Stone Seeds (12 page)

He adds, “Hope you don't get a pizen in your stomick. Eating escapees from the killing forest ain't a great plan, little Sinta. Leastways cook it first next time, eh?”

Zettie doesn't respond. She feels strangely offended. The boy seems to understand this and he's quiet for a while. And in a bit, Zettie says, “My name ain't Sinta, and I ain't ‘little' neither, Edge Farm.” She feels confident enough in him that it feels safe to be cross.

That low, rumbling chuckle again. “Well my name ain't Edge Farm, Sinta.” Grins. Puts out his hand to shake hers. “I'm Tomax,” he says, and Zettie notices that he puffs himself up just a little, when he says his own name. And then thumbing toward his chest, as though to underline himself in
her mind. She decides right away that she likes him.

Thunder growls behind Tomax, then a lightning crack and the rain stops. Zettie puts the two things together in her mind, the thunder and Tomax. She notices that he doesn't seem to be afraid of lightning. “What's your name, Sinta?”

Little Zettie grins shyly. Doesn't speak now. She has so far always clung to the Furdy when the lightning cracks. She decides now that she will never do so again, but just sit calm and cross legged in the shrubs, the way that the boy does.

Zettie holds out the lizard tail toward him now and lets him take it from her. Tomax examines it, as though with admiration, hands it back. “If you don't get a pizen then reckon you ought to tell your folks about that critter. Oughta spread the word. I mean … There are plenty of them critters, see ‘em everywhere.”

And then, “I ain't never gotten a pizen,” Zettie says proudly. “I can digestify most about anything I reckon.” Zettie thinks she feels something small moving beneath her feet. Something burrowing. She peers down at the shrub. It seems to shake a little.

“You'll be alright then,” Tomax says.

“Yes.” She says. “I will.” Looking up. And then seems to remember something. “I'm Zettie.” She says. Now Zettie pops the lizard tail into her apron pocket. Rubs her tummy. “My stomick feels just fine.” Zettie stretches out the last two words, soft upturn at the end, like a rhyme, like a song, like a question. She has learned to speak musically, like all of Mamma Ezray's bedtime stories. Giggles.

“My Mamma Ezray is teaching me to talk like music.”

“Is that so?”

“Yep. Tiz.”

“Ah well, there's still time to get a pizen, Zettie.” Tomax says, concern in his voice. “Be careful not to get a pizen. For myself, I don't eat nothing what scuttles.” He looks at her, to check her understanding. “It's by way of a personal rule.”

“What do you eat then?” Zettie looks at Tomax with interest.

“Crows eggs. Other scavenging birds. Vulture's eggs taste sour and rotten, even when they ain't. I don't eat those unless I'm clean ‘bout starving.”

“Aren't you afraid of the crows …”

“Yep. I am kindly afraid of the egg's mamma, Zettie. But not so afraid of a crow so much as I am afraid of starving to death.” Grins again.

Zettie thinks for a moment. “You is a good climber then?”

“Yep. I suppose.”

Zettie thinks about the taloned feet of the giant crows, the vultures, and the other scurvy, hybrid scavenging birds that come after the general's drones hit. They have been known to roof on the busted up top of the school house, in the peaceful periods when there are no bombs or drones, no riots and smoking piles of human bodies for them to feast on. In the peaceful times between the rain dances, the crows watch the OneFolk children inside the Furdy.

Zettie tells Tomax about the day when she only just got away in time and was saved by the school security manager, thrusting out a hand, gripping her collar and pushing her into the shed which held the spare generator. This story seems to surprise Tomax. Especially when Zettie then goes on to tell him that the school security manager had used his club on
the birds, which is technically speaking illegal, as the birds are government property. Now that she has his full attention, she tells Tomax how the school security manager had said, “You hold my life in your hands now, Child, so what's it to be?”

“And what did you say to that, Zettie?”

“Mmmm. Can't remember.” Zettie pops her thumb in her mouth. She is remembering that there was a cobweb in the corner of the cupboard that the school security manager had shoved her into. That she'd been as scared of the spider she couldn't see as much as she'd been ‘fraid of the cawing and scrapping birds outside.

Zettie has not told anyone but Tomax about all this. Not even Zorry knows, but there is something about the boy that makes you want to confide. She smiles up at Tomax.

Now her small face darkens. She is thinking about the birds' hard curved toes. The sharp tipping end of their beaks. Their squawking, flapping, scrapping. She had thought, that day, that she glimpsed rows of small teeth in their beaks. She decides to ask Tomax about this, seeing as he is a good listener, seems to know some useful things.

“Birds don't have teeth. Do they?” She asks Tomax. Shudders. And then, “Reckon the birds might eat me iffen I tried to get eggs like you do.”

Tomax looks into the child's wide, amazed eyes. He thinks quickly. “Yes. Second thoughts, Zettie, you stick to lizards. Leave them crow eggs ‘til you've growed a bit. Then I'll teach you to catch ‘em.” Grins again.

Zettie decides right away that Tomax is good. Or rather, she has decided that she really likes him, which amounts to about the same thing in the small girl's mind. She breathes
out. Maybe she won't dream about the crows again tonight, or wake up in a sweat the way she has every night since that close shave.

Zettie thinks she hears a rustling underneath her again, as though something in the shrub still insists on being noticed. She gets up slowly from her crouched position, pads around, looking. The child has learned to move without making the bushes come alive and the ground crackle with the sound of her. “Nothing.” She says. She can't see what's making the sound. Tomax shrugs, shows her his palms. He doesn't know either. He seems to be getting up to go, only Zettie isn't done conversing with him.

“Watch this.” Zettie says. Trying to hold his attention for a little longer.

“Okay.”

Zettie makes it a point of honour now, in front of Tomax, to climb the side of the Furdy without making the bushes beside it tremble. Her face is pressed so close to the mesh that the changing light makes patterns running down her, making her seem strange, even a little alarming to the children inside. Her shadow appears on the dusty floor of the playground underneath the Furdy.

“That one. She bit down on a lizard just now,” an older girl says, pointing Zettie out to the girl with the long plait, and, had she only known it, using her own mother's best disapproving voice. Shudders. “That Sinta creature.” She says.

“That's Zettie.” The girl with the long plait replies. It's a small reproach. “She's hungry.” She pauses, examines the first girl's face. “She's just a hungry little girl, that's all, ain't you ever been hungry, Cinda?”

“No. I ain't never.” The first girl scowls, as though the question itself were an insult.

A stone flies pasts the girls' ears.

“Stop it, Luco.”

The small boy inside the Furdy throws another stone now. This one hits its target, the mesh near Zettie's head but Zettie, for now at least, still holds firm to the belief that all folks are more or less friendly. This is something that the Sinta like to teach their childur when they're small. Zettie smiles sweetly now. As if the OneFolk boy played a neat joke. She smiles so sweetly at him, eager to join in this game too, any game, that the girl who'd called Zettie ‘Creature' just now, becomes ashamed. “You can't throw stones at little folks,” she says. Yanking the boy's arm quite hard at the shoulder. “Let her alone.” She says now, shifting her outrage toward him. She smoothes her apron, glares. “Ain't cha … Zettie?”

Zettie thinks for a moment, and then, “No.” Zettie says. Squashes her button nose flat against the mesh. Eyeing the older girl. “I'm very extremely big.”

“Oh. Hmmm. That so.” The big girl pulls her knitting out of her pocket.

“What's that?”

“Finger knitting.” Says the girl. “Now don't mither me, Sinta.”

The girl with the long plait sits down cross legged beside her friend, watches her thread and loop.

“I ain't mithering.” Zettie says quietly, but the two OneFolk girls are ignoring her now, not unkindly.

“Who taught you that?”

“My Sinta nursemaid.”

“Teach it to me.”

Zettie is pleased at how things are turning out today. Her stomach is full and various things seem less frightening than they did. Birds. Lightning. Big girls. Lizards. And she's made at least one new friend, maybe more. She turns and suns herself, lying flat on her back on the roof of the Furdy. Her arms are outstretched. The world seems to her to swim above her. The general's sun rolls across the sky like an absurdly giant pumpkin, luminous pink lines scribbling up the sky right behind. She turns onto her stomach. Taps the cage softly, one small finger.

The children inside the Furdy blink. Look up at Zettie, and in a bit jumping in and out of her shadow, giggling. She hears someone start calling her name. And then someone else is gently rattling the sides of the lightning cage, at first it's just to encourage Zettie to come down. Zettie notices that Tomax looks worried. She looks away quickly.

“Come down before the teacher sees you, Zettie.” But then, as more children join in, the rattling gets a little harder, a little less gentle.

Something happens.

The stone-throwing boy, humiliated about his yanked arm, rattles the cage hard and then, taking a run up at it, throws his small body into the side of the Furdy. Zettie slips down a little. She hears someone say Stop and then, squinting, sees the two big girls put down their knitting and get up quickly, they lock arms and hold themselves against the side of the Furdy, saying Stop, stop, but the rattling grows worse. Now it's impossible to tell who in the crowd is shaking the sides, and who's trying to hold the Furdy steady. Zettie's holding onto its edge, by
small fingers slippy with mud, Tomax is getting up to help her but he's still too far and one-armed with his sling, and now Zettie's grip is slipping. There are yells of “Do it, do it!” and more screams of “Stop, stop, the baby's falling, STOP!” Zettie slips three inches, grabs a foothold. She looks down and sees the children's faces upturned. The girl with the plaited hair is splayed against the inside of the Furdy, gripping the earthen floor of the playground with her toes. Her body is stiff, face dark red with her effort to hold the Furdy steady. Two small boys are banging her fingers with stones. She is crying loud, full-bodied, despairing sobs. Cinda is throwing herself against a wall of shaven headed boys to reach her friend, punching heads and taking blows, making the Furdy shake dangerously.

Zettie looks down at the long drop beneath her. The world seems to her to be moving slow and strange. She feels herself hovering somewhere outside of herself. Zettie freezes. She holds on.

Someone is calling her name. She doesn't dare turn toward the sound.

Tomax is stumbling through the scrubby bushes at the base of the Furdy, getting his left foot tangled in thorns, cursing quietly, catching his batwing sleeve on the corner of the Furdy again. Zettie, paralysed by fear, is making no attempt to climb to a safer position. She just hangs on, waiting for Tomax. The trusting and amazed expression never leaves her face. The child waits patiently for everything to be alright. Tomax curses, rips his sleeve, and tears his skin on the wire edge. Reaches out his one good arm as far as he can toward her. He can't get a hold of anything but her foot. For a moment Zettie is fully exposed. “Hold,” he tells her sharply, “Hold fast.”

The children have stopped moving. Some watch the edge farm boy as though they're openly rooting for him. The playground is completely silent.

The small boy who started the rattling gets a strange look on his face. A muscle in his jaw moves, grits his teeth. His little sister beside him, having seen this look before, seems to understand what he's about to do before the boy knows it himself. She moves quickly, pulls his hair and his ear, twists the fingers of his left hand, and now digging her stubby fingernails into the soft flesh under his chin and by his left ear, holds him back from throwing himself into the side of the Furdy. He's bigger, stronger, and it takes every single thing she has to stop him. The boy flails his fists at his sister, strains toward the side of the box.

Now the two small siblings roll and scrap on the floor, creating a distraction long enough for Tomax to get a foothold in a branch by the Furdy, take a hold of Zettie's right elbow. By the time the small boy is sitting on his sister's stomach, throwing punches at her face, Tomax has got a hold of Zettie underneath one armpit, helped her painfully down.

The knitting girl, Cinda, pulls the boy off his sister, “Don't. Hit.” She says. He looks down at her bruised, scuffed up knuckles. Blood under several of her fingernails. “No, ma'am.”

She takes a hold of his left ear, twists it hard.

Tomax takes a breath. He turns to Zettie. “Don't climb that thing again.”

“I won't.” Zettie gets the words out, sounding shocked.

“Now go home, Zettie. Might see you tomorrow, iffen I'm passing.” Tomax looks up toward the school security manager, heading toward him around the outside of the Furdy. He
scratches his shaven head, smiles. For an edge farm boy in the wrong part of the village, Tomax doesn't seem unduly alarmed.

Zettie stands up, looks in the direction of home. She still feels strangely detached from herself, looking down at her feet. Wonders if her feet will know the route without her.