This brings a gasp from a few of the men. We all know why the law says mutants must be killed on sight. The men even now are wondering if they’ve been contaminated, if they will somehow shrivel and die, or turn dark-skinned and wild-minded. No outsiders of any kind can infest Southshaw. That is the reason the Scouts exist, and I have just told them I want them to go against the very thing they exist to do.
Baddock contemplates. He stays motionless for several seconds. I fight within myself to resist the temptation to add more words to what I’ve said. I have made my point, said my piece. Adding more words, I know, will make me look desperate or foolish. More words would put authority in Baddock’s hands.
After a very long pause, during which the only movement is wind in branches and the swish of a horse’s tail unseen in the trees, Baddock speaks. “We will let her live, for now. She will come with us as a prisoner. Our Semper-son has commanded, and we shall do as commanded. When we arrive in Southshaw, Semper will hear what has happened and will judge in his wisdom what shall come next.”
As he says this, he looks at each man in turn, and an unspoken command is given through his gaze. They receive his command without happiness. The bear puts away his knife and stands, dragging the horse blanket upward with the girl wrapped inside it. I hear gasping. Their weight must have shoved all the air from her lungs.
The blanket is torn away and ropes are produced, and her hands are lashed with efficient cruelty. I catch her eye and try to let her know that I am very sorry, that I’m doing everything I can. I see that she understands, is grateful for the risk I’ve taken.
Baddock grips my shoulder hard, digging his fingertips into my soft muscles down to the aching bone. As he turns to walk back to the horses, he hisses six harsh words so only I can hear: “Careful, Dane. You’re not Semper yet.”
He releases me and strides to where the two men who emerged from the forest wait. There are horses behind them in the trees. “Come! We have a long way to go before night falls. And tomorrow we must make it back to Southshaw by dinnertime, to enjoy the feast on the eve of Dane’s Wifing!”
Lupay looks stonily ahead, stiffening at the last two words. The brutes shove her forward, and I see her hands are bound before her and a long rope comes off the bindings as a lead. They mean her to walk among the horses, like a captured, wild dog. I follow Baddock, wondering if I too will walk. Though none of the men meets my stare as I watch them prepare, I can feel in their cold movement that they want blood. Not just Lupay’s. Mine.
CHAPTER 7
Baddock's men delight in dragging Lupay behind the horses. They slacken then yank the rope around her neck, making her stumble and fall into fresh piles of horse dung. When that bores them, they taunt her with grunting and lewd gestures. Although I'm seething, I have to keep it inside as I ride in comfort. They treat her like a wild animal.
Except Baddock. He sways in his saddle, keeping his eyes forward, occasionally checking the rope that tethers my horse to his. He is happy enough to let his mutts toss Lupay around like a caught squirrel. He never asks my opinion. It would be my death to speak up for her.
The sun has set behind Tall Oak Mountain, and we’ve reached the open fields of Richards Meadow. Little Leaf Lake lies to the west a mile or so, but Baddock will camp here, just off the road. We're only a few hours from the village, deep within the security of Southshaw's borders.
Suddenly he calls out, "We stop here," and veers off the road to the left. The train follows into the sparse underbrush, and as we turn I glance back. Lupay still staggers with exhaustion and agony. Her clothes are torn, and in places I can see fresh blood muddied in jagged stains.
In minutes, the horses are emptied and set to graze while the men make an efficient encampment. I barely have time to sip from the flask Baddock has given me before wood has been gathered and a tidy blaze pops up in the middle of a circle of spread bedrolls. The mood has turned from cruel torment to one of comradely fellowship among the men. Every one of them makes me sick to my stomach. The Scouts are revered as courageous protectors of Southshaw, but today I've seen their true ugliness.
I wander as if aimless and find Lupay tied to a thick tree. Her wrists are still bound, but she has been left to sit unmolested in her filth and misery.
I yearn to comfort her. That ankle... how they dragged her through such pain. That's not the Southshaw way, not the people my father leads. If he knew, he would never allow such brutality, even against a mutant. When we see him, I will convince him to set things right.
Baddock watches me. He’s looking for any excuse to turn me from cargo to captive. I hold my pack close, thinking of nighttime when the others will sleep. Then, I might be able to slip some water to Lupay. I retreat to the far side of the camp and wait while his thugs prepare a dinner of fresh deer and stale bread. When we eat, I slip some into my pockets for Lupay, later. They offer her nothing and make a point of discarding extra food in the dirt just out of her reach.
With darkness, the moon illuminates the valley with the lake’s silvery reflection, and the fire crackles angrily. Its glow gives these men a devilish look, a circle of fire demons with hairy faces and glittering eyes They are talkative and boisterous, singing songs that would never be heard in the Semper’s house. Some of them border on sacrilege and heresy. Eventually the voices descend into stories of life on the borders of the wild. I try to listen, only half hearing about giant bears killed with a single bowshot, elk brought down with a knife's slash, wildfires escaped by diving into iced-over ponds. Embellished accounts that are no less fantastic than a rabbit felled by a whishing flash of silver, a deer dropped at the water’s edge, a bear chased off with shouts and curses.
Baddock sits apart, alone in the darkness away from the ring of light. His face looks shadowed and hollow in the moon’s dim pallor, and he whittles at a thin stick the length of his arm. He does not look up as I approach. He stares hard at his stick and his large hunting knife.
“Baddock.”
“Semper-son,” he replies, and I notice his knife turns in the moonlight without striking the stick. He’s showing it off to me, a warning.
“I come unarmed, Teacher.”
The knife stops its glinting as he lowers it into the shadow of his leg. He looks up at me from where he sits on a low root, but I can’t see his face. It’s entirely in shadow, except his teeth. They glow silver-gold. “Are you sure that’s wise, Dane?” It’s almost a whisper, his voice so low it makes the hair on my arms tingle.
It’s a lesson. He’s baiting me into an answer he wants me to give, but which will be the wrong answer for the circumstance. Then he will tell me how I’ve erred, and he will teach me the proper response. But my blood slows to the sound of his too-cold voice, and something tells me this is no lesson. He is through with lessons. He is no longer a pretend adversary, benign and beneficent, ready to bestow wisdom. But I do not know what he is, or why he has changed. “But Teacher, what have I to fear?” I hold out my hands, palms up, but I don’t return his ghoulish moonlit grin.
He doesn’t answer right away. I take this to mean I’ve given a good response, one that lets him know I understand the situation. But do I, really?
“Semper-son,” Baddock replies after a short but tense pause, “You have nothing to fear here, if you be the same Dane that said farewell five days ago in Southshaw.”
“What other Dane might I have become?” I want to assess how I’m doing in his eyes, want to read his responses as I so often tried to do in the training room. Every last bit of my mind is focused on him and the moment. An energy runs through my body. Something is happening in this conversation, but I don’t know what and I don’t know why. All I know is that in the training room, when I tried to play this game to outsmart him, I always lost.
This time there is no pause. He leans forward. “A Dane that loves a mutant girl.”
His voice drips with all the poison his accusation implies. It is treason of the worst kind. By bringing her into Southshaw, I could b
e dooming the entire community, contaminating all of God’s new Eden, destroying everything that twelve generations have built and preserved since the War. The remains of humanity, the chosen survivors. Simply by touching her, I could be sentenced to Exile, which means death outside, and eternal damnation.
Behind me, the fire burns and the border men break into another song, this one with a spiritual air. It’s a song sung before bed, a Vespers, but of a different kind than I’ve heard before. Its tune lingers dark and lonely, its words forlorn. They sing of lying down in the thick forest soil and hoping to wake to a new dawn, asking God to preserve them from death or take them to Heaven. I wish they would stop.
I focus on Baddock again and straighten as I reply. “How could I love a thing so foul?” My voice whispers clear and even. “I would do the same for a mangy coyote, if it saved my life.” This part, at least, is true.
“But this is no mangy coyote.” I feel Baddock lean forward. In the darkness, he emits the bloodthirsty eagerness of a viper ready to kill, and the fire crackling behind me sounds like his rattle.
“No,” I agree. She certainly is not a mangy coyote. She is an exotic, quick-witted beauty unlike the slow, bovine Southshaw girls. But Baddock has taught me very well, and I’ve learned the politician’s art of thinking one thing while allowing my mouth to say something else. “A mangy coyote would still, through its tattered appearance, carry the nobility of being one of God’s untainted wild creatures.”
Baddock retreats, his eyes flickering black and red in the darkness as the flames behind die to embers and the song dwindles to a meager ending. My thumping heart and racing blood tell me not to let down my guard. I have seen him draw back before, only to coil and strike a moment later.
He looks back to his stick and knife, now dark and idle. With his gaze on these things in his lap, he whispers, “Even a man of great stature might find the mutant… stimulating.”
What is this? His voice has changed from sharp accusation to soft defeat. Besides my father, my uncle, and myself, there is no man of greater stature in all of Southshaw than Baddock, captain of the Scouts. Is he laying an admission at my feet? Is he throwing his soul prostate at the feet of his superior, admitting a sinful feeling, asking forgiveness? He breathes deep and sighs a long, soft breath into the cooling evening. “Even the most pious Southshawan man, when faced with the raw animal flesh and shapely woman-like figure, might be… tempted. We do come from the same ancestry, after all.” He does not look up at me.
I wait, shocked, but I know he won't say more. He has seen Lupay in the same way, understands the fire she’s set inside me. And I understand that in baring himself to the young Semper-son, he is offering me one final lesson on the eve of my ascension to manhood. The inner struggles of the important man. My father has lectured in church that feelings like this are the tests of our character, tests of our vigilance in our struggle to be free of sin. My shock dissipates into compassion. If only Baddock knew Lupay's true nature, saw past our false assumptions of her race.
I reach my hand out in the darkness, bridge the gap between us. My fingers touch his shoulder. I have crossed some threshold, pierced a barrier I did not even know existed. I think of art from the book of Truth and older scripture, of Jesus laying hands on the afflicted, and I see myself as if from the side. My body's heat pulsing from my fingertips into Baddock’s shoulder.
I whisper words I do not expect. “Forgiveness is divine, my son, and you are wise to recognize these feelings in yourself and to deny them.” My skin tingles in the moist night air, and my eyes see through all the shadows around me, and my ears hear the breath of sleeping hawks high in the mountain peaks.
Baddock raises his head and stares at me, his eyes wide and white. His gaze searches the depths of my own eyes, and I imagine what he sees there: The fire of God Himself, His benevolence, His forgiveness working through me. For a moment, I am His agent, I am a conduit of God’s love direct to the sinner in need of redemption. And I see a recognition, a wonder, a bewilderment that I’ve never seen in Baddock’s cold, calculating eyes before.
His whole body shivers, and the knife and stick fall from his hand to the mossy ground without sound. He shrinks from my touch, stands and backs away three steps, four, five. The bewilderment turns to doubt, then to outright fear. I revel in my glory, in His glory, in the light God has given me to bear, if only even for a moment. It has terrified the unterrifiable, has distraught the unquailing.
My hand is still outstretched in his direction, and I still feel the heat and light pulsing through my veins to my fingertips. Baddock stands now ten feet back and raises his own hand, but not in connection. He points his accusing finger at me. He hisses a sharp breath and quivers with fearsome rage. “You… you are bewitched.” He steps further back, and I smile at him.
Dimly, in my heart I feel a pulling apart. The heat inside me persists but is diminishing. I hold my smile to let Baddock know that I absolve him of his sinful thoughts, that I forgive him. He is a loyal servant and a man of true heart, and as such he is doing his best as one of God’s flawed creatures. I am re-opening his path to Heaven.
But he spits at my feet, confusing me. “I see what you are,” he says. “I see what you’ve become.” He straightens himself, breathes deep while flexing his chest and shoulders, bracing himself. Recovering. “I have taught you everything,” he says with a sneer on his lips. “Your act has not fooled me. I see what you are, and Darius will know the truth.”
The light flickers inside me, and I struggle to hold on to the inner heat that cools too fast.
“You think you have won, Dane. But you don’t know anything. You learned too well the art of deception, and now you deceive even yourself. It’s too bad. You might have made the best Semper ever.” He steps up to me and pushes my outstretched hand down. “You could have led our people to salvation. But that will be another’s task now.”
He snorts out a derisive laugh as the light leaves me completely. “And now I will take from you what you prize most. I will remove the temptation. When the men are all asleep, I will take the mutant myself, then I will do what you should have done.” He pushes past me, and I’m left with the silence of the forest and the empty darkness of confusion.
But deep inside, I feel a rending of my thoughts, a tearing of my heart. There was something, a thing larger than me, larger than him. It lived in me, it burned in me. Perhaps it wasn’t the touch of God? At least, not the God that is written of in Truth, not the God that gave us Laws. Not Baddock’s God. Not Darius’ God.
I look down, at my hands, at the ground. There is Baddock’s stick on the ground. But his knife is gone. He took it with him into the darkness surrounding the ring of men, now mostly asleep around the struggling embers. With a jolt, I realize what he’ll use the knife for in a very short while.
CHAPTER 8
It’s been so hard to keep myself awake, listening for the rustle of Baddock’s blanket, looking for the glint of his knife in the moonlight. The darkness presses heavy on my eyes, and the moist night air makes my cooled blood sluggish. The past two days, without sleep, with only nibbles of food—my body aches all the way through, in a depth of exhaustion I’ve never felt before.
Worst, I have had to pee for an hour, but I’ve been afraid to get up and go. I don’t want to alert Baddock I’m still awake, and I don’t want to give him an opportunity by going away from the camp. My guts hurt so bad that I actually consider just rolling onto my side and letting loose into the moss next to where I lie. Just the thought of it stretches the pain even more.
I have to grab with my hand and squeeze, hard, to cut off the flood that’s pushing to escape. I breathe in and squeeze harder, and that’s when Baddock moves. A blanket sloughed off into some dry leaves. A shadow curling straight up from the ground. A pause. The shadow twists in my direction, steel glimmers in the moonlight, and the shadow twists back and glides away.
I wait a moment, then rise and follow, slinking between slow-breathing lu
mps on the ground. Lupay was left tied up among the horses, the rope wrapped around a thick pine. Last I saw her, she sat with her back against its trunk and her legs crossed, her hands behind her.
Despite my exhaustion and pain, I am on edge. It feels no different here in the wild than in the training room. But maybe that's because it's Baddock out there, as it always has been in my lessons.
Two of the horses break their silence to stomp and swish their tails. One steps forward, then relaxes. Through the gap left where its hindquarters were, I can see Baddock's silhouette leaning over Lupay. She seems asleep. They're twenty yards away.
His knife flicks in the darkness, and my guts lurch with panic. Before my feet can move, I see Lupay slump forward, see the rope slip from around the tree. Baddock cradles her in his arms, and I hesitate.
The shadow twists and looks over its shoulder. At me. White eyes flash and a vicious grin splits the darkness as he sees my panic. The horse steps backwards, filling the gap and severing our gazes.
Thoughts pop and dash through my head like drops of oil splashed on a hot griddle. I struggle to catch them. He saw me. There was evil in his eyes, cruelty I never suspected. I must stop him. There’s a horse. She’s asleep. He has a knife, a big knife. He may be sweeping around the horses, coming for me now. She may already be dead. Probably.
My hesitation continues three, maybe four seconds before my feet move. They toss me across the twenty yards, and I reach out to smack the horse’s leg as I run by, ready to spring on Baddock. The horse lets out a startled snort as it leaps out of my path. I gather myself for a pounce, but what I see confuses me.
Baddock lies on the ground, unmoving. Lupay is gone. The rope lies on the ground next to Baddock. His knife is clutched in his hand. His face is in the dirt. She is gone. Lupay is gone.
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