Genetopia (5 page)

“When the changing fevers came, eleven years ago, they took a lot of what Lizabel was, but they never took it all. You got to hold on to what you can, young sir. You hear me?”

~

There was a growth of podhuts ahead of them in the gloom. Flint had not expected that. He couldn’t remember if they had been there when he had come this way as a boy, on a family visit to Clarel and dry season work on the bladderpump farm.

The huts were empty, sealed against incursions from the wildlands, popping themselves open only when they sensed humans in the clearing.

This was a well-used road, Flint knew–that was, after all, one reason he had chosen this route. It made sense, then, to grow accommodation for travellers here, a day’s travel from Trecosann.

“How’s the travel suiting you?” asked an itinerant labourer called Alal. The group sat around a low fire, eating supplies of flatcake and fruit, and drinking sweetwater from a podhut bladder.

“It’s all bigger than I’d expected,” said Flint. He had been walking for most of the day, and still they were climbing Spinster’s Spine, the chain of hills separating the vales of Eels and Farsam. The name was appropriate, for the hills were like great vertebrae, locked together below a skin of soil and rock and tree. A sleeping giant.

“We’ve been walking all day,” he explained, “and yet we’ve travelled so little.” He had realised, during the course of the day, his own inadequate sense of geography. He knew the surrounding lands, he had some kind of grasp of the general directions and travel times to the main settlements of Farsamy, Beshusa, Coltar and Ritteney, and yet... so little idea of what lay beyond. Humankind interacted on a local scale, it seemed, each settlement the centre of its own world, of an interlocking network of settlements scattered across the wildlands.

To find one person in such vastness!

Alal, a man of much muscle and slow, careful thought, paused a long time in the golden half-light before saying, “I wouldn’t have it any smaller. The world. I’ve been in big towns, where people live crammed together. I worked in Farsamy once. People so close together ain’t the same kind of people.”

“Plenty of work for a dentist, mind,” said Jemmie, cackling.

Flint shared a hut with Alal, grateful for the big man’s human noises in the long hours of the night.

~

Not long into the morning’s trek, they parted company. The trail they had been following, a tight-packed mud road flanked by dense jungle, came to a crossing point where it cut straight across a wide road crafted from some dark stone that was flecked white and pitted with a tracery of fine cracks and clefts.

A wooden board lay flat at the side of the junction, its surface etched with arrows, words, directions. You had to stand right over it to read the words. The board indicated the directions and travel times to Farsamy, Greenwater, Trecosann and Berenwai. A fifth arrow pointed off into the heart of the jungle and was labelled, simply, hell, not far.

Flint eyed his travel companions. He had names for all fifteen, now, although many were still strangers; Alal, Jemmie and Lizabel, however, had become more than mere acquaintances in so short a time.

He realised that he had nothing with which to repay these people their kindnesses.

“Stick to the path, young sir,” Jemmie told him again. “Hide yourself from travellers unless you are certain of their nature.” He didn’t try again to persuade Flint not to travel to Greenwater alone, that argument already settled earlier this morning.

The dentist reached for his belt and released the long sheath which held his machete. He handed it to Flint. “Protect yourself,” he said. “May you have the Lord’s luck in finding your sister.”

Flint stood silently, knowing not to protest. He watched the group depart, Jemmie pulling his little cart, Alal and the others guiding their mutt-drawn wagon along the stone road, heading south.

Then he turned away. He studied Jemmie’s gift, and then attached it to his own belt. He drew the machete. Its blade was dull, the length of his upper arm; its double cutting edge was marked from use. He returned it to its sheath.

If Amber had left Trecosann of her own choice then she had almost certainly passed this way. But now Flint realised that his journey would present ever greater choices where his path may diverge from that of his sister. It was, indeed, most likely that she would head for Aunt Clarel’s home in Greenwater, so Flint’s choice of route was a sensible one. But she may easily have reached this point and–even if her intention had been to head for Greenwater–decided instead to head south, drawn to the excitement of Farsamy and beyond. He knew that she would find the prospect of travelling to the big town tempting. She could easily have fallen in with a group of travellers, as Flint had, and
then
decided–or been persuaded–to stay with them on their journey to the south.

Or to the north, he wondered? He turned, narrowed his eyes against the warm breeze, and studied the stop-start, humpback progress of the road heading north up Spinster’s Spine. The town of Berenwai was several days’ trek away. It was possible, he conceded, although they had no relatives or friends there and, Clan Beren traditionally being regarded as impoverished neighbours, there would be little to draw Amber in that direction.

On sudden impulse, he took a fist-sized flint nodule from the ground and struck it against another. Again, and on the third blow it cleft in two: newly cut flint, the best he could do to signal that he had passed. He placed both halves neatly on the arrow pointing to Greenwater. And then he strode across the Farsamy Way, seeking the trail where it plunged into the jungle once again.

Soon, he realised that the track was heading steadily downhill. He must have passed over the crest of Spinster’s Spine without realising: where distance gave the hills a definite profile, in reality they were little more than a gentle ripple in the landscape.

Trecosann behind him, he was on his way to Greenwater.

~

As he had yesterday, he eyed the surrounding jungle while he walked. There were still trees and other plants he recognised, but also many that were new to him.

With Jemmie’s advice fresh in his mind, he wondered if Amber would have acted similarly: hiding from any travellers she encountered. Sensible advice, where you might just as easily encounter bandits and other lawless itinerants as well as the Lost–changed people and mutts cast out or escaped.

The clear implication, though, was that she might easily hide from Flint–particularly earlier when he had been part of a group.

So as he walked, he studied the undergrowth, the entrances to animal tracks, the gaps between scrubby thorn bushes, hoping against all odds that he would see her hiding there.

He thought of old Jemmie’s words.
You’re out here for her, and I respect that a lot when there’s not much I’ll respect other people for any more. You’re all she’s got.
Was he really all she had? If she was out here on her own then maybe that showed that she didn’t need him to be looking out for her any more. Was he out here for her or for himself, then? A chance to break free.

Perhaps.

What did remain true was that there was nothing for him to stay in Trecosann for. And if Amber
hadn’t
left out of choice, then he was the only one trying to help her.

It was the uncertainty as much as anything, he realised: he had to find out what had become of her. A selfish reason perhaps, then, after all. He looked around himself again at the forbidding walls of the jungle. He did not regret his decision to come after her, not for an instant.

By the middle of the day, with the sun high over his hooded head, Flint was thirsty. He had long since drained the last of the podhut’s sweetwater with which he had replenished his water bladder. Earlier, with the sun lower and the trees affording shade, it had not been so bad, but as the heat had increased he had drunk too greedily.

He checked the water bladder again, but it had not miraculously been refilled.

He moved to the side of the trail, under the shelter of a great claw-leaved tree fern. He pulled his hood back, and felt the heat recede just a little. He studied the fern’s scaly trunk for signs of infestation before squatting and leaning back against it. He had seen many long lines of army ants today, memories of childhood stings increasing his awareness of the hazards of even everyday things.

There were sounds all around. Insects hummed and creaked and pipped, birds cried high in the canopy, other creatures–rats, lizards, more birds, perhaps–snuffled and scuffled on the forest floor.

He straightened his leg, the injured knee supported now by bindings and a poultice prepared by Lizabel.

The inherent respect for True humans was widespread in the wilds, too, Flint knew, but clearly it did not extend to the biting insects. Where the backs of his hands had been exposed they were covered in pink welts. What if vectors of the changing fevers could be transmitted by these tiny creatures, he wondered, scratching all around the most recent bite?

He blocked the thought, aware that he was spooking himself.

Eyes adjusted to the shade now, he saw that the forest thinned a short way in, and in the pool of light he saw bulbous clusters of fleshfruit hanging low.

He studied the ground carefully, head full of children’s terror tales of snakes and venomous spiders the size of a grown man’s head, of mantrap plants that would close around the legs of the unsuspecting and slowly suck their victims deeper into the dissolving digestive juices held in bladders beneath the ground.

There was just a thick layer of dead leaves, twigs, a scampering black beetle as long and narrow as Flint’s little finger.

Tree and fern trunks stood vertical and little else grew in the shade of the forest floor.

Flint moved further from the trail, passing through the forest to where another screen of vegetation thickened at the edge of the clearing.

He drew the machete and swept it down once through the greenery, and then again. Several small moths erupted from the leaves, whirring into the sunlight.

He stepped through.

Fleshfruit hung, fat and purple, paired side by side in a bunch as long as Flint’s arm.

So tempting, but he knew he wouldn’t dare eat from this bunch, wouldn’t risk even a taste of their sweet, meaty juices. There was so much richness in this biological wonderland between settlements, so much diversity and fecundity. And yet the abundance was illusory: all this richness and so much of it could easily be corrupt, tainted within. He would have to be foolish, or desperate indeed, to risk eating or drinking anything he found in the wildlands.

Some of the riper fruit had already come away from the top of the bunch but there was no sign of them on the ground. The insects and rats would take care of such fallings, but there could easily be larger beasts here.

Flint looked around, remembering Jemmie’s advice that he should never leave the trail.

He stepped back through the opening he had hacked and then paused to get his bearings. It would be so easy to lose one’s way in the jungle.

It was only a matter of paces across the bare forest floor to the tree fern where he had sheltered from the sun on the edge of the trail to Greenwater.

He hesitated under the grasping fronds of the fern.

Ahead, on the trail, was a small figure. A woman, or a girl, with long dark hair and downy, fleecy clothing.

Flint stepped out, broke into a run, and then stopped and called aloud. “Amber!”

Please, let it be Amber!

Chapter 5

Only twenty paces separated them when the creature–yes, creature!–stopped and half-turned.

The thing was naked, he saw now: what he had mistaken for thick, fleecy leggings and jacket were instead its heavy fur, merging, tangled across its shoulders with the dark strands of hair on its head. Hair too dark to be Amber’s chestnut tresses, even in the spreading shade of the forest trail.

Its face was simian, thrusting jaws and flattened nose bare and pink, its human lineage only really evident in its eyes.

“Stop!”

But it did not. The thing was no mutt, or at least it was no longer a domestic variety–it either had no understanding of language, or it had lost the deep-seated obedience that was in all mutts.

It parted its lips and gave a little snarl, cat-like, and then it darted into the trees, vanishing instantly from his sight.

The fleshfruit, he realised: they had not fallen, they had been harvested, taken neatly in pairs as they came ripe. There was intelligence, then, in this creature, or in its kind. He thought of the seed patches some of the mutts kept in Trecosann when their owners allowed it. Perhaps horticulture was instinctive for some mutts, giving them a special intimacy with the earth and its produce.

He turned, fearful.

A face peered at him from the shadows, barely spitting distance away from him.

And then it was gone.

The same dark hair as the female, but this one was broader of face, squarer, and Flint guessed it to be male.

He felt for Jemmie’s machete and let his hand rest on its well-worn grip. To draw it would be an act of aggression, but it would also prepare him better for any hostility on their part. He already felt himself to be surrounded, imagining untold hordes of the creatures waiting in the trees all about, drooling over the flesh of the True, over the various forms of torment they could put him through before he expired at their hands.

He turned slowly on the spot but saw no more faces, no sudden movements in the shade. Perhaps they had fled. Perhaps they watched him still, waiting their moment or unable to attack him because of ingrained respect for the True.

“Me master out of Trecosann,” he said. “You speak? You been know me words?”

No response. Was he just talking to trees? Talking to illusions?

“Me been look for mistress outta Trecosann. Her got red in hair, yellow in eye, she high like this.” He held his hand level with his chest, struggling not to laugh aloud from panic, from the ludicrousness of him describing his sister to the jungle. “If an’ you see her you treat her plenty good. You been know me words? Her find me Greenwater.” He gestured along the trail.

He turned slowly again. No sign of them, but he felt sure he was being observed.

He set off towards Greenwater, holding himself tall, keeping his pace slow, fighting the urge to keep looking, searching, all around.

You treat she good, he thought. Treat she good.

Some time later, he was alone. He just knew it. He stopped, turned a full circle, felt sudden sweat prickling his forehead.

And then he fell to his knees and vomited into the dirt, retching over and over, as panic belatedly overtook him.

Later, sitting on the trail, knees up to his chin, he rocked back and forth. Eventually, he made himself climb to his feet, and resume his trek.

He recognised this bit of the trail, he suddenly realised: a crook in the path where one last screen of tree ferns shielded the view from a traveller’s eyes.

A few more paces and then a panorama unfolded before him. The trail here wound lazily down a steep scarp slope to the flood basin of the river Transom. The waters of the river were still high from the wet season, still extending out across the forest floor, making it more like a lake with scattered trees emerging.

There, spreading out below, was the town of Greenwater, very much living up to its name, with as much as half of the land within the town’s stockades submerged in placid, leaf-green water.

The stockade itself formed a gently curving arc enclosing the town on the west and north; the other two boundaries would normally be marked by the snaking meander of the river, which was now only discernible as an area of slow-moving water not broken by emergent trees and huts.

The northern end of the stockade was completely clear of the water, the land raised to form an island. As the ground fell away from there, the stockade followed its contours until its mud and timber construction formed a dyke enclosing the flooded part of the town.

Within the defences, walkways raised on pontoons connected the dwellings, narrow thoroughfares dipping and bobbing on the water. The podhuts themselves were supported by inflated bladders, anchored in place to great stakes that had been driven into the ground.

Flint had never seen Greenwater in flood, had never quite been able to envisage it like this, despite the tales of Clarel, Mesteb and the others. He wondered at the mentality of a people–his relatives!–who lived with this annual inundation.

Even at this distance, he saw the figures of people in the town, on precarious walkways, in boats and rafts, passing along the top of the stockade, and out in the open streets in the dry sector of town.

And already, he felt his pulse quickening, wondering if Amber was here ahead of him, if it really could be as simple as all that. He prayed fervently that it could.

With one last glance over his shoulder, he started to walk down the track to Greenwater.

~

“I am Flintreco Eltarn,” he said again, his voice raised to carry across the water. “I have come to visit my Aunt Clareltreco Elphelim.”

The boy atop the stockade still stared, still kept his wall-mounted crossbow directed towards Flint. The boy was barely into adolescence and his grubby features and tattered clothing–and that mad stare–made Flint suddenly fearful of what he would find in Greenwater. Had they all been struck by the changing plague? Had they been taken over by some degenerate subhuman mob?

The boy glanced to one side, as a man came to join him. “Flintreco?” he said. “Travelling alone?”

Flint thought he recognised this man as an occasional visitor to Trecosann. He nodded. “It is a matter of urgency,” he said. “My sister, Amberline, is in danger. I’m looking for her. Can I come in?”

The man nodded. “I know him,” he said to the boy with the crossbow. He reached down and did something behind the wall and suddenly great eructations of gas popped from the water before Flint, as a series of bladders inflated, thrusting a walkway above the surface.

He stepped onto the bridge, more stable than he had expected. Ahead of him, a gate opened outwards, welcoming him, finally, to Greenwater.

~

“Petertreco,” said Flint, stopping before the man, just inside the Greenwater gates. The name had come to him as he traversed the walkway, waters thick with green algal scum lapping tamely to either side. “Thank you for allowing me to enter.”

Peter stood nonchalantly, a small-axe hanging loosely from one hand. “It must be urgent indeed for you to travel alone through the wilds,” he said. His eyes were calculating, assessing Flint for threat, for signs of change.

“I travelled in a group as far as Farsamy Way,” said Flint. “I came directly here when my friends headed south. My sister Amber disappeared two days ago. Despite our searches, we have not found her. She has quite clearly left Trecosann and, if she travels voluntarily, then her most likely destination is Greenwater.”

The two of them stood on a narrow wedge of raised land behind the stockade. Above, the boy and some other young men stood on the town’s defences, leaning precariously down to hear what was said.

It was only when he saw how poorly these people dressed that he recalled his impressions of this place from his earlier visit as a boy: of people who had to work hard merely to carve an existence out of the jungle, a meaner, leaner level of subsistence than he knew from Trecosann.

“Your sister isn’t here, Flint,” said Peter gruffly. “I’m sorry to let you down.”

They were the words Flint had anticipated. If she were here then they would have been far quicker to tell him so.

Flint looked away. The ground here had been submerged until recently, and its surface was slick with green slime. He wondered again at how they could live like this.

They climbed the mud slope to the top of the stockade. Its exterior surface fell away vertically to the frothy waters. Flint saw that the walkway was deflating and sinking again. He looked back towards the fringe of the jungle.

“Your defences are impressive,” he told Peter. His words masked an unspoken question:
what have I just passed through to get here?

“The wilds,” Peter said, simply.

“I saw... humanoids, in the jungle,” said Flint. “Mutts, perhaps. Only a few minutes’ walk back to the west.”

Peter nodded. “If we had the resources we’d purge the wilds around Greenwater,” he said. “There are mutts, as you describe, and there are all kinds of changed beasts out there. They’re getting closer all the time, getting bolder, too. A lot of them are reasonably harmless: the subservience to the True is ingrained deeply even in the wild stock.”

“But...?”

“You can never be certain. Sometimes the changing fevers can remove the shackles, although thank the Lord we don’t see that often. It’s not just mutts out there, though: the humans are the worst. Some of them are Lost–”

Victims of the changing fever, Flint thought, chilled by dark memories, dark fears.

“–and some of them are just bad to the marrow. You’re lucky you got here in one piece, cousin Flint, lucky you got here at all.”

~

The hard lines of Aunt Clarel’s face made him think of his father. He flinched as her hand brushed against his face, but it was a gentle touch, a sympathetic gesture. The bruising on his nose and jaw was still evident.

“It’s okay,” he said. And indeed his breathing had been easier today, the healing speeded by Lizabel’s therapeutic herbs. “My nose will never be straight again,” he added, softening his words with a smile.

He saw in her eyes that she knew that it was her brother who had inflicted Flint’s injuries.

“Whatever possessed you to come all this way?” she asked.

Flint had been mulling this over throughout his journey. Love for his sister, yes: for years they had been there for each other. He had spent much of his life looking out for her and now she might need him more than ever. But also it was less noble than that. It was an opportunity, a chance to seize the freedom he so fervently still hoped that Amber had seized.

“Can I stay for a while?” he asked. If he had passed Amber en route, if she had, as he had suspected, hidden herself off the track whenever she encountered other travellers, then she may still be on her way to Greenwater. He could head back, he knew, but if he did so he might just as easily miss her again.

Clarel tutted somewhere deep in her throat. “You think I’m going to turn you away do you, you silly young bugger?”

She turned and headed back along the narrow walkway in the direction from which she had come.

Flint shouldered his pack and followed.

~

The small raft maintained its position on the water, despite the steady tug of the Transom’s current. A fibre net trailed behind it, steadily filling and swelling with green scum. According to Clarel’s partner, Chendreth, the locals called this process “skinning the river”.

The algal blooms at the end of the wet season were rich in minerals from the Elphine Hills. Rich, too, in a particular strain of changing vector. Fed into the bladderplant nursery beds at this time of year, the scum instigated vigorous growth, and a promiscuous exchange of traits between varieties. Many of the resulting sports would be useless, the changes too extreme and damaging–like that young mutt pup that had died after its dipping in the changing vats in Trecosann. But many would be promising enough to be maintained, nurtured and perhaps propagated and grown for trade.

Mastery of the changing arts was Clan Treco’s greatest achievement, something they did better than anyone else, with the skills passed down through the generations.

“Yes, I do think Tarn would sell Amber,” said Flint in answer to Chendreth’s question. “If not into the mutt trade, then as a bondsman. He has always treated her as little better than a mutt–she always said that.”

Chendreth worked at winding her cord, hauling the nets in behind the raft. She kept her head turned slightly away from Flint’s gaze. Barely a year or two older than him, but yet he was struck by a gulf between them: Flint awkward, unsure of himself; Chendreth a woman comfortable with herself and with her role in Greenwater life.

“I have never met your father,” she said now. “Clarel talks of him sometimes... She won’t go to Trecosann any more.”

Flint knew that Clarel had stopped visiting, but nothing had ever been said and so there had been no finality to it.

Over in the settlement, there were voices and Flint spotted a small group passing through the stockade. There were at least six people, and they had a wagon being hauled by a team of four mutts. He wondered how they had manoeuvred it over that inflatable walkway.

“Mesteb,” said Flint. The trading party was back from the market festival at Trecosann. There would be news! Clarel had been urging Flint to wait for Mesteb’s return, assuring him that he would bring news of Amber, news that she had shown up at home, after all.

At a nod from Chendreth, Flint squeezed a valve on the bladderpump engine and the raft surged gently for shore.

In his five days at Greenwater, he had spent long hours at the stockade, staring into the wilds for any sign that Amber was out there, always disappointed at the end of his long vigils.

In that time the waters had receded a long way, but many of the riverside streets were still awash, the anchored podhuts still connected by walkways suspended across bladderplant pontoons.

Now, he guided the raft past the normal landing jetty and through the centre of Greenwater. A short time later they bumped against the pontoon that abutted Clarel’s podhut.

 One of Clarel’s mutts reached down and secured the raft with a loop of cord and Flint and Chendreth clambered up onto the walkway. Instantly, the mutt jumped down onto the raft and started to gather up the skinning nets, deftly trapping the harvested scum in a floating cane basket.