by Ely, Jo;
Jengi clears his throat. “It is dangerous work that they’re doing. If one of the modified forest creatures don’t get them, or the leaches, then the too-many-small-bites from the nipping saplings will bring them down slow. Worse, if one of the general’s Egg Men catch a mother cupboard illegally keeping and meddling with the nature of the plants, that will be it … They’ll be dragged half alive to the long gaol in the mountain’s shadow or, worse, the government laboratories under the general’s great house with the moat around it. He catches about two out of three active mother cupboards, even with the mother cupboards’ best efforts. There ain’t no crime worser’n gardening, in the OneFolks’ village.”
“I see.” Scratch of an ancient pen, scrabbling over a scroll.
“Do you? Do you, Sir? What is it you see?”
HUNGER
MAMMA ZEINA HAS BEEN cooking in the general’s kitchen all morning. She’s not been paid this week and her food-ration cards are three days overdue meaning that, between the one thing and another, including an unforeseeable Egg Mens’ raid of her food stores last month, the hunger almost took Mamma Zeina yesterday at the feast of the flowers fund. The general’s wife will pay Mamma Zeina eventually. When she gets around to the thing, meaning whenever she happens to wake up from her pollinated stupor and finish her duties. Then, and only then, will Mamma Zeina get to eat.
The general’s wife is a busy woman. She has at least three things left on her official To Do list, before she gets around to paying her slave Sinta workers their food rations. Firstly, she’s to tend to the waxen flowers in the vast entrance hall, secondly, to count the heads of OneFolk babies born to the village, pat their mothers’ arms serenely, coo absentmindedly and smile for the photos, and thirdly she’s to choose three frocks for coronation day. This will take at least two days, without accessorising, and last of all she’s to oversee the making of a new jewel encrusted bullet proof jacket which has been ordered for her by Jengi, the shopkeeper’s assistant.
The general keeps his wife’s schedule chocked full with things that don’t matter a scrap. She works hard to keep up.
So … There’s no knowing when Mamma Zeina will next eat.
This is the third day without food for Mamma Zeina, which on a regular sort of day for her means porridge made with water and sprinkled with seeds grown on her allotment, or else the root vegetables rejected from the general’s wife’s own kitchen as being too rough-looking, mangled or pitted with holes. Boiled by the Sinta woman until they’re soupy and digestible and then eaten with the hard dry leftover oat-bread, herbs and spices, chilli peppers from Mamma Zeina’s own allotment, a pinch of bartered-for salt.
This morning the general’s wife, looking frail after her latest pollen over-dose, and wobbly on her stilts, had stumbled down three steps to the kitchen below stairs. Kindly insisted on throwing the kitchen’s misshapen vegetables away. Pizens, she called them, slurring her words. Promising, in her over-pollinated state, to replace them with the heart shaped oranges from her own garden.
Of course the general’s wife forgets these kinds of promises by morning, sneezing and waking in a haze of pollen dust. Meantime her kitchen workers have been starved for a day, Mamma Zeina for three. They’d been counting on the vegetable soup.
The rejected vegetables were immediately dragged away from the moat, pulled to the edge by giant desert rats and eaten right there on the banks.
“How those damned things got as far as the moat in the first place beats me,” Mamma Zeina wonders aloud. She examines the rat nearest to the window. Sniffs.
“These desert rat scavengers are the only creatures which seem to be able to sneak around the border fences.” She gazes at Zorry. Scratches her chin thoughtfully. “Them and the oversized, fattened up edge farm crows.” She points upward with her short, square index finger. “They fly over the fences just as t’other goes under it.” She muses. “The only two sets of critters that can work on both sides of the fence. Lest you count Jengi, of course.” She scratches her head. She’s thinking.
Mamma Zeina and Zorry eye the critters through the kitchen window. There’s a desert edge farm rat the size of a large domestic cat or a medium sized dog. The rat is squinting at the kitchen window in a quite unnerving manner just now. Zorry notices that it has huge jaws and long fanged grey-tipped teeth, an extra long pointed nose which droops a little at the tip. Apparently old and slow, a little mangy, distracted by gnawing at the tough root vegetable between its front paws, the critter allows itself to be cornered by two wild dogs.
The carrot is being stuffed into the rat’s pouched cheeks when it’s pounced on. And then dragged in two opposing directions, twists and scuffles, objects, and is torn into two still-wriggling pieces by the OneFolk village pets. Zorry notes that the larger dog is more scratched and bitten up than its small ally, which stops and swallows down its half of the rat’s body, in just two or three struggling gulps. Now it’s moving forward menacingly toward the second dog. The second great curling-haired beast of a dog ends up with just the giant rat tail, which it grips gormlessly by the end, and the huge tail goes on waving slowly in its pug mouth. The smaller dog comes back in a bit, takes that off him too. Like an afterthought. “These ‘show’ pets are pretty useless.” Zorry turns.
“Zorry.” Mamma Zeina says gently. Pulling the girl away from the kitchen window.
Zorry looks up. She finds herself shocked by Mamma Zeina’s appearance. She looks deathly. Her mouth is a blueish grey line, her eyes set deeper into her skull and the overall appearance is gargoyle-like, “Mamma.” Zorry catches Mamma Zeina before she falls. Supports her and then lets a wooden chair by the sink take the strain.
“Mamma Zeina, take my ration,” hisses Zorry, “You’re faint with hunger.” She struggles to pull some oat bread from her left front apron pocket.
Mamma Zeina looks down at the dry bread wryly. She doesn’t move to take the girl’s food ration from her. “I haven’t come to that. You can kindly strangle me your own self,” she says fiercely, “before I’ll take food from a growing youngster.”
“Mamma Zeina …”
Mamma Zeina rises to her feet. Winces.
Mamma Zeina has had nothing but a squirt of milk stolen from a cow’s teat this morning. Crossing the Egg Mens’ land on her way to work in the early light of the old sun, even the Egg Mens’ steel trap farms can be beautiful before curfew breaks. Curfew when the general’s luminous sun takes away the shadows, the soft filtered light through the branches of the border trees.
The cows aren’t afeared of Mamma Zeina, on account of she sings harmonious Sinta curses as she goes. Poems of the dead. Mostly the cows prefer rhythms and lilts, she advises her Sinta neighbours. Soft, bewildering upturns in the word-music. But you have to be pretty hungry to risk it nonetheless. One missed note and the cow could take your head clean off at the neck, such eating isn’t for the faint hearted.
Mamma Zeina has learned that predictable patterns sooth the cows’ reptile brains best. Makes the cows peaceable enough to milk. No mean feat since the reckoning era, when the cows were injected with DNA from an ancient and more savage strain of cow, combined with a Komodo dragon. The cows are now meat eaters since last season. Wide sharpened teeth, claws for hooves, milking them by hand is no joke, as the general intended. The modification coming after a rash of hungry Sinta thieves had diminished the OneFolks’ milk supplies. Mamma Zeina has, of course, found a way around the problem, but drinking milk in the reckoning era comes with a health warning.
And there was that piece of fruit Mamma Zeina stole last night too. The heart shaped novelty blood orange which the general’s wife was always promising to share with her kitchen workers and somehow never quite did. Being caught in the orange garden could have been trouble for Mamma Zeina.
“What’s that on your ankle?” Zorry asks.
Mamma Zeina looks down.
There are sores on Mamma Zeina’s ankles from the nipping saplings in the killing forest last night. Gnaw marks
around her bulging ankle veins.
Mamma Zeina was so excited last night by a new find, another plant which can hold enough water in its leaves to quench the thirst of a child for one day, before replenishing itself overnight, that stooping in the darkness to uproot it, she’d taken about a hundred small nips to her left ankle from the nipping saplings which grew protectively around it. And that was just whilst examining the thing, pulling it up by its roots before it closed up its leaf claws and took a hold of her wrist. She had got it into her gauze sack and heard it wrestling with the thick cloth, held it away from her body’s soft parts.
Mamma Zeina hadn’t even felt the large, and extremely poisonous, killing forest leech which dropped softly from a mossy branch above her and, as she struggled with the water storing plant, the leech had secreted itself down the back of Mamma Zeina’s collar, on the left side. Dangerously close to her jugular vein. It has been using its liquid sap to thin her blood all day.
Mamma Zeina would have noticed both the plant-itch and the stinging sensation at her throat if she hadn’t been already so distracted by the pain of her hunger, and last night’s stomach churning pizen experiments on herself. She briefly glanced down at the small sore developing on her left ankle this morning, promised herself she would tend to it later then … The old woman simply forgot. At one hundred years old, Mamma Zeina has so many aches and pains that it was easy to miss something that was important.
Looking down now, Mamma Zeina sees that the red sore that she barely noticed this morning has grown darker and is spreading out black roots from the point of ‘infection’. One root just above the sore is already thick as a thumb and moving up slow and steady, in its vine-like way, along the back of her leg. Making its way toward her carotid artery, sniffing out essential organs, following a trail to the heart where it’s evolved to cut off her blood supply, stop her heart. It will use her remains then for compost. A small but highly predatory plant.
Mamma Zeina feels her legs rolling under her. Shoots a hand out, takes a hold of the handle of her steel serving trolley. On an instinct puts the other hand to the side of her throat and pulling away the swelling leech. Then, with the expertise of a woman whose spent every single night of the last year navigating the killing forest in darkness, she examines its underside. Sees at once that the creature’s poison sacs are depleted.
Mamma Zeina, with her knowledge of plants and insects, understands her situation right away. She might’ve been able to handle the plant or the pizen but not both. Not together.
She’s got three minutes, maybe two and maybe less.
She has two things to do first:
Give the root of the promising plant to her immediate underling, and that’s Zorry.
And then get outside as fast as she can.
–––––
THE PLANTING
MAMMA ZEINA MUST DIE outdoors, under the sky. The laws of Mamma Zeina’s religion are quite clear on this matter. More importantly, it’s what she wants most.
“Last work, Mother Cupboard. Finish the job.” Mamma Zeina mutters softly to herself, under her breath. Grits her teeth and tries to move. Her left arm is paralysed for one long moment, grips the cage enclosing the vent and holds her there, vine like. As if her curled hand has a mind of its own.
“Holy baobab,” she says to herself, “give me strength.”
“Strength.” She says again. Throwing herself away from the wall and then staggering forwards, three steps, four, and now she’s falling. Slaps the palm of her left hand on the wall for support as she goes down. Saves herself, only just.
And now, sweat steaming from her brow and face twisted, hauling herself along by the pipes on the wall. Staggers against the air conditioning system, grips it with both hands. Rests for a moment. Satisfied that she’s stayed on her feet. Now she eyes the door handle, lunges and grips it. Right hand. Left hand. Pulling herself along slowly.
Zorry stands watching her come with a rising sense of panic. She feels strangely unable to move.
“Zorry Child, help me. Don’t stand there looking at me with wide eyes, help me, damn it.”
When she gets as far as Zorry, Mamma Zeina grips the girl’s wrist hard. Pushes her pained face up and into Zorry’s. “It’s you.” She hisses. Struggling to speak now.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m passing you the baton. I pick you. I am reseeding.”
“What? Holy baobab, Mamma …” Zorry wants to object but the words seem to stop in her throat, choke her.
“I ain’t got long so I hereby reseed myself and name you Mother Cupboard Zorry, henceforth Mamma Zorry.”
“Mamma …”
Mamma Zeina then thrusts her hand into her apron pocket. Pulls out a small cup with a lid. Lifts it slightly, checks behind her. Zorry looks down at the plant root nestling inside. It’s rippling gently.
“This has been my life Zorry. This here. It’s a water plant. I entrust it to you.”
Zorry’s eyes become round and afraid, she is bursting with questions. “Mamma … Mamma Zeina …”
“Hush! There’s no time now, don’t be mithering me with questions. You’ve seen the work.” Mamma Zeina looks at the girl, sternly and warm at the same time, as the best kind of general can be sometimes with her troops. “Do not slow me down now, Child.”
“Why’d you pick me?”
“You picked yourself, Zorry. Your nature picked you. I’ve lived a hundred years and I’ve seen the likes of you, Zorry, borned and died many times over, and I know it to be a mistake to over protect young women like you. You will die of that sooner. You need the resistance as much as the resistance needs you, submission is pizen to a …” Zeina smiles sadly. “I wouldn’t be able to put you in harm’s way iffen I didn’t believe …” She peers into Zorry’s face. “Bavarnica won’t change and nor will you. The double life, Zorry. It’s the only way for a Sinta girl like you.” She grips Zorry’s wrist.
“I need more time.”
“There is no more time, Zorry.”
Pain overcomes Mamma Zeina. It’s like a wave of contractions in her legs and stomach. As her body resists the plant inside her, the long roots and vines growing up and outward. She grips her throat, groans, there’s a larger contraction in her stomach that feels to her like birthing. She curses. Spits up a drizzle of poison. Yellow sap runs down her chin. And then blood. She doubles over with pain, “Take this cup from me …” The cup is tipping from her fingers. Zorry reaches out to catch it before it falls.
Mamma Zeina rises. Her face seems gargoyle-like once more, and strange. Haggard. She’s sweating, panting, Zorry thinks she sees death moving underneath Mamma Zeina’s skin. A snaking shadow and then it’s gone. The old woman is gritting her teeth. Holding on.
“Mamma …” Zorry says. Now her eyes fill. “You are in pain.”
Mamma Zeina gathers herself. Her colour returns for a moment. She looks the girl in the eye, a shrewd direct stare, “This next thing will …” Her voice falters again. She holds on to the wall.
“What do I do?”
Without looking up, “You got to take the water plant to Jengi, Zorry. He’s the only one who can get it to the other side, over and under both fences, through the killing forest and to the right person on the edge farms.” She grits her teeth again.
“I don’t trust him.”
“Zorry. We have to trust him.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s no-one else.”
Zorry catches her breath. “Jengi … Mamma Zeina …” Zorry wavers. “Jengi’s in the heart of the village. In the shop, Mamma Zeina.” Zorry casts about in a panic. “If I’m caught they will kill me. Or take me to the labs, the long gaol, there’s no worse fate for a Sinta woman.”
“No. There isn’t.” Mamma Zeina says heavily. She goes on gazing at Zorry. “You think that I don’t know what it is I’m asking?”
The girl sets her jaw, “Yes.” She says. Not remembering the question, if there even was one.
&
nbsp; The old woman looks around her, eyes the window. Sighs. Then looks toward the door to outside. The corridor leading toward the exit seems longer to her just now. The door seems to her to glow with strange life.
Wind rattles the hinges. Desert sand beats against it.
“Help me outside?”
“Yes.”
Zorry takes Mamma Zeina’s elbow.
They walk the white-lit corridor together, Mamma Zeina’s strong right arm thrown over the young girl’s slender shoulders. They walk a little zig-zag at first, find a pace.
“Nearly there.” Mamma Zeina says. Looking grim, determined. Stops and groans. Zorry waits until Mamma Zeina is steady enough to go on. The girl looks down, examines the root of the water plant. It has one leaf unfurling from it already.
“I’m dying.”
“Aye.”
They both appear to consider this. Neither speaks.
And in a bit, “That plant has great promise, Child. It might save many lives someday. As far as I can make out … It attracts rain,” she says. Stops again and grimaces, holds her stomach. “And pulls moisture from deep in the earth. Its roots grow a hundred feet, more. Stores what it collects in the leaves and roots, vines. It might bring back the rains. It needs more work but … Jengi.” She says. “Jengi. He’ll know what to do with it. Who’s the best … gardener to give it to. And if he can’t find no-one to finish the work on it then he’ll see it’s planted out by the baobab. At least that. On the fertile soil of the Sinta graves there. Let the water plant do what it will then, out by the baobab.”
At the exit, Mamma Zeina easing down the door handle, steps outside and then pushing Zorry back over the door jamb, inside the house. “Don’t be seen with me here, Zorry. I am done now, dangerous to know. Don’t speak of me. All of Bavarnica will be watching now. Tell them you barely knew me, Child.”
A squeeze of the old woman’s hand.
Mamma Zeina closes the door firmly on Zorry. Then she leans against its hinges.
Clutching at the ivy strewn outer wall, Mamma Zeina makes her way over the drawbridge and beyond the garden lights to the outside.