.

“Novices of the Restitution,” he said, “Your time of trial is close.”

Flint felt damp warmth run down his thigh, but his shame at losing control was nothing to the terror that now engulfed him.

Chapter 10

“The last years of man are a time of trial for us all,” intoned Seesthroughlies. “We are nothing before the Lord until he chooses us, until he seals us within the faith. In these dying times only the chosen ones will rise to paradise. All others find eternal damnation. The faith has chosen you, children of the Lord, and you have chosen the faith. Tonight your faith will be sealed.”

Flint stood silent, isolated in the group of novices. He wondered how much they understood. Those who showed fear, perhaps, but many showed excitement and eagerness, all of their faces lit by the intense glow from the changing lagoon only a few paces distant.

Now, Seesthroughlies lowered his lamp and pulled at his cloak, opening it, discarding it.

He turned and stepped out into the changing lagoon.

Flint gasped, half-raised his hands in fear, and then he stopped, stared, felt even more confused than he had during the day when he had been overcome by successive deranged visions.

Seesthroughlies walked on the surface of the changing brew, his hurried, nimble strides taking him rapidly across to the far side, feet touching the surface for mere instants.

He stood on firm ground, spun on his heels and let loose a tremendous roar of triumph. He stood in a half-stoop, fist raised, his swarthy body glowing with sweat picked out by the lagoon’s fearsome glow, eyes wide and staring.

People started to sing from nearby, the steady rhythmic song-chant that was now familiar to Flint. Seesthroughlies moved over to where someone had ignited a tray of stick-spirit. He stepped into it, white flames lapping up his legs, and then stepped out of the fire, cleansed.

A child hurried round to Seesthroughlies and offered him his cloak. He dressed and returned to stand before the novices.

“Trust in the Lord,” he said softly, a great weariness suddenly in his tone.

Just as Flint began to suspect some kind of trickery, Seesthroughlies squatted and picked up a stone. He lobbed it into the pool and it sank instantly.

“If the faith has truly chosen you then the Lord is your guardian,” he said.

~

The bladder of frenzy wine was passed to him, and he drank deeply, savouring the fizz on his tongue, the burning in his throat. He needed the strength it gave him.

Slightly disoriented, he studied the faces of those around him. He saw Tallofmind, barely chest-high to him. “Tallofmind,” he said, approaching the Riverwalker. “You have to stop this! These novices have chosen to be here–they all want to be Riverwalkers. They’ve chosen your faith and prepared for this but I haven’t! I don’t want any of it.”

Tallofmind placed a hand on his arm. “You should seek calm,” he said. “We live in a time of trials and your greatest trial approaches. Tread softly,” he added. “And do not hesitate.”

The first of the novices approached the pool and dropped his cloak to reveal a body still loose with adolescent puppy fat. He looked slowly around as if savouring the moment and then set out across the changing brew. His small, rapid steps carried him across to the far side where he collapsed into the arms of two waiting attendants.

Another two crossed, each adopting the light tread of Seesthroughlies, each slumping gratefully into waiting arms on the far bank, each then guided through the cleansing flames.

 Closer now, Flint stood one back from the changing lagoon. The novice ahead of him was the young Trecosi woman he had questioned at the Communary. He looked beyond her to the pool. There was a layer of scum across the surface, he saw now. Something like the blanketweed that grew across the swamp pools back in Trecosann. He wondered again if there was trickery involved and he allowed the thought to calm him a little.

The novice in front of him stepped forward and now Flint was intensely aware of the glare from the pool and the insistent chanting song rising from all around. The frenzy wine had a hold of his senses, he realised, and it was both a comfort and an antagonist: calming his core yet intensifying all sensation.

She paused, loosened her cloak and let it fall so that all she wore was a slender bracelet on her left wrist. Flint stared at her nakedness, so close and pale, so strangely sexless.

She stepped out onto the pool, little nimble steps taking her halfway across before the blanketweed appeared to be folding itself around her feet, her ankles, slowing her, sucking her down.

She tried to keep going, but she had broken through the surface layer and now she was up to her knees, her thighs. Arms windmilling, she somehow managed to keep moving, but the stuff was over her hips now.

She gave a little cry as she tipped forward and yet still she managed to keep pushing herself on through the goo.

At the far side she emerged on all fours, sobbing softly. The waiting helpers backed away.

The singing continued, not faltering, as one of the helpers–at last!–threw a blanket over the fallen novice and helped her clear.

Three had crossed, one had fallen. Now Flint stood at the front of the small crowd of novices, his turn arrived.

~

He drank more frenzy wine, felt its fizz, felt its burn.

The atmosphere had subtly changed now. Not so much because of the fallen novice, but because they sensed Flint’s reluctance. He was no normal novice: he was suffering this trial to prove his humanity, his worthiness to survive, he realised. They could easily have left him to die, but instead they had chosen to give him this chance before their Lord.

He saw men with spears and sharpened mutt sticks, ready to encourage him if his reluctance lasted much longer.

He stared at them, suddenly overcome again with memories of being nine years old, having a mutt stick thrust into his hand. “Go on, Flint. It’s your duty. It’s your justice.” The stick, heavy in his hand, its surface smooth in his small grip, its point specially sharpened for the occasion.

He remembered jabbing with the stick, Flint and others guiding the beasts into the changing vats.

But no, not mutts and livestock: pointing and thrusting at a man, Flint and Jescka and Tarn each jabbing at the cowed figure, goading him forward and down the ramp into the changing vat.

Justice, they had said.

He remembered the man’s look of resignation as he stepped forward into the vat, faced with no other choice. Jescka and Tarn goading him, Flint copying, angry and scared and proud to be taking part in the retribution. The changing brew engulfing the man as it had engulfed the novice just now.

The man was a criminal, found guilty, his sentence to be changed at the hands of his victims and to be banished, his legacy destined to haunt and torment Flint with fear and guilt and anguish for ever after. Guilt, more than anything. Something to be submerged, repressed, something to be forgotten.

Justice, he thought, and guilt. Was there a balance?

He stepped forward.

His clumsy fingers fumbled at the tie of his cloak, then found the cord and pulled it loose. The garment fell to the ground and he turned to survey the eager faces of the crowd.

Even the chanting had fallen silent now.

Calm, he turned full circle until he faced the pool again.

He moved forward to the edge, smelt sulphur, smelt salt and decay and something he could not define.

He stepped out onto the pool and the surface yielded gently beneath his weight.

A second step, a third.

Small strides, contact kept to a minimum.

He had expected heat, wetness, but instead there was a cool, leathery surface beneath the raw soles of his feet.

A surface skin, the layer of blanketweed, was all that supported him. Wetness would signal a rupture, a weakness, an inevitable descent into the changing brew.

He stared at the changing pool, shutting out the world. He felt himself part-blinded by its malevolent glow, coiling patterns surging just below the surface.

How long? How far?

He seemed to have been walking forever and yet he was barely halfway across.

No going back now.

The crowd was chanting again, but the sound, despite its insistence, was distant to him, hardly registering.

This was where the previous novice had hesitated, sensed the enfolding clutches of the lagoon.

He didn’t let his stride break. He fastened onto Tallofmind’s words:
Tread softly, and do not hesitate
.

Harsh grit on his feet, stinging. Arms folding around him, preventing him from stumbling back into the pool.

He had crossed to the far side. He was safe.

“Blessed one, blessed one. Child of the Lord.”

The helpers were mumbling, chanting as they embraced him. He felt a rush of panic, of elation, of confusion. They were tugging at his arms, jostling and directing him. He staggered on, felt the tingle of cool spirit flames caressing his feet, calves, shins. Removing any traces of the changing brew that may have adhered to his feet. He stepped out, the soles of his feet newly sensitised to the abrasive surface of the rocky ground. He felt his arms being guided into the sleeves of a cloak, a cord tightening around his waist. A smartfibre chain tightening itself around his head, the knobbly indentations of beads along its length against his skin.

“Flintheart,” said a voice, a man’s voice.

Seesthroughlies, was guiding him away from the pool. “The Lord has chosen you, the faith has found you. The Lord has given you a name.”

Flintheart
. Strong, but liable to fracture. It felt right. No clan affiliation, no paternal assignation, just Flintheart. He liked it. They had given his name back, both more and less, and it fit.

~

“You do this the wrong way round, Flintheart,” Tallofmind told him a short time later in that long night.

They sat in the shelter of a small outcrop of rock, a quiet spot amid the frantic intensity of the Riverwalkers’ celebrations. Of fifteen novices only four had fallen, the ratio far better than they could rightly expect, apparently.

“How so?”

“Most novices spend many days in retreat, learning the techniques of inner control, coming to their own understandings of the ways of the Lord in the dying years. Only then do they face their trial in the faithwalking ceremony.”

“I did not choose this,” said Flint. “I was not given a say in the matter.”

“The faith chose you. Circumstances put you among us and gave you the opportunity to find faith and the ways of faith.”

“I’m looking for my sister, not faith.”

“Maybe faith will find her, too, before judgement finds her.”

He could agree with the small Riverwalker on that. Judgement: death and change to these people were all the Lord’s judgement. He nodded.

Tallofmind was studying him in the gloom. Flint shrugged, and said, “What is it?”

“You are a Riverwalker now, brother Flintheart. You should stay in the Communary and learn the ways of faith.”

Flint rubbed at the soft stubble on his chin. “Give this time to grow, eh?” he said, pointing at Tallofmind’s great thicket of beard. “You saved my life,” he went on. “I am honoured that finally you welcome me into your community. But I do not have the time to devote to the kind of learning you talk of. Amber’s out there somewhere. I need to get to Farsamy, Tallofmind. My chances of finding my sister are slim, but they are greater in Farsamy than elsewhere. Do hauliers pass through here? Would it be possible for me to arrange passage?”

Flint spread his hands. “I have nothing,” he added. “I would not ask if there was any other way.”

“I will ask Sees,” said Tallofmind. “You will always have a dirt floor to sleep on in Restitution,” he said, grinning.

~

“The man, he says don’t do this, don’t do that. Don’t eat fruit from the wild fruit tree. Don’t drink the sweetwater from the wild pretty sap flowers. You’ll be
changed
, he say. You’ll become what you’re not now, he say!”

Frenzy wine splashed Flint’s face as Teller strode around the small clearing, knees kicking high, waving his arms and swinging his wine bladder with abandon. Normally subdued–or at least, that was how Flint would have described him–tonight Teller was a man possessed. He drank deeply and stood forward, hands on hips, bladder hanging from a loop of twine around one wrist, body tilting precariously over his rapt audience.

“Don’t listen to what the man says,” he told them, his voice suddenly soft, purring. “When the Lord is in your heart you
know
–you don’t need to be told. Monkey come out from the jungle–” suddenly Flint felt eyes on him “–monkey scratching in the dirt, monkey making animal sounds. Lord in your heart and you
know
. Ain’t no monkey: that’s a fellow brother of the river. Brother Flintheart’s in the Lord’s eyes like you and me.”

Teller leaned even farther over the seated listeners and thrust the wine bladder at Flint.

Flint took it, drank, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

Teller pulled away, yanking the wine from Flint’s hand by its length of twine. He spun on his heels, arms flailing, wine spraying. “We’re living in the end times,” he said. “The last trump, it sounded many many years ago, I tell you. The last trump sounded and Biogiddeon shook the man who says this, the man who says that.

“We’re living in the end times, brothers, sisters. We have risen up to face our judgement. When the last calling comes and the Lord chooses, He chooses those with faith in their hearts, those who have proved their trust in the Lord beyond doubt. You, me, brothers and sisters: we seen some fine faithwalking tonight, but we’re all faithwalking every breath we take.

“It’s so easy to fall, brothers and sisters, but you don’t know when the Lord is watching, when the Lord is testing. You don’t know–
I
don’t know–when the final call will come, when each and every one of us will be judged before the Lord. But I tell you one thing: we sure will know when it happens...”

~

The Faithwalking ceremony had become a party, in which much frenzy wine and jaggery tea was drunk, but now the gongs were sounding and Flint felt their insistence echoed in the pulsing deep in his aching skull.

Flintheart the Riverwalker. It seemed both appropriate and incredibly alien to him, but he knew he had become more Flintheart than Flintreco Eltarn.