Genetopia (19 page)

She was lost, he realised. All he could hope was that she would eventually find her way back to Rittasan on her own.

Yet still, he was drawn onwards, unwilling or unable to abandon hope.

Ahead, he heard voices. He was sure they were voices and not mere animal babble. Perhaps these people would have seen Taneye, perhaps she was even with them.

Pil and Janos may think of him as an object of ridicule, but he was no fool. He approached cautiously. These were the wildlands, after all.

There was a small group of travellers, resting at another junction. Henritt recognised this place from his journeys to Farsamy: he had only ever taken the fork to the left before. The travellers were wearing poor clothing, coarse fabrics that may have been woven from the wool of the goats they had staked by the roadside. There were three men, five women and seven children, from toddler to a rangy adolescent girl.

The men were bearded and all of them looked hardened to the world, but they looked to be purebred humans, although not from any clan he knew. Itinerant craftspeople, he guessed from the wagon stacked high with what looked like bales of fabric. Weavers travelling from market to market. There were many such bands in the region, he knew; they called regularly at Rittasan, knowing it to be a wealthy settlement. It was a peaceable, domestic scene before him.

He emerged from cover and approached the junction in the open, careful to hold his hands freely at his sides to show that he posed no threat. When he saw that they had seen him he raised a hand, palm held flat towards them, a universal gesture of amicable greeting.

As he came closer to them he saw that they looked puzzled by his appearance, more than anything. He was an unexpected sight, he supposed: a purebred human, travelling alone.

“Greetings,” he said, lowering his hand. He did not know what language they would speak, but it would be an insult to address them in Mutter. “I wonder if you can help me?”

He saw that one of the women was not looking directly at him, but rather at a point just over his shoulder. He paused and half-turned to glance behind him.

The girl, the tall, gangling, adolescent one, had doubled up on him, emerging from the bushes with a brutal-looking club raised above her head. She laughed when she knew he had seen her, then rushed at him and swung the club down towards his face.

He raised an inadequate arm to fend off the blow.

The girl was still laughing when he hit the ground, lay there unable to move, senses drifting, floating away like in a lucid-trance, blackness spreading, enveloping...

~

Voices woke him. Not human. Not mutt. Voices punctuated by moist snuffling sounds.

He was cold, his body slick with moisture–blood or water, he was not sure. He tried to move and felt a sudden stabbing pain in his chest, his ribs.

He opened his eyes and saw that it was still light. Perhaps it was morning now and he had spent the night unconscious. He drifted.

The snuffling sound again. Then something cold, wet, sharp with bristles, pressing against his face. He opened his eyes and saw frighteningly human eyes staring back at him over a wide snout. There was fear: the beast squealed, spraying him with spittle, and backed away with a hammering of feet.

He remembered the hogs from Farsamy market, toying with a street rat they had caught. This beast... there was a lot of hog in it, but there were other traits too: the disturbing eyes, the long canine fangs protruding from its wide mouth, the sleek fur on its body, rising to a tufty crest along nape and upper back. A true beast of the wildlands, malignant and corrupt as anything he had ever seen.

The fear had been temporary, an artefact of surprise that was rapidly departing. The thing took a step towards him again.

He was naked, he realised. The travellers had beaten him and stripped him of all that he possessed and left him to the wilderness.

He made himself sit, scrabbled about in the leafmould for anything that might serve as a weapon.

He was in some kind of clearing in the jungle. The travellers must have dumped him somewhere away from the track.

His hands closed on a stick, but under the brittle bark it was soft to the core, rotten. He looked around for possible escape routes.

And that was when he saw that there was more than just one of these mutant boars. There was another adult nearby, standing crookedly to support its heavily goitred neck, and beyond it two smaller, possibly younger beasts.

He returned his attention to the nearest boar and, abruptly, a stick emerged from its left eye-socket. No... not emerged:
planted itself
in the thing’s eye. The shaft of an arrow!

The beast took an age to realise what had happened. It stood, rooted to the spot, tipped its head slightly, as if puzzled, then shook vigorously. It raised a front leg, pawed at the ground, tried to step forward and staggered to its front knees. Then it groaned, a disturbing, near-human sound, and finally it sagged to the ground.

The other boars stared for a drawn-out moment then, emitting brief, startled squeals, turned and stampeded out of the clearing.

Henritt slumped, releasing the breath he had been holding.

A man stepped out from the trees, tall and bald with bulging eyes. He wore many layers of rough clothing, made from animal skins, coarse-woven fabric and stripped, braided leaves. A bow was slung casually across his shoulder.

He stood over Henritt, studying his pathetic form.

“I expect you have a story to entertain me over some pork, eh?” He laughed, turned to the boar and started to work his arrow free.

~

The man, who called himself Cedar without claiming any clan allegiance, was not alone. He introduced his companion as Herrel. She looked to Henritt to be a mutt, with densely matted hair across most of her visible features and a wide, animal mouth. She didn’t speak–couldn’t, according to Cedar. Illness had deprived her of the ability.

Henritt knew what kind of illness the man’s words implied: the corrupting illness, creeping into its victim’s core and twisting what it finds, transmuting, leaving human not-human and animal not-animal.

Now Herrel approached Henritt and he was suddenly aware of his nakedness before these two strangers.

“Let her heal you,” said Cedar. “The Lost have talents your kind ignore: the inner change is not always malignant.”

She had a wad of chewed leaves in her hands, some kind of herbal poultice. She pushed them against Henritt’s chest, where the skin was torn and puffy. Pain lanced through his ribcage and he fought to stop himself crying aloud. It subsided rapidly, and a numbness spread through his side.

“Thank you,” he gasped.

And all the time, sounds of wet cutting puntuated Henritt’s healing as Cedar worked at the dead boar, stripping back its hide and carving chunks of meat from its body. He had lit a fire and already strips of pork were cooking, suspended in the flames from skewers stuck at angles in the ground.

The man studied him patiently. He had asked for Henritt’s story and so now, falteringly, Henritt started to talk, of Farsamy, of Taneye, of Rittasan and his father. Soon his words flowed more freely. It was like confessing to Oracle again, seeking advice from the ancient one.

As he talked, Cedar rummaged in one of the packs he and Herrel carried, emerging with a coarse cape. He handed it to Henritt as his story was nearing its end.

“I... I have nothing with which to pay you,” he said.

Cedar shrugged, dismissing the matter. “Your obsession with this mutt, this Taneye,” he said. “From what you say it does not sound like a natural thing, an infatuation. You had little chance of finding her out here and yet you still tried: your senses must have been clouded, corrupted. It sounds to me as if you have had a lucky escape, in more ways than the obvious. You still intend to seek her out?”

He felt the desperation again, but it was less intense. He shook his head. “I don’t think so. She has gone and it is probably good that she has gone.”

“She was not the normal true-breeding mutt, in any case.”

Cedar’s words had a certainty that surprised Henritt and for a moment he wondered how this man could say such a thing.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s inbred in a mutt that it should always be subservient to any purebred human: they can’t help it. If your Taneye was of true stock then she would not have been capable of running away from her master. The fact that she fled proves that she was not pure, that she was tainted.”

There was a sudden bitterness in the man’s words.

“You...?”

Cedar nodded. “I have seen everything, experienced it all. I was once a purebred just like you, and then the changing fevers stole my humanity away, corrupted me, wiped what I was and left me as I am: tainted and impure. My clan drove me out because I had become imbuto, one of the Lost. But is it really so bad?”

He took a skewer from the ground, held it out towards Henritt.

Henritt hesitated, then reached out and took the strip of pork from the skewer and stuffed it hungrily into his mouth.

Later, he said, “If Taneye was dangerous, then surely Pilofritt would have known? My father, even. Why did they not do anything?”

“Maybe they don’t like you,” said Cedar. “Or maybe they were testing you to see how you would handle the situation.”

He wondered what he would do when he returned, how he would handle this kind of knowledge.

“I will not forgive them,” he said.

“Does it matter?” asked Cedar. “Your kind always regard yourself as the freest of the free and yet you are bound by your self-imposed position. I remember exactly what it is like. Now, for the first time in your life, you are truly free. You don’t have to return to Rittasan. You can do whatever you like.”

That hadn’t occurred to Henritt. He had just assumed that he must return.

He settled back, comfortable in the heat of the fire. He could decide later.

~

Henritt pulled the cape tightly around himself, keeping the sun’s penetrating rays from his naked body. Cedar had shown him more kindness than he had ever known–and that from a man who had lost everything.

As he entered Rittasan, he was aware of the stares, the comments. He must look odd, frightening even, clad only in a rough-woven cape, his face so sore it must be heavily bruised despite Herrel’s poultices.

He straightened his back and kept walking. Let them stare.

He could have done as Cedar had suggested: left all this behind him and looked for a fresh start. But he had resisted the temptation to run. This was his home and these were his people–good, bad and everything in between. This was where he belonged.

He saw Pilofritt and nodded. The bondsman studied him with narrowed eyes. Finally, the old man dipped his head, looking away. Things would be different now.

Henritt smiled grimly. He was a changed person–stronger now. Not tainted in any way, just different.

In a world where traits migrated from species to species, carried by plague and fever, where people were judged on what could be divined of their breeding... in a world like this any transformation was a frightening thing. But also, he now understood, it was a natural progression.

He had become a different person and he was learning to embrace the change.

Chapter 15

Flint stood on a floating bladderplant pontoon, rising and falling with the pull of the Farsam’s current. Out over the water the early morning light slanted silver, casting a million flickering gems on the water’s surface. Gulls swooped and skimmed, beaks dipping in the water to drink and snatch morsels of food.

And a line of mutts strode in steady unison, at this distance looking as if they were walking on water.

The Riverwalkers were going home.

Flint watched until they had long since passed out of sight.

“Move with smoothness and continuity,” Sister Judgement had told him, leaning close and kissing him on the cheek. Reminding him that he was a Riverwalker, even when he was alone.

Now, he took a deep breath and held it, searching for a deep internal solidity in the Riverwalker way.

Calmer, he turned away from the river and threaded his way through stacked bales and sacks, back to solid land.

~

“Floor sweeping’s done by rota,” said the wiry young Tenkan Alal had introduced as Nimmocoll Elphilamy.

Flint surveyed the interior of the rooming lodge. The lodge occupied the basement level of a city centre brewhouse and the floor was packed mud with a thin scattering of rushes and unidentifiable debris. “Whose turn will it be this year?” he asked.

Nimmo laughed. “I like him, Alal. This one’ll fit in like you says.” Nimmo was the lodge’s overseer. Alal had explained that this meant he looked after the place for the owners, dealing with any trouble and making sure no one stepped too far out of line. Flint had sensed a hint of dark undercurrents here–that he was sinking lower into the underclass of Farsamy–but did not really understand. All he knew was that he had some quick learning to do if he was going to make his way in this foreign city once the money Judgement had left him had run out.

“What work do you do?” asked Nimmo.

“I...” Flint stopped. “In Trecosann I pretty much ran the family fleshfruit plantation. I helped change mutts and stock at festival times. I...” He did what was required to keep a drunken and violent father solvent. And since then... he had learnt to pray, he supposed.

“We’ll go to the Pillories,” said Alal. “We’ll work something out.”

~

It was still only mid-morning, but it felt much later. The Riverwalkers had set out early, the upriver journey being a greater challenge for their crews of mutts.

“Farsamy is hungover,” said Alal.

It was true. The place had an air of dejection today, in the aftermath of Carnival. An air of imminent violence, too. Tarn was always at his most volatile when he was hungover, liable to lash out at the slightest provocation.

Flint hunched his shoulders and walked with Alal. He was wearing trousers and an over-sized shirt, borrowed from fellow lodgers. He had even, reluctantly, removed the fibre strand of beads from his hair. No one would employ him if he was dressed as a Riverwalker.

He said nothing as they walked. Maybe it was just his mood, a sense of anticlimax after he had felt so close to finding Amber the previous day.

There was more activity in the Pillories than in other parts of the city. People still needed work, after all. The crowds were thinner than last time Flint had been here, leaving more space around the men and women who stood on boxes and low walls, silent or engaged in a reasoned monologue.

“...if you should employ me, good sir, I can guarantee as how you wouldn’t be disappointed. I’m fit and strong, and I’m a family man so I stick at a job to make sure I gets my money. My last...”

“...been work hard. Me been carry letters of sat’sfaction from...”

“...learnt to cook in the kitchens of a Beshusami brewhouse. I’m good and I’m clean and...”

Flint found it all terribly disheartening.

He watched as Alal found a space on a low platform. His friend was the silent type: he stood and people saw that he was healthy and strong. He had said earlier that he could never be one of the “Pillories braggers”.

Alal beckoned to him, shuffling along to make room.

Flint looked around, then climbed up beside his friend. He felt exposed. He felt as if all eyes had suddenly turned on him. He thought about how he should stand, and that only made him even more conscious of his every move, and of his discomfited posture. He moistened his lips and tried to think of something he could do or say, but his mind was blank.

Some time later, a man stopped before them. He was a wealthy man, by the look of his clothing, or he was in the employ of a wealthy man, at least. He peered up at Flint from under the peak of a flat straw hat.

Flint nodded, making eye contact.

The man’s gaze moved on. A short time later he gestured at the young woman who claimed to be a Beshusami-taught cook, and moved away as she followed behind him.

~

“I felt like a mutt,” said Flint.

He and Alal sheltered from the midday heat beneath the spreading fronds of a tree-fern in a small square just off the Pillories.

“Like the auction pens at Carnival,” he added.

Alal nodded. “Get used to it, Flint,” he said, after a time. “You are a freeman now, not a clansman. The best you can hope is to get by as a freeman or to find a place in bondage to one of the clans. It’s not always a bad way of life.”

Alal led Flint down another side-street and into a brewhouse. “Nimmo stands door here some nights,” he said. “He recommends it.”

“But how can we spend money in a place like this when we have no work?” asked Flint.

Alal shrugged. “Things come along,” he said. “You can’t suspend your life while you’re waiting, though.”

He ordered two beers and paid before Flint had managed to fumble for Sister Judgement’s money in his cuff-purse. The ale tasted fine after the dusty heat of the Pillories.

Some time later, there was a disturbance among a group of young men and women at the bar. Alal smirked at Flint’s worried expression. Leaning across the bench so that Flint could hear him above the raised voices, he said, “This is nothing, Flint. You should come here at night.”

Two men pushed against each other, each with his arms raised to fend the other off.

“Let’s go,” said Alal, standing.

Flint followed him towards the exit, but as he did so a rotund man backed into him and turned, cursing.

Flint raised his hands. “I...”

The man’s face was pink–from heat and excitement and drink, Flint supposed–and his eyes narrowed angrily. He stepped towards Flint and pushed him square in the chest.

Flint sprawled back across a low bench, knocking drinks across the floor.

He staggered to his feet and found that the fat man had followed him, fist drawn back to his shoulder like a snake coiled to strike.

Rhythm and clouds
.

Sister Judgement’s voice hung in his head, so intimately! He remembered standing surrounded by seven and eight year-olds, each kicking and chopping in a poetic, disunified synchronicity. Patterns in chaos. He remembered the feeling as he had learnt to find the rhythm, to move with softness and continuity, as Judgement had taught.

He stared at the man, saw sweat shining his stubbly features like snail trails.

He felt time coalescing around this moment as he found solidity deep within and his body settled into an easy, prepared stance.

The man’s meaty fist stabbed at him and Flint swayed to one side, felt the man’s forearm glance off the side of his head.

Off-balance, the man staggered forward and Flint stiff-fingered him in the midriff and stepped out of his path.

Coughing, the man turned.

Flint seized him by his tunic and threw him across his outstretched leg.

Now, his awareness spread, and he realised that at least two other fights were going on, as the original disturbance had been catalysed by his skirmish with the man now sprawled on the dirt floor.

He twisted, as a hand settled on his back, then relaxed as he saw that it was Alal.

“Come on,” said the labourer. “This isn’t our fight.”

They left the bar and returned to the Pillories to seek work.

~

All the time he stood on the low wall, Flint held onto that inner solidity, enduring the appraising looks of his prospective employers and, more often, those of onlookers and fellow paraders.

He wore a hood against the sun’s glare and from beneath its shade he surveyed the crowds, always looking for a flash of chestnut hair. He had little hope, though, convinced that it was, indeed, Amber who had been sold at auction during Carnival. She would be travelling now, with her new owners. Probably heading for one of the Tenkan gang-farms, though Flint could hope that–bought by a man of standing, as the trader had insisted–she would have as acceptable a life as possible for a true human being treated as a mutt.

Back at the rooming lodge, he drank rancid water from the fountain and then washed the day’s dust from his face. Rubbing water into his hair and beard, he felt refreshed.

A man called Lorin was strumming at a banjar and singing a song that Flint half-recognised. It was a song of new love, but its jolly words were undermined by the wistfulness in Lorin’s soft, high voice.

Flint joined Alal and the others, gathered around Lorin. Someone struck up a headstick and passed it round. When it came to Flint’s turn, he hesitated and then sucked deep.

Instantly, he felt a rush of heat pass across his face, as if he was suddenly leaning close to a fire. His nose and throat were burning, tingling; his chest felt as if it was about to burst.

Eyes bulging, streaming tears, he took the stick from his mouth and held it in front of him. A hand floated into view from the left and plucked the stick from his fingers.

He took a deep, burning breath and held it within, seeking calmness, inner stillness.

And still, Lorin sang.

Later. Cool evening air. A hollow feeling deep in his gut. Flint stood supporting a youngster whose name he did not know as he coughed up the contents of his stomach into a latrine pod.

The boy straightened and rubbed sheepishly at his mouth. “Thanks,” he mumbled.

“Lorin’s song,” Flint said. “Why...?”

“Lorin married a year ago,” said the boy. “Back home in Tenecka. Two days later she was raped by Lost raiders. They gave her the changing fever, too. Poor sod.”

Flint watched the boy’s retreating back, then turned and relieved himself into the same latrine pod. Smells of vomit mixed with urine and the pod’s digestive juices reached his nose, which seemed to be overly sensitive tonight.

“Flintheart.”

He turned, nodded at Nimmo who now stood at the next stall absently pulling at his penis before sending an arc of glistening piss into the waiting mouth of the pod.

“I hear how you handled yourself today,” said Nimmo. “Muddy says you sees off that fat bastard, Guligan.”

Muddy was the barman who ran the brewhouse where Alal and Flint had gone earlier.

Flint arranged his clothes and shrugged. “He was drunk and I didn’t want trouble.”

“Sure,” said Nimmo. “Listen: I may be able to find some work for you. Standing door, maybe going out on the Night Watch. What do you reckon?”

“Beats standing in the Pillories like some Beshusami whore,” said Flint. “Do you think there’s work for Alal, too?”

“Maybe. I’ll ask.”

~

Working the Watch suited Flint well, leaving much of the day free for him to explore Farsamy, continuing his search for Amber. And at night, he went with four or five others to patrol the Elderman Quarter of the city.

They were paid by a collective of brewkeepers, and much of their work consisted of hauling drunks out of the brewhouses. A dousing with water from a drinking fountain was usually enough to bring them to their senses, but sometimes they needed more forceful persuasion to go on their way. On rare occasions the Watch actually had to intervene in brawls and it was then that Flint made grateful use of his brief training in the martial arts of the Lordsway.

Most of the time, though, they walked the streets from bar to bar, chatting idly with the whores and waiting for something to happen.

“Pastey tells me you’re a Tenkan,” Flint said to Lorin in the dark hours towards the end of one such night.

Lorin nodded. “I’m a freeman now,” he said. “I had to leave the clan. I couldn’t stay in Tenecka. I expect Pastey has told you all he thinks he knows.”

Flint nodded. They rounded a corner, trailing a little behind Alal and Sweet. Street rats scampered in the shadows of the buildings and somewhere a dog yapped.

“From what I hear Tenecka sounds a harsh place,” Flint said. “Tell me: how do they treat the mutts on the gang-farms?”

“I’ve heard about your search for your sister,” said Lorin. “So I know why you’re concerned. You think she’s working the fields?”

“If she’s been dragged into the mutt trade then it’s not unlikely, is it? Most end up there.”

“She may be lucky,” said Lorin, after a pause.

Which, of course, meant that she may be
un
lucky, too, Flint knew.

“I want to go there, I think. Look for her. You think I’ll get by on my own out there?” It was an idea that had been slowly taking shape. His best remaining chance, he supposed.

It was a while before Lorin answered, and then it was indirect.

In silence, they stopped by the docks and shared bladders of the dark beer Muddy brewed in his basement. The sky had a yellow haze above the city, Flint saw, light pooling from Farsamy’s streetlamps–suspended knots of smartfibre that gathered sunlight by day and leaked it out through the night. Out over the water, bats plunged after small fish, their irregular, loud splashes oddly unsettling to Flint.

Lorin turned to him now, and Flint saw that same dark wistfulness in his eyes. “I met some old friends at Carnival,” he said. “Did a lot of catching up. They tell me there’s going to be another purge before too long. It’s been building up that way for a few years now: more and more Lost settling in the wilds around the settlements. Bringing the fevers with them...”

A purge. Back in Trecosann they had regular purges to drive any Lost out from the lands around the settlements, driving out the agents of change. But from what Flint had heard they were nothing compared to the purges held in southern lands, where the Lost were more entrenched and the scale of everything much greater.