Sorrow's Sin

by Helen Allan

  Etienne nodded, and he and Tansy left the spacepod. They had only taken a few steps when they were ordered to raise their hands and stand still.

  “Keep them up,” Newto ordered from his vantage point on top of the tower. “Who are you? What do you want?”

  Etienne squinted up at the tower, seeing only an outline of a man on the roof holding a bow and arrow.

  “We are with Sorrow,” Etienne shouted, “Megan’s daughter. We are on the run and need shelter.”

  “Sorrow?” A woman shouted, coming up to stand behind the man, “Sorrow, show yourself.”

  Sorrow, bent over with cramps, slowly walked down the ramp of the spaceship.

  “Hello, Joella,” she said, loud enough for them to hear, “can you help us?”

  “Of course,” the pair said in unison, already throwing ropes over the side of the fortress and making their way down.

  Sorrow sat down on the dirty ramp, her legs seemingly unable to take her weight any longer and waited for them to come to her.

  3

  Sitting like a cat, perched high on a vantage point, she leaned on the fortress battlements and looked down at the small settlement that had been hastily thrown up at its base. Every patch of dirt inside the Keep walls, built so long ago by her mother to defend the small fortress, had been filled with a shelter of some sort and crammed with refugees.

  A light rain had begun to fall, as it usually did at this time of evening, but it was not enough to make Sorrow head indoors. Many other people, also ignoring the damp, went about their business preparing for the night.

  Newto and Joella had taken in the scattered remnants of households from throughout the plains. Those now sheltering below were human survivors and refugees who had heard of a safe place in the forest – a place where the Sin, the vicious indigenous monsters who hunted and ate people, could not reach them. In all, a teeming mass of several hundred people huddled in makeshift shanties inside the safety of the fortress walls.

  ‘Mum if only you could have known how many lives you would save building this,’ Sorrow mused, listening to the faint hum of the small community’s voices.

  After they had exited the spacepod, she and Etienne had updated Newto and Joella on where they had been, what they had experienced, and the local pair had shared all that had occurred since Megan and Sorrow had left this planet.

  Ensconced in the lowest storey of the tower – the safest, warmest and most habitable of all the buildings in the Keep, Newto and Joella, with their daughter Jess, had shared a meal of vegetable soup and unleavened bread with their visitors. Over the meal, they explained the growth of their small settlement, and how they were coping with the increased attacks by the Sin.

  “There are four local tribes of Sin, as far as we can make-out from the differences in their armour and weapons,” Newto said, placing his wooden soup spoon down on the table to carefully answer Sorrow’s questions. “But only two tribes consistently attack the fortress, the rest range wide and take farmers, as they always have. One tribe raids our goats, we believe that is Han’s tribe, but we have not been able to prove it.”

  “How is Hannibal?” Sorrow asks, forcing herself to eat the bread and trying to ignore the pain in her stomach, “he was just a small boy when we left, he must be a teenager now.”

  “He is a man,” Jess said, blushing at the frown her mother cast her and looking back to her food.

  “He’s grown,” Joella said, “he looks like all the other Sin now. He has tusks, fur, he is fearsome,” she shuddered. “We had to ask him not to visit anymore. We couldn’t guarantee his safety the people were too frightened of him. It has been about two years since we have spoken.”

  “Mum will be so happy to learn he is OK,” Sorrow smiled, “she thinks of him as a son. We both think he is an important link to creating peace between humans and the Sin, especially when he becomes the leader of his tribe.”

  “There will be no peace,” Newto growled.

  Etienne, sensing the growing tension, butted into the conversation.

  “I feel I am missing something here. All I see are people hiding in fear from the Sin. Yet Sorrow, didn’t you say that one day the Sin would live in harmony with people and with the Earthborn?”

  “Well, I hoped,” she sighed. “Mum said the history of the Sin was linked with our own and the Earthborns’ in many ways.”

  “How,” Etienne pressed.

  “Their history, written on the cave walls in the mountains by their wise elders, shows that originally this planet was inhabited by a humanoid type of people, similar to humans, with one heart, although Mum said probably hairier and vegetarian. The Gods, the same aliens who also invaded Earth, Amun and his little group, they referred to as the two-hearted. The God’s landed here in search of a lifeform that they could breed with – they could regenerate indefinitely using their tank technology, but they were unable to have children. They started killing off the local men, inseminating the local women, but the babies turned out mostly horribly ugly, like the Sin now; hairy, large. They were two-hearted, like the Gods, but unlike them, they were meat eaters. The God’s rejected the ones that turned out looking like this, they called them the Original Sin, they left them in the forest, and the locals took them in and raised them. But the problem was, they were so large and so hungry. They decimated the wildlife – ate anything that moved, and then,” Sorrow swallowed hard before continuing, “they began to eat their ancestors, the one-hearted, but they also mated with them, producing the Sin we know today. They are not as large as the Original Sin, but they still have two hearts, and they still need to eat meat.”

  “So, there are others on this planet,” Etienne noted, dipping some bread into his soup delicately, “the ones who lived here before the Gods.”

  “No,” Sorrow shook her head, “eventually the Sin and the Original Sin ate all their ancestors, there are none of their one-hearted ancestors left – then, having run out of food, they turned their attention to the Gods. There was war; the Gods were being decimated piece-meal until, well, they found Earth and began to bring humans here.”

  “For what purpose?” Etienne frowned.

  “Food,” Sorrow said quietly, “and slaves.”

  “Mon Dieu,” Etienne shook his head, “and now, here we are,” he waved his hand to indicate the primitive lodgings they were sitting in.

  “Yes and no,” Sorrow said smiling, “Mum said that by learning their heritage she was hopeful the Sin would understand they had a common ground. She hoped some change would have occurred between human and Sin relations since she left. Has there been any progress made in this regard?” she looked from Newto to Joella hopefully, noting Jess, the couple’s teenage daughter, blush and hastily reach for more bread, “even a little bit?”

  “They are as vicious as they have always been,” Joella growled, “the Sin are monsters that feed on our flesh. There can be no common ground.”

  Etienne raised his eyebrows at this, but Sorrow said nothing. She knew the animosity between the races would take a long time to break down, perhaps even generations, although Jess’ reaction had not been lost on her.

  After the meal Sorrow had come to the rooftop to bathe and change and be alone with her thoughts.

  Now, turning from the scene below, she stripped off and washed herself down with a small cloth and two buckets of cold water, one for washing and one for rinsing. She knew no one could see her where she was, and the family below were giving her the privacy she needed.

  Peeling off her gown, she pressed her hand to her stomach momentarily and gulped back the lump in her throat before shaking her head and sponging the blood from her legs. Drying herself on a towel from her bag, collected earlier by Etienne from the ship, she rummaged through her backpack and found her loose light grey velour tracksuit pants and a matching hoodie. Shrugging into their familiar soft fabric, she emptied the rest of the bloodied water into the drains on the edge of the fortress and resumed her position on the battlements.

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nbsp; Hugging her knees and watching the people below, she played back over in her head all that she had learned since her return, the forced memories and those last few moments with her husband; wishing she could banish the thoughts from her head, forever. She knew now that her mother had been right about him. He was more alien than human, but somehow, she couldn’t reconcile the cold, hard, hate-filled Anhur with the man she had married after a whirlwind romance.

  Anhur was the only man she had ever dated, slept with, loved, and she knew it would take a long time to erase the hurt from his betrayal. She also knew he would not take her actions, either in killing Amun or cutting off his head, lying down. ‘Well, you will for a while,’ she thought ruefully. It took 70 days to rejuvenate a body fully in the tanks. ‘But you will hunt me down after that. I know you well enough to know that, husband.’ She shivered at the thought. She had seen him hunt, ‘single-minded bloodthirst’ were the words that most came to mind. She had never fully been able to reconcile his gentle behaviour towards her, with his merciless hunting of the Sin. No one was safe from his weapons, not children, pregnant women, the elderly; all fell before him. It was as though he had no humanity – and maybe, she chewed her lip as she considered the memories, she had received from the eight Gods who settled Earth – he didn’t.

  She knew now that her husband was three-quarters God, she only half, could this be the reason he was so angry over Amun’s death? Could he be far more different from her than she had ever suspected? But, if he had told her the truth, and his mother was really the Goddess Nephthys, and his father was Thoth, a half-human, then the memories suggested he was not even Earthborn. She and Osiris had left earth while the Goddess was pregnant. Why would he call himself Earthborn if he was not? And what did he know about Amun’s plans for Earth that she was not yet privy to? She shuddered. Her mother had once asked if she was related to her husband and she had scoffed at the idea. But now, now she knew, Amun, her father, was Anhur’s great, grandfather. She felt a little sickened, what would her mother say when she found out?

  Her brooding was interrupted by a shout from below. Peering down she saw a mother cradling a young girl.

  “Hello,” Sorrow shouted down, “is something wrong?”

  “My daughter,” the woman said, the strain of holding her child and stress evident on her face, “she has the fever, I need Joella.”

  “I can help,” Sorrow said rising and throwing the rope over the side of the fortress, ready to descend.

  “No,” the woman shook her head vehemently, “not one of you – I need Joella.”

  Sorrow nodded, she had forgotten that to the people here she as an overlord, an Earthborn master, an alien. Grimacing as her stomach contracted in another cramp, she rose and walked downstairs to fetch Joella and Newto.

  4

  “No, we really have to do something about this now,” she said, rising from where she had been leaning to examine another sick child and looking to Newto and Joella.

  “But the people are scared, Sorrow,” Newto sighed, “they have, every one of them, seen their family members murdered and eaten. Most wandered in alone or ran in, Sin hunters at their heels. They won’t leave the fortress.”

  “They have to,” Sorrow said, throwing her hands up in the air in frustration. “We need to collect as much mud as we can and expand this fortress before the snow sets in, the disease you are experiencing now is only the start.”

  As she spoke Sorrow considered the small child on the bed in front of her. She and Etienne had only been in the fortress a month, but already she had treated more than a dozen small children suffering from fever-like symptoms and stomach upsets. She knew it was the filth and lack of sanitation within the Keep’s walls making the people sick – there were too many crammed into a small space. But she suspected many were also suffering the fever her mother had been afflicted with when she first landed on this planet – brought on by constantly staying out in the ever-present drizzle and cold.

  “How many refugees are there here now?” she asked, chewing her lip.

  “120,” Joella said, “about half are women and children.”

  “And of the children,” Sorrow said, “how many are 12 or older, roughly?”

  “Most,” Joella frowned, “those who were too small often died on the way here, others have succumbed to this,” she pointed to the child in front of them, “or other fevers.”

  “Anyone over the age of 12 has to help with the rebuilding,” Sorrow said firmly. “Call a meeting; I want to address all the people.”

  Newto shook his head.

  “Night is falling Sorrow. You know what that means. We need to prepare for attacks. The Sin are wearing us down, every night they come back and try another way to breach the walls. The women with small children will hide, the rest of us need to defend the Keep walls.”

  “You’d think they would have given up by now,” Etienne said from where he had been leaning against the wall, watching Sorrow treat the child.

  “No,” Joella said, shaking her head. “They want the people inside, but more importantly, word is getting out amid the human settlers that it is safe here. Many are leaving the plains and forming small communities. There is rumour of another fortress being built. It is making it harder for the Sin to harvest us. They need to go further and further to hunt. Destroying this fortress is the only way for them.”

  “Yes,” Sorrow said nodding, “if they can destroy this, the largest and first, they also destroy people’s hopes that they might have another option, other than staying on the plains and waiting to be eaten.”

  “We never waited to be eaten,” Newto frowned, “we worked the land for the Earthborn, they protected us. Providing we sent enough produce to the Capital each year; we had nothing to fear.”

  “That wasn’t my mother’s view,” Sorrow said quietly. “She watched the Sin raid almost nightly during the winter months.”

  “Yes,” Joella nodded “and that was the big secret that humans have only just learned in recent years, thanks to your mother - we have spread the news as far and wide as we can.”

  “What secret?” Etienne asked.

  “That the Sin eat humans so that they don’t eat the Earthborn, and that the Earthborn allow it to happen,” Newto said holding his palms up as though this were obvious.

  “Of course,” Sorrow said, looking down at the little girl in front of her. “Humans were brought to this world for two purposes, to feed the scary locals and serve the Earthborn as slaves. But now, the tables are turning.”

  As she said this Jess entered the room and quietly made her way over to the fireplace, helping herself to a cup of broth.

  “Where have you been Jess?” Newto demanded, “I looked all over the compound for you this morning.”

  “Nowhere,” the adolescent girl said, keeping her eyes on her food.

  Sorrow studied the girl. She had seen her throw a rope over the wall and disappear into the forest earlier that day.

  ‘Well, at least there is one human not afraid to leave the Keep.’

  “Alright,” Sorrow said, drawing attention away from the young woman, “crall a meeting for first thing in the morning Newto. This fortress needs expanding, the people need proper housing, and there is only one way that can happen.”

  The look Newto shared with his wife was not lost on Sorrow, but much like her mother, when she saw a wrong, she sought to right it. And, unlike her mother, she was a doctor, a healer, and she knew the only way to save the lives of the people living here, in these medieval conditions, was to make changes – fast.

  “I will call the meeting,” Newto sighed, “but remember, Sorrow, to many you are not human, you are Earthborn. They may allow you to heal their children, but that doesn’t mean they will follow you.”

  She was about to reply when the alarm sounded.

  The sea of black circling the Keep walls sent a shiver of dread down Sorrow’s spine.

  All around her the men of the Keep stood behind the battlements wit
h their spears, bows and arrows at the ready, just waiting for the Sin to get within range.

  “They are the ugliest things I have ever seen,” Etienne frowned, shaking his head in wonder at the creatures below.

  “Yes,” Sorrow sniffed, the heavy drizzle making her shiver and her nose run, “Mum thought they were Orcs, like from Lord of The Rings, when she first saw them, and I can understand why, they look very similar from a distance.”

  “I don’t know this book you reference,” Etienne said, his eyes narrowing as the forms began to creep closer, “but they look like the very denizens of hell to me.”

  “They’re not,” Sorrow said, turning to briefly meet his eyes, “they are beings, just like you and I, with feelings and thoughts and plans. It is just that they don’t know what they are doing is wrong. Mum said they think of us as animals, they don’t give as much thought to eating us as people give to slaughtering a cow or a chicken and serving it up.”

  “Cows and chickens don’t speak,” Etienne smirked.

  “Yes, they do,” Sorrow frowned, “we just don’t speak their language.”

  Etienne shook his head and checked his gun for ammunition. He had a small automatic handgun, German make, given to him by Clara before they left Earth, a machine gun, a gift from Sorrow’s uncle Jamie, and a range of other weapons packed in his trunk on board the spacepod. Tonight, in a hurry, he had decided upon the handgun and the machine gun, although he didn’t think the latter very sporting when he picked it up. Now, however, seeing the creatures below, he had no problem at all with killing them en masse.

  Setting the range on the small machine gun he leaned it on the battlement and took aim at a big Sin who had just stepped to the front of the line.