In Solitary (4 page)

Day had dawned through a cage of cirrus that covered
the sky like an iron mask, and the sun’s heat, controlled by the Soal thermostatic mushroom towers, allowed a rise of 5 degrees centigrade which went unnoticed by humans but caused all the Soal to waken virtually simultaneously: a most effective alarm. The nervous systems of the Soal were extremely sensitive to changes in temperature, which was why they had built the mushroom towers. They were not vulnerable to extremes in temperature provided they had time to adjust to them but any sudden changes, up or down the scale, would have a fatal effect upon their systems. Consequently the temperatures in the zones were tightly controlled and the Soal acclimatized in chambers on moving regions. The poles were left unvisited and remained frozen.

Stella and I were already out on the mud, breathing in the lovely morning stink of decaying vegetation and animal life. Gaseous bubbles of mud burst between our toes and the smell of stale sweat from our armpits created alternatives to the other odours.

I was asking (my unquenchable curiosity) about her personal affairs – her life before I had entered it, about which she was not over-talkative.

‘Don’t you ever wonder about your father?’ I asked. ‘I mean,’ I hesitated, ‘you don’t even know what he looks like. From what you’ve told me of your promiscuous life, before we met, he could even be the father of your child …’ I stopped because she was staring at me so furiously she frightened me. I
am not a big man but physical violence does not normally overawe me unless it is accompanied by passion and fury. Stella looked about to fly at me tooth and nail. However, she merely shifted the baby’s position from one hip to the other. I watched the process, licking my lips nervously.

‘My father,’ she said finally, and very slowly, ‘was one of the five men who terrorized the mudwalkers for six months. The Soal eventually caught them together. They were boiled alive and then thrown to the crabs.’

I found this difficult to believe, and felt she was over-dramatizing the execution of the men. So I said, ‘That sounds extremely primitive for the Soal.’

Matter-of-factly she answered, ‘Perhaps they thought they needed to put out a strong warning?’

I gave her a sideways look – in some ways Stella turned more soil with one thrust of a spade than I did after a long ploughing contemplation. Perhaps all women were naturally as astute. I had no way of knowing.

‘But five men? They could not be afraid of a gathering of five unarmed mudwalkers.’

She gave me one of those superior smiles I had come to associate with female smugness and I realized that it was true – for a gathering of just Stella, myself and the baby girl would cause great alarm on the vat walks. Five men would amount to insurrection of no small nature. A thought occurred to me which I voiced out aloud.

‘The Soal must have very weak defences.’

Stella smiled again.

‘You should know about that. You’ve lived there.’

I said nothing for I was ashamed of the fact that the Soal defences, if they had any, were an unknown quantity to me. I had never had occasion to ask about them, and I doubted I would be informed if I had done. My violent thoughts had all been directed towards Endrod. It is difficult to entertain thoughts of revolution with only one head. These things need discussion. Revolution is forged out of many minds – at the most a single mind merely produces that substance from which the forging begins.

‘Stella …’ I was about to admit my failure when
she held up a warning hand. I realized what was wrong and said rather superfluously:

‘Quickly, put distance between us. Someone’s coming. I told you we should not have walked together.’

However, before I could move a few paces Stella called out, ‘It’s all right. It’s a human. I would know if it was the Soal.’

She pointed and I followed the finger. A long way off a man was plodding on mudshoes towards us. We waited, expecting him to veer off when he saw us but he continued using us as his target, and the nearer he approached, the more anxious I became – not because of the Soal Law, but because of Stella’s reaction. She was watching him through narrowed eyes that bore obvious knowledge of the person they viewed.

‘Who is it?’ I asked quickly. I had a large blockage in my throat and my stomach was turning circles.

‘A friend,’ she said simply and then glanced possessively at the baby, which confirmed my suspicions.

‘Will I,’ I said, as casually as I could manage, ‘will I have to fight him?’

Stella looked round, the eyes now widened. ‘What for? Besides he would kill you.’

The man was quite close now and I saw what she meant. He was like a walking hill, huge and round, but not with fat – the muscles stood out in chunks on the broad expanse of his abdomen as he walked. Unlike my own, which hung free, his testicles were tied up between his legs. I guessed they were probably his only vulnerable piece of anatomy. Slung about his shoulders were two intricate fish traps.

When he was about ten metres from me I unslung the crossbow and wound the mechanism. The balding giant stopped short.

‘That far and no farther,’ I warned.

Stella slapped me hard across the arm with her free hand.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ she shouted.

But I was resolute.

‘I’ll kill him before he makes another step,’ I barked. ‘Before he gets within arm’s reach.’

The hill in front of me cracked across the face, the bent nose
bending even further as the grin spread.

‘She’s my woman now,’ I said.

The grin vanished. ‘Oh, yes?’

Stella interrupted. ‘He hasn’t touched me Fridjt.’

The grin returned. ‘Ah!’ Fridjt took a step forward and I lifted the weapon level with his chest.

‘Cave!’ Stella’s sharp voice made my finger tighten rather than relax.

‘If you do, I shall walk away from you and never see you again.’

I hesitated. ‘What about him then? He’s the father of your child.’

‘That’s all he is.’

I shouted. ‘You hear that, kraken?’ I kicked off my mudshoes.

Finally the big man finished a sentence. ‘You speak strange words for a mudwalker. I don’t know what a kraken is but I do know that bolt won’t stop me from cracking your neck – even if I have to crawl to you with it sticking outa m’chest.’

‘Then I’ll just have to split your nose in two,’ I replied coolly, raising the bow to head height – Fridjt’s head height that is.

Suddenly he threw his arms in the air.

‘What’ve I done? Tell me? I might even say I’m sorry or something – if I only knew what I’ve done.’

Then he casually stepped forward, wrenched the crossbow from my grasp and with a huge hand in my face sent me sprawling backwards into the mud. I half spun round, skidding on the black mire. Fury unleashed in my brain: I had not had the courage to kill him when it came to the test. I climbed to my knees and went slipping and sliding across the mud, clawing at his legs. A fist struck me on the shoulder and again I went reeling, the wind breaking from my body. I heard him laughing. Stella was silent, almost sullen, watching us.

I climbed unsteadily to my feet again, my hands full of mud.

‘You fornicator of empty whelkshells,’ I said softly. Whether he understood or not he stepped forward, legs open to deliver a kick. I sent the mud splattering across his eyes with a quick flick of my right hand, at the same time bringing my foot up for a sharp kick at his vulnerables. My toes struck a hard protector – a clamshell or something similar, wrapped
in the cloth. Nevertheless he winced, a thick leg reciprocated my action, and for me the world exploded.

I awoke later inside the segment of a needle. My head was full of the aftertaste of bad dreams and I had half an egg above one of my eyes.

‘Eat something.’ It was Stella about forty kilometres away, offering me boiled seaweed.

‘Please,’ I said waving her image away. ‘No.’

‘He kicked you in the head.’

‘That means I have to eat seaweed?’ I said. ‘I don’t even like the stuff when I’m well.’

‘Eat it anyway.’ A piece was dangled before my mouth and I feigned vomiting until it disappeared.

Slowly vision returned in the dim light. It must have been coming on night or we should not be together. I could see half the sun, a blurred fuzzy and misshapen cloud of red light. Fridjt came into focus in front of it.

‘That hurt,’ I said, pointing to the wound.

He was eating, and spluttered through a mouthful of cockles: ‘So what are you going to do about it?’

I answered loftily. ‘I don’t see why I should reveal my plans to the enemy – that would seem to me to be an idiotic piece of military strategy. However, I should like you to consider whether you sleep light, or heavy, for in the answer to that question lies your future …’

‘Stop this,’ Stella glared at us. ‘Get a Continental and an Islander together and immediately there is antipathy. The Soal are our enemies – and no other.’

I stared at this remarkable woman.

‘Where did you learn words like antipathy? I thought you had lived on the mudflats all your life.’

She was doing something with the baby – one of the innumerable cleansing or feeding tasks involved with raising an infant, and she looked up.

‘I haven’t always teamed up with dull minds like his,’ she indicated Fridjt with a quick flick of a finger, ‘or lack of moral courage like yours. Once … there was a man whose intellect dwarfed yours – which is not so very much
– and whose body was purpose built for physical exactitude. We loved together for two years – unfortunately there was no child. I think I was too young.’

‘And I think I’m disgusted,’ I said, turning to the wall. ‘Of course your hero was giant size if you knew him when you were that young. They all are at that age. I expect he never did any wrong – how did you lose him?’

‘There’s no need to be jealous, Cave,’ she said softly. ‘He too was from the Soal like yourself – a Continental. He died of an illness.’

Fridjt was regarding this conversation without interest, viewing each party as we spoke, and chewing solemnly upon his food. Finally, without changing his expression, he asked, ‘Who’s dull?’

I giggled and Stella smiled. Then I said, ‘We had better go to different segments to sleep,’ and left them together. I was too befogged by Fridjt’s blow to worry. Anyway, it certainly would not be the first time for them.

I fell asleep almost at once, but later, feeling drugged with a heavy sleep, I was awoken by someone pressing against me.

‘Wha … what is it?’ I mumbled.

‘It’s me … Stella. It’s time we … we consummated our togetherness.’

I came awake. Her breasts were squashed hard against my ribs and a hand was doing something between my legs.

‘What about …?’

‘Nothing. He is nothing.’ Her breath was hot and musty-smelling near my nostrils.

‘You are my man now. Take me. Weyym wants you to take me. I’m a lusty woman and I need it now.’

‘I don’t know how,’ I whined.

The answer was in physical form, delivered furiously, but whether in violent anger or passion I could not ascertain, my own feelings being somewhat confused. I submitted.

Later, when we had finished, there was an electrical storm – one of the kind where the lightning burns across the sky in thousands of thin bows of light. It was a bad one and the webs of light blotted out the stars with their brightness when they flashed.

‘It’s as if there were a cage of fire around
the world,’ I said, marvelling at the changing networks, the patterns that the lightning formed. Stella moaned something.

‘What?’ I asked, thinking she was afraid of the storm.

‘Bastards,’ she said, loudly now. Then she turned her head towards me and buried her face in my chest. Poor Stella – she blamed the Soal for everything, even natural phenomena.

The meteorites that sometimes accompanied storms such as this flared like momentary stars as they hit the atmosphere at the point where the storm was raging. This was only the second straight-lightning storm I had seen in my life, and I was enjoying it tremendously. Stella was no lover of beauty, otherwise she would have conquered her fear and joined me in viewing the splendid spectacle.

That night the baby died. It was not neglect
on Stella’s part – not because we spent the middle hours together. The nameless mite had been getting thinner for several days, having diarrhoea and probably a number of other unseen complaints. Stella did not seem surprised or bitter at the news – she told me it was the second baby she had lost. The first had been in the foetus stage. Infant mortality was high amongst us humans. Before a shambling and broken-voiced Fridjt brought us the news (he had been looking after the child while Stella and I had lain together, and seemed to take the small death harder than anyone) we had been lying in the dark, after the storm had abated, talking to each other.

‘Did you like that?’ Stella questioned me concerning our consummation.

‘It was better than walking the vats after the sludge has been, freshly turned,’ I replied in a satisfied tone and squeezing her thigh.

She rolled away from me, angry.

‘If that’s what you think of my mating you can wait until the season comes around and take your chances with the other females,’ she snapped huffily.

‘No! No!’ I was bewildered. ‘Don’t take that attitude, please. I really do like walking the vats – or did.’

‘Really?’ Her hand touched my shoulder in the darkness. ‘What else was it like?’

‘It was like soaring to the sky,’ I replied. ‘It was as if my life, having been hammered flat by misfortune, had been
reshaped into something mysteriously meaningful – a multi-faceted shape constructed from light and dark, and pulsing with power. It was …’

‘You don’t need to convince me further,’ she replied, ‘but tell me, why do you like the vat walks? I’ve heard of them but never seen them. Do they really cover a quarter of Brytan?’