by Patty Jansen
Chapter Twenty-Three
By now, everyone had packed, and people had moved into the hall.
The bus stood outside the front door, a bigger vehicle than the one that had brought us here.
We all climbed in. Nalya helped Larrana negotiate the steep stairs, Ayshada helped Ileyu climb in by pushing her backside and then Mereeni, Deyu and Thayu handed Zyana at the storage compartment all the bags and equipment so that they could be stowed underneath. We had accepted some of Clay’s camping gear: sleeping bags, emergency rations, and tarpaulins that could be fashioned into makeshift tents.
He’d wanted no payment for any of it. I wasn’t sure what arrangement he had with Amarru, but I was fairly certain he and his sisters had a close relationship with her and he either was an agent for the Exchange or was closely associated with agents.
And not only were we leaving against Amarru’s wishes, I’d told him to lie to her about it. I hoped this trip was going to be worth the deceit.
Clay, Marisol, Vanessa, the local Coldi farmers from the valley and the group of military people watched us from the veranda.
As the bus pulled out of the driveway, I thought I spotted one of the black-clad military people move to the side of the house. What was the bet they were going to follow us? I had no doubt that they were Asha’s people.
The bus took us over the bumpy road back up the mountainside, over the pass where the last glimpse of Los Angeles shrouded in dusty air slid from view, and down the bumpy and cactus-lined road on the other side to the same farm where we had arrived yesterday.
In daylight, the dry desolation of the landscape was all-encompassing. It was dusty, grey, washed-out. The remnants of previous agricultural activity dotted the hillside.
A half-collapsed house stood amongst a graveyard of dead olive trees. The ground between the skeletons was dusty and covered in rocks, but a group of brown goats—some with big horns—still found something to eat between the boulders.
Junco, at the wheel of the bus, complained about them.
“Those things have exploded everywhere. They even come into the suburbs. They eat any skeleton of a plant or bush that’s still standing. Many people who wanted to farm out here have given up because of these damn pests.”
The Coldi farmhouse lay in a gully where it was marginally greener than the surrounding countryside.
The doors to the shed with the Asto-made craft were closed, but a gyrocopter sat in a field outside the house.
The bus stopped a little distance away from it, facing the open cabin door. A man appeared at the top of the steps, in the company of a dog.
It was Sage and his canine companion.
As soon as the door to the bus opened, the dog jumped from the gyrocopter and tore across the field. It scrambled up the steps into the bus before Junco could grab it by its collar and came to a screeching halt at Ynggi’s seat, barking furiously.
Several members of my team sprang into alert, especially those who hadn’t seen the animal before.
The dog’s tail was wagging, and Ynggi’s tail was wagging. Jaki had taken the two Pengali youngsters on his lap, but their tails were up in the air, trembling with curiosity and excitement.
Had Ynggi told them about this strange creature called a dog?
He slid down from his seat and let the dog sniff him, and then let the dog sniff Jaki and the kids.
Junco had been about to interfere, but he relaxed.
He snorted. “Hmm. I think that stupid dog likes him after all.”
We all got out of the bus. We collected our bags and trudged in a line to the gyrocopter.
Sage was still standing in the doorway, dressed in full military gear: a camouflage shirt and trousers, a broad belt with pouches, a knife strapped around his right leg, a gun in a bracket on his left leg. The gyrocopter’s headset hung around his neck.
“I’m glad to see you safe and well,” I said. “I’m sorry about causing trouble in your town.”
He snorted. “Those idiots in town wouldn’t harm me. I’m the reason the town still exists. We’ve been through tougher stuff than this.”
He tossed us some jackets.
“It would be a good idea if you put those on,” he said. “It might be a bit cold up there where we’re going. This craft is not as nice as the other one.”
We did as he said and then climbed into the gyrocopter.
Not as nice was an understatement. The other gyrocopters had been properly fitted with comfortable seats.
This was a military style vehicle with hard benches along the sides and a platform with netting in the middle of the hold where we had to deposit our luggage so it could be strapped down with a net. Junco was in charge of this operation.
We all sat down and did up the harnesses that hung from the wall.
With his harness and wheels, Larrana couldn’t easily sit in a way that allowed the harness to be done up. The straps wouldn’t extend far enough. We tried a few different spots.
“Oh, no, I got something different for the boy,” Junco said when he noticed our efforts. He gestured. “Come here.”
He opened a cabinet behind the pilot’s seat and pulled out a shelf made from wood, fitted with something that looked like an old car seat.
“I rigged this up for you because I know life is hard,” he said.
Larrana probably didn’t understand what he said, but he pushed himself onto the seat.
From his new position, he could see over the pilot’s shoulders to the controls and out the front window. His face was beaming.
I realised that he hadn’t spoken of his collection all day.
Junco did up his harness and then walked past me to shut the door. Sage slid into the pilot’s seat.
When Junco came back, I stopped him.
“Did you make that seat just for him?”
He met my eyes, and I was disturbed to see the emotion in them. He nodded.
“The poor kid’s probably never had the best seat in the house before.”
“What about your son? Isn’t he going to miss you?”
“He’s looked after by my partner. If he had wheels like this, he could probably come on trips and help me, but it still doesn’t change who he is. Just makes him a bit more... human, you know?”
He spoke briefly to Sage, then took the spot next to me.
Sage started the gyrocopter’s rotating blades. It became too noisy to keep taking.
Ayshada sat, very well-behaved, next to his father strapped in on the bench. He put his little hands over his ears. Telaris sat on his other side, and pulled out a pair of earmuffs and put them over Ayshada’s head.
He was growing into such a big boy. He’d start formal tuition when we came back to Barresh.
Emi sat on Thayu’s lap, looking around with big eyes. Her hair was getting quite long and Thayu had put it in a ponytail, which highlighted the spots of downy hair above her ears that were soft and purple. Thayu had also draped Sage’s military jacket over her.
This behaviour was so typical of Emi. She loved being in noisy and busy places, but never contributed to either the noise or activity herself. She watched. She was, as Thayu would say, a perfect spy in the making.
The power of the engine made the craft vibrate. With a jump, we took off. The adventure was underway.
For a while, no one said anything. It was just too noisy inside the cabin.
But then the craft stopped climbing and increased its forward motion. Sage spoke to someone on the radio.
Larrana was looking over his shoulders out the front window.
From where I sat, I could only see a small window in the craft’s cargo door. The Pengali were at that end, and Pykka was standing on the dog’s back in order to look out. Both he and the dog were wearing a harness, attached to the side of the craft by a retractable cable. Were these harnesses especially for dogs?
Past him, I c
ould see the dusty air. The sky above was pale blue. We were flying in an easterly direction. Pale sunlight came into the front window.
It was peaceful.
I didn’t know what I’d expected. To be shadowed by the military? To be forced down?
Junco was looking at me.
“Thanks for helping us,” I said.
He shrugged. “We’re being paid.”
“You don’t normally work for Clay, do you?”
“Until this morning, I’d never seen him before. But that doesn’t matter. He wants a guide to take people across the country, and we provide the service. He pays.”
“You don’t have to do this. It could be dangerous.”
“Life is dangerous out here. We’re used to it.”
“I hope we haven’t created any problems for you by escaping across the lake.”
“Nah. That’s not the first time something like that has happened. The young guys in town get a bit hot-headed. They’re proud young men and they have nothing to do. Everything the town used to have that gave them jobs—the factories, the agriculture, the mines—is gone. They hate having to allow me and my business into the country. They hate tourists, especially foreigners. I understand. Hey, many of these kids are like the members of my family. They hear from older folk how great everything used to be and they don’t have a lot of hope that things will get better in their lifetimes.”
He appeared nonchalant, but his words and attitude filled me with sadness. Imagine being so jaded that you no longer viewed an armed attack on visitors as unusual.
Chapter Twenty-Four
It was well past midday when we came down.
Junco informed us that the craft needed to refuel, and that we had best stay inside while they did that.
We landed, and Sage got up from the pilot’s seat and opened the door. A waft of air carrying the smell of hot and dry bitumen came in.
Several of the children had been asleep, and they woke up, looking around bleary-eyed.
Larrana wanted to know when we were going to get to Athens. It was a strange question. He hadn’t asked about going back before, but I assumed that now that the visit to the park was over and done with, he might miss his family.
It was strange because he had never shown much interest in them. He’d travelled to my house in Barresh with Nalya, and while Nalya had dutifully contacted his family—even if I wasn’t sure the family deserved it—Larrana hadn’t shown interest. But clearly something was up.
These two boys were on the cusp of Coldi puberty. I didn’t think they were friends. I didn’t even think they got on very well, although they hid their dislike of each other well.
I had to tell Larrana it would be a while before we got back to the Exchange, cringing all the way, because his father would be unhappy to hear about this little excursion we had taken, one that was going to be more dangerous than bargained for.
The refuelling took little time. Sage and Junco climbed back inside and we kept going in an easterly direction, with the sun now at our back.
The landscape passing under us was mountainous, with red rocks and patches of snow on the tallest mountains.
It became increasingly covered in vegetation, green vegetation even. The amount of dust in the air decreased. Not long after that, we passed over the first patch of forest: thick dark green stands of pine trees that grew more frequent. The occasional road intersected the landscape, but otherwise we didn’t see many signs of recent human habitation. I did spot an abandoned settlement, ruined buildings overgrown with weeds and tree saplings.
Junco told me that Sage deliberately picked a route that didn’t cross commercial flight paths and that kept away from population centres. I asked him if many people lived here, and he said these areas had never been densely populated, but that most people now lived in the towns.
I was familiar with the phenomenon.
The big industrial food production complexes had made broad acre farming unnecessary. In New Zealand, the people in the community where my father lived traded farm produce and sold it for premium prices to urban cooperatives. But cities where few people could afford farm produce had no need for real meat when protein came cheaply out of a processing plant and no need for field-grown vegetables when they were grown in multi-storey complexes under artificial light.
When the sunlight turned golden, we arrived at a medium-size town close to a lake, surrounded by forest-covered mountains.
The lake was clear and dark, and shimmered in the evening sunlight, its surface barely disturbed by the breeze. The shoreline consisted of a mixture of rocky beaches, rocks and marshland, set against a backdrop of dense pine forest. It was tranquil, secluded and pretty.
The paved airfield on the other side of the town was a simple affair with a small administration building, a shelter with benches and a hangar for maintenance. Another gyrocopter and a couple of fixed-wing planes stood on the tarmac.
While the gyrocopter was a recent model, like the ones that had taken us into the canyon, I wasn’t sure that the fixed-wing craft were still operational. Leaf litter and sand had gathered underneath the undercarriage of one of the craft, a model with two propellors that I strongly suspected to date from before the wars of the last century.
Wow, the last time I’d seen an aircraft that ran on oil-based aviation fuel was… I didn’t even remember. It must have been when I visited an aviation show with my father, in Germany if I remembered it correctly.
“Holy crap, look at those aircraft,” Nicha said.
Reida took pictures.
Sage turned off the gyrocopter’s engine.
“Well, this is as far as I can go,” he said. “That land on the other side of those mountains is Prairie, and they’re none too friendly with us. Someone else will come tomorrow and take you across the border. From there on, you’ll have to find your own way.”
“Thank you for helping us this far.”
“It’s the least we could do,” Sage said.
Did he really feel the need to apologise for the events? That wasn’t necessary. It had nothing to do with him.
A bus came up to the gate. The driver was a leather-skinned woman in middle age by the name of Poppy. Sage introduced her as a distant cousin of his and said that she would take us to our accommodation.
She took us through the town and along a narrow road that meandered through forested hills and came out on the shore of a small lake where a couple of wooden cabins sat on a grassy slope.
Our cabin was the one closest to the water. It had a large living area and communal kitchen. Two boxes with pumpkins, a bag of rice, onions and various other food items stood on the table.
The cabin had four bedrooms, each of which with sleeping benches and bunk beds.
Thayu and I dumped our bags and then took Emi for a walk while Sage, Junco and Poppy messed about making a fire in the outdoor fire pit for roasting the pumpkins.
Emi’s legs were only short, and she tripped easily, so we kept to the paved paths, strolling past the other cabins, which were all locked up. Some cabins had been well-maintained, but others showed signs of age, with moss growing on the steps and leaf litter on the verandas.
Emi babbled away, leaving us to guess what she was talking about. The soft springiness of the grass and moss fascinated her. She placed her little hands into the moss cushions and then giggled when the imprint lingered in the surface.
“This is a sad place,” Thayu said.
“It’s the wrong season. People come here in summer. It gets very hot in the cities.”
“Only a few people. No one would stay in the neglected houses. It’s a sad place because people don’t enjoy its beauty.”
“That’s a strangely philosophical thing for you to say.”
She blew out a breath. “I like going to your father’s house. The village is nice and you can tell that the people who live there love it. This… is a s
ad place. People live in deserts because rich visitors pay for an illusion that no longer exists, and they’ve abandoned places that are beautiful.”
“There is no work here for people. They want jobs.”
But of course the concept of paying jobs was alien to Coldi. People in Athyl worked because they had been carefully selected for positions they were good at and enjoyed, and most basic items were distributed over the population through a barter system that was only marginally related to work performed.
Emi said, “Oh!”
She looked around, wide-eyed, listening.
Down near the lake shore, Sage’s dog was barking like an idiot.
The Pengali kids had found a piece of wood big enough for them to use as a raft. They floated a short distance from the shore. The dog stood with Ayshada, who was throwing sticks at the raft. And the dog was barking because, being a dog, it wanted to chase sticks, except it also seemed to object to jumping into the water. I assumed it was cold.
The scent of cooking hung in the air.
“We better go back,” I said.
By the time we’d arrived at our cabin, most people in our team had gathered on the veranda. Poppy was carrying a large dish of roast pumpkin to the table.
The Pengali kids came running to the table with the dog, all three wet and muddy.
Ynggi said something to them. I thought it was a joke about their failure to bring a fish.
We sat by the lake until well into the dark.
Ynggi and the Pengali kids played with the dog until they were all tired. It was the first time I saw the Pengali kids voluntarily go to bed at night.
Thayu went to put Emi to bed. I spotted her a bit later out the back of the cabin with Anyu, setting up a device.
Gradually, everyone left until only Junco and I were left in the dark. We sat on opposite sides of the table, both of us close to the fire, which still radiated heat. The night was getting cold.
“Well, I better go to bed as well,” I said. “We’ll have a big day tomorrow.”