Genetopia (20 page)

“It should have been done long before now,” said Lorin bitterly.

Flint nodded. He supposed that Tallofmind would disagree, arguing that it was impossible to hold back the final reckoning, but how could you take that line with one who had lost as much as Lorin?

“Why are you telling me this?” asked Flint.

“If there’s a purge then they’ll be recruiting,” said Lorin. “I’m going back, Flint. If something is finally being done to drive out the Lost then I’m going back to join the fight. And if you really want to look for your sister in the Tenkan plantations you might want to come with me.”

~

It was several days before the occasional gossip about an imminent purge turned into anything substantial. Flint became convinced that such talk was simply the kind of rumour that idle young men used to fill their days and make life potentially more interesting.

Then, one day, word came back from the Pillories that the Tenkans were there, rounding up volunteers to join the purge force.

“I’m going to the Pillories now,” said Lorin, to those gathered in the gloom of their rooming lodge. “And you are all welcome to join me.”

Flint followed him immediately, pausing only to clasp hands with Alal and wish his friend well. Young Sweet came, too, along with four others. Finally, Nimmo stepped forward to join them, looking suddenly pale and child-like. Licking his lips, he said, “Been here too long. Reckon it’s time I travelled a bit, don’t you reckon?”

Lorin stepped out into the street, and Flint and the others followed.

Chapter 16

There were four longboats in this convoy alone, each carrying upwards of sixty men. From what people were saying, several such convoys had already set out, and more would follow in the days to come.

This was no mere purge he was heading into. This was a war.

Leaning against one side of the boat, he was standing below the water line, which was about level with his waist. A small gangway passed along either side of the boat, which was divided into four cargo bays like the one in which he stood. Above his head, fibresheet canopies kept the sun’s harsh rays from burning them.

He turned to Nimmo. “You realise what this is, don’t you?”

Nimmo looked at him, eyes big in his narrow, bony face.

“It’s a haul-boat,” said Flint. “It’s the kind of boat Clan Beren use to transport mutts downriver in the trade.” He remembered travelling on a similar boat from Greenwater–memories of a time which seemed so long ago.

“You ever killed someone?” asked Nimmo abruptly.

Flint thought immediately of the time as a boy, prodding at Cedero, forcing his former teacher into the changing vats. “No,” he said quietly. “Not killed.”

“You will soon,” said Nimmo.

Flint stared at him, not sure whether Nimmo’s agitated state was caused by fear or by some other sense of anticipation.

~

They landed in Tenka territory well into the afternoon. Lorin called this area the Ten; Flint was unsure if that was its full name or a local abbreviation.

The docking area consisted of a small cluster of podhuts and lean-tos surrounded by a high stockade. Beyond that was a wide area of razed ground, a buffer zone before the wilds took hold.

They trooped off the haul-boat. Flint felt tired, even though he had spent most of the day standing and sitting around.

They joined a crowd around the podhuts, the rest of the day’s volunteers. A short time later, a grey-haired man with a thick moustache and a crossbow slung across his back climbed up onto a small platform and addressed them.

“Welcome,” he said. “Welcome to the Ten, my friends. My name is Marshall Maltenka Elmarc and I will be commanding this division of the purge force. We may come together as strangers today, but by the end of this all you will be closer than brothers. It is my task to organise you into a working division as soon as possible.” He pointed towards the stockade, indicating the wilds beyond. “The Lost are out there, men. While we prepare ourselves they continue to spread. They continue to raid and steal. They continue to rape and kill. It is your job to stop them.”

His fighting talk had a rousing effect on the volunteers and the mood became markedly different: upbeat, boisterous, high spirits verging on rowdiness. Flint felt it himself, a righteousness swelling within.

Nimmo clapped him on the back. “Come on,” he said. “Lacey says there’s beersticks if we’re quick.”

“Sounds good,” said Flint.

He looked, then, at Lorin. His friend was still staring out beyond the stockade and into the forest, where Marshall Elmarc had indicated the wilds. He was ready for the fight, Flint realised. Probably more ready than any of them.

They slept in the open, sheltered only by the stockade and the sleeping rolls with which they were issued. Flint lay for a long time staring up at the stars, listening to the night calls from the wilds.

They could have set out that afternoon, but Lorin had told him the Marshall had decided that it was too dangerous as they would be finishing their journey after sunset. Instead, they would wait until morning.

~

Dawn came with a lightening of the sky and the coarse calls of the Marshall’s officers, chosen from among the volunteers the previous evening. Lorin was one of them, known to the Marshall as a returning Tenkan. “Come on, men,” Lorin said, standing over the sleeping forms of his fellow volunteers. “New day. Time to organise. We’ll be on the move again soon.”

Flint rubbed at his eyes, and joined the general chorus of grumbling at the early start. He sat, and saw that already queues were forming.

“Kit or grub?” said Nimmo, squatting at his side.

Flint rolled his bedding and attached it to the loop at the back of his belt. “Hnnh?”

“Kit, I says,” Nimmo went on. “Food can wait, but kit’s with us for the duration. Come on.” He rose and, with a backward glance at Flint, hurried over to join one of the queues.

Flint joined him.

Slowly, they moved forward. “Bow or crossbow?” Nimmo asked, more than once. “Crossbow, I reckon. The Tenkans make ’em well, or at least, that’s what Lorin says. How about you, Flint? What’re you after?”

Flint shrugged. The only weapon he had ever used was a mutt whip, and then only in show.

Lorin already had one of the finely crafted Tenkan crossbows. He had shown it to Flint and Nimmo the previous evening. It was the preferred Tenkan weapon, technology founded on a combination of their own engineering skills and refined smartfibres supplied by the neighbouring Ritt clan. They were supposed to be more manoeuvrable and accurate than the conventional long and shortbows Flint had seen some of the Tenkans carrying, but the time needed to crank up the tension between shots made them slower in action.

They came to the long bench, where three old Tenkans were dispensing equipment: clothing, weapons, drinking bladders. One of them thrust a pair of boots at Flint, strapped together with gum tape and good intention. “No,” said Flint. “I’m okay as I am.” He took an empty bladder, instead.

At his side, Nimmo was arguing with one of the men, trying to convince him that he should have one of the small number of crossbows. Flint looked at the longbow offered to him and again said no. Instead, he gestured at a fighting staff, sharpened at either end. He took it, felt its balance in his hands and nodded. It felt like the staffs the Riverwalkers used in some variations of the Lordsway. “This is good,” he said. The man behind the bench shrugged and turned to the next in line.

As they ate a breakfast of dried bread and cane cheese, Marshall Elmarc stood above them on the stockade. He assured them again that before long they would be a smoothly functioning fighting unit and not a disparate group of strangers. He told them that they were heading today to what he called a settlement camp on the Leander Plain, where they would be based for a few days while they awaited deployment into smaller purge squads. He reminded them that they would be travelling through the wilds, the home of troupes of Lost, only too willing to attack and rampage and destroy all that was True. “Be prepared,” he concluded. “You march through enemy territory.”

Soon, they were out there, forest closing in around the well-worn trade route they followed. Its surface was cracked and buckled blackstone and it was as wide–wider, even–than Farsamy Way itself.

Silence had rapidly stolen over the purgist division when they set out, the boisterous mood of the previous night now departed. Occasional murmurs broke out over the sounds of the wilds and the padding of booted feet on the road’s surface. Flint walked barefoot in the Riverwalker fashion, occasional sharp edges of the blackstone uncomfortable under his calloused soles. The boots he had been offered earlier may have helped, but he suspected not.

He kept looking around, searching the shadows for any signs of movement, of Lost. He felt scared, and he felt ashamed that his own fear over-rode any concern he had for Amber and what she must have felt if she had travelled this road.

Judging by the anxious looks of the others, he was not alone in his sudden trepidation.

In the imposing screens of jungle to either side, Flint recognised stands of whitewood and a few dawn oaks and thicket oaks, but most of these southern trees were new to him. Thick drapes of moss and vine wove barriers between the branches and trunks of the trees, and gaudy fungal growths erupted in sudden splashes of orange, red and sickly flesh-brown. Occasional movements were birds–the darting jewels of hummingbirds and barkcreepers, the startling crashes of forest fowl and pigeons–or butterflies and bees.

Early on, a mist clung to the ground in places, but soon the sun burnt it off and they all had to remember to ration the contents of their drinking bladders against the day’s heat.

At some point, Flint realised he had simply been marching–vigilant, but no longer expecting every mysterious shadow to hide an assailant, every movement to be the first sign of attack.

He thought again of Amber, wondering if she had come this way, part of a group of mutts being marched south to the gang-farms of the Ten. Joining up for the Purge seemed to make sense back in Farsamy, but now he wondered how he would ever find the opportunity to look for his sister.

~

They reached Camp Sixteen in the middle of the afternoon, having broken their march only twice to drink water and chew on dry breadcakes.

Sixteen was a stockaded settlement that had clearly expanded greatly in recent years. A central core of long-established podhuts and wooden cabins was now surrounded by ranks of dormitory huts, and two sides of the stockade had been dismantled and extended outwards to accommodate the growth.

“It’s what we call a settlement camp,” Lorin told Flint, as the three climbed up onto the stockade later that afternoon.

Up here on the camp’s defences, Flint could see that the jungle formed a cliff of greenery to the west. To the east, the land was open, divided up into a patchwork of fields and plantations where the Tenkans grew massive quantities of fibres, meat fruits and canes, boll-cotton and other crops. A slender river, some tributary of the Farsam, snaked through the fields. Here and there, Flint saw small figures working at the plants and some even climbing high in the trees to work.

Mutts, working the plantations.

He thought of all he had heard of the brutal conditions endured by plantation mutts, and even by their owners, and now it did not ring true as he surveyed what appeared to be some kind of rural idyll. It all looked so peaceable at this distance.

“Why do you call it a ‘settlement camp’?”

“It’s on the edge of the settled territories,” said Lorin. “Mutt teams stay here and clear the land and then the camp becomes a proper named town.”

“So we’re bunking in a mutt camp?” said Nimmo.

Lorin nodded. “At least we’re inside the stockade,” he said. He indicated the ground immediately below the defensive wall.

Flint and Nimmo leaned over and saw a few lean-tos and fibresheet screens below. Around to the right there were more, and Flint guessed that the bulk of the encampment was out of sight from where they stood.

“The mutts sleep outside to make room for us,” said Lorin.

Nimmo pinched his nose and straightened. “I wondered what the stink was.”

They went back down to find some food.

~

Nimmo had been right about the smell: a rich melange of bodily odours, both human and animal in nature.

In all his travels, Flint had not been anywhere as alien as the mutt encampment felt to him now. After being allocated space in one of the dormitory huts, Flint had slipped away to shin down some climbing rungs he had spotted on the outside of the stockade.

All around, mutts sheltered from the late afternoon heat under canopies suspended from stout canes. He had never seen so many mutts in one place, gathered in small groupings, queuing for food, dozing in the shade, singing Mutter songs that were the same as the songs they sang in Trecosann.

He walked through the encampment, studying the mutts, struck both by the great variety and by the constancy of type within that variety. He was familiar with many of the types: the short, muscular labourers; the tall, willowy race favoured by Clan Beren; the small simian tree-climbers known as Mutties. The others he knew less well or not at all: the dense-furred aquatics with their breathing slits and webbed hands; a type that was almost entirely hairless, with slender heads and long fingers; groups of small, hyperactive creatures he first took to be children until he saw that they were in fact adults, chasing each other and chattering and squabbling over scraps of food.

At every opportunity, he stopped them and asked his well-worn questions. “Me master outta Trecosann,” he said. “You speak? You been know me words? Me been look for mistress outta Trecosann. Her got red in hair, yellow in eye, her high like this.” He held his hand level with his chest. “If an’ you see her you treat her plenty good. You been know me words?”

He spotted a bondsman–an overseer–and spoke to him. “I think my sister has been taken in the mutt trade by mistake,” he said. “Her most distinctive feature is the yellow in her eyes from a childhood illness. Have you heard of anyone like this?”

The bondsman shook his head. “Not here,” he said.

It was the same response he always had.

He climbed back onto the stockade and down into Camp Sixteen. Outside the camp, the atmosphere had been one of domesticity; within, it was taut, close to boiling point. So many young men in close confines, waiting for action.

There was a brewhouse, packed so tightly that its customers had spilled out into the street. Flint went on past and eventually found a relatively secluded spot near the cook house.

He inhaled deeply and held his hands palms-together above his head, struggling to find and hold the Joyous Breath. For a long time it evaded him, his attention diverted by the comings and goings of the purgists around him.

Then he realised that darkness had fallen and some time must have passed. He felt solidity deep in his centre, and moved smoothly into the rhythmic chopping and kicking of Rhythm and Clouds. There was a whole repertoire of the Lordsway which he had never learnt, but the moves he knew he knew well.

Much later, he found his place in the dormitory hut and spread his sleeping roll in the narrow space on the floor between Nimmo and a snoring Beshusami.

~

It was four more days before they were finally despatched to the front line of the purge. They spent much of the time in what the Tenkans called training, but was clearly an effort both to assess their fitness for action and to fill their time while decisions were taken and arrangements made.