by Ely, Jo;
“That one. She bit down on a lizard just now,” an older girl says, pointing Zettie out to the girl with the long plait, and, had she only known it, using her own mother’s best disapproving voice. Shudders. “That Sinta creature.” She says.
“That’s Zettie.” The girl with the long plait replies. It’s a small reproach. “She’s hungry.” She pauses, examines the first girl’s face. “She’s just a hungry little girl, that’s all, ain’t you ever been hungry, Cinda?”
“No. I ain’t never.” The first girl scowls, as though the question itself were an insult.
A stone flies pasts the girls’ ears.
“Stop it, Luco.”
The small boy inside the Furdy throws another stone now. This one hits its target, the mesh near Zettie’s head but Zettie, for now at least, still holds firm to the belief that all folks are more or less friendly. This is something that the Sinta like to teach their childur when they’re small. Zettie smiles sweetly now. As if the OneFolk boy played a neat joke. She smiles so sweetly at him, eager to join in this game too, any game, that the girl who’d called Zettie ‘Creature’ just now, becomes ashamed. “You can’t throw stones at little folks,” she says. Yanking the boy’s arm quite hard at the shoulder. “Let her alone.” She says now, shifting her outrage toward him. She smoothes her apron, glares. “Ain’t cha … Zettie?”
Zettie thinks for a moment, and then, “No.” Zettie says. Squashes her button nose flat against the mesh. Eyeing the older girl. “I’m very extremely big.”
“Oh. Hmmm. That so.” The big girl pulls her knitting out of her pocket.
“What’s that?”
“Finger knitting.” Says the girl. “Now don’t mither me, Sinta.”
The girl with the long plait sits down cross legged beside her friend, watches her thread and loop.
“I ain’t mithering.” Zettie says quietly, but the two OneFolk girls are ignoring her now, not unkindly.
“Who taught you that?”
“My Sinta nursemaid.”
“Teach it to me.”
Zettie is pleased at how things are turning out today. Her stomach is full and various things seem less frightening than they did. Birds. Lightning. Big girls. Lizards. And she’s made at least one new friend, maybe more. She turns and suns herself, lying flat on her back on the roof of the Furdy. Her arms are outstretched. The world seems to her to swim above her. The general’s sun rolls across the sky like an absurdly giant pumpkin, luminous pink lines scribbling up the sky right behind. She turns onto her stomach. Taps the cage softly, one small finger.
The children inside the Furdy blink. Look up at Zettie, and in a bit jumping in and out of her shadow, giggling. She hears someone start calling her name. And then someone else is gently rattling the sides of the lightning cage, at first it’s just to encourage Zettie to come down. Zettie notices that Tomax looks worried. She looks away quickly.
“Come down before the teacher sees you, Zettie.” But then, as more children join in, the rattling gets a little harder, a little less gentle.
Something happens.
The stone-throwing boy, humiliated about his yanked arm, rattles the cage hard and then, taking a run up at it, throws his small body into the side of the Furdy. Zettie slips down a little. She hears someone say Stop and then, squinting, sees the two big girls put down their knitting and get up quickly, they lock arms and hold themselves against the side of the Furdy, saying Stop, stop, but the rattling grows worse. Now it’s impossible to tell who in the crowd is shaking the sides, and who’s trying to hold the Furdy steady. Zettie’s holding onto its edge, by small fingers slippy with mud, Tomax is getting up to help her but he’s still too far and one-armed with his sling, and now Zettie’s grip is slipping. There are yells of “Do it, do it!” and more screams of “Stop, stop, the baby’s falling, STOP!” Zettie slips three inches, grabs a foothold. She looks down and sees the children’s faces upturned. The girl with the plaited hair is splayed against the inside of the Furdy, gripping the earthen floor of the playground with her toes. Her body is stiff, face dark red with her effort to hold the Furdy steady. Two small boys are banging her fingers with stones. She is crying loud, full-bodied, despairing sobs. Cinda is throwing herself against a wall of shaven headed boys to reach her friend, punching heads and taking blows, making the Furdy shake dangerously.
Zettie looks down at the long drop beneath her. The world seems to her to be moving slow and strange. She feels herself hovering somewhere outside of herself. Zettie freezes. She holds on.
Someone is calling her name. She doesn’t dare turn toward the sound.
Tomax is stumbling through the scrubby bushes at the base of the Furdy, getting his left foot tangled in thorns, cursing quietly, catching his batwing sleeve on the corner of the Furdy again. Zettie, paralysed by fear, is making no attempt to climb to a safer position. She just hangs on, waiting for Tomax. The trusting and amazed expression never leaves her face. The child waits patiently for everything to be alright. Tomax curses, rips his sleeve, and tears his skin on the wire edge. Reaches out his one good arm as far as he can toward her. He can’t get a hold of anything but her foot. For a moment Zettie is fully exposed. “Hold,” he tells her sharply, “Hold fast.”
The children have stopped moving. Some watch the edge farm boy as though they’re openly rooting for him. The playground is completely silent.
The small boy who started the rattling gets a strange look on his face. A muscle in his jaw moves, grits his teeth. His little sister beside him, having seen this look before, seems to understand what he’s about to do before the boy knows it himself. She moves quickly, pulls his hair and his ear, twists the fingers of his left hand, and now digging her stubby fingernails into the soft flesh under his chin and by his left ear, holds him back from throwing himself into the side of the Furdy. He’s bigger, stronger, and it takes every single thing she has to stop him. The boy flails his fists at his sister, strains toward the side of the box.
Now the two small siblings roll and scrap on the floor, creating a distraction long enough for Tomax to get a foothold in a branch by the Furdy, take a hold of Zettie’s right elbow. By the time the small boy is sitting on his sister’s stomach, throwing punches at her face, Tomax has got a hold of Zettie underneath one armpit, helped her painfully down.
The knitting girl, Cinda, pulls the boy off his sister, “Don’t. Hit.” She says. He looks down at her bruised, scuffed up knuckles. Blood under several of her fingernails. “No, ma’am.”
She takes a hold of his left ear, twists it hard.
Tomax takes a breath. He turns to Zettie. “Don’t climb that thing again.”
“I won’t.” Zettie gets the words out, sounding shocked.
“Now go home, Zettie. Might see you tomorrow, iffen I’m passing.” Tomax looks up toward the school security manager, heading toward him around the outside of the Furdy. He scratches his shaven head, smiles. For an edge farm boy in the wrong part of the village, Tomax doesn’t seem unduly alarmed.
Zettie stands up, looks in the direction of home. She still feels strangely detached from herself, looking down at her feet. Wonders if her feet will know the route without her.
The small rattling boy slopes off to a corner of the Furdy to sulk. Hold his pinched ear with both hands and gazing menacingly at his younger sister, who, sitting down cross legged now, between the two knitting girls, pokes out the tip of her tongue.
Zettie trails her fingertips along the mesh side of the Furdy, behind the three girls, tap, tap, tap on their cage. Very gently. The small girl squints up at her, smiles shyly.
“Bye, Zettie.” Says the girl with the long plait. “See you tomorrow.” The big girl doesn’t look up from her knitting. Threads and loops. The colours slowly merge, fan out under her hands.
“You’re quicker than me. What you making, Mezan?”
“Dunno, Cinda. S’gonna be good though.” Sniffs. There’s a soft knot in the wool. She rubs her round nose. And then examining Zett
ie’s footprints by the gate.
CAT
“BE CAREFUL, CAT.” SOMEONE says. Sliding in through the Furdy gate beside her and then shutting it carefully behind.
“I’m Zettie.”
“Cat.”
Zettie visited the Furdy twice yesterday, just after first light and then again in the last light of evening, when it was cool enough to venture outdoors. When Zettie appears again this morning, first she carefully eyes the beribboned plait nailed to the gate of the Furdy. And then she peers in.
“Cat, cat.” She hears.
At first Zettie can’t imagine they can mean her. She checks the grass behind her. But some of the OneFolk childur have, as it turns out, decided that Zettie is due for a name-change. Hence ‘Cat’.
Zettie, who is just four droughts old this season, by no means buys into the Bavarnican idea that cats are vermin, and she likes the flying caracal cat most of all. Mamma Ezray had to chase one away from the chickens only last night and Zettie had examined the creature with pleasure. The long stripes running down the cat’s body, its huge pointed ears. And yet … something about being called Cat bothers the child. Zettie thinks about this.
The mood here is different this morning, that’s clear. Last night Zettie had most about convinced herself that the thing didn’t happen. She’d spent the night, hands over her ears, and in the morning she told herself she’d forgot. Zettie shook herself and put it all away like that.
But Zettie does remember.
She presses her face against the mesh of the Furdy, peers in. She looks down at the playground. Zettie notices the scorched ground where the flat rocks were lit and heated. Leaving a black trail in the dust after it was all cleared away. The rain makes rivulets now, in the scorched ground and looking across the small covered yard, Zettie finally understands that what happened yesterday evening underneath the Furdy was real. Yesterday seems to get realer the longer she looks. There is a cold feeling spreading out from the base of Zettie’s stomach. It seems to seep up toward her throat.
Yesterday a small group of the older OneFolk children inside the Furdy had tried to poke Zettie food through the gaps at supper time, even though sharing food is strictly against Bavarnica’s most important regulations. No one could quite remember who had the banned thought first or who it was decided to act on the thing, but like they looked down at their supper together, saw Zettie watching them eat. Three children had the same thought at the same time, ‘Let’s share.’
Anyway, the gaps in the mesh were too small to pass anything through, as it happened. Zettie watched the OneFolk childur try with the strange amazed expression she is known for. She had appreciated their intention, though it seemed like a shame, she had thought then, to waste it. Zettie had seen from the start that their efforts were doomed. The size of the food and the holes in the mesh. But she’d gotten caught up like the childur in the intensity of the game, the way they’d worked together, some playing look out. The boy who had rattled the fence yesterday morning was, by the evening, a turncoat. Threatening to tell on his schoolmates at the mesh, and he was pinned down and sat on by his younger sister and two small friends. Other childur had joined in, taking sides. It had been a small playground insurrection. It was only just before playtime ended that the OneFolk childur trying to share had admitted defeat. The Furdy itself stood between them.
“I can’t do it. I can’t get the food through. She’s going to starve.” Said the girl with the long plait. A tall thin boy with white hair examined the gate, kicked the side of the cage.
That last act was what had brought the school’s security manager and the class teacher outside, the teacher was holding her clipboard, taking names. “What are you children doing with your food?” Zettie had crept into the shrubs just outside the Furdy and watched.
“It’s just … It’s just decoration.” Said the girl with the long plait, suddenly inspired.
The teacher took a pair of scissors out, hacked off her plait at the base of her neck.
“Don’t lie, Mezan.”
Apparently the class teacher and the school’s security manager had seen the whole thing from an upstairs window. They’d not even missed the boy with the over-tight uniform collar and the anxious face who appeared to have assigned himself the post of look-out. He’d looked at every window, every shadow and leafy corner, looking for a face or a camera. Only he hadn’t looked up.
“That’s a lesson you won’t forget in a hurry, eh Zinko?” The school security manager said, somewhat ambiguously. And then seemed to point at the brim of his hat. The boy blinked. And then noticed it.
Behind the school security manager was the school security camera, like a blinking red-lit eye on a stilt. Blended with the small red flowers on the vine which crept along the school wall, you wouldn’t see it at all, unless you knew where to look.
The security manager’s office window is just above the camera. He decides what camera footage to keep and what’s safe to delete, according to the general’s instructions. Ghost of a wink. The boy had examined the security manager’s face with a soft, amazed expression. Blinked.
When the children had all gone in, Zettie had stared at the mushed splats of food on the mesh. She looked to sharpen a twig small enough to poke through the mesh, grab back bits of the wasted food, but nothing worked. She did not expect it to. Eyed the forlorn shiny plait pinned to the gate. The ribbon still in it.
Zettie had stayed hidden in the scrubby plants beside the Furdy when three of the schoolchildren were made an example of about an hour later: Mezan, the girl with the long plait hacked off and black hair falling into her face, looked sullen, tear stained. Clinging to her side was the tiny freckled girl, Ezmay, who’d taken on her own older brother in order to save Zettie from falling off the Furdy and was now, in Zettie’s mind and her own, a firm and lifelong friend of Zettie’s. Joined by blood, scratched up knees and their matching bruises.
The tall, white-haired boy, Zetan, stood apart from the two OneFolk girls. Zettie remembered his grim determined face when he’d tried to help get the food through, help as though his own life somehow depended on it. The playground leader looked younger now, beaten in the presence of the teacher.
“What is she?”
“A slave. A nothing. A wild critter.” The three OneFolk childur repeated robotically, looking down.
“And?”
“Sharing is dangerous.” That toneless chorus again. The white haired boy had glanced up.
The two older children were punished the worst.
Later, the teacher had reminded all the OneFolk childur of the punishments involved in sharing food. The childur with an instinct to share food with a small hungry girl, and the courage to do something about it, were made an example out of. Were made to walk a line of hot rocks in front of their classmates. Not so hot they’d break the skin but enough to cause pain. The humiliation of tears.
“You’ve got to breed the sharing out of ‘em early,” the teacher had whispered to the school security manager who’d nodded sternly. “Yes.” He’d said, turning toward her, seeming to take her in with a glance, “You must remind children that mercy is wrong.” And then eyed the teacher cautiously to see how she took this. She didn’t appear to have heard what he meant, only what he said. Scratch of her pen across her clipboard. Taking down the names of the three scapegoats.
The school security manager had taken down names also, Zettie had noticed this much. Well, not so much names as faces. He seemed to carefully note the girl with the hacked off hair, the white haired boy, tiny freckled girl. And then shifted his eyes gently left, as though he takes his thoughts and deposits them somewhere inside. Zettie has seen Mamma Ezray do this trick many times. Sinta cannot write things down, it’s not safe. But there are other ways to remember.
Zettie is still staring at the fence, the seared ground from yesterday, food still stuck to the fence, dried out now, she is letting herself remember. Trying to think what it means. She tries to find the words to frame the
feeling. Thinks for a while.
When Tomax appears at Zettie’s left elbow, without making her startle, it’s as though he simply grew from the bush. The first thing Zettie tells him is surreal, as far as he’s concerned, “I ain’t a cat, I am a little girl.” She says.
Tomax blinks. And then leaning forward intently, as though he is trying to figure it. All of it. He grins. “What sort of cat aren’t you?”
Zettie draws herself up to her full height. “I aren’t any sort.”
Tomax sniffs. And then, with a sudden intuition, “I like caracals best.” He checks Zettie’s face for a sign. “Those cats can fly.”
Zettie looks sour. “Mamma Ezray says they only jump.”
“Oh. But still …” Tomax smiles. And then eyes her, nodding as though he believes in everything that Zettie said and even the things she didn’t find a way to say yet. Somehow conveys to her that these unsaid things will also be good. This seems to help Zettie to contain what she’s feeling. She’s quiet for a while. Sucks her thumb.
And in a bit, “Yep, caracals are the best sort of jumping cat, I reckon.” Tomax stares down at the palms of his hands.
Zettie feels her indignation rising, checks his face. He’s still examining his hands intently. And then, “Look, Edge Farm.” She says, cheering up. “Loooooook!” Shows him the soft lined palm of her tiny hand. Zettie wriggles her fingers. “Hum-ing bean,” she says.
Tomax pulls a face. “That’s … Disappointing.”
Zettie giggles.
“Nah, you is a … Cat.” Tomax teases her now. “A little girl would have fell offen the Furdy that morning, fell offen and clean died. You must’ve held on with your claws.”
The infant examines her own hand again, just as though she’s checking. And then looking up at the edge farm boy with a wide eyed amazed expression. Scowls suddenly. “I ain’t a cat. Edge boy.” She says. Bursts into tears.