Genetopia (22 page)

Chapter 18: Cedar’s story

Such a pretty young thing.

Strong and clean-looking. Soft, golden down covered her exposed skin. Her night-black eyes were stained honey-gold around the edges. Distinctive.

She could almost have been human.

So why had he hit her again? He’d spoilt her pretty face.

First time... well, the first time he
had
to. Quickest way to shut her up. But this time... this time he had enjoyed it.

It made him wonder just what he had become.

~

He found her the day before. He didn’t have a name for her then: didn’t know that she was called Taneye.

They’d been travelling north when he found her. Through the wildwoods, skirting around the settlements and roads of the truebreds, wary in this time of unrest.

Too much violence in the south. Too many panicking truebreds clubbing together to slaughter anyone who was different.

Purge
was too clean a name for mass murder. That’s what Cedar thought.

But he knew not to argue. Arguing against crossbows and spears–with people who sneak up on you at night and burn you out–was not a good idea. He’d had too many near misses recently, enough to tell him to move on.

Herrel had accepted his decision to head north without question. She would not speak aloud, of course–in all their years together Cedar had never known her to speak and still he did not know if she had a physical impediment to speech or a mental one. She had other ways of communicating, though: gesture and sign were the obvious ones, but she also had more sublte senses heightened in the way some Lost do. Sometimes he thought she read his mind, but he didn’t really believe it. She spoke to him through body language, and she understood his own language of the body intimately and often responded to this even before he had voiced his intentions. She sensed the moods of the body and its traumas and ailments, too. He had owed his life to her healing hands on more than one occasion.

And so, they had travelled, walking side by side, burdened by towering backpacks that carried all their possessions and supplies.

The day before this day they had come across signs of settlement: plantations and paddies and tended roadways.

“We’re in Ritt territory now,” Cedar said, although he suspected Herrel already knew. “No longer in the Ten. Best we stay clear of them, though. Panic may have spread.”

Finding a trail through the jungle, they had bypassed the settlement, their journey longer but safer, too.

All the time, Herrel walked at his side.

She was a short woman, with a broad body that was higher on one side than the other. Her deformed shoulders may have been a fault of birth or a result of later change, Cedar had never discovered which. She wore a coarse woven skirt and a knitted sable leaf vest, but left the rest of her thickly-furred body exposed. Her face was flat, as if someone was constantly pressing it backwards, and her mouth–that silent mouth!–was wide, lipless, like the mouth of a river turtle.

She was the most beautiful human being Cedar had ever known, one whose company he never felt worthy to share.

Towards the end of the afternoon they came to an old woodman’s hut, from the days when truebreds still dared live and work in the jungle. Long abandoned, it was covered in thorn bush and tangleweed but, within, it was clear of growth and clean.

He deposited his pack, but kept the long bow slung across his shoulder. He kissed Herrel on the brow and she turned away, already intent on gathering herbs and fruit from the forest, reliant on her sense of what was good and what corrupt.

He explored the vicinity of the hut. There was no sign that this part of the jungle had been visited recently by truebreds or others: no trails or traps, no signs of encampment or harvest.

That was good.

Truebred or Lost: Cedar knew that you could never trust anyone in the wilds.

But... such a pretty young thing!

There she was: wandering, staring around herself like a pup who’d never been out. He could see wonder in her eyes. Pausing to cup a trumpet flower in one hand and sniff its pungent scent. Staring up at the trees towering over her, slivers of blue showing through the canopy mosaic.

And pausing every so often, looking about, a nervous animal wary of predators.

She wore the rough tunic and leggings of the enslaved, but he saw immediately that she was no mutt: she was Lost, blessed by change.

He stood motionless. Watching.

She came close before finally she spotted him and stopped, eyes wide. Her mouth had opened abruptly and stayed open, but no sound emerged.

He smiled.

There was something about her that disturbed him. Something frightening. Some stirring of long lost memories.

Maybe that was why he would hit her the first time.

“Don’t run,” he said, his voice sounding hesitant and weak.

But he knew she was going to flee. Years with Herrel had attuned him to the language of the body, too.

He stepped towards her and punched her.

That was all it took. A single, well-aimed blow.

The feeling of his fist as it struck her: soft flesh, bone beneath. That nearly made him turn and run away. More fear, more memories that wouldn’t find their shape in his head.

He squatted over her, stroking her short chestnut hair away from her face. “Never trust anyone out here,” he told her unresponsive form. “Didn’t they ever tell you that?”

~

Herrel had the appropriate herbs all ready by the time he dragged the girl back to their camp, the first time he had hit her.

Not just for the girl, but for Cedar too. She knew he was hurting.

“You are the most beautiful human being,” he told her, for the twentieth or thirtieth time that day. He waved towards the slumped body of the girl. “And this one is the prettiest,” he said. “So why am I so greatly disturbed?”

He decided not to tie her up. Maybe she would learn to trust him, even though he had hit her and dragged her through the jungle, and even though later he knew he would picture her in his head as he made love to Herrel.

He sensed her movements when she roused, late in the night.

He sat in the doorway of the woodman’s hut, buried deep in layers of clothing. He liked the sounds of the jungle at night. It was something he had grown accustomed to, for he rarely slept for long. Years ago, he had gathered from Herrel that he should accept it as part of his condition, just as he should accept his over-sensitivity to cold and the fact that not a single hair grew on his body.

When she moved, he turned his head, aware that although he could not see her, she would see him in the doorway, lit from without. “Sleep,” he said. “You are safe, my love.”

~

There was a sudden eruption of squeals and grunts from the jungle. They were distant, but near enough for Cedar to be wary: there were few large animals in the wilds, but the various forms of feral hogs were among the largest and, often, most dangerous.

Both Herrel and the girl were awake in the hut–probably woken by the sounds. “Wait here,” Cedar said, standing in the doorway and unslinging his bow.

He went out into the dawn light, senses alive to the dew-fresh scents, the calls of tree crickets, frogs and songbirds, the touch of leafmould on bare feet.

So sharp the swings from low to high! He did not understand the shifts in his mood over the last day and night, but now he knew the exultation of a new day, of a man at one with his environment.

He pulled his marten skin coat tight around him. The morning air was cold as ever to Cedar.

He headed towards the sound of the hogs and soon saw signs that people had passed this way in the night or maybe the previous evening.

There!

A herd of six or seven of the beasts in a clearing formed where a great jelo tree had fallen. Some of the tree’s roots had remained in the ground and now, horizontal, the tree had thrown up a row of new limbs from its fallen trunk.

The off-shoot saplings screened Cedar’s approach.

There was a young man in the clearing, stark naked and fumbling pathetically in the leaf litter. He was looking for some means of defence, Cedar deduced.

A big boar was closing on the man. Stiff bristles stood up in an uneven crest along its spine and its fangs were already stained red–perhaps from this man or perhaps from earlier fighting or prey. The naked man was injured, Cedar saw, but there was no obvious sign that he had been gored by a hog.

Cedar took an arrow from his quiver and drew his bow. He made a clicking sound in the back of his throat and the beast turned its head towards the sound.

Instantly, the arrow buried itself in the boar’s eye.

The beast stood, tipped its head to one side, started to shake from side to side as it tried to free the arrow. Pawing at the ground, it went down on its knees and then collapsed.

Already, Cedar was up and over the fallen jelo tree, clapping his hands and shooing the other hogs away. They stared at him and then, as one, turned and stampeded off through the trees.

The young man sat back in the dirt, trembling.

“I expect you have a story to entertain me over some pork, eh?” Cedar said, chuckling at the look of horror on the man’s face as he wrenched the arrow from the hog’s eye.

Not long afterwards, Herrel joined them, carrying their backpacks slung over each shoulder. With a brief hand sign she reassured him that she had bound the girl and left her behind.

Cedar saw the young man watching their exchanged signals curiously. “This is my partner, Herrel,” he told him. “She does not speak. The fevers stole her tongue.”

Again: the horror on the youngster’s face–this time at mention of fevers, implications of change.

He would enjoy taunting this one.

~

Cedar gave him food and listened to him and offered him gentle guidance.

And young Henritt Elkyme gave him a name for the runaway with the honey eyes and the naivety of a child. He called her Taneye.

It was an exchange loaded in Henritt’s favour and soon Cedar was bored with him, the spoilt child of a village Elder, blind to the limits of his own shuttered, unchanged existence. “Your kind,” Cedar told him, “always regard yourself as the freest of the free and yet you are bound by your self-imposed position.”

There was a flicker of understanding in the boy’s eyes, the briefest moment of insight, perhaps.

Cedar regretted lighting such a good fire to cook the pork. Now, the boy was too comfortable before it, entranced by the flames.

But the cold! Even now, as the day’s sun grew stronger, Cedar felt chilled through, cold inside.

Finally, he held a hand aloft in farewell.

He took the two backpacks and indicated to Herrel that she should stalk the young truebred to make sure he was on the right road back to his home, and also to make sure he planned no trickery. You should never trust anyone out here.

Taneye was there in the woodhut, staring at him from deep in those dark eyes. Herrel had gagged her and bound her with shrinking vine around her wrists, knees and ankles. She had hauled boughs of thorn bush across the doorway, too, hiding their captive from view and preventing her from shimmying out like an eel if she should be so inclined.

Cedar slid an arm beneath Taneye’s back, another behind her knees, and lifted her, disturbed more deeply than he thought possible by the feel of her, the smell.

He put her down in the sunlight

Herrel had painted a poultice on Taneye’s cheek, where he had hit her. He wondered why he had struck her so readily. He was not a violent man. Not that he could remember, at least.

“It’s okay, my love,” he told her.

And then he paused to wonder why he called her that.

~

His life had really started when Herrel found him, however many years ago that was.

Before...

Fragments. A few images of places and people, the knowledge that he had been a truebred man as good and as blind as any other before the change had found him and he had been banished from his clan.

Memories were like nervous butterflies: approach them direct and they always evaded him. Approach them at a tangent and just occasionally they would offer him more; sometimes, too, they would explode in a dazzle of colour and movement at unexpected moments, triggered by scent or sound, or by some abstruse association.

And now... he sensed them flitting about, just beyond his reach.

So banishment, yes: driven out from his home because of the change that had ripped through his body and his head. (And was there something more?) He remembered the confusion, the aimless wandering through the jungle he had always been taught to fear.

The driving hunger and thirst vying with the ingrained terror of what he might eat, what he might drink.

Fevers taking him in their grip, cold sweats drenching his body as he desperately clawed at the few possessions he carried to wrap himself in his blanket and even, eventually, to rip open his backpack with brute force so that he could wrap himself in its fabric. Fighting the cold. The bone-deep cold of the changing fevers.

He remembered that first bite of a jungle fleshfruit, the blood-like juices running down his chin. He had seen tree martens grazing these fruit, so he hoped that indicated that they were untainted.

More fevers: the fruit or simply a continuation of his change? He never knew. Never knew anything but the frightening deepness of the chill.

And warmth!

Heat, sinking into his body. Moist compacts of chewed leaves, pressed against his head, smeared over his scalp which was now bald, unprotected–he had shed his hair as he had shed his humanity. The poultices bound him in their warmth, drawing the chill from deep within.

A face, a woman, her features wild and distorted. Scaring him, as he had not yet learned to abandon his fear of the Lost and changed.

Later, wanting to talk, and unable to utter a sound. Wanting her to talk to him, and not understanding her silence.

He did not know how long that time had lasted. Or the time afterwards, when Herrel–as he had decided to call her, a name derived from some fleeting memory of a woman in a city–when she had led him by the hand, feeding him from the wilds and teaching him, patiently and tenderly, how to survive.