I’ve chosen to eat the heart, not because it grants power, or tastes better, but because it provides the most nutrients. When I’m done with the heart, I will consume the liver. And if I am not full to bursting by then, I will consume what I can of its brain.
Preparing my meal is simple. I take the blood-soaked organ, raise it to my lips, and bite.
My father told my child self, as I plucked trout from a river, that people once cooked food using devices that generated heat without fire and smoke. I’m not sure how such a thing was possible, but I have often dreamed of it. Now we would have to use fire, and an open flame for cooking is forbidden. In the winter, wood fires are necessary for survival, and thus, deemed legal when more than two miles from the Divide. Most of the smoke is collected by large, damp, cloth tarps stretched over the blaze. What escapes into the air dissipates long before it can be detected. Forest fires occasionally fill the air with towers of smoke, and they have never attracted unwanted attention, confirming the safety of burning wood—in moderation.
But burning meat?
The scent of heated oils and crispy singed flesh?
My mouth waters at the thought. I have little doubt such smells would draw every predator from the forest, and those beyond it, perhaps even from across the Divide.
I have consumed cooked meat just once in my life. I was seven. My brothers, during their rebellious teenage years, captured, killed, and cooked a squirrel. I was offered a morsel as payment to stay quiet about what they had done, making me an accomplice. It wasn’t until the meal was complete, and the arrival of a hungry bear, that the full weight of what we had done crashed down upon us.
How long had it taken to attract a predator? Thirty minutes? How far had we been from the Divide? Two miles? Less? No one had kept track, and as we fled the scene, we pledged two things: never to tell, and never to repeat our act of insanity.
Every meal—meat, vegetable, or insect—since that day has been fresh, and raw.
I chew my last bite of heart, relishing the taste, and then spit out a ring of artery. Too rubbery for my liking. The bit of blood vessel hits the pine needle carpet and bounces three times. In the still silence of the forest, broken only by the distant chirping of small birds, I hear the pat, pat, pat of it bouncing, and then, when it stops, I hear the sound once more.
From behind.
Knife gripped in hand, I turn my head, tilted upward as though admiring the trees. The sun is higher, shimmering between a patchwork of needles and leaves scraping together as a breeze sifts through, bending and creaking the trees.
Though my eyes are turned up, I focus on my periphery. The aberration is nearly invisible despite being in the open. It’s hidden in a patch of sunlight, the creature’s coat matching the yellow light. The black nose and rings around its unblinking eyes reveal the beast—the male lion’s mate.
Before I can retrieve my spear, or turn, the lion pounces, and I feel the warmth of blood on me once more.
3
The journey home is made out of duty—the meat from two lions is enough to feed several families. It’s also made out of necessity—the four puncture wounds in my thigh need the kind of attention that I cannot provide on my own. The twelve hour hike is drawn out by the two cats’ weight, which I drag behind me, staked on two fresh-cut poles. My limping gait doesn’t speed things up, either. While it was once preferable to eat raw meat within two hours of a kill, human beings’ guts have adapted—so says my father, who once explained how we now have enzymes that our ancestors lacked five hundred years ago. Some people even prefer the flavor of rot.
The village is all but invisible until you’re inside it. The structures are made from wooden poles and layers of animal hides, all of which are already perfectly camouflaged. Some of the structures, like the elder’s dwelling and the meeting hall, are quite large, but everything is designed for mobility, able to be broken down and transported within hours. The village is relocated once a year, allowing the forest to erase all evidence of our temporary dwelling, leaving no footprint behind.
In my lifetime, the tribe of Essex has migrated thirty-five times. Mobility is essential to concealment, which is paramount to survival, and thus, it’s the law. The location is never the same, but we also never leave the county borders. As a people on the Divide, it is our responsibility to protect our eight hundred and thirty miles of land, primarily the thirty mile-long stretch bordering the Divide. And as the only tribe to border both the Divide and the ocean, our responsibilities are twofold. Though we are able to fish our coastal waters, fishermen must enter the water naked and tethered to shore. If evidence of our occupation was swept out with the tide, it could wash up on shore further south and be found. The water protects us, so says the Prime Law, but no one knows if the Divide can be crossed, and no one wants to find out.
I’m spotted by lookouts hidden in the trees. I don’t know they’re around me until I hear twin pairs of mourning doves cooing at my approach. The soft coo tells the guards on the ground that a member of the tribe is returning. Had they been crow calls, I would have been greeted by spears instead of helping hands.
Two young men rush out to greet me, their hair cut short to prevent lice and to deter ticks. Neither of them say ‘hello,’ or welcome me home. Despite their age, and social standing, I am still less. A shepherd. One of them lingers, eyeing my wounds, and then the lions, his eyes showing a flash of respect as he realizes who killed the beasts. Then they take the poles from my shoulders and drag my kills away. I won’t see them again. I won’t taste their flesh. If anything, I will be berated for consuming the heart, which should have gone to Micha or to his child-bearing wives.
But I will likely hear nothing of it. Micha prefers to act as though I don’t exist, waiting for me to die in the wild, while he leads the tribe by proliferating and pretending to be as knowledgeable about the world as my father.
“Vee.” The voice is friendly, familiar, and then concerned. “My god, what happened to you?”
I smile at Grace as she approaches and points to the lions being dragged away. As my father’s assistant for forty-five years, she helped raise me, despite never having had a romantic entanglement with my father, who only married once. My mother died giving birth to my younger brother, who did not survive his first winter. That’s not to say my father doesn’t love Grace. She and Father were, and are, inseparable. But their love did not comingle with lust. They are, as Grace puts it, best friends. I find the term unusual, as I have no friends.
Grace looks back at the lions, tsks loudly, and frowns. “The forest is no place for a lady to be on her own.”
“It’s a good thing I’m not a lady.”
She rolls her eyes. The title ‘lady’ is generally reserved for members of elder families, of which I belong to two. But as the lowest member of both families, cast out by my husband, bearing only a single child, and generally covered in filth and blood, the term is never used in reference to me—nor would I want it to be.
Ladies are dominated.
I am independent.
That is dangerously close to saying I am free, but only in a personal sense. I am as bound to New Inglan as every other living person.
“Pretty sure neither of us are ladies,” I add.
Grace responds with a partially-toothed grin and a wink. “I’d rather be skewered alongside those cats.”
As I wonder if that is the real reason she and my father never married, she takes my wrist and tows me along. We pass the butchery, where my lions are already being dismantled, hungry people lining up for their portions. Like me, the people of Essex are brown-skinned, brown-eyed, and brown-haired. Our ancestors had a variety of skin colors, eye colors, and facial features. But a limited population after the time of the Great Divide, and five centuries of breeding, blended many races into one. According to my father, we are similar to the people who populated this land one thousand years ago. Even our way of living and customs have more in common with those people than with our amalgam
of more recent ancestors.
As a child, listening to my father’s ramblings, it all sounded like fairy tales, that for a brief time, mankind could do things that sounded like magic, that the world was larger, that people looked different than they do now. And then I had a son with eyes like the ocean, and I understood that everything my father had told me as a child, was true. I also knew I could never discuss what I had learned. To do so would be a death sentence for both me, and for my father. Aside from the cooked squirrel, the knowledge passed from my father to me is my only offense against the law.
After passing through a sliver of forest, we give the elder’s dwelling a wide berth. I can hear the voices of women through the layers of hanging hide, no doubt chattering on about the tribe’s latest drama, which they most likely conjured in the first place. Our path takes us uphill toward a natural, rocky clearing, where my father dwells like some kind of wild recluse.
After hustling us through the village mostly unseen, Grace says, “I didn’t expect you to return so soon.”
“Soon? My watch doesn’t end for another month. I’ll be leaving in the morning.”
She pauses long enough to furrow her brow in my direction, then she’s moving again. “The runners didn’t find you?”
“Runners?”
“Your father sent out four. Two days ago.”
Runners are most often young men training to be guards, soldiers, hunters, and trackers. They carry messages between tribes, and on occasion, to deployed tribe members. But never to a shepherd. That four of them had been sent to find me reveals my father’s enduring influence, and the severity of whatever I’ve been summoned for.
“Is it Father? Is he—”
“Jesse is still a cranky, old bastard.” She spoke the words with a smile. My father was required to relinquish the position of elder at the age of sixty-five, an arbitrary number he claimed harkened back to a day when men and women of that age were expected to do little or nothing for the rest of their lives. Now eighty, my father has surpassed the normal life expectancy of an elder by ten years, and that of the common man by thirty.
Grace pauses again, her smile melting into a frown. “It’s about your son.”
Your son.
As dear as I might be to my father, and to Grace, neither of them accepted Salem, even before his betrayal. He was too smart, too curious, and too impetuous for a young man whose station in life will never change, partially because of his mother, but mostly because he is a dissident. He is what’s known as a Modernist, obsessed with the ancient ways, technology, and what lies beyond the Divide. Discussing such things is forbidden, the punishment for which is lashings. Actively pursuing technology, which could announce our presence to the world beyond the Divide, is punishable by death, often in brutal and very public ways.
Salem and two of his friends were caught discussing an ocean voyage and were beaten for it—by Micha himself. When they recovered, all three boys disappeared. For a time, I believed Salem dead, and then I learned his fate was worse than death. He had sought out and fallen in with Plistim, the Modernist leader and former elder of Aroostook. It is a wild, untamed place far in the north, more than two hundred miles from the Divide, where it is rumored that meat is cooked and homes are constructed as permanent structures.
If Salem returns he will be tortured for information, and then killed.
If he is caught with Plistim, he will suffer the same fate.
At the age of sixteen, my son’s life will, like most wild creatures in the forest, end in violence.
It is not the fate any mother wishes for her child.
And yet, I respect his conviction. But respect doesn’t change the law.
Freedom is death.
“What about him?” I ask.
“Best if your father tells you,” Grace says, failing in her attempt to hide the despair in her eyes.
I dig my feet in, the same feet that stood against a mountain lion, and Grace jerks to a stop. She turns to face me, wilting some under the weight of the questions I might ask. So I’m merciful and limit myself to a single query. “Is he alive?”
“He is,” she says. “For now.”
4
The hairs on the back of my neck rise as I clear the forest and hike up the open hillside, limping through knee high grass. Eyes straight ahead, my view is composed of large granite stones, a small, almost frail looking hut, and a very blue, cloudless sky. Insects buzz in the warm sun. Sweet pollen from blooming flowers tickles my nose. Straight ahead, the day is magic.
But behind me…
Curiosity digs its relentless talons into my head, pulling me around to look, but I resist.
“You should look,” Grace says. “We all need a reminder sometime.”
Her prodding is all it takes for curiosity to win. I turn and feel the deep sense of dread that is instilled in us as children. The Divide is just three miles away. It’s invisible from the forest below, but from atop Father’s hill, it is in clear view. No one knows exactly how deep the gorge is—it has never been explored, and even walking to its precipice is forbidden. The tree line ends several hundred feet from the edge, the land there mysteriously barren. Venturing beyond the trees is against the Prime Law. I’ve only been to the forest’s edge once, a year ago, while redirecting the herd. Three of the deer ventured into that barren, craggy land. None of them returned.
The far side of the Divide is visible here, but diluted by a permanent haze rising up from below. The Divide is an estimated three miles across at its narrowest point, and at its widest…no one knows. What we do know is that it keeps us safe, and alive, and is impossible to cross—for us, and for the Golyat.
I’ve never seen the Golyat. No one has. But we know it exists, and not just because the Prime Law says so. On rare occasions, the setting sun projects the monster’s silhouette into the fog rising from the Divide, warbling as it stalks the lands beyond the horizon. With such a clear view of the horizon and the Divide from here, I imagine my father has seen it more than a few times since his hut has been located atop this hill.
The Golyat is our enemy. The Divide protects us from it, not because its vastness is insurmountable, but because it keeps us hidden. If the Golyat knew we were here, it would find a way across.
So says the Prime Law.
And my father.
Morbid curiosity satiated, I turn and find my father standing before his hut, body curved forward, twin canes bearing the burden of keeping him upright. His eyes linger on the view, and then turn toward me, his gray hair and beard fluttering in the wind.
He stands upright for a moment, arms open at my approach. And then I am within his embrace. “My daughter returns once more.”
“And I will return until one of us is dead.”
He leans back, smiling. The exchange has been our routine since my first solo venture into the forest and I returned alive. The first time he spoke those words, there were tears in his eyes—not everyone returns from the forest—but his confidence has grown over the years, and worry became pride.
He looks me over, eyes lingering on the wounds that are bleeding through my crude bandages. His confidence wavers some, but the smile remains. “There was a time when I was sure I would go first, but…”
“You’ll still croak first, old man,” Grace says, swatting his shoulder. “She’s tougher than all the men of Essex.” Her eyes widen. “Just…don’t tell anyone I said so.”
“Strength means little without the wisdom to guide it,” he says, and the joy of my return drains away. He turns to enter his small dwelling, but I stop him with a question.
“What of my son?”
My father pauses, his weight bearing down on the canes. His lips crack open and a stillborn word hisses from between them. Then he shoves the skin hanging over the entrance aside and steps inside the hut. I glance at Grace, who looks sympathetic, but I’m not sure for whom.
“He has trouble standing for long,” she says, motioning me to follow.
Wi
th a sigh, I enter the skin-wrapped hut. It smells of pipe smoke, animal hide, and the herbs that hang from the walls in bundles. The domed ceiling is open, allowing a cone of light to glow on the deer-skin floor. The space is tight, but dry and cozy in a way that reminds me I’m exhausted.
When my father lowers himself to his mat with a groan, crosses his legs, and motions for me to join him, I’m transported through time. A child again, ready to hear another of my father’s stories, I sit. But the illusion lasts only a moment.
Despite his age, my father picks up his already packed pipe and strikes a flint to the dry leaves. Such is his skill that a single hot ember the size of a sand granule is enough for him to get the contents burning. He breathes in deep, holds, and then turns his head to the ceiling exhaling toward the opening.
“That’s going to get you killed,” I warn. Like fires, smoking during the summer months is forbidden, especially something as fragrant as Mary’s Leaf.
He chuckles. “So few are my visitors that I would be forgotten during the next migration if Grace did not remind them I still lived. And there has never been an elder who carries the weight of all human knowledge, that was not, on occasion, soothed by the pipe.” He smiles at Grace. “Or by a strong woman.”
Grace bows her thanks at the compliment and then crouches beside me, opening a small medical chest with bandages, a sewing kit, tinctures, and oils. “You know how this goes, and I know you can handle the pain. So pretend I’m not here and get down to the business at hand.”
We sit in silence, him puffing, me fuming, Grace dabbing, wiping, and sewing. But my father is a man who cannot be rushed. His words are well thought out and concise. When he speaks, there will be no mystery in his message, and no more efficient way to communicate the facts.
I wince as Grace tugs the thread through my thigh, closing up the puncture wound she’s already disinfected with alcohol. The pain is nearly enough to erase the rest of my patience, but interrupting my father’s train of thought would mean starting the process over again.
The Divide Page 2