by Ely, Jo;
Zorry examines the Egg Man discreetly. His neck seems to strain at the weight of his skull.
“Batch 46 were poorly made, if you ask me.” Mamma Zeina shrugs. “Clumsy looking.” Sniffs.
“Who is this Antek?” Zorry rolls her eyes in the boy’s direction. “The son? The young one?”
“He is … Antek is a person of interest to the resistance, Zorry. Let us leave it at that.” Mamma Zeina sniffs again and rolls another napkin.
“But the younger one, this Antek you seem to like so much,” Zorry scowls … “He has a different shaped head. He looks … He looks pretty human to be honest, Mamma Zeina.”
Mamma Zeina eyes her. The old woman becomes cautious. “He is one of batch 47.”
“The new batch?”
“Yes, Child. The new batch.”
Mamma Zeina stops talking for a long time. And then, “The Egg Boys are posted here today on account of the rumour that the general himself might attend this feast of the flowers.”
Zorry’s eyes widen.
“Relax child, that’s always the rumour and the general never does show up. I’ve been working this kitchen ten years, and I’ve never clapped an eye on him.” Rolls a napkin, tips an escapee back on to its plate and then looking at it. Waving claws and curiously intelligent expression. “The general hasn’t shown his face in public for the last twenty-three years. Aren’t too many folks, even in this room, who would recognise him iffen he did. Probably only Jengi who ever looked the general properly in the eye. They say even the general’s wife only met her husband the once.” Shudders.
“But Jengi saw him you say?”
“Close enough to count the pink pores on his face. Leastways that’s his story.”
Zorry sniffs. “And you believe him? You believe in this Jengi, don’t you?”
Mamma Zeina folds a napkin. Eyes Zorry. “He’s not perfect. He’ll do. You don’t like him do you, Zorry? Jengi, I mean.”
It’s not a question as far as Zorry can make out, so she doesn’t feel the need to answer it.
Mamma Zeina turns a little toward Zorry. Blinks. Quick knowing smile. “We work with Jengi, Child. He is less dangerous when we do it with love.” Sighs. “Look. He’s a friend. We believe he means well, although he hasn’t … We didn’t … In spite of …”
Her shoulders droop softly. She doesn’t finish any of her broken sentences. Zorry listens best to what folks don’t say. “Got it. Work with him. Watch him.” Mamma Zeina eyes the girl’s long sloping back. Presses her forefinger against the side of her head. She has learned just now that she needs to be more careful, educating Zorry. It seems the girl misses nothing at all.
The general’s wife rises slowly to her feet once more, coughs and taps the side of her glass. She looks unsteady for a moment, Gaddys appears to take the reins. Support her from behind. And then the general’s wife giving obsequious slightly sickening thanks then to Gaddys, the village shopkeeper, for her stirling work in getting the best table together for the OneFolks’ village, like always. “Although …” She says, peering hazily out into the middle distance, “although … I myself cannot eat a scrap.” Eyes the plate with compassion then rather than distaste.
There’s a collective intake of breath. She waves one starved limb, boney fingers passing in front of her eyes.
The general’s wife sits down.
It’s sudden.
One of Gaddys’ beloved flower girls had pushed the old woman’s chair hard into the backs of her knees, ending her performance abruptly. “You’ll be more comfortable, Dear.” Pats the older woman’s emaciated arm, petals around the flower girl’s face tauten then its leaves curl around her neck, as though the plant she wears senses something. The beloved flower girl is softly turning blue, looks over at Gaddys with wide reproachless eyes. Pleading, suffocating. Gaddys gazing at her grimly. Something happens. Zorry watches the leaves slowly slide away from the girl’s neck. Now Zorry and the beloved flower girl meet each other’s eye, it’s an infinitesimally brief, knowing glance. Both turn away at the same time.
Mamma Zeina winces.
“What’s wrong Mamma Zeina, you still have a pain?”
“I have a thousand pains, Child. Take this whilst I …”
Mamma Zeina holds on to the wall for balance. Now her face twists in agony. Zorry sees something’s wrong.
“Do you have a pizen, Mamma?”
“Zorry, Child … I believe that I do.”
THE MOTHER CUPBOARD
“LOOK AWAY FROM ME, don’t make a fuss Zorry.” Mamma Zeina gazes back toward the feast. “It’s nothing I can’t handle.” Gaddys looks at Mamma Zeina. Gives a surprisingly wide, doggish yawn. Showing all her strange, child-like teeth.
Mamma Zeina smiles back through gritted teeth.
“I said turn away, Zorry. Move away from me, Child.”
Zorry stares out at the feast. Anyone looking over toward the young Sinta woman would only see impassive smiles. The Sinta left in Bavarnica learned to hide their facial tells in the long ago and even Zorry can call on this facial stillness if she concentrates. In an emergency, like this one, it’s essential to be calm.
Mamma Zeina doesn’t like her girls taking risks, especially Zorry, whom she loves most of all her kitchen helpers. Taking unnecessary risks Mamma Zeina believes to be a species of sin. Of course, coming from a woman who risks her own life everyday three times before sun up …
“Damn them.” Zorry says, through gritted teeth.
“Hush Zorry. Not here. You is bein’ reckless, Child. Now turn toward the room. ‘Taint about the battle. Child, it’s about the war. Now. Bow, scrape and smile the way that I taught you, Sinta girl. Now. Again.” She watches her student. “That’s right, Zorry. Smile like a Sinta. Meaning with clenched teeth, use the injustice in each bow and scrape just to power you onwards, Zorry. That’s the way. Turn it, twist it. Use your rage, Zorry. Like I taught you. Head toward the back door. Be discreet Zorry. I’ll follow you as soon as I can.”
Zorry faces the dining room with a beatific look, bows low. Turning then with a dancer’s grace, she sweeps toward the door. Several pairs of eyes at the groaning table follow the girl, it’s a dangerous simmering atmosphere. Mamma Zeina considers this. There is something troubling about the wake that her favourite leaves behind her. She’s going to need to address that if she’s to be useful undercover. Once again Mamma Zeina has a worried thought about, Zorry – it don’t do for a Sinta girl to stand out the way Zorry does. She’ll not be certified tame by Gaddys at this rate. She’ll be sent to work in the sewers and she’ll be no use to the resistance down there. Zorry will need to work on herself if she’s going to be a useful undercover in the general’s house.
Zorry is shoved into the door hinge by the Egg Man who guards it. A punishment for not seeming submissive enough just now in the feast room. Young Sinta are generally meted out this kind of treatment, small but relentless punishments on a daily basis, to ensure they enter full adulthood compliant. A little broken down.
Mamma Zeina winces on Zorry’s behalf.
And now The Egg Man at the door eyes Mamma Zeina.
She turns away and tries to stack the dishes. Her left hand is trembling again.
In the corridor by the back door, a show village woman slips away from the feast and hands Zorry a napkin with a spewed snail in it. Zorry takes it and curtsies, thanks her. The vomited up, half-digested creature, cracked shell pieces and all, drizzles nauseatingly down the side of Zorry’s hand and into her shirt sleeve. The shirt that Zorry’s mother, Mamma Ezray, lovingly starched and ironed for her eldest daughter this morning. As if her shirt could protect her from this.
Zorry watches the OneFolk woman’s bony back sway, she swaggers past Zorry, back toward the feast. The OneFolk’ women are thin on account they vomit up their food in a deliberate manner, or consume prescription medicines which enable them to digest it faster.
The woman clomps away from Zorry unsteadily on painful looking stilt-like heels which lo
ok somewhat like weapons with the points, sharp edges and studded arrangements, but in truth mostly seem to hurt their wearer. The woman’s arms are strapped down to her sides in the latest Bavarnican fashion, and on her back a painting of the leafy outline of a tree from the killing forest, nipping saplings entwined around it. The general’s sun drifts up behind, like a giant pumpkin, huge and round and absurd looking, the body paint bleeding out at the edges where the woman leant on her chair. She’s left orange half moons on the velvet surface of the seat-back.
Zorry finds that once again, and as if by instinct, she’s backed herself into a window. She turns now and looks out. The general’s sun blinks out and the last light from the old sun is rising. The understanding comes to Zorry, standing here with a woman’s sour smelling vomit and the soft guts of a Bavarnican snail dripping down from her wrist to her elbow. This will be my life until I die, she thinks. This.
A line of baobab trees mark the boundary where the edge farms cede into the desert beyond them. The baobab seem for a moment to Zorry as though they lift their great arms and wave. Blink, blink. And then roll their huge stomachs. For a moment it’s as though she can hear the rustle of the desert wind in their branches.
Zorry closes her eyes. Mamma Zeina takes so long to arrive that Zorry naps briefly, forehead against the cool wall. When she wakes she knocks her head accidentally, blinks and whips round. Nobody saw, apparently. Zorry wipes away a seam of sleep-dribble. Checks behind her. Zorry’s eye is drawn back toward the window. There’s something out there. Moving in and out of view.
It’s a small light.
The tiny patch of yellow dances on the farthest baobab. When Zorry squints and looks closer it disappears. Now she imagines that she dreamed it.
Something makes Zorry look down. She examines her hands.
The yellow saliva trail has stained the skin of Zorry’s left palm. The oozing napkin is still clutched in her right hand.
Zorry drops the napkin.
Her damp right hand slowly curls closed.
“Zorry.”
Zorry turns abruptly, sees Mamma Zeina walking awkwardly toward her. The old woman is slow, unsteady on her feet. When she gets closer Zorry hears Mamma Zeina hissing a stream of barely audible foul words. It takes Zorry a few moments to understand what she’s saying. It’s a long, slow, obscene string of Sinta curses, forbidden texts from the ancients, “You do not do, you do not,” Mamma Zeina curses, “Any more, black shoe, in which I have lived like a foot …”
And Zorry gives the answering phrase to the funeral poem, “And one gray toe, big as a frisco seal and a head in the freakish Atlantic.” Mamma Zeina stares at her. “Where it pours bean green over blue.” Zorry finishes with a flourish and then, “Mamma Zeina why are we saying death poems now, this ain’t a funeral. Is it?”
Mamma Zeina stops. She leans heavily on the wall.
“What’s wrong Mamma Zeina? You’re really sick?”
Mamma Zeina can’t answer for a moment. And then turning, gripping Zorry’s arm just to stay upright.
REPORT 3: MEDICINE
“WHAT DO YOU HAVE for me Special Operative Jengi?”
“Sarcasm?”
“Not at all, it’s Promotion, Jengi. You are very special to us. What do you have?”
“That depends what you want.”
“Don’t play games, Jengi.”
“Okay.” Sighs.
“Tell me about the greening.”
“The greening, eh? So you know about that?”
“We have a few friends inside Bavarnica, Jengi. Are you jealous?”
Jengi takes a long breath. He begins. “The general’s latest idea to defeat the Sinta’s tendency to insubordination is … memory erasures. Any slave who refuses the government ‘medicine’, refuses to forget the past, is deemed an enemy of the state. The Greening, the new policy’s called.”
“And how does the greening work, exactly? I mean … According to you, Jengi.”
“The greening issue divides Sinta families. It’s not unusual to have one parent take their medicine, and the other parent refuse to. Forcing him or her to boil plant roots every night and scrub the green discoloration offen they selves or else be found out, greened, in the morning. It takes hours and their raw, plant-itched, complaining skin is as much of a clue to their medicine intake as turning softly lime coloured would have been.”
“I see. That it Jengi? That all you got for me today? The greening? Something I already knew?”
“Well of course there’s your hair, and the whites of your eyes. Not everything can be scrubbed with a hard brush or boiled, rubbed with plant roots.”
“I reckon not, Jengi. Is this important at all?”
“The Sinta have not yet figured out how the general’s lab technicians have achieved the spores which effect this green discoloration only in the Sinta, and only in those not taking their government meds, but you can be sure that those Sinta who remember there’s a problem at all are working on the solution to it.”
“And these Sinta not taking their meds … are they the Mother Cupboards whom you spake of afore? Are they the Sinta resistance?”
“No, there are only a handful of mother cupboards fully operational in Bavarnica now. It’s fairly specialised work and not too many have the disposition for it.”
“I see. I heard they’re calling them witches, Jengi.”
“Aye. The general is always looking for the mother cupboards, his biggest problem is that the mother cupboards reseed themselves, that’s what they call it. Meaning: they’re fearless and up to ten more will spring up when you mow down the one. An ancient cult of scientists, doctors, gardeners, cooks and teachers. The general has found them impossible to eradicate entirely.”
“I see. But it’s a hopeless cause, that’s what you reckon, Jengi? These mother Cupboards?”
“I never said that.” Jengi thinks for a moment. “Hopeless isn’t the word I’d use. The mother cupboards might save us all. In about a hundred years.”
“I see. And that’s too long for you, Jengi?”
“Yes. That’s too long. The edge farms will be buried in the desert by then.”
“And, tell me, how is it that they plan to save anyone Jengi?”
“If they can turn the drought resistant predatory plants in the killing forest to some good use on the edge farms. Well then …”
“The killing forest? They’re messing with that ungodly strip of hell. Holy Baobab, Jengi. How they even get in there, let alone come out in one piece?”
“Aye. It’s dangerous. The mother cupboards ain’t cowards. Cowardice weren’t never their problem.”
“You don’t see eye to eye with them Jengi?”
“Well. Look … Think about the killing forest for a moment. What is it? The general’s man made border? Most of us just see a long, vicious, breeding, living forest-fence, but the mother cupboards see … Drought resistant plants. Mostly predatory, mind. The plants. But if the plants can be turned, is their thinking … Well then.”
“Well then what? I don’t see your point Jengi.”
“If the drought resistant plants in the killing forest can be changed, turned, so they don’t try to grab your throat or stop your veins flowing, pizen you in a thousand ways and can be turned into … Food. Then the edge farms can break free of Gaddys and the village shop, tend their own crops then …”
“I see.”
“Do you see? With respect … It’s the key to their freedom, Sir. Food. An irony that if they pull it off the mother cupboards will be turning the general’s best weapon, his damned killing forest, against him. Even killing plants can be farmed, turned, that’s the creed of the mother cupboards.” He sighs. “Everything can be its own opposite. That’s what the mother cupboards say and believe. But the science of turning killing things into the means for living, turning pizen into food and water … It’s difficult, deadly work, Sir.”
“Again with the deadly. I sometimes wonder if you exaggerate Jengi.” There’s a
cough. “And what is it exactly Jengi? This … Work that you speak of?”
“The mother cupboards like Mamma Zeina have learned to get through the fence and brave the killing forest. They dig up any promising looking new plants by the roots and take them home to breed the pizen and killing out of em, make em fit to eat. Remember that they test the plants on themselves, Sir. That’s important. They do tend to die younger, even if they ain’t uncovered by the Egg Boys. Pizen.” He sniffs. “The thing can creep up on you.”
“So what are they after? Eating plants?”
“Right now, no. They are looking for most about any plants that are good for storing water. It is Mamma Zeina life’s mission, to find such a plant. One which would supply water to the edge farmers. She may die ‘afore she sees the thing out, she’s near a hundred years old and I’ve had my doubts she will pull it off before the edge farmers are dried bones, under six feet of desert.”
“I see. Mamma Zeina you say. She comes up quite a bit don’t she? So. She getting anywhere with this … Work?”
Jengi feels his stomach drop. On an instinct, “Nope.” He says. Realises at once that he’s answered too quickly, now he hesitatingly qualifies his answer. “Leastways I kindly doubt it, Sir. Sure I’d have heard something by now.”
“Relax, Jengi. Okay. You said these are women. Old women.”
“Gaddys and the OneFolks call them witches but we call them mother cupboards.”
“Yes. You said that already. And it’s dangerous work you say? This bloody gardening that these witches are undertaking. Clattering about in the killing forests at night, risking meeting the Egg Men at the fence, or being greened so much they are arrested for not taking their medicine. Even on a good day, tasting pizens like they were sweeties. Testing them out on they own selves. These women sound pretty hard boiled to me, Jengi. All that sounds pretty … extremist.”
Jengi doesn’t answer.
“Okay Jengi. Why am I here iffen you’re not talking. Why call me at all? Are you sulking?”