If I had stayed near Aro, if I had stayed near Melory, I would have found a way to end it. I could not have borne knowing she was right there and would condemn me to full Severance if she so much as saw me again. And so I left.
There were other communities out there. I would just have to find my way to one. They would know me as outcast and be no friends of mine, but at least I would be driven away by strangers rather than by former friends.
Except I had no way of finding those paths. I had never learned woodcraft from my mother. I just blundered through the trees like a blind man, missing every clue. Strange to say, it was Kalton who saved me. Kalton, my childhood friend who had not said a word to me, or even looked straight at me, since the accident. Kalton, who had been chosen for a fate oddly comparable to mine.
A day after resolving to leave, I saw people moving through the woods. I dropped to the ground in a flash of fear, convinced they were hunting me. Why else would such a large party be on the move, after all? There were far too many of them to be hunters and every decent-sized animal around would be making itself scarce, even the Arraclids.
I hid myself in the trees and watched, seeing that this was a party well-provisioned, at least twenty people on the move, some armed to ward off beasts but others carrying drums and pipes, and a couple lugging along a heavy box between them, and in the middle was Kalton, not carrying anything or doing any work, but clearly the point of this entire venture. He looked nervous and a bit afraid. Just like me, he was only sixteen years as we counted ages in Aro, meaning that many short winters or four long ones if your village counts those instead.
When I saw him just shambling along in the middle of them, a bit like a hero and a bit like a prisoner, I understood. Kalton was going to be a gift to the women of some other village. There must have been a traveller from somewhere where the Lawgiver had told them they needed fresh blood, and Kalton had been chosen. He was going to end up just as cut away from Aro as I ever was, though in a far more comfortable way. All the girls of wherever he went would be eyeing him up the moment he arrived, and he’d probably not have to do a day’s work for the next three years other than lie on his back. To some that might be a dream, but Kalton just looked scared and miserable because, like all of us, he’d only known Aro.
I couldn’t find much sympathy for him in my heart, but I could follow where they led. People didn’t travel much, around Aro. We were at the edge of the world, right up where the wilderness proper took up, where nobody lived at all. After loading me with so much, the world had finally given me a sliver of luck to clutch at.
I came so close to showing myself to them on the road. I would crouch at the very edge of their firelight, gripping my shrunken stomach and listening to familiar voices talk about nothing very much. How bad would it be if I just walked from the night like a ghost and took my place before the blaze, warming my hands, smiling like people smiled at each other? Except they might kill me like they’d kill a beast that, impossibly, tried the same trick. Or they would just hurt me and drive me off, more likely, which would be worse: a continuation of my life but with more pain. But most certainly they would turn away from me, even if nobody so much as raised a fist. I had to stop yearning for the things I couldn’t have.
And I had to eat, as well. I spent half the night foraging for some kind of tubers or berries or flesh I hadn’t eaten, novel enough to fool my stomach for a night, maybe two, before that particular brand of poison built up inside me and made me sick. Perhaps you’re tired of my hunger now. Not as tired as I was, but when you’re starving, that starvation sets up a big camp right there at the front of your mind and won’t let you forget. It’s not some pastime you can put down and take up again later when you’re at liberty to do so. It’s your life until it kills you.
I almost braved their sentries and their fire just to go through their bags for bread. The hard, burnt loaves Melory had got from the baker were golden in my memories. A few days later, they actually threw away some old crusts gone too stale for their comfortable, well-fed tastes, and I gnawed them until my gums bled and felt myself the luckiest man in the world.
The place they were going was called Cro, so I gathered from their fireside talk. I’d heard the name before, as one of Aro’s neighbours, but people back home weren’t curious, for what would other places have that we didn’t? Cro, when we came in sight of it, was much the same as my home, though maybe twice the size. Its tree grew in the midst of good flat farming land and the forest had long since been cut far back. The houses were spaced wider apart and some past artist had put up a ring of stones, man-high, to mark their gathering grounds. They grew flowers on either side of their doors, too, which I’d never seen before. These were a bright orange with green veins, hand-sized petals strung in spiralling trails along tendrils that twitched sluggishly when touched. They didn’t do anything, as far as I ever knew. They were just something people in Cro did, to make their homes brighter.
The deputation from Aro was at Cro five days. They were met by a great big gathering of people come to look Kalton over, and their own doctor came out to examine him and make sure he was fit and well. She was Corto-old but she still seemed sharp, and she prodded him hard enough to make him yelp, which I meanly enjoyed. I had done a lot of thinking about our respective exiles, and I didn’t reckon he was owed any sympathy from me.
After that, they had a bit of a festival to welcome Kalton to his new home, and there were certainly plenty of women there who had their eye on that fresh blood. Nobody ever knows their own father, not for sure, but there would be plenty of babies in a year’s time who would grow up to look like Kalton.
And then the rest of them left, rested and reprovisioned and heading back to Aro, a place Kalton and I would likely never see again. My childhood friend had settled in, by then, moving in with a couple of young women and their two-year-old child but spending plenty of nights away with other new friends. I watched the other Aro folk head back down the road with the pride of a job well done, cracking jokes about the sort of life Kalton would be enjoying. I let them go, knowing that I was finally cutting my old life away and accepting, for then and forever, that I was an outcast.
Back when I was young, I remember a couple of times when outcasts had been near the village, once a lone woman and once a band of three or so starving wretches. Everyone had been on alert, and we kids had told each other that the one thing that wouldn’t make outcasts sick and die was human flesh. It had been halfway between a silly game and a real danger. I remember hunters going off to drive them away, though I couldn’t tell you what had actually gone on, just that soon enough nobody was talking about it anymore. I never saw them myself, though I think Ma went with some of the hunting parties. Outcasts were just like dangerous animals, except they looked like people and that made them horrible.
They didn’t know my history in Cro but they would know me for what I was the moment they looked at me. After all, even the Arraclids had turned away from me. But what were my options, precisely? Walk into the wilderness and die a famished death? No, but neither would I walk onto the spears of the Cro folk or expose my body to their sling stones.
I became a thief. It was what Sethr had been before they Severed him, and so I felt I was somehow earning my exile after the fact. I crept into Cro every three nights or so and I took what I could. I went to the baker’s and I stole bread, the more burned the better. I stole clothes to keep off the rain and hold the cold at bay. I reached through windows and lifted shoes that looked right to fit my feet. I even stole their flowers because for one night I was able to get a little sustenance from them, before they started to turn my stomach like everything else.
The people of Cro worked out quick enough what was going on. After my fourth raid, they had guards out, but it was a big place and my eyes had got used to the dark by then. I would make a commotion near their livestock to draw them away and then run off to the other end of the village to steal everything I could. I took things I didn’t need,
food I wouldn’t eat. I was in a frenzy of adrenaline and self-loathing and I hated them for all the things I couldn’t enjoy.
And then their Lawgiver must have made a pronouncement, because they started going out and hunting me, and although I’d had to learn some woodcraft the hard way, their hunters were always going to be better at it.
I ran—I could run by then, better fed and better shod than I had been for a long time. For a whole day they chased me, and I didn’t make it easy for them. I wasn’t some beast to just charge headlong away from their shouts and torches and sticks beating against the branches. I doubled back, I hid, I led them towards where real predators laired. I didn’t recognise myself in that mad pursuit. I made them my enemies in my head, as though they had wronged me. I took up a sharp branch and resolved that I would do mischief to any of them to fall within my power. I had been helpless for so long, ever since stupid Doctor Corto had left his stupid Severance mixture bubbling away untended. I was going to take back control, in blood if I had to.
And then I had my chance, because one of their hunters ended up going down a slope badly and twisting her knee against a tree. She’d been ahead or away from the others, and when she called out for aid, I was the first one who heard. I remember very clearly: me cresting the rise, looking down on her, my jagged branch in hand. Her round face, so much white around her eyes as she stared. She had broken her spear when she fell, and the end she thrust towards me was little more than a knife.
I wanted to make her scared, to threaten her or make a terrifying face or brandish my stick, but she was already plenty scared without me doing anything. The mere fact of me was terrifying, like a corpse come to life or something met in a bad dream.
Any desire to hurt her, or anyone, died in that moment, and instead I just sat down and started crying. I felt empty inside, not for food but because this was the first human being I had come face-to-face with in ages and no matter how close I came, even onto the end of her half spear, there would still be an insuperable distance between us.
“What do you want?” she demanded, and I started. I had almost forgotten what it was like to be talked to. I had to reach deep inside myself to find words.
“I’ll go,” I told her. “But tell me where I can go. Some other village. Just give me somewhere to head for.” All that mischief I had wanted to make, all the vengeful glee at taking away the trappings of their comfortable lives, it left me all at once and I was just exhausted, tired of being hunted, tired of being hated.
She stared at me for a long time, as though trying to see me differently, like a person. Like a boy scarcely sixteen, painfully gaunt with his face streaked with dirt and tears.
“If you go the way the sun rises, there’s Divo,” she told me. “The way the Haffet flowers grow. Divo’s bigger than we are. They’ll have more for you.” And that was a lie, but she was desperate.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I just . . . I’m so hungry. It’s hard. It’s too hard.” I could hear others from the hunting party calling now. I couldn’t just sit here and talk, but the words kept tumbling out of me as though trying to escape. I could see her frowning and squinting like someone trying to bring my predicament into focus. She wanted to understand what I meant, what it was to be me, but she couldn’t. She would have an easier time understanding an Arraclid or a Sherb.
And so I accepted that I had outstayed my welcome at Cro and moved on to Divo, which in fact was smaller and harder to get at, nestled in between hills overgrown with a thorny vine I saw nowhere else. I had lean pickings there but the Divo folk had a similar problem, short of good grazing and farming land. They brewed various goods out of a score of plants, some strange, others familiar but put to novel uses. These they traded for surplus from Cro and a half dozen other communities, and in this way I drifted from place to place, taking what I could, moving on when my feeble depredations were noticed. It kept me alive, but more than that it gave me a purpose and a feeling that I had some control over my life. Better a thief than a corpse, yes, but better a thief than a beggar as well. The world finds it harder to say no to a thief.
So it went until I came to Orovo, which was the largest place I’ve ever seen, surely five times the size of Cro, which itself was bigger than ever Aro was. And at Orovo, my life would change again, though I won’t say I gained any more control over it. Orovo was a place of strange ideas, because it was where Iblis lived.
V.
OROVO MIGHT COVER FIVE times the area of Cro, but it crammed even more people into that area than you’d think. They’d built houses in between their houses, and some of the newest buildings—some still being completed—were very different to anything I’d seen before. I didn’t know it, but they were different to anything there had been before. They were houses built on top of houses, so that the people who lived in the top part went up a ramp or steps to get to their door, and the people who lived below must have heard them clumping about on the ceiling every night and morning. It was all to claw more space without spreading Orovo’s boundaries even further, and even then it was too little, too late. Orovo folk just liked having kids, I think, and so had their Ma’s, and so had theirs before them. There were more people in Orovo than they could easily feed or house or find a use for. The woods had been cut back all around the town for fields, and beyond that they had been hunted until nothing bigger than a Hegelworm was left.
Now normally this isn’t a thing that happens, although I had never asked myself why. Villages only grow slowly, enough that the farming and the hunting could keep up with demands. You almost never see a place like Orovo where too many kids a generation ago means way too many today, and most of them having kids themselves. At the time I couldn’t even understand that something had gone wrong, but now I reckon that, a generation back, something got botched. Maybe they had an Architect who went odd like our Doctor Corto, or more likely there was a problem with the hive itself, that meant it missed what was happening or wasn’t able to correct folk, but by the time things straightened themselves out, the place was too big, the people too many, for the usual controls to get things back in hand. Or that’s what I think now, knowing what I do.
But they were in dire straits right then, in need of some sideways thinking—that was Iblis’s term for it. And I still don’t know whether Iblis herself was born, pure good fortune giving rise to someone who could think in just the right way, or whether the tree and the hive at Orovo had somehow made her. It was enough that the Electors, when they had gone hunting a new candidate for Architect, had found her, and known she was what the village needed.
Iblis was a tall woman with a high forehead that was knuckled out across most of its breadth by the whorls and knots of the ghost’s dwelling. She still had both her eyes, but the left one didn’t focus and roamed about independently of its neighbour. Her ghost was the Architect, who has responsibility for long-term planning of the community, making pronouncements on where to build, where to farm, that sort of thing. Architects aren’t like doctors and lawgivers, who get called on every day for this or that. They get to live most of their lives in peace, and maybe some of them don’t get called on for whole years at a time. Iblis wasn’t one of the lucky, lazy ones, though. I never knew anyone who worked harder. I don’t think she ever slept.
Most of what struck me about Orovo was due to her innovation—the way the buildings were packed in, the new tall houses, all of it stopgap measures because a whole load of people had pretty much been born on the streets. None of it would feed all the mouths, though, and so Iblis’s ghost had given her a new directive that she was trying to make happen right about when I saw her community.
When I came to it, though, none of it this was known to me and I had no idea who she was. I was just there to skulk and steal, as I had in a half dozen villages before. Orovo looked a good prospect because it was so big, and because the houses were packed into a close maze where I reckoned I could lose anyone chasing me. I couldn’t look over the place from the trees, like I’d bee
n used to doing, but there was so much farmland that I could creep in as dusk drew on, padding barefoot down the irrigation channels and keeping out of sight. As I reached the first houses, I began to feel the sheer number of people all around. Even though it was getting dark I could hear voices from all directions, feet, doors, querns grinding grain, the whistles and heckles of livestock being driven to slaughter. Orovo never truly went to sleep.
But then I smelled something that seemed to run right up my guts like a knife blade. I had no idea what it was, but it smelled like food, and nothing had smelled like that to me for years. Everything smelled wrong, since the accident. Food I’d loved turned my stomach, and even the bread I had lived on had the scent and savour of dust. This, though! This filled my mouth with saliva and my stomach with craving. My mind barely had a say in how I reacted.
I changed course and tried to track down where the scent was coming from. I couldn’t have done anything else. At first I was stealthy, expecting a trap. As I got closer and my nose got a better whiff of it, I started moving faster, more and more desperate. I just knew that if I could find some of that whatever-it-was and get it into my body then surely I wouldn’t be hungry, not even a little bit. I would eat like a normal person for once, and even if it was just the once it would be worth it.
I was curving back into the outskirts of Orovo, practically running flat out now. Ahead was a fenced compound—not actually closed off, but almost, and most definitely separate from the rest of the community. The one way in and out faced away from the centre, out across the fields to the distant tree line. It was occupied by about twenty people, and there was a big cauldron there, a doctor’s cauldron of treated palewood that should have woken all manner of bad memories in me. Hunger trumped them all, though, and I just barreled into that enclosure with all caution stripped from me. If it had been a trap, I’d have been caught.
The Expert System's Brother Page 4