Genetopia (24 page)

Chapter 20

After the great cities of Beshusa and Farsamy, Tenecka was a disappointment. Like many long-established settlements, the Tenkans’ capital had grown up around the ruins of some ancient place. Some of its stone buildings must date back long before the Fall.

But even those ancient constructions struck Flint as squalid and poorly formed: square buildings of an ugly grey stone; blackstone roadways, buckled and cracked yet still conforming to a grid plan. Most of the buildings were made from whitewood and oak, the timbers split and regrown together with admirable craft, but little flair. Accustomed to the flowing bulbosities of podhut architecture, Flint found the straight lines and angles of Tenecka oppressive.

Everywhere, a layer of dirt coated all surfaces. Flint even felt that he could taste the grime on the air he breathed. Lorin had told Flint about the great dust storms they sometimes had towards the end of the dry season, powerful gusts taking up the soil from the drained rice and bellycane paddies and driving everyone indoors to shelter.

There were crank-handled sirens mounted high on some of the boxy buildings. To warn of storms, Lorin had said. Yet now, everyone knew, if the sirens sounded it would be for a different reason. Now, if they sounded, it would be a signal that what they were calling Shade’s Rebellion had spread to the city.

Flint marched three abreast with Lorin and Nimmo, part of a long line of purgists that had arrived at Tenecka late on this afternoon.

People lined the streets and every so often cheers and whistles broke out to welcome the purgists.

“They all look so poor,” said Flint. Their clothes were grey and brown, made from natural fabrics and–at this distance–simply looking dirty and ragged. Their faces were gaunt, eyes bulging, shadows beneath; some children ran naked in the street, despite the sun and the cysts on their backs.

Lorin looked around, as if noticing for the first time. “It is the Teneckan style,” he said. “We are not as outrageously decadent as those in the western cities, that is all.”

Flint looked around again and it was then that he realised how few mutts there were in this place, a city at the heart of the plantation lands where it was said that mutts outnumbered humans several times over. They must keep them more in the rural areas, he thought. No need for them here in Tenecka itself.

So long ago, it seemed, he had come here hoping to continue his search for Amber. The reality had proved very different to his intentions, though. Now it was just a matter of enduring, surviving.

The purgists camped in makeshift tents in a field on the northern outskirts of the city, and that was where Flint started to get some idea of what had been happening.

~

They sat outside in the darkness, drinking tubes of the local jaggery spirit they called
burn
and sniffing coarse headsticks. The mass of canvas and fibre shelters was like some kind of transit camp, bringing to Flint’s mind stories of mutt camps used by the haul-boats along the rivers Elver and Farsam. There had been crops growing in this field until recently–hacked off at the base, their flattened stumps still in the ground. Some kind of fibre-cane, he thought.

“Hey! Is that you, Sweet?” Flint called, louder than he had intended.

It was. Sweet turned and waved, and pushed his way through the crowd to find a space on the end of the bench. A few years older than Flint, he was of small build–a similar stature to Nimmo, and back in Farsamy some had joked that they were brothers, parted at birth.

“Flintheart, Lorin... hey, Nimmo!” he said, laughing. “Nightwatch reunion, isn’t it? Been here long?”

“We just arrived,” said Nimmo. “How about you, Sweet?”

“Yesterday. Been up to Henika’s today. Just back.”

Henika’s was where all the trouble was, or so people were saying.

“People say the mutts have found a way of changing themselves,” said Nimmo. “A vector that knocks out their devotion to humankind. Is that right?”

Flint hadn’t heard that version. He’d heard that the mutts had learnt how to hypnotise themselves to overcome their deep-bred subservience. He’d also heard that they weren’t mutts at all: that they were Lost, or even True humans, passing themselves as mutts in order to trigger some kind of regional war. And that they had been possessed by the spirits of the dead. And that they were carriers of some virulent new changing fever. And any number of less likely scenarios.

“Dunno about that,” said Sweet. “Marshall Albatenka says there’s really only a small number of them that are behind it all, and that the rest are just there because they’re stupid mutts who don’t know any better. Henika’s is a pissy little farmstead up the Leander. We got it surrounded. This whole thing won’t last much longer.”

“Why so many of us here, then?” asked Flint, head reeling under the onslaught of the burn and the sticks.

“The people of the Ten are scared,” said Lorin. “They don’t know how rife this new change will prove to be.”

“And there’s one other thing,” said Nimmo. “Think about it: mutts have changed–God knows how, but they’ve changed. And we’re right in the middle of the biggest fucking purge in living memory! Who’s doing the purging? Sure, there are people like us, but has there ever been a time when there have been so many armed and trained mutts around?”

They drank and they sniffed and they swapped stories of their campaigns.

Later, one of the brewmaids came by, collecting empty bladders and discarded sticks. She had a tray suspended from a loop around her neck, and it was stacked high with more drinks and sticks.

“Hey,” said Nimmo softly, “got anything for us?”

The girl was tall and slim, and she wore a tunic that emphasised her cleavage. She smiled, and said, “Burn, headsticks, ale as weak as piss, is all I’m offering.”

Lorin thrust some coins at her and said, “Burn, and three more sticks.”

“Got anything more?” asked Nimmo, showing her a handful of coins. He had a hand on her hip, thumb working a tight circle.

Flint was aware of the looks of those around, sensed tension suddenly ready to erupt. “Leave her,” he said quietly, leaning towards Nimmo. “Not the place.”

For a moment, it seemed that Nimmo would object, then he subsided, letting his hand fall away, closing his fist over his money. “Anyway,” he said, as the brewmaid moved across to another bench. “Buy me three mutts with that.”

Flint took a tube of burn and cracked its top with his teeth. He enjoyed the trail it left down his throat, tingling and raw.

“Sweet,” he said later, when the night sky had fully darkened and they had filled their bellies with all the drink they could afford.

“Hnnh?”

“Why’s it they call it ‘Shade’s Rebellion’, then?”

“Their leader. A white-skinned mutt called Shade. Henika bought him not so long ago. The Tenkans say Henika was always known as a vicious bastard. Seems he found a mutt who learnt to stand up to him. The mutt thinks he’s been sent by God to sort out humankind for good. First people knew of it was when Henika’s body came floating down the river. Took ’em a while to work out who it was.”

“I saw a mutt like that for sale from one of the traders who passed through Trecosann,” said Flint, clutching at vague memories. He laughed. “I had a good look at it. It had scars on its back. The ones with scars are always trouble.”

Nimmo laughed. “Looks like old Henika wasn’t as good a judge of a mutt as you, Flint. Could have saved himself a lot of trouble.”

~

Darkness by the river. The sound of water helped: soothing, washing away the tensions and the fears. And the memories.

Flint sat cross-legged on the dry mud.

He had been unable to settle. Perhaps it was the mixture of burn spirit and headsticks–even now his head was a-jitter–or perhaps it was something else.

Where would he go from here? What was to become of his life? He had closed so many doors by choosing to travel, clutching at the vague hope that he might find Amber and they would then work out what to do.

He had been drunk, he realised, and maudlin, but he had come to this place and sat and now the river calmed him.

He did not even try to find the Lordsway. He knew it would be futile. Calmness was as much as he could hope for.

Some time later, he heard the sound of feet. He looked around and saw the form of a woman, heading along the riverside path. It was the brewmaid from the camp, he realised. She ducked her head, aware of his presence and pretending that she did not know he was there, no doubt hoping that he would leave her alone.

And then she looked up and he saw her attitude change.

She came over. “It’s you, isn’t it?” she said.

He did not know what the appropriate answer was.

“Thank you,” she said. “For stopping the other one,” she added, explaining.

“Oh... Nimmo,” said Flint. “Don’t worry about him.” A platitude: Nimmo was most certainly a person to worry about.

“I’ll go.”

“No, it’s okay,” he said. “I was just... getting away.”

She sat by him, legs crossed, arms resting on her knees.

“My name is Flint.”

“I’m Wend.”

After a while, she said, “Most men...” She hesitated, then started again. “You’re not a Tenkan, are you?”

“Trecosi,” said Flint. “And I am a Riverwalker, too–they call me Flintheart.”

“Flintheart. I like that. Riverwalkers–they do that meditation thing, don’t they? Is that what you were doing here when I came along and disturbed you? What’s a holy man doing in the middle of all this?”

Flint smiled. He realised then how strange the expression felt, how unfamiliar. “The Lordsway has deserted me,” he said. “And I don’t think anyone would rightly call me a holy man.”

She turned to him, skin pale in the moonlight, the whites of her eyes almost luminous, it seemed. She took his hand and eased it through the gap at the front of her cloak. He felt soft flesh, fabric stretched tight, hardness pressing into his palm.

“Times like this,” she said. “You need someone, don’t you think?”

He shifted position slightly, awed by the rising and falling of her chest beneath his hand.

“Most men...”

Memories held him back. Memories both recent and long ago. Stopping him.

This thing... these feelings. They
changed
people.

He was scared.

She seemed to sense his reaction.

She took his hand, pulled it back out from the opening in her cloak, and he thought it was over, that he had failed her, messing everything up in his confusion and guilt.

She moved his hand lower, to where she had pulled her cloak aside, to the parting of her robe.

He found thick hair, heat. Softly folding flesh. Wetness.

She leaned back, still cross-legged, and he saw her face tipped up to the stars, long hair trailing in a curtain of shadow behind her.

He found hardness again, pressed it, ran his fingers around it, fascinated by the way she responded.

Finally, shuddering, she turned to him, found his mouth with hers, working to find a way through his clothing until her hand found the cord of his trousers, eased it loose, moved down.

Her leg slid up over his hip, and she moved up against him, positioned him, gently guiding him, teaching him.

Afterwards he cried, and she held him, stroking his hair and pressing his face against her chest.

Later she led him by the hand, through passageways and sidestreets to the building where she shared a room with her sister.

Within, in the darkness, they shared Wend’s small sleep mat, trying to remain silent so that they did not disturb her sleeping sibling.

~

Waking up had never been like this before.

Light angling into the small room through opened shutters, a stranger moving about, apparently unconcerned that he was here with her sister, Wend.

“I... I’d better get back,” he said, when he had dressed.

Wend kissed him on the cheek, as he paused by the door, and Flint mumbled, “Thanks,” before he realised that that was probably the wrong thing to say.

Descending the shared stairway, he heard the sisters’ voices, the two relaxing into conversation now that he had left.

He walked back through the outskirts of Tenecka, wondering if he would find his way and realising that, for today, at least, he really didn’t care.

~

“Off doing your funny standing all night, were you?” asked Nimmo, when Flint reached their shelter. That was what they had taken to calling the Lordsway, whenever they caught Flint going through the meditative movements of the Riverwalkers’ art.

“Something like that,” he said.

“You haven’t heard, then?”

He looked at Nimmo, eyebrows raised.

“We’re going up to Henika’s,” said Nimmo. “Going to take out the mad white mutt.”

~

The track led them through a wide floodplain, divided by low mud ridges into square paddies where bellycane and rice matured under the dry season sun. White herons danced in the muddy pools, disturbing fish with their spidery yellow feet. And mutts worked, already harvesting the slimmer canes to take an early crop and leave room for the rest to fatten out.

Men and women armed with crossbows, bows and canes watched over the mutts.

Nodding a greeting at one of these overseers, Lorin said to Flint, “A year ago the mutts would have been left to work unsupervised. But not now. These days we watch them. We watch their every move.”

They marched in a column of around thirty purgists, silent other than the pounding of feet on the baked hard track.

Eventually, the ground rose ahead of them, a whitewood plantation forming a neat screen of pale trunks. Guards were posted where the road entered the plantation.

Soon they came to a cleared area where Marshall Albatenka was already giving instructions to another squad of purgists. “Ah,” he said, looking up. “The last arrivals.”

He gestured at a board where someone had marked a plan of the Henika farmstead. “We have squads in place all around the farm,” he said. He indicated the lower half of the map with his hand. “You will reinforce those on the southern side of the clearance. When we are in place, the farm will be razed to the ground. No one is to escape. Our information is that we are dealing with one aberrant individual who has undue influence over the other mutts but I am sure you have all heard the speculation. If these mutts are changed in some way that removes their devotion to humankind then they must be purged.”