Crecheling

by D. J. Butler

  “People of Ratsnay Station!” she called. Her voice rang against the wooden walls of the stockade and snapped back at them, creating a faint echo. “Every year you harvest your crops. You lay away what is good of your grain to bake your bread through the winter, spring and summer to come.”

  “Aye,” the crowd murmured together. Dyan realized that it was an expected answer, part of the script. She tried to listen closer to the words, to memorize them. She might be reciting them herself, someday soon.

  “And every year, you take the best of your crop and bake it into cakes and brew it into ale and celebrate. You celebrate what is good in your lives and the blessings of the System. You also celebrate against what is hard. You celebrate to help you bear up under your yoke.”

  “Aye!”

  Many of the men followed each cry of aye! with a swig from a cup, pot, or bottle in their hands.

  “Also, every year you raise another crop of young women and men.”

  An expectant hush fell over the crowd.

  “And every year, the System harvests that crop. What is good among the crop is laid away at Ratsnay Station, to work, love, bear children, and live through winter, spring, and summer. What is best among the crop, the System harvests.”

  “Five!” wailed the bearded elder. “Five fingers on the System’s hand!”

  “Five is the number of death!” shrieked the old woman.

  “Five is the number of life!” added carrot-nose.

  “Aye!” the crowd shouted.

  Dyan trembled, thinking of the Gallows Tree.

  “I hold in my hand judgment!” Magister Zarah called. “Your youth have been winnowed and tried, and I hold in my hand the names of the five who are consecrated to the System. These names are not secret, they are known to you. Their fate is not secret, but it is sacred. The System needs new blood. The best among your children go to join the System.”

  “Aye!”

  Dyan wondered if this was the source of Buza System’s gardeners and other menials. Pieces seemed to be fitting together, and the thought that she was a Magister-designate made her heart beat faster. It was a little like being a Cogitant, whether you brought up Crechelings to know and love their roles, or brought in the new blood of the best and brightest Landsmen. She felt proud. A Magister was a leader, had an important part.

  “I have come with five, and we will take five with us!” Zarah recited. “Mechanical-designate Deek, step forward!” Deek did, stumbling a bit, but staying upright. A few deep voices in the crowd chuckled. “Hamish, son of Goodman Soren and Goody Barrab, step forward!”

  A grinning boy who could have been one of the Creche-Leavers himself but for his rough wool clothing kissed his mother good-bye and pushed forward. Dyan felt a twinge of something in her heart at the sight of the kiss, and ignored it.

  “Deek,” Zarah said, her voice softer now but still loud enough to be heard by everyone. “Look closely at this boy. Your task is to deliver him to Buza System, as the System requires. Will you undertake this task?”

  Deek’s eyes wandered and he blinked, but he managed to force out the one syllable required of him, “Yes.”

  “Healer-designate Wayland!” Magister Zarah called.

  Wayland stepped forward, was matched with a young woman with missing teeth. Then Zarah matched Shad with a girl whose head had frizzy white hair like the spores of a dandelion, and Cheela with a boy with jug-handle ears and an expression on his face that might have been sullen.

  “Magister-designate Dyan!” Zarah finally announced, and Dyan stepped forward.

  “Jak, son of Rosyn, step forward!”

  Jak, the boy about whom Magister Stanton had been worried, slunk slowly out of the crowd. He had big hands and a big head, Dyan thought, and he walked with his knees and feet forward and his chest sunken in, like he was shrinking from something. He came forward until he and Dyan stood face to face. The rest of the Landsmen youth, all standing in a row, stood at attention. Jak seemed to hang back a hair, and kept his hands in his pockets.

  “Dyan,” Zarah said. Dyan thought her voice sounded tender. “Look closely at this boy. Your task is to deliver him to Buza System, as the System requires. Will you undertake this task?”

  “With all my heart,” Dyan said.

  Jak flinched.

  Magister Zarah rested on a hand on her shoulder. “Not with all your heart, child. You do not need your heart to carry you through your obligations. The System does not need you to love it, and it does not need you to love your duties. It only needs you to carry them out.”

  “Yes, Magister.” Dyan’s face burned with shame, though Zarah’s eyes looked, if anything, kindly.

  “Will you do as the System requires?” the Magister asked again.

  “Yes, Magister,” Dyan said.

  Zarah nodded. She turned back to the crowd and spoke, raising her voice again. “The Selection is complete!” she announced. “Tomorrow is the Harvest, when these five sheaves will be gathered in to the System! Tonight, now, is the time to celebrate!”

  “Aye!”

  More beer was swallowed, and the musicians began again, in earnest.

  ***

  Chapter Four

  A young woman chased a small child through the tall grass in the darkness. “Get back here right now, unless you want Guns to get you!”

  The child shrieked and kept running.

  “So what’s it like in the System?” Jak asked.

  He stood close to Dyan at the edge of the bonfires’ light, above the Station and looking down at it. Dyan leaned against the thick, dried-out stump of a tree, shorn of limbs and needles and still taller than she was. Jak held pebbles in his hand, hefting them for weight, and as he asked the question, he hurled one high into the air, over the head of revelers, and silently into the waters of the reservoir.

  “Haven’t you been?”

  Jak shook his head. “Not allowed,” he said. “System men come out here and collect harvest tribute. Other than that, we see Magisters and Outriders. No one else.” He whipped his arm casually and hurled another rock down into the water. “If I’d wanted to, I guess I could have ridden over and looked at it from the outside, but Holy Mother, that doesn’t seem worth the trouble.”

  Dyan searched for words. “Well,” she essayed, “Buza System is beautiful.” She tried to think of what would be distinctive to this Landsman boy, how she could prepare him for his first sight. “There are parks. Trees everywhere, because of the river. The buildings are all white stone.”

  “Sure,” Jak agreed slowly. “I’ve climbed the Jawtooths and looked down into it. That isn’t what I mean.”

  Dyan tried to guess what he was thinking, and failed. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  Jak turned suddenly and snapped his elbow again. A stone whizzed from his hand and thunked hard against something in the grass, something that suddenly rustled, stood up, and turned out to be a young man in leather-and-bone breastplate.

  “Ouch,” he grumbled, rubbing his forehead.

  “If you’re on guard duty, Eirig, you’re doing a lousy job of it.” Jak raised his arm as if to throw another stone. “Maybe I should report you.”

  Eirig raised his arms defensively. “What if I’m not?”

  “Then you’re missing the best party of the year.”

  “Does that bother you?”

  “No,” Jak admitted, and threw the stone in his hand. He nailed the other boy right in the center of his bone-stitched protection with a blow so hard it actually knocked him back a step. “But eavesdropping on my private conversation does.”

  “Okay, okay!” Eirig staggered away and down the hill, raising his hands in surrender. “I’m leaving!”

  “Don’t let your uncle drink all the beer!” Jak called after him. “I want to get hammered later!”

  “I don’t think there’s any beer in the System,” Dyan said. “Or wine or whisky. Healers dispense narcotics and other medicines when you need them.”

  “No bee
r?” Jak snorted. “If they’d told me that, I’d have tried even harder to bomb the tests.”

  That caught Dyan’s ears. “You tried to do poorly?”

  “Yeah,” Jak said. “So what else? Are people in the System … nice?”

  “They’ll be kind to you,” she said quickly. “They’ve always been kind to me. They’ll make you feel right at home.”

  “You know, my sister was Selected a few years ago,” Jak said. He stood slightly downhill of Dyan and looked into her face, so his was entirely in shadow and the expression on it was unreadable.

  “I knew that, actually.”

  Jak was quiet for a moment. “So you know Aleen?” Dyan still couldn’t see his face, but she thought he sounded surprised.

  “No, I …” Dyan cursed herself silently. She was trying too hard to act like a Magister, like someone important and in the know, and had given him the wrong impression. “No, I don’t really know anybody.”

  “I heard you don’t have families in the System.”

  “That’s true. The Council decided years and years ago that families were unnecessary, and reorganized the System to do without them.”

  “So who … who raised you?”

  “The Magisters. I’ve grown up in the Creche, changing Crechemates every two years. That’s why I don’t know anybody. Unless they’re a fellow-Crecheling or a Magister. Although as of … well, yesterday, I think, I’m not a Crecheling anymore.”

  Jak shook his head. “I think if I’d been raised by Magister Stanton, I’d have killed him or myself long ago.”

  Dyan was shocked. “You don’t mean that.”

  “You’re right,” Jak agreed, “I don’t. What I mean is I would have punched him in the face and left the Creche.”

  “You can’t leave the Creche,” Dyan said. “It isn’t done.”

  Crunching footsteps in the grass warned them of someone’s approach, and they both turned to look.

  “Milt,” Jak said, nodding to the jug-eared boy who’d been Selected along with him. “I didn’t know making friends was a talent of yours.”

  “It isn’t,” Milt agreed. His voice was sour and terse. “But she promised to show me something amazing.”

  Jak barked a short laugh. “I bet she did.”

  “Cheela,” Dyan said. She was happy to see her Crechemate with the Landsman, because it meant that other girl wasn’t with Shad. But then, neither was she.

  “Step away from the tree, Dyan,” Cheela said. She stood squarely downhill from Dyan, her feet planted apart and under her shoulders, her long coat pulled back behind her, her fingers flexing above her belt. “You too, Jaik.”

  “Jak,” he said.

  “You’ve been watching too many funvids about Outriders,” Dyan told her Crechemate. “You don’t need to call me out, whatever problem you think you have with me.”

  Cheela was quiet for a moment, which was ominous, given that her back was to the fires and her face was entirely in shadow. Then she hiccupped. “I’m not calling you out,” she replied. “I’m calling out the tree.”

  Dyan scrambled out of the way. Jak was a little slow to move, and wore a puzzled look on his face, so she grabbed his wrist and pulled him with her.

  “You’ve been drinking!” she accused Cheela.

  Cheela ignored her. The dark girl in the Outrider get-up stared down the tree stump fiercely. “You’ve escaped for the last time, you dirty renegade,” she growled.

  “Duck,” Dyan whispered.

  “What’s she going to do?”

  “Just in case.” She pulled Jak with her, down into a crouch.

  “Draw!” Cheela shouted. The big-eared boy Milt fell back in surprise, she grabbed a bola off her hip, instantly elongating its monofilament cord with the slightest pressure from her fingers as she simultaneously whipped the weight-end of the bola around once, releasing it in the direction of the tree—

  and the bola disappeared into the shadow of the grass, hitting the hillside with a soft thump.

  “Got you, you dirty dog,” Cheela muttered. She pressed a button in the bola’s holster and the bola flashed red in the darkness so she could find it. She passed to the uphill side of the tall stump and bent to pick up her weapon.

  “So … you missed,” Milt sneered. “Gee, that was amazing.”

  Cheela said nothing. Standing uphill of the tree, she reached out one arm, leaned against the trunk, and pushed it over. The log, sliced in two with an utterly clean precision typical of monofilament instruments but otherwise impossible, tipped forward—

  whumph!

  And slammed to the ground right beside Milt.

  “Holy Mother!” Milt snapped. “You almost took my toes off!”

  Cheela looked at her fingernails with exaggerated indifference. “You want to see something even more amazing?” she suggested. “Find me a big rock.”

  Dyan stood. She felt Cheela had crossed some sort of line, but she wasn’t sure what it was. In her heart, she suspected she might have crossed the same line. As she groped for words to express her doubts, she heard a stern voice in the darkness.

  “Children. Time to retire.”

  She turned and saw a caped silhouette standing on the hillside beside her, yellow firelight splashing against the Magister’s black cloak of office. Zarah’s hood was thrown back, and in the fire’s shadows her face looked like it would suit a bird of prey.

  “I don’t think I’m one of your children,” Jak shot back at the Magister. “And I think I’d still like to have a beer or two.”

  “You are not,” Zarah agreed. “And you may.”

  Jak took Dyan’s hand and squeezed it once. “Thanks for the tree,” he said. “I guess I owe you one.”

  Dyan nodded, feeling under Magister Zarah’s stare that more would be inappropriate. Jak and Milt turned and sauntered down the hill together towards the bonfires and the beer, and Zarah led Cheela and Dyan away from the stockade, back up the hill.

  “Camping away from the fire again?” Cheela grinned as she asked the question, like it was a personal victory for her.

  Dyan didn’t care. She was astonished and fascinated by the events of the day. She had had no idea, leaving Buza System, that she would be immediately plunged into her Calling this way, and she was full of questions. Why were the others along? she wondered. They weren’t Magisters. Was there some portion of this Selection process that they needed to see? Why hadn’t they all been told about this part of their education sooner?

  The question she decided to ask was about Jak. “Will the other Creche-Leavers … I mean, the Landsmen who have been Selected … will they receive a Calling? Are you carrying their Lot Letters? What will they do when we bring them back to the System?” She imagined Jak finding his sister Aleen, and how sweet the reunion might be. She wondered what it would be like to have a sister of her own.

  “Child,” the Magister said, not looking back, “we aren’t going to bring them back to the System.”

  Dyan had nothing to say. Her mind reeled, and she focused on putting one foot in front of the other and following Magister Zarah up the slope.

  Wayland, Deek, and Shad waited at the top, nearly a quarter mile away, under a steep butte wall. All six horses were neatly picketed within a short box canyon, and someone—almost certainly Shad—had already laid out bedrolls neatly, with packs piled against stiff brush to break the wind.

  “Children,” Magister Zarah announced, turning at the edge of the little camp to gather them all under her gaze. The bonfires were too far away to provide any real illumination here, but light from the moon and stars above cast a cold, pallid glow down over her features. Her eyes looked like bottomless wells of darkness for just a moment, and then she pulled her hood up over her head. “There is death in the world.”

  Wayland opened his mouth to say something, but stopped. No wonder, Dyan thought; the Magister’s tone of voice made it clear that she did not invite questions at this moment. She looked like Death, perched at the top of the small
campsite, shrouded in black from head to toe.

  “There is no choice that is free of death,” she continued. “Death is inevitable, death is all around you. Do you see it?”

  “Yes,” Dyan’s Crechemates answered, but something in Magister Zarah’s face made Dyan answer slightly differently.

  “Aye,” she said.

  Zarah waited.

  “Aye,” added Deek, and then the others followed his and Dyan’s lead, “aye.”

  “If you would guard life, you must wield death.” The Magister’s words seemed to echo out of a bottomless pit. “The hunter kills prey to feed her people. The farmer kills weeds and vermin to protect her crop. The shepherd kills the wolf to save the flock. Do you see it, my children?”

  “Aye.”

  And Dyan did see it. And suddenly, horribly, she knew what was coming next.

  “So the System wields death, to protect the life of the System. Guardsmen repulse attacks with violent force. Outriders track down renegades and bandits and bring them to justice. Criminals are hung. The System does not punish, my children. The System kills whom it must, to protect life. Do you see it?”

  “Aye.”

  The Magister paused. Poised in her cloak against the stars, she looked like a vast darkness, like a blotting out of the light.

  “You have seen the Hanging,” the Magister said. “The System killed the worst of its own, in the name of life. You have seen the Selection. The System chose the brightest children of the Landsmen of Ratsnay Station. It has done this, too, in the name of life. Tomorrow, you will see a third thing done for life’s sake.

  “You will not only see it, my children, you will do it. Each of you has already been assigned to one of the young Landsmen. In the name of life, and at the order of the System, each of you will kill his … or her … Landsman. You will do this not because the young Landsmen are bad, not because they are criminal, but because the System requires it. Buza System requires it of you and it also requires it of them. Do you see it?”

  “Aye.”

  “Aye,” Dyan whispered, last. She forced herself to keep looking up at the Magister, now a terrifying shadow, an empty void into which the entire world around her seemed to be pouring at a lightning pace. She looked at Zarah, but she kept seeing Jak. She didn’t care about Jak, Jak was nothing, but she didn’t want to kill him. He didn’t deserve to die, and she didn’t want to be a murderer.