The Scorpion Rules (8 page)

“Apples,” said Thandi. Her voice was tight with . . . something. Anger? Fear? “We can put up the windfall apples. Let's go, before he gets us all in trouble.”

The eleven- and twelve-year-olds had already gathered the apples into peck baskets, and set up the grinder in the shade of the toolshed. They looked to be about half-done. Bushels of bruising apples sat on one side of the grinder, and pails of coarse apple meal sat on the other. Bat Brain the goat had her head stuck in one of the pails. Her tail lifted; she appeared to be turning apples directly into excrement. “Hhawu!” shouted Thandi. “Get out of there!”

The goat lifted her head, working her jaw from side to side like a man chomping a cigar. Lacking upper incisors, goats cannot eat apples without comedy, but this does not stop them from trying. Bat Brain looked at all of us looking at her, remembered that she cherished freedom, and took off like a suborbital rocket.

“Han, you catch her,” said Thandi. “You're the one who likes them.”

“I don't like
them
—I just like cheese.”

“Just catch the damn goat,” said Thandi. So Han and Atta went to catch Bat Brain, and the rest of us—Grego, Xie, Thandi, Elián, and I—picked up the full pails and went into the shed.

Inside, it was close and sticky with cobwebs, cluttered with coiled ropes, stacks of baskets, hoes and forks and spades in racks, scythes hanging from the rafters with more symbolic import than any of us were comfortable with. The light was sepia toned, coming through the warped slat walls in lances.

Grego and I carried our pails over to the ancient hulk of the apple press, but Xie and Thandi stopped just inside the door.

Elián ducked under the lintel and found himself between them. He blinked. “You girls aren't gonna beat me up, are you?” His voice was soft, free of the braggadocio that seemed characteristic of him. He put his pail down and stretched upward, wrapping his fingers around a low rafter. He was startlingly tall. “Got no doubt you could take me, but, no offense—” He cupped a hand loosely over his heart, the nursery spider there. “The job's already covered.”

“Of course not,” I said. “It's—we're merely pressing cider.”

“Yes,” said Grego. “Certainly there is no subtext.”

“The Abbot would have us show you the ropes,” said Da-Xia.

“Ropes?” said Elián. “We just met, Xie—sure you don't want me to buy you dinner first?”

“Stop it,” said Thandi tightly.

“Stop what, fighting?” said Elián. “When pigs fly.” Spiders twitched. The bolt must have been stronger this time, because Elián made a sound, a kind of helpless exhalation. He raised a hand to his heart, and his voice was suddenly breathless. “Or when they kill me. Gotta say, that seems more likely.”

“The cider—” I tried again.

“We have to explain to him, Greta,” said Xie. “The Abbot said—”

And Thandi cut in, “We're supposed to be getting him under control.”

“
Ačiū
, Thandi,” murmured Grego, even as Elián said: “I'd like to see you tr—” And the word dissolved into a little cry.

Da-Xia hadn't dropped her dark-goddess thing yet: her smile was a strange mix of distance and compassion. She nudged an upturned bucket toward Elián with the side of her foot. “Sit,” she said.

Elián dropped onto the bucket and let his head fall forward, lacing his hands behind his neck. Sunlight fell in stripes across him, one turning a streak of his shorn black hair into gloss, one giving shadows and gleam to the knots of his knuckles.

Da-Xia dropped into a crouch beside him. “What are you doing, child?”

“I'm the same age as you,” Elián muttered.

“Do you like ‘peasant'?” said Grego. “We might call you ‘peasant.' ”

“Was
crucifixion
too subtle?” snapped Thandi. “You need to behave better, or—”

Elián didn't answer, didn't lift his eyes from the floor, but he shook his head.

Xie stepped in front of him. “Look at me.” When he didn't, she reached out and put her fingers against the corner of his jaw. He lifted his head.

“Elián,” she said, spreading her hand against his cheek. “What is your plan here? They're
machines
. They don't have qualms. They won't become tired. They won't simply give up.”

“So, what? I should just lie back and enjoy—”

A shock—loud enough to hear, a sound like one popcorn kernel popping. Elián didn't even cry out; he just crumpled. He would have gone to the floor except that Xie caught him. She and Thandi held him for a moment as he flopped limply. Then Elián seemed to both strengthen and sag. Tension came into him, and he bent his head forward to rest in his own hands.

“Elián, I am impressed with your strength of will,” said Xie. “But you are one of the Children of Peace now. Other fates are tied to yours.”

Elián snarled without looking up: “I'm not a goddamned Child of Peace!”

Everyone drew breath, waited—but no shock came.

Elián lifted his head, looking for a moment bewildered.

Thandi shook her head. “You have no idea,” she said. “No idea.” She jerked upright and grabbed the apple buckets. “I have to— I am going to get more apples.”

Grego and Xie looked at each other—I was missing something here—and then Grego bowed to Thandi. “Certainly, you should.”

“Explain to him,” said Thandi to Xie, as she stalked out. “Explain to him that it's all of us.”

Is it racist to think of Thandi in terms of African animals? I was not sure. Once, she'd told me I had a face like an Irish wolfhound, and that had not felt like a racial remark, merely an overly astute one. In any case, she went out, and I thought of a cheetah's sway, fragile and strong and proud.

“What does she mean?” Elián surprised me—he could get up, and he did. Grego, meanwhile, set an unexpected example, turning one of the hand cranks that lowered the wooden press on the long spool of its screw. I took the other, and soon the friendly
creak-click
of the wooden gears filled the little space.

Elián stood there, bewildered. “Da-Xia, what does she mean?”

Xie shook her head, almost fondly, as if at a child's folly. “The Abbot asked if we could be a stabilizing influence on you. And I—or rather, Greta and I—we said yes.”

“And if you can't?”

We all just looked at him. Surely it wasn't
that
hard to work out.

But Elián didn't seem to be working it out. He looked at me, rather wide-eyed. Evidently Guinevere needed to spell it out for Spartacus. I said, “We'll be punished collectively. We have been already. And we will be again.”

“But that's not— I didn't— That's not fair!”

“It is the Precepture,” said Xie.

And it was.

H
owever bullheaded and masochistic Elián had been on his own account, he settled down when he realized that other fates were tied to his. In the gardens, in the refectory—anywhere we were in sight of the younger children—he behaved less stupidly.

Or at least he dammed up his stupidity for a while. Like any force of nature, it sought new channels. In the classroom he was hopeless, and sometimes ended up flat on the floor, which can put a dent in the discussion of (say) aquifers.

For instance, there was the day when we fell to arguing about why the Children of the Preceptures spoke English—a practice that Thandi had picked as her cultural injustice of the day. Da-Xia had quoted from the Utterances:
Too bad. They've got to speak something.

“He's not a god,” Thandi had answered. “Talis is not a god, and the Utterances are not a holy writ.”

Da-Xia had smiled at her, her voice dripping honey. “Near enough.”

The bickering then became general. Grego (a Baltic nobleman struggling under the weight of his Russian name) took up the part of minority languages, Thandi talked about cultural privileges, and Han (missing the point of the argument entirely) began laying out the simple terms by which one might recognize a god.

“Way I see it,” said Elián, unfurling his about-to-get-shocked smile, “anything you can take out with a decent-size pulse bomb—not a god.”

The blow to his nervous system knocked him from his chair.

Elián had come into my life the way comets had once come to medieval skies, the way Swan Riders still came, over the horizon with their wings catching light. He'd come like a portent of doom. But when he rolled over on the classroom floor, gasping and laughing at once, he did not seem portentous. Foolish, yes. Crazy, possibly. But too human to be reduced to a symbol, merely.

And besides, he could garden. There are those, newly come to the Preceptures, who think gardening is beneath them. Not Elián. He knew his way around compost teas and drip irrigations, around cockleburrs and flea beetles. He was, he told us, the son of a pair of sheep farmers.

“Farmers?” said Han. “Then what are you doing here?”

Dear Han. So slow to speak, and yet so often he said the wrong thing. It was clearly out of bounds to ask about a hostage child's history. Much pain could be hidden there, and no good came of poking at it.

But Elián took no offense. He propped a foot up on the lug of his spade and raised an imaginary glass into the air. “Here's to Grandma. My mother's mother is Wilma Armenteros.”

Wilma Armenteros, the Cumberland Alliance's secretary for strategic decisions—the newest of many euphemisms the Americans have used for “person in charge of war.” I had been reading about her. Recently I'd spent many hours poring over fragile, dry sheets of news dispatches stacked up on the misericord's map table. The dispatches were printed on special paper, easy to compost. They were so dry, they pulled moisture from the skin. I read them until my hands themselves dried, until the skin between my fingers cracked and bled. I was unable to look away from the war that was inching toward me.

Wilma Armenteros loomed large in those papers. Her great-great-something-grandfather had led the evacuation of Miami. Some more recent ancestor had been the secretary of unity during the period when the drinking-water-supply wars had finally torn apart the former United States. By all accounts the current Armenteros was the shadow president of the young state, the power behind the Cumberland throne. Of course Talis would demand a hostage from her.

And she was lucky to have one. If she had not had a beloved grandson . . .
Remember when kings used to be required to have children?
said the Utterances.
I require you to have children. You want to be a king, I require you to have children. You want to be a president, you want to be a general, you want to be a lord high dogcatcher—if you're in charge of blowing stuff up, I require you to have children.

I wondered if Elián realized that he'd been chosen—and not just by Talis. He was here because Wilma Armenteros loved him. But apparently not enough to avoid nominating a hostage. Not enough to turn her position down.

“My mother wanted out of politics,” said Elián. “And I'll tell you, she got as far out as she could get. Married this dirt-poor farmer from Kentucky—the hilly bit, you know. Down nigh the Licking River.”

“The Licking—” said Da-Xia, as if she couldn't believe her luck.

Elián scrubbed a hand over his face, and his voice came out small: “The south fork.”

“Have you at this point heard
all
the jokes about that?” asked Grego.

“I'll bet there are more,” said Thandi.

“Shut up,” said Elián, majestically. “So my mom, she married this Jewish farmer from a tapped-out springwater town. Got herself religion and settled in to live happily ever after, only with some sheep. And then Talis took her son anyway.” He pushed his hat back and swiped the sweat off his forehead with his sleeve. “My father didn't want me to go, but the Swan—”

Spiders moved under his clothes.

Elián stopped talking, took a steadying breath, and resettled his hat. “And here I am,” he said. “So that'll put a snake in your asparagus, heh?”

Even the proctors must have been baffled by that. They did not hurt him.

The height of Elián's disruptions came late in August, on the day when the goats got loose.

I was in the dairy making cheeses with Xie, Atta, and Thandi. Han and Grego were showing Elián how to milk goats. When they all left, Elián didn't shut the gate properly. You would think a farm-raised lad would know better, but perhaps sheep were not as clever as goats. Or perhaps that was what Spartacus would have done, if his every move had been watched, if his body had been weakened by electrical battering. Perhaps Spartacus would have fumbled with a latch, turned his back, and freed the goats.

Come to think of it, Spartacus the gladiator would probably have freed the lions. And then tied torches to their tails and burned down Rome a century early.