Stone Seeds

by Ely, Jo;

  Now Tomax recognises his mother’s voice. Outside. He tries to orient himself, where’s it coming from? And then strains toward the crack. His eye strung to the light through it. It’s as though he sees her for the first time in his life. She is standing by the rubble. Orange grain sack in each hand. At first she seems bewildered. “Tomax,” she says. She drops her grain sacks, and he sees them spill and drifting windward, quickly gone. “Tomax,” she says. Quietly at first. And then, “TOMAX!” She screams. And there’s that pained sound again. Inhuman.

  You think it can’t be coming from you, Tomax thinks. But it is.

  The pain comes in rhythmic waves now, sending jolts to the base of his skull.

  There’s a different voice outside now. A man’s voice. “Stop,” says the voice to Tomax’s mother, not unkindly. And then, “Listen.”

  Tomax tries to identify the voice, the man sounds familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It takes a moment and then. Jengi. He thinks. It’s Jengi out there. Now Tomax knows he stands a chance. A slim one.

  Jengi is last of the Diggers tribe and the Diggers were salvage workers in the previous era. The old bomb clean up crews. The Diggers were skilful at extracting the bodies, both the living and dead, along with valuable metal pipes, and other useful things. People sometimes survived the bombs in the days when the Digger tribe still worked the clean up operations.

  “Tomax?” Jengi yells. “Tomax? You alive, Boy?”

  Jengi. Tomax thinks. But he can’t say a word.

  “Make a sound if you can!” Jengi yells. And then there’s quiet.

  Tomax’s jaws are pinned closed by the sand, rubble. He makes a sound in the back of his throat. He knows right away that it’s not loud enough.

  Jengi lies stomach down on the ground. “Silence,” he instructs the edge farmers milling around the rubble. And then Jengi puts his ear to the earth again, strains to hear. Tomax’s mother swivels slowly around to watch the Digger do what he was trained to.

  “Quiet.” Jengi repeats, sterner this time. Puts his ear back to the ground. He waits.

  And then “Tomax!” He raises his head, yells again. “Make a sound if you can, Boy.”

  Tomax tries again. Sound in the back of his throat. Tries and tries until his throat is raw.

  Jengi goes on listening. Then he twitches his head. He looks up.

  “Nothing.” Jengi says decisively. Getting up and dusting down his trousers. “I reckon he’s dead.”

  Tomax sees his mother feeling her way around the rubble. “He’s not dead,” she says. More to herself. “He’s not, he’s not … dead. Tomax, Tomax,” she whispers into the crevices in the piled up bricks. And then calling down into her ruined house.

  Tomax sees the fire, small but spreading quickly. Starts in one corner of the rubble and then taking hold of a dry beam. The fire grows high quickly, just to the right of his mother.

  The edge farm houses are mostly made out of wood and wattle, mud daubed. When the drones hit the edge farmhouses they light up like match-heads. But Tomax’s father was a house builder in the before and made his house with Bavarnican brick and cement, nobody is quite sure how he managed to get hold of the materials but deals were sometimes struck with the last exiles. Not to mention friendships which crossed lines.

  The general put a stop to all that, of course. Tomax’s father was forced to make do with tin for its long roof but in that way this house looks like every other edge farm house, at least from above. What you can’t see from a drone’s-eye-view is that he used thick beams from the killing forest to make the rafters of his house, burying the roots of them many feet into the ground. “Those rafters will either kill us or save us some day,” Tomax’s father said at least once every single day, including his last one.

  Tomax’s mother sees the fire right away. She seems to snap out of her trance, filled with a strange life, “Tomax, Tomax.” She thinks she hears something at the rock, springs away and moving quickly to the next heap, calling into every crevice she can find. Calling, waiting, calling waiting. At one point she imagines that she hears him.

  Now she’s moving pieces of rubble, gently, expertly. In the wrong place. “Jengi.” She says, “Jengi, help me.” Jengi watches her. He shakes his head. Her voice still doesn’t sound like her voice, Tomax thinks. Only broken, rasping sounds. And that strange mania to her digging. She’s not herself, Tomax thinks. She’s too close to the fire. As though she can’t feel it right now. A small corner of her scarf catches fire, burns along the seam, sparks peter out at her hair. She keeps digging.

  Tomax makes another sound in the back of his throat. His throat is raw and the effort’s agonising.

  At first Tomax thinks that no one heard him over the fire’s crackle, sound of moving rubble, swish of feet. And then Jengi’s close, saying “Tomax?” Softly at first. And then it’s very near, Jengi’s voice, and now Tomax knows Jengi can hear him. Tomax shifts his elbow accidentally in his excitement, sand moves in, pushing his head farther back. Now Tomax’s forehead is jammed hard against the boulder. His eye is close to the crack.

  Suddenly Jengi’s boots are right there. Just to the left of Tomax’s head and just a boulder between them. Tomax makes every last sound that he can in the back of his mouth. There is a tearing, ripping feeling. Pain in his throat and he’s moved his head in his urgency. Stones clatter down, the right side of his head, a small surge of gravel, more dust.

  Tomax knows he can’t make another sound, if he wants to or not.

  And then Jengi’s face. Looming close in the crack. Tomax and Jengi are eye to eye for a moment. Blink. Jengi heaves away again and disappears behind the rubble.

  Now he is trying to move the debris above Tomax, gently as he can.

  Jengi finds the dog before he finds Tomax.

  He has to use a brick to kill it. Tomax hears the soft whine as the dog greets Jengi, soft thump of tail wagging, long pause and then a sickening thud, one low dog whine, another thud then nothing. The dog’s silence swelling back to Tomax.

  The fire is at Jengi’s back now. His limbs are black lit against it. Tomax can’t see his face.

  Some edge farmers come and pull Tomax’s mother back from the fire. They pin her to the ground. “Stop,” they say. “Stop. Your boy’s gone.”

  Tomax feels the heat rising around him.

  There is a deep keening sound. Now he sees his mother struggle against the pinning arms, fail. She sees the flames rise. And then her mouth is thrown open like that. No sound coming out, not for one long moment. The flames go on rising. Her body bucks and heaves. Then lurching, hitting, scratching, filled with a strange life, she rolls away from her neighbour’s hands, their arms and elbows. She becomes unpinned for several moments, scrabbling determinedly toward the flames. Toward the wrong spot, toward the place she imagines that her boy is. And now yelling his name, his name, his name like that, down into the flames, and dragged back again. Pinned by her limbs. Body lurches skyward. Now a large-built neighbour kindly sits down hard on her stomach to hold her. She looks up. Bomb-dust rolls across the sky and smoke, a gap forming in the cloud above her like a great set of jaws, she thinks. Opening slow.

  Jengi glances behind him. “Hold her,” he says. And then to himself, “We’ll see what’s left of him in a minute.” He goes on digging. Sweat streams down the sides of Jengi’s face. He stops again and listens. He gets closer to Tomax. Jengi picks up a brick. He looks back just once at Tomax’s mother.

  Night fell that suddenly, Tomax thinks. He thinks he hears his mother’s voice, and then Jengi again. He also thinks that this is dreaming. There’s a burning sensation down his left arm. Smoke seeping down from the beam above him, it’s peppered with sparks. Flame lights up the whole of one end of the wood.

  More shouts, hiss of water on heat and the burning slows down. Jengi used the precious water on the flames. Meaning one thing only, Tomax thinks … Jengi knows I’m alive.

  Tomax passes out.

  When he wakes it’s the cold that c
omes with the desert night, the blackness of lights out, so Tomax knows that it must be after curfew. There are scratching sounds, things move around him. Desert rats, Tomax thinks. There’s a determined scrabbling, then a gnawing at the brick behind him. Something slides into the cracks, wriggles the gap wider. The rats are getting close now. Tomax is that gathered by the dark, that tightly gathered by it.

  Now Tomax believes that nobody is looking for him. They think he’s dead. For the first time since the bombing, he wishes he were.

  Scrabbling sound but there’s a different rhythm to it, not rats or mice but large brusque hands. Debris tossed in a haphazard fashion. Human sounds. And then Jengi’s knuckles, thick veined and blood streaked, veering in and out of view. Moves the rock by Tomax’s head and then eases both his hands in. First he makes a space around Tomax’s ears. Tomax watches Jengi’s fingers working. They’re covered in dried blood. “There you are, Boy.” Jengi says in his low voice. And then “Now,” he says. “Now. Try to move something, Tomax.”

  Jengi hasn’t called out to Tomax’s mother or to her edge farm neighbours helping. For the first time Tomax sees the brick, in Jengi’s right hand.

  Tomax moves his head slightly.

  “Good.”

  Jengi tests the boy’s neck. “Okay,” he says. “Okay.” Jengi seems to need to take a moment. Tomax hears Jengi breathing in and out, in and out, rough little pants.

  “You are … fixable.” Jengi says.

  Jengi lets the brick fall from his hand. Tomax looks down at the weapon. The brick is dark with blood at both ends.

  “He’s here.” Jengi shouts behind him, notifying the others for the first time.

  “I couldn’t tell ‘em before,” he explains to Tomax. “They’re … emotional. Right now. They’d have brought the whole roof down on your head. Amateurs.” He says, dismissively.

  There are loud voices now. Shouts and hollers. Tomax hears his name spoken. Laughter. And then voices getting farther away. Nothing to see here. Drone strikes on the edge farms are so common since the last drought and none of Tomax’s neighbours can afford to be caught in an act of rescue at a bomb site when The Egg Men arrive. That’d be a quick way to die or have your family’s grain rations cancelled, which would mean death too, only a slower one. Jengi checks the sky. Calculates he has less than six minutes left before the Egg Men arrive on the scene. He starts counting down in his head.

  But for Tomax’s mother time will be forever divided this way: There will be who she was before this bomb. Who she was after it.

  Tomax sees his mother turn, fall to her knees on the hard soil. Jengi looks briefly in her direction and then seems to forget her. He identifies the beam which has saved Tomax’s life, pats it like an old friend. Admires the workmanship in the hinges and brackets. He squints down at the small opening he’s made to let Tomax breathe better, relieve the strain on his neck. Now he starts slowly taking rubble from above the beam, using it to stabilise the exposed ends of the wooden beam underneath.

  Bent tin roofs and stacks of broken bricks rise around Tomax. For a time there’s more building than digging, it seems, and Jengi looks grim, intensely concentrating on the work. Looking in the direction the Egg Men’s trucks will come. They have three minutes.

  A little further off, Tomax’s mother is still on her knees, giving thanks to the baobab for Jengi.

  Jengi shrugs. Looks at her from time to time and then quickly away. Wipes the dirt out of his eyes with the back of his arm, and then turning in a long swathe, casting a shrewd gaze over the rubble that lies over Tomax.

  Jengi has dug down to just above Tomax’s waist before he risks pulling him out hard. “We’ll have to make it fast. When I pull on you then the beam will shift left sharply, all this …” and now he indicates the pile above and behind Tomax, “it’s going to come down, crush your legs. So one short heave, yeah? And if you make it out then you run as soon as your feet hit the floor.” Earth falls away from Tomax. Jengi drags him back quickly before the avalanche of sand and rubble, brick. And then a sickening crump as the roof is dislodged.

  “Holy dursed baobab, Tomax that was close.” Jengi mops a seam of sweat from his eyebrows. Grins.

  There’s blood. Tomax thinks. There is too much of it. It’s dribbling down from the right side of his face, clouding his vision. “Am I …?” Tomax can’t think of the word. Rubble has started sliding down from the top of the stack.

  “Let’s go. Move.” Jengi says. Only Tomax can’t move.

  Jengi drags Tomax rough and fast, by his left arm and right hand.

  The flames climb over the rubble behind them, the heat rises. Flames catch a hold.

  Tomax sees the fire veering up behind his mother. She is still on her knees.

  For a long strange moment she looks to him like a puppet without strings, a pile of rags praying to the baobab, and then she twitches, shudders with life. She cries out then, and getting up. Staggering toward Jengi and her son.

  Jengi dumps Tomax on the ground at a safe distance from the fire. “One minute,” he says. “The Egg Men will be on the scene in one minute.” Glancing up at Tomax’s mother. And then, “He needs a doctor.”

  “A doctor?” She looks at him. “This is edge farm land, Jengi. There’s no doctor.”

  “Mamma Zeina.”

  “Mamma Zeina?” She examines Jengi’s face.

  “She’s a Sinta. She’s in the killing forest right now. She was a doctor in the before. I can pull Tomax through the hole in the fence, the one that I just came through.” He pauses. “I can do it if you help me.”

  They are face to face. “Jengi. The killing forest?”

  “Yes.”

  She looks down at her son. She steels herself. And then slipping her hands underneath his armpits, then eases her arms through, makes a loop of her right hand, left wrist. Now she can feel Tomax’s heart thrum against the knuckles of her right hand, and the palm of her left. He’s alive, she keeps telling herself. For those who believe in miracles, there seems to be one on the edge farms every day. Jengi takes Tomax’s feet.

  They stagger toward the fence with Tomax’s long, heavy body between them.

  Tomax hears the crackle of fire, swish of the killing trees. The Egg Mens’ truck wheels, getting closer.

  And then the coolness of the forest. Smell of dark moss.

  THE FENCE

  ZORRY IS SITTING IN the nipping saplings just inside the fence.

  Sees Mamma Zeina coming toward her through the dark mouth of the forest. Things move around her but Mamma Zeina trudges onward. Crackling of bracken under slow, heavy feet.

  “You’re late.”

  “I been busy child.” Mamma Zeina sighs. Wipes her hand across her forehead. Leaves a palm print of blood. She seems to see Zorry for the first time. “You alright?”

  “I’m alright. Why you late?” Zorry asks, a little peevishly. She’d spent several anxious hours the wrong side of the fence to the killing forest, dark things moving around her. There’s an edge in her voice.

  Mamma Zeina eyes her. “This your first time in the killing forest?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you spent it alone?” Mamma Zeina appears to consider this. “That’s good work, Child.” And then, “You’ll do, Zorry.” Smiles. “Mayhap you’re cut out for this work. Ever think of that?” Scratches herself. “You got bitten, Zorry?”

  “No. Don’t think so.”

  “Not bad, not bad.” Mamma Zeina says. “You did well.” Mamma Zeina seems to take the thought and deposit it somewhere. Rolls her eyes. “Follow me.”

  Zorry follows.

  “I heard something,” Zorry says. “When you were gone. At first I thought it was a bomb but it seemed too small. And then another one. It came from t’other side of the forest. From the Edge farmlands.”

  Mamma Zeina rubs her forehead, doesn’t answer for a while, and when she does it’s an answer to a question Zorry didn’t ask.

  “Good news is I found a plant on my way back
. Almost tripped over it. In fact, you might say that it found me.” Mamma Zeina lifts her sack to show Zorry. The sack is wriggling. Mamma Zeina holds it away from her stomach and soft parts. Zorry eyes it. “Gotta take it home and splice it to the root.” Mamma Zeina says. And now, as though it heard her, the plant struggles harder. And then a gnawing sound, like it chews on the sack.

  Mamma Zeina grins. “Come on, Child. The Egg Men are about to check this length of fencing. The bombings get them Egg Men jittery. We’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, Zorry. C’mon, Girl. Let’s go.”

  When they’re safely at the backdoor to Mamma Zeina’s cottage, the sack is dangerously quiet. Zorry eyes it, “If you’re sure you’re alright with that …”

  “This? Ha! I can handle this.” A deep, throaty chuckle. Shakes the sack.

  “Alright then. I’ll be … I’d best be …” But Mamma Zeina holds her back by her arm. Just above the elbow. “Zorry,” she says. Low voice.

  “Yes?”

  “The feast at the general’s house …”

  “Yes?”

  “Tomorrow … is it your first time serving the feast too?” Examines the girl’s face. “Are you ready?”

  Zorry eyes the sack. The plant is quite still now. As though it’s listening.

  “Yes.” She says. She thinks of something. “You didn’t check my fence suture.”

  “No, I didn’t, Zorry.” Sighs. “There wasn’t time. So … Did you heal the wound in the fence good, Zorry?”

  “Yes. At least … I think so. I’ve not done it on my own before.”

  “Well, let’s cross our fingers. Because they’ll check it. With the bomb and all.”

  Zorry takes a breath. “I’m pretty sure I healed the hole in the fence.”

  “Good. That’s good Zorry.” Examines the girl’s face once more. She appears to be pleased with whatever it is she sees there. “You’ll do.” She repeats. Long, low whistle. “You may be the assistant I’ve been looking for.” She appears to be speaking more to herself than to Zorry. Looks up at the girl, who’s a clear foot taller than the short-legged, stocky old woman. “Right then, Zorry.” She says crisply. “You best be getting on your way. Stay in the copse until you’re sure your way’s clear.”