Acolytes (The Enclaves Book 1)

by Nel Franks

  ‘Lenna was worried for a long time that Jem might be like her. He was perfect physically, but the day-care centre said he was slow in achieving his milestones. It terrified Lenna.’

  Lenna nodded. ‘Motherth point. Whithper.’

  ‘Oh, were they being mean?’ Rosie said. Her face was sympathetic, but her voice seemed a bit ... I’m not sure what. Perhaps challenging? Like she thought Lenna was being overly sensitive? I glared at Rosie. Sometimes she could be so insensitive herself! Of course, it would scare poor Lenna if she thought Jem was slow. I’d seen her bullied, being taunted by some nasty girls as ‘Goddess-gifted’.

  ‘Why didn’t you get him tested?’ Rosie said. There was still that edge to her voice, faintly accusing.

  Gaia gave her a quick admonitory frown. ‘The carers suggested that to Lenna, but what would you do, Rosie? If your worst nightmare was that your baby might be identified as defective and Sacrificed, and someone told you to get the testing that might lead to that very thing?’

  Rosie flounced over to her own bed. ‘I still think all babies should be tested to weed out the defectives. It’s not fair if the Enclave has to support people who don’t contribute. It’s no different for the mothers of girls. They have to relinquish their daughters too. And sacrifice the ones who are damaged.’

  Gaia sighed, slumping a little beside Lenna. ‘We all get it, Rosie. We all know that the Enclave requires everyone to be productive, and they find places for everyone, even those with some disability, to have a job.’ She squeezed Lenna’s hand. ‘But this is not about policy, we’re talking about how Lenna felt. She was more scared than she’d ever been, for her baby. It was kind of a relief to give him up, even though it was terrible. At least in the Men’s Enclave, they don’t sacrifice their sons with disabilities.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Rosie murmured, staring out the window. That made me stop – how did we know what happened to the boys?

  The conversation lapsed. I was unnerved by Rosie’s lack of empathy. How could she feel differently from us? But I didn’t know how to talk about it with her.

  I went back to thinking about all mothers relinquishing their babies. Oh Goddess, that must be so hard! But it was the way it had always been, girl babies went into the Infants Rooms, and boy babies went to the Male Enclave. What would it be like to live in a single family, where the only people you could count on were your blood relatives? Here, everyone was related; all older women were our mothers, aunts and sisters. We could rely on everyone. To live with just your parent, that would be strange. Perhaps it could be wonderful, if they loved you as much as Lenna loved baby Jem before she gave him up. As much as she still loved him.

  But it wasn’t fair, was it, to have to give them away, if it left you as devastated as Lenna? I lay on my bed thinking, staring out the window across the room. What had my mother done on that day of relinquishing? I had no memory of it. The earliest thing I could remember was waiting for the elder sister who was feeding me to turn her back, so I could dump my porridge onto the floor. I was very little. But I couldn’t remember a mother at all.

  A sudden chill ran across my chest. One of the elder sisters out there was my mother! I felt cold and shaken; my stomach was wobbling. Did she know I was her child? Did she look out for me to see how I was growing? Who might she be?

  ‘One of our elder sisters is my mother!’ I burst out. ‘Do you know who’s yours? Have you ever wondered about it?’

  ‘Of course,’ Gaia answered. ‘Haven’t you thought about it before? I always wonder about it. I’ve decided the man who fathered me must have had darkish skin and curly black hair – I’ve never seen an elder sister with exactly my colouring, so I must have got it from my father.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking about who fathered me – I’ll never know who that was. I was thinking that there’s one of my elder sisters, maybe someone I know, who is actually my mother.’ The though still astounded me. ‘Do mothers know who their daughters are? I mean, does mine know it’s me? Does she still love me just as much as when I was a baby? Or does she just look at all of us and wonder which one is hers?’

  Rosie leaned against the wall behind her bed. ‘They couldn’t possibly know which one of us is their own daughter. I mean, have you ever seen one of our elder sisters look differently at us, or speak differently to us? There’re are so many kids; how could they keep track of us?’

  Gaia was more animated than I had seen her for months. ‘Yes, I have seen them look at us differently! Remember on Naming Day? Everyone goes, and we all stand around cheering the little girls when they are given their life-names. They’re so excited about it – they go running back to their dorm sister and shout their new name to her. Haven’t you ever watched the other women, though? They’re always laughing and crying together, and pointing out one little girl, and cheering and weeping when she gets her name. And what about those women weeping when we were in the Transition procession? I think they do know who we are. They must.’

  I lay back on my bed, stunned. Was my mother watching me, somewhere, wondering how I was doing? I had never even thought to look for my real mother. Did she think I was ignoring her? Why hadn’t she ever let me know she was my mother? What did she think of me - was she proud of me, or disappointed? Did she love me? I mean, more than just sisterly love? Did she wish, like me, that we’d never been separated?

  ‘Do you think our mothers love us still?’

  Lenna nodded vehemently, fresh tears pouring down her face. We stared at her, silenced by her raw grief. She mimed holding a baby close, then reaching out and emptying her arms, and then her hollowed hand clenched against her chest, squeezing as hard as pain.

  For a while, I kept searching the faces of my elder sisters, trying to find one who treated me differently, who might be my mother. There was a gnawing wish in my chest that I had grown up knowing my mother and feeling her love. But all my interactions happened the way they always had, and gradually I stopped looking so hard. If my mother had wanted to make herself known to me, she would have done so already, I thought. She must be living the way everyone did, in community with our sisters, with no special bonds between mother and daughter.

  I began to wonder what it would be like to remain in that deep and powerful love between a parent and child. I had never realised the strength of that bond, until I had seen Lenna’s grief and heard her story. Might it be better for the child, for me, for all of us, if we had been treasured by our mothers? What if we could have been loved by mothers and fathers? Could such focussed devotion be helpful to a child? Would it be better than the general affection in which we had grown up? I began to miss what I had never known.

  IN AGRICULTURE, AFTER the foot incident, I learned you can entice cows, and encourage them, but you can’t force them. I still tried sometimes, and always came off second best. Rosie learned the same thing about little children. She probably didn’t need as many lessons as I did. She always seemed willing to do things the way she was told. It drove me crazy when we were little; she’d always do what the elder sisters said without questioning, while I always wanted to know why, or why not. Gaia stayed cool and quiet. She didn’t question either, not to their faces. But when we were where the sisters couldn’t hear, oh then she questioned, analysed and criticised, until sometimes I was sick of it.

  When we were little, in the Children’s Rooms, Gaia, Rosie and I had often run down the road and played in our hollow beside the Wall in our free time. But now, working in different Houses, our timetables were completely different, so we didn’t see each other nearly as much as we had. Even living together, it felt like I could go days without seeing or talking to my sister-friends, at least not talking about anything properly. I missed my friends, despite living so closely with them. But when we did manage to meet up on our infrequent days off together, or sometimes late at night in our room, we would tell each other all our news. Gaia would often ask difficult questions based on what we had just learned.

  One rare day off together
, sitting down at our favourite hollow by the Wall, she said ‘Where does the metal come from to make our craft tools?’ We puzzled over that one a long time. We knew the theory about mines, and ores and smelting, but we also knew that the Enclave didn’t have any mines. So how did we have metal implements?

  ‘Perhaps they’re left over from the time before?’ Gaia mused.

  ‘No, they’d have rusted away by now, wouldn’t they? I think they must come from either the Male Enclave or the Expelled,’ I said.

  ‘But we don’t have anything to do with the Expelled!’ Rosie said, shocked.

  ‘Except to send them babies and sterilised women.’ Gaia’s voice was so disapproving.

  ‘So,’ I reasoned, glossing over her frozen face, ‘metal things must come from the Male Enclave. But how, and when? I’ve never seen any man come into the Enclave, to bring in tools or implements. Can you imagine? – a man walks into the Enclave with an armful of tools?!’ I hooted at the thought. ‘And why would they give them to us anyway?’

  ‘I don’t care how they bring them in.’ Gaia stared into the distance. ‘I just want to know what it’s like to make them. To go exploring for the ore. To work in a mine.’

  Rosie gave a high nervous laugh. ‘But you’d have to be a man to do that, Gaia. There’s no point in even thinking like that.’

  Gaia said nothing.

  Perimeter Squad

  Tomma, Late Spring, Year One, Initiates

  OUR TRAINING FOR THE Perimeter Squad began at the end of our fourth week in our assigned Houses. During work time, apart from our weekly foundation learning days and a rare simultaneous day off, training was the only time Rosie, Gaia and I were regularly together. I was so glad to be doing something together again; working on my own in the House of Agriculture was a bit daunting. The other four Initiates who started with me were off in some other part of Agriculture and I hardly saw them. There were other new students in Agriculture I didn’t know, Novices and Apprentices who all seemed to be able to understand things much faster than I could. The Agriculture workers and mistresses always seemed on the verge of criticising what I was doing. Being in the Initiate perimeter training squad with my dearest sisters should be a treat.

  The training, however, was anything but. I had thought we would be learning to do exciting things with weapons, sneaking around in the fields, but no. Our first training session was back in the Learning Rooms and consisted of sleep-inducing lectures about all the things we would get to learn. It was much more boring than the hours of lectures we sat through about the upcoming Summer Festival and our role in it. In the first lecture for Squad training, we were told about fitness, the importance of security within the Core, the lifelong commitment to defence of our Enclave, the necessity of the background work of logistics, planning, catering, and support functions for the actual Perimeter Squad, and that we wouldn’t get anywhere near going out on regular patrols until we had graduated from Acolytes and were robed women.

  I yawned hard. ‘Nine years, Gaia! I don’t think I can stand nine years of being bored rigid.’ I whispered.

  ‘Acolyte!’ The Perimeter Squad Mistress, Allit, was a tiny steel rod of a woman who could have raised a barn roof with her voice alone. I shrank down in my seat, hoping she was yelling at someone else. Somehow, she appeared in front of me without seeming to have moved from her spot at the front of the group.

  ‘Acolyte! Name!’ Her face was smooth, but absolutely rigid. I couldn’t imagine that she could ever smile with such stiff cheeks.

  ‘Tomma, sister. Er, Tommasika really, but everybody ...’

  ‘Silence. Answer only the question,’ she barked.

  I nodded, swallowing in fear.

  ‘So, you think nine years is too long to train, do you?’

  ‘Um, well, I’m not sure, sister. But it seems ...’

  ‘Answer the question yes or no. I didn’t ask for your thinking processes, just your insight now that you’ve had less than a half-day of training. You are obviously now in a position to judge how much there is to know, and how quickly you’ll be able to learn everything your elders have devised over decades for our protection. Do give us the benefit of your opinion.’

  Her tone could have etched glass, and my face was hot enough to melt it. I slid further down in my seat and mumbled something.

  ‘Sit up Acolyte Tomma! Do you imagine that you can slink away from any and every confrontation? How will that help you if you come across the Outcasts?’

  I hoped the earth would open up and swallow me right there. But of course, it didn’t, and I had to push myself up straight in my chair again. I took a deep breath and decided I had to show a bit more spine.

  ‘I’m sorry for talking out of turn Mistress. I won’t do it again.’

  She stared silently at me for a moment, and then her face changed, without actually moving. It just seemed slightly less stony. I took it as a good sign. She turned and within a moment had reappeared at the front of the group.

  I risked a glance at Gaia and Rosie. Rosie’s face was pink with embarrassment, but Gaia was staring as impassively as always toward the front. But her hand slipped out and gripped mine in reassurance. I felt I could breathe again.

  At the end of the lecture, we were placed into small groups with several robed sisters and sent on a jog around the streets of the Core. We had to kilt up our robes above our knees so we could run freely, tucking the extra fabric into our belts. I was certainly out of practice. I walked a lot in Agriculture and certainly had built up my arms hauling feed. But I hadn’t run at all.

  Within moments, my feet hurt, and my breath was dragging in my lungs. I pounded on, gritting my teeth as more and more girls passed me. They all looked perfectly comfortable. Why couldn’t I do it? I didn’t like the whine of my own thoughts, and the spectre of Mistress Allit sneering at my woeful time spurred me on to greater efforts. But my elbows were flapping, and my knees wobbling by the time I staggered back to the Learning Rooms.

  We were assigned to groups depending on how long it had taken us to finish the circuit. Gaia was in a group of faster girls. She had always loved running. I was with Marien and several others who had been slow. Sister Mandra was assigned to our group, a teacher from the Children’s Rooms. She was tall and soft-bodied, and I felt my chest expand with relief. She at least would not be such a tough taskmistress as Sister Allit.

  I could not have been more mistaken. Mandra never seemed stern, but she was absolutely unrelenting. She ran with us for every lap, and never seemed to get out of breath. With a smile she would urge us to go a bit faster—‘not a lot, girls, just pick up the pace a little’—but she would not let us off the slightest length.

  ‘Come on girls, you want to catch up with your sisters, don’t you? You can’t lag behind when you’re on Patrol, you know. Just keep going. It’ll get easier.’

  It was like trying to resist water. No matter what the girls in my group did to get her to ease up—and over the next few weeks we tried everything we could think of—she would just keep demanding, sweetly, a bit more and a bit more. It seemed she didn’t think any of us were fit or able at all, no matter how much we improved. After a few weeks, I got so angry with her that I decided I would show her once and for all that I was perfectly capable, and then she would stop insisting on more. After half-way on one of our training runs, I took off, building up my speed steadily. I didn’t sprint because I knew I’d end up foundering, but I ran gradually faster and faster until I had left the rest of the group behind and arrived back at the training hall well ahead of them. That would show her. She would stop harassing me now. As Sister Mandra and the rest arrived, she looked at me, unsmiling.

  ‘There, Tomma, I knew you could do it. I’ll expect that pace from you from now on.’

  I groaned and staggered over to Rosie and Gaia, who were waiting by the roadway. Feeling rather irritable, I shrugged off their congratulations on my new running capacity.

  ‘Let’s just go and get a drink in the Refectory
. I’m parched.’

  OVER A PERIOD OF MANY weeks, I not only became stronger and fitter from the running, but I began to find some of the lectures interesting. At least they were more interesting than the ones about Summer Festival, which were full of spiritual theory, and very little detail about what actually happened. The Perimeter Squad lecture on calculating the amount of food required to support a patrol was useful, as it related directly to my work in Agriculture. But the most absorbing one was about the history of the Outcasts and an analysis of their intentions. The Outcasts lived in the high hills behind the Enclave. They were women, and women only, that not even the Expelled could tolerate. Or perhaps they couldn’t tolerate the Expelled. Whichever way it was, they were the worst of the worst.

  ‘It’s our belief that most of the Outcasts are women who have committed some breach of the rules in the Expelled, or who can’t live within the Expelled community. Thus, we believe that each of them probably has some mental illness, or social disability, or personality defect.’ Mistress Allit seemed glad they suffered from some disability, as though they deserved it. ‘They would have to have some such deficit to be in those extreme circumstances. From our observations along the perimeter, we know something about how they live up there in the hills behind our Enclave. We know from captives we have taken during their raids on us that the group is composed entirely of women – they have a hatred of men, and do not allow them in their society, unlike the Expelled.’

  Rosie wrote something with great industry, and I was impressed by her notetaking. However, a moment later, she passed me a corner torn from a page of her notebook, written in her tiny perfect handwriting: ‘so now we know there ARE men in the Expelled, even if not in the Outcasts’. Her expression was defiant. I looked at her in bemusement. Had we not known there were men in the Expelled? I don’t think I’d ever thought about it.