Revenge of the Zeds

by Stewart Ross

  The speed of Giv’s development surprised everyone, including himself. His skill in mimicking the sound of Timur’s voice was matched by an extraordinary ability to use his hero’s vocabulary. Moreover, he continued to believe the Over-Malik was speaking through him, that his words really were Timur’s and that he, the humble Captain Giv, was merely a mouthpiece. This gave his pronouncements real authenticity. Noticing this early on, Jinsha had used it when planning the recruitment of Malik Ogg. She knew of Ogg’s obsession with women, and added the temptation of naked women to honey the trap. She did not see the danger of making Ogg a promise they had no intention of keeping.

  Giv kept up his performance the next morning when he marched boldly into the Gurkov camp as an emissary from Over-Malik Timur. Ogg, still burning with memories of the previous night, received him at once and agreed to join the Grozny–Kogon coalition under Timur’s generalship. An assault on a Constant community was just the sort of thing he enjoyed. He wasn’t entirely sure what the Soterion was – nor was Giv – but the idea of defying the Death Month was certainly appealing.

  Throughout the discussions, Giv trod carefully around the subject of Xsani. He mentioned her name, calling her Timur’s ‘officer’. But knowing Ogg needed educating in the new ways, as he himself had been, he avoided the word ‘Malika’ and reference to the gender of the Kogon and their leader. This was just as well. As the negotiations were drawing to a close Ogg asked about the slaves he had been promised. Feigning ignorance, Giv asked what he meant.

  “In the night,” drooled Ogg, “Timur showed me two slaves with thighs like gold and –”

  “Ah!” interrupted Giv. “Yes, mighty Timur has a whole tribe of slaves like that, all unused and all for Ogg.”

  The Malik grinned and rubbed himself in a primitive fashion. “Where are they?”

  “Waiting with Mali – er, with Officer Xsani. The sooner we get there, the sooner they will be yours, great Ogg.”

  The promise of giving Ogg female slaves annoyed Jinsha and Yalisha; but since the original idea had been theirs, they went along with it. They were delighted with the rest of Giv’s bargaining. Like Teach, they wondered how different he might be had he not been born a Grozny.

  The journey back to Filna passed without incident. On arrival, the Gurkov were settled some distance from the town and from the Grozny. Ogg stayed with his men until nightfall when Giv, guided by the calls of the Eyes, led him to the smoke-filled sty. After the leaves had had their effect, he was introduced to the Timur totem in much the same way as Giv and Jamshid. The ceremony differed only in three small but important details. Xsani, Sakamir and the two Zektivs masked their faces and wore shapeless clothing, the word ‘Malika’ was omitted and, on Jinsha’s recommendation, Giv spoke the words of the totem. The show left Ogg wedded to the coalition, besotted with the Over-Malik and in awe of his mysterious officer, Xsani.

  Nevertheless, he was a man of very basic instincts. A fuzzy head, mysterious rituals and moonlight were all very well, but they were only part of the reason why he had brought the Gurkov to the coalition. The vision of the naked slaves still haunted him. Timur had promised them to him and he wanted them. Right now. So, when after two days’ camp near Filna they still had not appeared, he grew restless. Someone was thwarting the will of the Over-Malik, he decided. But who? The obvious people to ask were his new allies, the Grozny.

  The fire in the Alone brought Yash hurrying up the terraces to see what was going on. When Sammy explained to him, he glared angrily at the blaze for a while before confronting Cyrus. “Suppose you think you can do that sort of thing now, eh?”

  Cyrus was too exhausted to take in what he meant. “Sorry, Yash – what sort of thing?”

  “Setting fire to Alban property without my permission.”

  “Oh that! The hut was doing more harm than good – and with luck it won’t be needed any more.”

  Yash snorted in frustration. “Listen, Cyrus. You tricked your way out of trouble that time, didn’t you? I’m not stupid, you know: you got Sammy to set up that little test which you knew you’d pass. And it’s made you a bit of a hero. Clap, clap!”

  His eyes narrowed and, staring straight at Cyrus, he continued, “But I warn you, it’s the last time you make a fool of me. Got it?”

  “Come on Yash, you’ve got it all wrong,” began Cyrus. “Sammy and I didn’t set up anything –”

  “And you expect me to believe that? Huh! Just watch it, ok? Next time my authority’s challenged I won’t be so understanding.” So saying, he turned and strode off into the darkness.

  Cyrus shrugged and joined Sammy and Miouda as they returned to the settlement. Before going to his dormitory, he called in at the Ghasar to think over what had happened. The building’s interior was dark and still. Groping his way over to his customary chair, he sat wearily down and let the evocative smell of books wash around him. It reminded him of the moment he had opened the Soterion door and for the first time encountered the magical aroma of leather, ink, glue and paper. He thought of it as the ‘scent of learning’. Sometimes he was content simply to bury his nose in a book rather than read it. He wondered whether the Long Dead had ever done the same. Perhaps, because books were so common then, they had simply taken them for granted?

  His mind turned to Jalus and the information in First Aid and Basic Medicine. Wasn’t it strange how black marks on a white page – ‘squiggles’ Yash had dismissed them as – had saved a child’s life? How clever it was to think of making words into shapes so others, at different times and in different places, could understand them! How many people’s ideas and dreams and reasonings were stored in the volumes stacked around him? It was beyond his conception. And Yash had talked so casually of carting them all back into the vault.

  Cyrus lay back in his chair, yawned and closed his eyes. Why couldn’t the Emir see what a tragic waste it would be to lock the books up again? He had no imagination, that was his problem. He was also a fool. When the books were returned to the vault, only the person with the key would be able to get at them… And that, of course, was Yash…

  In his dream, Yash and Timur were coming out of the Ghasar with armfuls of books. Cyrus was down the well in Lion Square, shouting at them to stop what they were doing. “Leave them!” he cried, his words echoing round the shaft without ever reaching the top. Bahm’s laughing face blotted out the sky above and he threw down a round and heavy object that struck Cyrus on the shoulder. He looked into the water where it had fallen to see Timur’s face staring up at him. Now he was climbing out. In the thronging square, mocking Zeds had replaced the Albans, and Roxanne and Miouda were being paraded before him, both cruelly bound in chains.

  He was running through crowds of Zeds who chanted something incomprehensible about Timur’s head. They clawed at him as he fought his way along the path in a desperate effort to reach the Soterion. Yash and Sakamir, with oversized and bloody Z tattoos branded into their foreheads, were guarding the steel door. “It’s ours!” they taunted. “All ours!” He tried to get at them, but the Zeds pulled him back, tearing his clothes with nails like talons.

  “It’s not yours!” he shouted. “Not yours! Not yours!”

  He woke with a start in the darkened Ghasar. It was only a dream, thank goodness, a fantasy like in The Odyssey where men were turned into pigs. Things like that just don’t happen, he told himself. Sakamir and Yash were Constants – they had been raised as Constants and thought like Constants. It would be inconceivable for such people to have anything to do with Zed barbarians…

  Curling up in his chair, he decided not to return to the dormitory but to spend the night where he was. The place inspired him, gave him strength to continue. He had already shown how the knowledge of the Long Dead could improve the daily lives of all Constants. It was his duty to carry on.

  An opportunity came the next day, when one of the four Konnels responsible for Alban children under the age of eight approached him and asked whether the cure that had worked on Jalus woul
d work on others. Of course, he replied – and before long he found himself instructing those who ran the nursery in the basic principles of avoiding and treating diarrhoea. In the afternoon, he began going through first aid with his students. The idea was to make them capable of doing what he had done with Sammy and Miouda. The entire class would become healers of the sick.

  Cyrus had a new status, too. When he first arrived in Alba, he was seen as an exotic Outsider, a good-looking and brave man who had helped Roxanne open the Soterion. This position was then undermined by Yash’s hostility and Bahm’s criticisms. The burly conservative blamed Cyrus for upsetting the regular pattern of their lives, and scorned the quest for the Salvation Project because it threatened to replace the quick, clean and certain Death Month with a protracted, slow and uncertain end.

  The Jalus incident had not just restored Cyrus’ prestige, it had increased it considerably. The entire community was moved by the recovery of a child whom they had believed to be dying. Slowly, as more people were healed of their illnesses and injuries, death came to be seen as something to be fought against. And Cyrus, the inspiration behind the reform, was hailed as a hero. He was almost what the Long Dead would have called a prophet. His judgement was asked on all kinds of matters, such as whether he thought so-and-so would make a good copemate. The five boys born since his arrival were all named Cyrus.

  Bahm, always straightforward and honest, went along with the new thinking. “I still don’t like the idea of living on and on until I’m a rotting bag of loony bones,” he confessed when Sammy had told him what life was like before the Great Death. “But I suppose a fair bit of that Soterion stuff is pretty useful.” He had a special interest in firing pottery in a charcoal kiln.

  Only Yash resisted the general trend. The more praise was heaped on Cyrus, the less civil the Emir was towards him. As the days passed, he became increasingly tetchy about Sakamir’s absence, too. Even his military skills, previously second to none, began to falter. He reduced the number of lookouts on the walls and turned down requests for patrols. “We’re quite safe enough,” he retorted on one occasion, “unless Cyrus goes bringing in some Z-marked woman again.” He tried to cover the insensitive remark with a laugh, but no one was taken in. Roxanne’s star had risen alongside Cyrus’: to mock someone who had sacrificed her life for the Constant cause was in very poor taste.

  “He’s just plain jealous of you,” Bahm declared one day. “And I don’t like it.”

  “Maybe,” replied Cyrus. “But I can understand how he feels. To be honest, his decision-making’s a greater worry.”

  “Aye,” Bahm agreed. “You know, only yesterday I was certain I’d seen summat moving out beyond the Patrol Gate. It weren’t a wolf and it weren’t so small as a rabbit. Hiding in the trees, it was. Watching. It were a Zed, as sure as my name’s Bahm – but the Emir said no patrol was going out, so that was it.”

  “Yes, it’s infuriating. But we’ve got to be so careful, Bahm. Yash was chosen by the people. If we undermine that principle, everything falls apart.”

  Bahm frowned. “Suppose so. But it makes me very uncomfortable, Cyrus.”

  Me too, thought Cyrus. It was almost as if Yash was weakening Alba’s defences deliberately. But that was impossible, wasn’t it? Things like that happened only in nightmares.

  Cyrus spent his mornings working on ways to improve Alban life, and his afternoons reading and teaching. He had never been so busy. With Bahm and Sammy he was experimenting with metal smelting, building a water mill to grind corn, and setting up two furnaces for firing pottery. Other members of his class, headed by the fifteen- and sixteen-year-old ‘seniors’, learned about candles and lamps lit by vegetable oils. Their first attempts resulted in more burned fingers than light. In time, when they had mastered how to make a wick, they provided all the sleeping quarters with an emergency night light. Miouda’s personal triumph – a sundial that stood beside the well – came from her study of how the Long Dead divided a day into hours and minutes. She also explained the term ‘Death Month’ by discovering that ‘month’ was the Long Dead term for what the Constants knew as a ‘moon’.

  The afternoon school was no longer a matter of Cyrus standing and dictating. His role had developed into that of principal teacher among several. Four more young Albans had joined Jalus, Poso and the other beginners. Two seniors took it in turns to instruct them in reading and writing. Miouda and the fourth senior worked with the middle group. All the older students, including Sammy and Yash, studied on their own. At the end of the day, they met together to share ideas and discuss what they had learned.

  An individual was invited to lead the daily discussion – ‘seminar’, Cyrus called it. With Yash the talk was nearly always about the Salvation Project or the Long Dead’s weapons. What fools their ancestors were to have destroyed all firearms as they were dying out, he declared. He had read of a device called a ‘machine gun’ and dreamed of positioning one on the walls of Alba. The only other subject he raised was a drink he had researched called ‘wine’. He wasn’t yet sure of the details, but the Long Dead seemed to have great fun with it. When he had time, he announced, he’d do further research.

  Cyrus urged him to be careful. “I’ve read about this wine stuff, too,” he explained. “It changed people’s minds. Made them happy, yes, but also made them sad – and violent sometimes. Probably best to leave it for the moment, Yash.”

  “Thank you for your wise advice, Mister Scholar,” drawled the Emir in a voice that dripped with sarcasm. “But with your permission, I’ll decide for myself what I do.”

  Cyrus exchanged glances with Miouda but said nothing.

  Sammy’s topic was based on his upbringing with the Children of Gova. Their settlement was protected by a very powerful electric fence. Roxanne, who had come across electricity in the IKEA catalogue, one of the three books she had read, was the first to understand the force behind the fence. But she had not seen the relationship between the electric current and the settlement’s huge solar panels. It needed Sammy’s patient research to figure this out.

  “Now, this is how I see it,” he told the seminar on one occasion. “This stuff ‘electricity’ is a sort of power made of ‘particles’. I looked that word up but it didn’t help, so let’s forget it.

  “Anyway, electricity goes through metal wires like water through a pipe. It runs along really, really quick. And you can’t see it, which makes it pretty weird stuff. When it gets to the end, it can stop or do something.”

  “Eh? ‘Do something’ – what’s that mean?” asked the man on Miouda’s right.

  Sammy thought for a moment. “Well, it’s a sort of force, right? Like the wind. The Long Dead got it doing loads of things, like powering lights and making cars go.”

  “Cars?”

  “Sorry. You’ve not been far out of Alba so you’ve never seen one of them rusty things with wheels, have you?” The young man shook his head. “Cars is what the Long Dead travelled in. I’ll show you a picture of one after this.”

  “Thanks.”

  Sammy resumed his presentation. “What I’m really interested in is making electricity. They did it in the Gova place I come from with a whopping great panel. Black, it was, and made of a sort of glass.

  “On our way here,” he went on, waving his hands about in excitement, “we saw smaller panels like that on the roofs of Long Dead houses. They were mostly all covered by ivy and other stuff, but if we went out and got one, and brought it back here, I reckon –”

  “No!” It was Yash. Standing up and pointing at Sammy, he went on angrily, “Don’t you understand? I’m the Emir of Alba and I decide whether a patrol goes out or not. You and Cyrus come in here and think you can take over the place. Well, you can’t!”

  With that, he left the building and the seminar came to an early close.

  After the others had gone, Cyrus and Miouda were left alone with their books. They often sat like this, quietly reading together until it was too dark to continue. Their f
riendship was deeper, more relaxed since the evening, several days previous, when they had drawn back the invisible curtain hanging between them.

  “Miouda?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s about Roxanne…”

  “I wondered when you’d mention it, Cyrus.” She paused. “I know she was exceptional, a remarkable person in every way. And I’m not like her. I couldn’t be even if I tried – and I’m not sure I’d want to be. Everyone’s different. But I’m not a child and I’m not jealous.” She smiled. “And it doesn’t stop me liking you.”

  “Nor me you, Miouda. A lot. And I’m so glad you understand. But you have someone…”

  “Had.”

  “Ah! I hoped so.”

  Miouda made rapid progress in her literacy and they had got into the habit of reading the same book, one after the other, then talking about it. Frequently it was not the stories or the information they discussed, but the meaning of individual words. So many were alien to them because the concepts they represented had been lost.

  In the years immediately after the Great Death, while the Constant settlements were fighting off Zed attacks almost daily, there was no place for weakness or sentimentality. Survival was everything. At this time, duty, courage, obedience and constancy were paramount: the community came before the individual and the leader before all. In a number of settlements, Alba included, words considered ‘weak’ and ‘selfish’ were frowned on and gradually dropped out of use. It was these, often the words of poetry and emotion, that fell like rain onto the thirsty soil of the couple’s imagination.

  On the evening that Yash had stormed out of the seminar, they had been reading for a while when Cyrus looked up from his book and asked, “What’s the difference between ‘ignorant’ and ‘innocent’?”

  Miouda shrugged. “Have you tried the dictionary?”

  “No. I thought you might know.”

  “Well, ‘ignorant’ is not knowing something. But I haven’t a clue what ‘innocent’ means. Go on, look it up.”