by Ely, Jo;
Zorry’s eyes widen.
“Yes, Child. Jengi showed folks the routes, the best hiding places in the killing forest.” Mamma Zeina shudders. Now her voice hardens. “I have argued with him. I doesn’t even want to contemplate a repeat of the last revolution. What it cost. I keep telling him that we are not … Ready. It’s too soon and he is losing his best people at the fence.”
She looks at Zorry softly. “But he’s young and vengeful.” Pauses. “Impatient. Wakes up every morning counting his dead.” Mamma Zeina raises her eyebrows gently. “Never was a faster way to get folks killed than Jengi, Zorry. But he’s … Jengi is … We need Jengi.”
Mamma Zeina hears the sound of shrill mocking laughter from the feast table. Winces. “The killing forest is the biggest hurdle after the edge farm fences of course, she says. Most will never get even that far. Leastways not without training.” She pulls open her apron pocket, peers inside. Looks up. “Yes.” She says. “But the fence on this side … ah that one’s really the trick.” She turns back toward the dining room.
“No.” She concludes. “You might survive the killing forest iffens you’s lucky or skilful, trained, but …” Sighs. Looks back at Zorry. “It will always be the last fence which kills the bravest and the best of the edge farmers. That fence is alive, as you’ve seen. Although, of course, every living thing can be … turned, but that fence is mostly beyond my understanding.” She screws up her face, pulls her ear. “We mostly don’t get there in time, when the rebels are caught in it, but even when we do them runaways is picked up quickly by the Egg Men. It’s hard for the Sinta to hide a thing as big as a living body in the OneFolks’ village, Zorry.” Mamma Zeina looks grave. “We ain’t saved even one of them edge farm rebels so far. Not one Zorry. And we’ve lost twice their number in trying. Only think about that.”
Zorry is still looking down at the fence. “Not one saved so far,” Zorry says, almost to herself. The fence seems to her so thin, even flimsy, from all the way up here in the general’s house.
She sees something moving just inside it.
“What’s that?”
“What is what? Oh, what in the name of unholy weeping … Damn it, Jengi.” Mamma Zeina curses quietly, and then, “Some days it’s like the boy is doing the general’s work for him.” Mamma Zeina stares. Sighs. Then, turning, looking up at Zorry. “The general likes to leave the edge farm rebels’ bodies stuck to the inside of the fence, to be slowly absorbed by it. They will be left there until their corpses dissolve, a warning to any more potential rebels amongst the Sinta slaves inside the fence.”
Zorry looks baffled.
“Look close, Zorry, that is Jengi’s damned revolution. Right there. Death itself, that boy. Some days.” She curses him again.
Zorry sees what look like cocoons along the inside of the fence. “Aye.” Mamma Zeina tilts her head left. “Edge farmers, stuck and drowning in the fence. Turned slowly to bones.” She turns away from the window. Locks her jaw. “Damn that boy Jengi to Hell.” She looks at Zorry. “Oh, Child, I don’t mean that.” She is quiet for a while, thinking.
“Hope,” she says. Catching Zorry’s eye and then holding her gaze. “Hope is the mother cupboards’ resistance. And our creed is gather.” Soft hissing sound on the last word. Zorry freezes. Feels the word running down her spine. “Like a sigh, like a song, ain’t it?” Mamma Zeina turns away and stumps heavily toward the kitchen to fetch more platters.
Zorry watches her go.
Zorry notices the Egg Boy Antek eyeing her, he looks away quick, and then looks back. On an instinct she can’t quite explain, Zorry nods. Antek returns the nod stiffly. Looks away. Now they carefully ignore each other.
Zorry can hear the moving plants in the killing forest groaning and heaving against the thin fence beneath the window, by her right elbow. She turns a little toward it. Catches a glimpse. The fence seems to bend and strain. Moves like water. Just a cobweb-thin white mesh and rippling with plant- blows, twisting as though it’s alive. Zorry’s had nightmares about those cocoons along the fence. Now that she knows what they are, it’s worse.
Antek looks down. Notes the Sinta girl’s right hand curling and uncurling. Sees her eyes glitter. He turns his head a little. Tries to see what the Sinta girl saw down there, at the fence.
Zorry hears thumps and bumps underfoot. She has already been warned that the general’s labs are built underneath his feast room. There’s a small crash like something or someone falling and then, in the periphery of her vision, three white-coated Egg Men make a rush for the inner door, just beside the kitchens. Antek, pulling on his helmet, joins them. The light above the inner door’s blinking on and off red.
The Sinta kitchen staff go on waiting tables around Zorry, seemingly impassive. Someone hands her another plate.
“Someone made a hole in the fence last night,” Zorry hears one of the OneFolk girls at the far end of the table whispering to the girl beside her. The whispering OneFolk girls are around Zorry’s age and the second girl eyes Zorry sideways. And then both girls do. Zorry suspects they intend her to overhear them.
“A Sinta, no doubt.”
“Yes. No doubt.”
“Things came into the village.”
“Things? What things?”
“The general had the Egg Boys rounding up … strange creatures in the village since dawn.” The second girl shudders prettily.
“Oh, relax,” the first girl says to her friend now. “The Sinta in the general’s house are all certified tame.” Eyes Zorry.
“Are you sure? Even that one?” And now the girls turn as one to look at Zorry. Giggle softly.
Zorry winces. Looks away. Notices for the first time a claw mark down the side of the face of the Egg Man by the front door. He seems to notice her watching, grunts and shifts from foot to foot. Zorry looks away quickly. Tries to press further back into the space beside the window. She feels the cold window ledge agains her arm. Hot air drifting in through the grille set into the glass.
The killing forest, just beyond the fence, seems to draw Zorry’s eye toward it. She glimpses things moving, down there, just at the periphery of her vision. Zorry daren’t turn. She daren’t turn to look again for a long time.
From her position backed against the window, Zorry can, with a discreet and well timed eye swivel, see the green tips seeping out over the fence below. There’s just a glimmer of movement in the treetops. She has to train her eye to focus, catch it. Stare hard and the dark green life seems to pulse and swell and move against the boundary fence. Zorry twitches and shifts. Looks away. Doesn’t do for the kitchen staff to seem too curious about the killing forest or the fence just now. Especially not on her first day. There have been several Sinta slaves vanished already by the general’s troops, just this morning. Zorry doesn’t want to join them.
She can’t see it from here but she knows it’s there.
The gaol. Like a cold shadow under Bavarnica’s mountain range. The mountain’s shadow and the gaol spans out for miles and it’s growing, filling up with Sinta slaves no longer certified tame by the general. There’s the constant sound in the OneFolks’ village of prisoners building new walls to their gaols. Hammering out their new tin roofs. Forced to build with their own hands the cells which will contain them and knowing all the while that one day they’ll be made to dig their own graves too, all watched over by the Egg Men.
Zorry looks back at the feast table. The food is groaning. Just a low hum, you don’t hear it until you tune in, she thinks, and the tinkle and clatter of the feast table barely conceals the low continuous thrum of the creatures’ fear. Zorry notices that the Sinta butcher has his eyes closed. His left eyelid twitches and his mouth trembles, just a little. He is pale, blue lipped with tension. The Egg Man to the right of the butcher eyes him carefully, keeps a hand on his electric prod (the butchers have been known to break out in strange ways, one year at the feast a table was turned over, windows broken. The Egg Men won’t let that happen again).
; The sound of the feasting OneFolks’ chatter rises. Zorry clutches her serving plate until her knuckles ache, and she’s pressed small dents into her palms.
She thinks, “Why would Mamma Zeina call that Egg Boy by name? Antek.” She hardens her thoughts against Antek. “A human name when the guards aren’t human. How can they be? The Egg Men don’t deserve names.”
Zorry lets go of the serving plate with her right hand, it curls into a fist of its own accord.
Zorry has not by any means perfected her impassive Sinta expression. The thing takes practice and years to accomplish, if you can live long enough to complete your training that is. But Zorry is in theory learning from the best, Mamma Zeina, head of the general’s kitchens, and so her own mother has high hopes. At least that’s what she told Zorry last night, high pitched brittle voice. But then this morning, and with deep circles from unsleep under her eyes, her mother had seemed more resigned, “No one can ever truly say what Mamma Zeina feels or doesn’t,” and then lifting up her voice, making the effort of hope for Zorry’s sake. “But a thing like that is a gift, Child. A face that holds no expression. Times like these. You need to practice that, Zorry. Right now every single thing that passes through your heart shows up here.”
She had stroked her daughter’s face sadly. “The general’s people are going to read you like a book, Zorry.” Zorry recalls the exact tone of her mother’s sigh then. The way she had shaken her head. There is no deal a Sinta mother can do to get her child out of a work rota at the general’s house. Not once it’s written down in red ink.
Zorry watches as the escaping dinner table critter vanishes in to the tall powdered wig of a OneFolk guest, conceals a small smile. Roots for it. She thinks she sees the flower arrangement in the centre of the feast table move slightly in the direction of the escapee. She stares. The centrepiece doesn’t move again. Zorry shakes herself slightly. Mamma Zeina nudges her.
“The grotesque flower funds of Bavarnica flowers will, of course, die on their first day in the searing heat of the edge farms,” she says. Eyeing Zorry severely. “Their petals begin wilting the first moments.” She sniffs, scratches the back of her hand. “They take them there in refrigerated vans, so it’s not like they don’t …” Mamma Zeina scratches her nose. “It doesn’t make sense.” Sighs. “Well, nothing is what it seems in Bavarnica, eh Zorry?”
“I’ve seen those vans.”
“Eh?”
“I’ve seen them. White bullet proofed vans. Reinforced steel.” She turns to Mamma Zeina. “You can recognise the flowers fund vans.”
“Recognise them how?”
“Solid gold headboards in the form of small crowns.”
“Aye.” Mamma Zeina rolls her eyes. “Gaddys is theatrical, give her that.”
Zorry turns toward the flower decoration on the table. Blinks and tries to look away from it, can’t: the largest flower inclines its drooping head slightly toward her. Mamma Zeina elbows her hard.
“Bred in the general’s cool moist outhouse, them things,” Mamma Zeina sweeps a little debris off the serving table, into her hand and then slips it into her apron pocket. Her shoulders drop. “Aye. Cool, moist outhouse,” she says. “They will start dying the moment the dry desert air of the edge farms hits them.”
Zorry thinks Mamma Zeina sounds strange. “Is that your tour voice?”
“I been giving this tour for a long time, Girly.” Blinks. “Your predecessor is in gaol.”
“I know, Mamma Zeina.”
“Do you? Then what don’t you know? Let’s start with that.”
Several flower centrepieces adorn the feast table, they seem to move in unison when they breathe. Snake-like sniffing, wavering heads, pulsing with strange life. Zorry finds herself instinctively moving closer to Mamma Zeina’s side. Mamma Zeina notices, drily hands her a cloth. “Try to look busy.” Zorry mops up some crumbs ineffectually. Stares.
“When the flowers fund of Bavarnica’s work is done, the edge farmers will have to stand there for an afternoon, for the privilege of watching these flowers die fairly quickly, or seem to,” Mamma Zeina blinks again and turning toward Zorry. “Die in their edge farm soil.” She gazes at Zorry blankly, as though she can’t see her just now. Looks at something behind or just above her. “Wriggle back into the hard edge farm soil, like whelks on the shore. Leaving only cracks in the earth, a few sun dried petals.”
“How do you know they die? The flowers I mean.”
“Did I say die? No. No, I don’t think they die.”
“Then what …?”
And now turning, and her gaze meets Zorry’s, “I don’t know. At least not yet.”
Zorry overhears the general’s wife, “Your flowers are a breath of inspiration for the poor dears on the edge farms, dear Gaddys,” she intones in a wobbling voice, made more wobbling by her apparent addiction to the dried pollen from the flowers. She sniffs. Now the general’s wife turns and looks at the flowers. Soft, helpless, almost loving gaze. You can’t say what she sees, but the plant seems responsive to her. Soft rollback of its petals, peeling back of its proboscis, a deep puff of raspberry coloured smoking pollen into her face. The general’s wife sinks a little more. Her eyes swim with tears.
Zorry turns toward the flowers, as though trying to see what the general’s wife sees there. “Nasty looking things,” she confides in Mamma Zeina. “Give me the creeps.” She takes a discreet step backward, then tilting gently toward the view once more. Considering the flowers. They appear to consider her too.
There’s something unnerving in the way the flowers turn their huge bulbous heads towards you, Zorry thinks. In a bit she notices something else. The flower breathes out pollen dust in small puffs at discreet intervals, there’s a rhythm to it, and the Sinta waiting tables seem to have adapted to that too, hold their breaths when they pass, swerve and avoid, blink, blink, and Zorry realises that the scene is a dance, but only the Sinta serving seem to hear the music. The guests at the feast chatter, swallow, gulp, choke on the fumes, splutter, cough and then the OneFolks’ table is getting louder. And then quieter. The OneFolk slide slowly, inexorably, underneath the table.
Gaddys the village shopkeeper seems immune to the flower pollen herself, Zorry observes. She sits stiff and straight backed at the head of the table.
Mamma Zeina heaves her large frame over toward Zorry. “She’ll sit like that,” Mamma Zeina says, indicating Gaddys with some bitterness, “Straight backed, alert, until the Sinta clean up crew come to shovel all these OneFolk guests on to their stretchers, pour them into their waiting cars.”
“What’s it all for? The feast? Food ain’t never just food for the general, is it?”
Mamma Zeina considers the girl admiringly. “No it ain’t. Just watch.” Mamma Zeina says. “You’ll see.” She steps away. In a little while Gaddys disappears into a side room beside the feast table.
“That’s to give her ‘notes’ to the general via his telecom.” Mamma Zeina says in a low voice. Glances at Zorry. “Gaddys is giving him useful names.” She explains. “She’s telling him about soft allegiances and friendships amongst the OneFolks.”
“The general’s watching his own tribe?”
“Of course, Zorry.” Chuckles. “He must control them most of all. Any eyes which met over the dinner table or hands which found each others under it. Gaddys misses very little, in truth. Here, take this plate.”
Mamma Zeina uncovers the dish before she releases it to Zorry. They both examine its contents, stare bleakly at each other. “The general likes to understand who’s connected to whom.” Mamma Zeina looks up at Zorry and then down again at the contents of the plate. “Not so much to suppress a revolution, Zorry, as to stub out the thought before it starts.” She sighs. “Go take your plate to him. Over there.” Gestures toward an ancient looking man in a cat costume, flea collar and all. Zorry gently raises her eyes toward the ceiling.
Mamma Zeina makes her way back to check on the serving table. She appears to be having some difficulty wit
h her right knee, just now, and she is dragging her left foot a little. Stops several times to hold the wall. When she reaches the serving table, Mamma Zeina covers the blue crabs, which are scrapping and waving their claws. She turns sideways to see how Zorry’s doing. Watches the girl walking back to collect a second plate.
“Walk slower.” She instructs her when she returns.
“Walk slower?”
“Yes. And don’t hold your head so high. Try to … Try to glide. Try to pass unnoticed. They like their Sinta serving girls depressed. Submissive.”
Zorry seems to be considering these words.
Mamma Zeina goes on, “Of course …”
“Of course what?”
“She doesn’t catch it all.” Soft knowing look.
“Who doesn’t …”
“Gaddys.” Ghost of a wink. “That’s where you come in, Zorry. Try to see the things that the shopkeeper Gaddys missed. Observation. That’s the work here, Zorry. Go stand by the window again. I’ll bring you the next plate in a minute.”
Zorry hears the sound of the edge farm rain dances, washing up through the crack in the window behind her. Rain beats against the window. Rain which will not pass the border, Zorry thinks, but she can hear the edge farmers’ rain dance: music rising up over the killing trees and the answering bird sound, caw of crows and jackdaws, rhythm of drums. And then the soft hollers, musical shrieks. Zorry just makes out their words: ‘Give back our rain.’
The edge farmers rain dances will last all night, the Egg Men will begin the crackdown on the edge farms soon, Zorry knows that much.
Zorry can hear the sound of the Egg Mens’ sirens. Starts as a low complaining whine, rises to an ear splitting mechanical shriek which can be heard even in the ‘anti-noise pollution’ OneFolks’ houses. The chatter in the feast room rises to conceal it.
There is now the sound of small, contained explosions, she sees the trees shake a little, at the periphery of her vision. The bomb dust from the edge farm side fans out over the killing forest, drifts towards the OneFolks’ village. She twitches and looks away. Now she hears the caw of crows as they rise and gather. A flock, looking like a dark cloud as it passes over. “They’re starting early today.” Mamma Zeina says, winces. Turns away.