by Tiffany Tsao
CHAPTER 8
A shadowy figure watched from the treetops as the settlers continued on their merry way, oblivious to the mortal peril they were in. They were a plump family—one of the fattest she had ever laid eyes on. The father’s neck was piled in folds above the fur-lined collar of his shirt, and his belly lay draped over his knees as he sat on the driver’s box, gently prodding the cattle on with his switch. The mother looked just as doughy, with billowy cheeks and puffy arms and ankles, and the four children looked even more delicious—beautiful, bouncing balls of lard. Even the bovquitoes pulling the family were fine specimens of meat, thick haunched and glossy furred with bright eyes and long, limber proboscises. And to top it all off, their wagon was laden with the finest fruits and cheeses she’d ever seen.
As she licked her lips, she raised her head and gesticulated at her compatriots in the neighbouring branches. On her mark. They nodded. She fixed her gaze downwards again and waited patiently for the wagon to pass directly beneath them.
Now.
She emitted a spine-chilling tingle and slipped down her rope, landing directly onto the cart. Her fellow raiders did the same, overpowering the bewildered party in a matter of seconds and tying them to the trunk of a large tree. Then they pranced around them in triumph, contorting their painted faces into terrifying expressions and brandishing their knives in the air. The family quivered noiselessly, except for the baby, who, much to everyone’s amusement, spat out his pacifier and screeched, “Somebody save us!”
“Why?” asked a voice from a nearby ironberry bush. It sounded faintly amused.
The baby spoke in a loud stage whisper. “I said you’d make a good rescuer! Don’t let them down!”
Everyone else tingled encouragingly. There was a pause. The voice seemed to be thinking about it. “Fine,” it said, before revealing itself to be Ann. The revelation was carried out in truly spectacular fashion, beginning with three low somersaults out of the shrubbery and a running leap onto the trunk of the tree directly opposite from where the settlers were being held captive. Using the trunk as a springboard, she launched herself into the midst of the savages, who had given up all pretence of savagery and now stood slack jawed and wide eyed in amazement. Upon landing, she became a flurry of kicks and cartwheels, backflips and punches, all executed with such precision that the only injury her small foes suffered was dizziness at being so close to such a whirlwind of motion. She disarmed them easily, whisking the twigs out of their hands one by one and flinging them into a pile a few metres away. Then she came to an abrupt stop, strolled over to where Murgatroyd, Garamond, and the others were tied up, and set them free.
The air was so abuzz with excitement that Murgatroyd’s ears hurt. The children immediately swarmed Ann, jumping up and down and tugging at her clothes and arms.
“Wow!”
“Again!”
“Teach us!”
“How?”
“Again!”
“Brilliant!”
“Again! Again!”
Ann merely smiled faintly in amusement. But Garamond, who was the most senior of the children and had played the role of the settler father, tingled something stern, and everyone quieted down.
Then they heard a loud bark. A human bark. “Hush!” it yelled. “Hush!”
One of the boys who had played a bovquito sighed at the sound of his name. “Tomorrow?” he whispered hopefully to Ann. Then, before he could receive a reply, he sprinted away through the orchard in the direction of whoever had called him.
“Work?” Ann asked the others.
Everyone nodded sadly. Hush had been called away first, but it probably wouldn’t be long before their parents followed suit. It was understandable. There were crops to tend and livestock to look after and household chores to be done. Someone nicked a hanging artery vine with his teeth, and they all took turns washing their faces and taking drinks before the wound in the vine clotted. Then they helped Garamond wheel his father’s cart back to the shed.
“Tomorrow!” exclaimed the head savage, taking the pacifier and bonnet back from Murgatroyd. They belonged to her little brother.
“Tomorrow,” lisped the settler mother, waving shyly to Ann.
Murgatroyd looked over at Ann. “Tomorrow?” he asked hopefully.
“Looks that way,” said Ann unenthusiastically. She aimed her foot at a rock and kicked it in the direction of a distant field of red rye. They’d been in Flee Town for two full days now, and they still didn’t have any leads about what to do next. Another sweep of the field where the body was found had proved useless, just as Mildred predicted. They examined Nimali’s body again, scrutinizing the loose hair, nails, and teeth in the little sack as well, but to no avail. Ann even tracked down the man who discovered the body and interrogated him for a second time, much to his distress. Then, acting on the false information he’d provided in an effort to get rid of her, she spent half a day looking for the mysterious one-eyed stranger who the man said helped carry the body into town. Upon learning from Chester that the man had brought the body to the hospital by himself, and upon realizing that the man was making fun of her and her own single eye, she attempted to find him a third time, only to be informed by the woman he lived with that he had left for Bolivia-Aspersion to get supplies and would not be back for many weeks.
These fruitless efforts had caused Ann to wake up that morning feeling unequivocally pessimistic about ever being able to find the killer, not to mention depressed about spending the remainder of the four weeks she was supposed to be working on this task stuck in Flee Town with nothing to do. In an attempt to cheer her up, Murgatroyd had roped Ann into a game of Settlers and Savages with his newfound friends.
More tomorrows were uttered as the children began to leave. Garamond was the last to go. “Later,” he said, heading in the direction of the barn. He sounded very pleased. While the others would have to wait until tomorrow, he would get to see them at dinner that night, as he had for the past three nights, though he was always too shy to say anything to them in front of his father.
“Later!” Murgatroyd chirruped.
Ann stretched out on the grass and closed her eye.
Murgatroyd sat down next to her. “Fun, right?”
Ann yawned again. “Very.”
Murgatroyd looked a little crestfallen. “Not even a little bit?’
Ann lifted her head and stared at him. “I said I had fun, didn’t I?”
Murgatroyd turned pink. “Erh, s-sorry,” he stammered. “You didn’t seem to mean it, that’s all.”
Ann looked offended. “I always mean what I say.”
There was a long pause as Murgatroyd searched for the right words—a search made all the more difficult because he never knew where to look. “I know,” he said finally, because even if the words weren’t right, they were true. “I think they really like you,” he continued. “We played the same game yesterday, but I think they had more fun today.”
Ann grunted, rested her head on the ground once more, and concentrated on a fixed point somewhere in the branches overhead. A part of Murgatroyd sensed that she wanted to be left alone, but another part of him, for some reason, was determined to keep going, to get Ann talking, to get her to act human. His conversation with Mildred from the other day was still bothering him. Could it be true? Was Ann actually heartless deep down? What if he’d been wrong about her all this time?
He made another attempt to draw Ann out. “I bet you’re wondering where the idea of savages came from.”
She wasn’t, but he continued anyway.
“The grown-ups say they don’t exist, but according to Garamond, a lot of his friends have seen them with their own eyes. They can move among different Territories, like Oddfits, except they float—like ghosts. And they eat people. Scary, hor?”
Ann continued staring up into the trees and gave no indication that Murgatroyd had spoken at all. Murgatroyd tried one last time. “I like children,” he declared. “How about you?”
&n
bsp; “They’re okay,” Ann answered with a horizontal shrug. “But they remind me of childhood.”
“What’s wrong with you?” The words exploded from Murgatroyd’s mouth before he could stop them.
It took a few seconds, but Ann sat up. “Excuse me?”
Murgatroyd’s first instinct was to apologize—it always was. Always had been. But this time, he resisted. Sometimes, there were things that needed to be said. “You heard me,” he said as firmly as he could, though the faintest of tremors crept into the me nevertheless. As if he were walking a tightrope, he paused to regain his balance, then kept going before nerves took full rein. “Got no feelings, is it?” he asked, his use of Singlish reflecting his frustration. “So hard to be nice to other people, is it?”
The very air froze.
“Not all of us have your gift for emoting all over the place,” Ann sneered. “And I don’t know what you define as ‘nice,’ but it’s a shame it doesn’t seem to include lying in a state of half sleep all night, keeping watch over one’s incompetent apprentice as he snores in his room down the hall.”
Murgatroyd was silent. “You, erh . . . you don’t really do that, do you?”
Ann said nothing, which Murgatroyd took as a “Yes, I do.” Several seconds passed. Then Murgatroyd leaned over and gave her an enormous hug.
“You do care about me!” he exclaimed as Ann extricated herself from his arms.
“Of course I do,” she said indignantly. “I said I’d watch out for you, didn’t I?”
“Yes, but . . .” Murgatroyd tried to explain. “It’s just that it’s hard to tell sometimes—whether or not you . . . like people.”
Ann looked at him, puzzled. “I don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Like people. As a rule.”
“But you like some people, don’t you?”
Ann snorted. The answer was so obvious it didn’t need to be said. But since he appeared to be in a strange mood at the moment, she humoured him. “Of course I do.”
“Then why don’t you say so?” Murgatroyd blurted in exasperation.
Ann looked even more puzzled than before. “You want me to go around saying, ‘I like some people’?”
Murgatroyd thought about this. “I don’t know. Maybe. Not ‘I like some people,’ exactly, but would it be so hard to be more . . .” His voice trailed off. Ann was still looking at him as if he had gone completely insane. To his surprise, she finished his sentence.
“Expressive about it?” she asked.
He nodded. And to his amazement, she even seemed somewhat interested. She leaned in closer.
“For example?”
Murgatroyd felt emboldened. And a little pleased. For once, it seemed, he knew more about something than Ann did. “How about making conversation? You never do. Conversation shows you want to know about the other person.”
“But I already know about you.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”
“Like what?”
“Like . . . how scared I was when I got lost on the way back from China-Plummet.”
“I knew that.”
There was a long pause. “You did?” Murgatroyd asked in a small, disheartened voice.
“Well, I didn’t know for sure, but I thought you might possibly be.”
“So why didn’t you come and find me!”
Ann frowned. “You weren’t in any danger. Nimali had just been murdered, so the chances of you getting killed were highly unlikely. And I also thought you’d like to try to transfer the whole way yourself. You know, be independent.” Ann reached for a twig and began breaking it into tiny bits. “Any other suggestions? For showing how I like some people?”
“You could talk more about yourself,” he ventured. “Your life. Your experiences. How you feel. It shows you’re willing to be honest about who you are. That you’re okay with letting them see the true you.”
“The true me,” repeated Ann. She said it in a peculiar way—with a tinge of something readily identifiable as bitterness, but a trace of something else as well. An emotion resembling horror.
Murgatroyd, despite having better conversational skills than Ann, was nowhere near skilled enough to pick up this shift in tone. “Yes,” he said with an enthusiastic nod. “The true you.”
It was a very long time before Ann spoke again. Murgatroyd thought, happily, that she was simply absorbing the wisdom of his counsel. Nothing could have been further from the truth. She reached over to her left and picked up a sharpened stick from the ground—one of the weapons left over from playing Settlers and Savages. She examined it closely and hefted it in her hands as if testing its weight. Then she drew back her arm and let it fly. It hurtled through the air like an arrow from a bow and embedded itself in the slender trunk of a sapling a few metres away. By the time Murgatroyd’s attention had returned to the stick’s thrower, it was too late. The bridge had been drawn up, the gates had been shut and barred, and soldiers manning cauldrons of boiling oil had been stationed on the ramparts of Ann’s innermost self, ready to defend it to the death.
Someone coughed.
They turned around.
It was Garamond. With him was one of the other children—the boy who had played Bovquito Number Two. He held something in his hands.
Garamond communicated to the boy in Nothing, and the boy stepped forward. He glanced at Ann briefly, but then handed the object to Murgatroyd.
Garamond took the deep breath he always did before saying anything. “He found it beside the woman.”
“What woman?” Ann asked, though she knew what the answer probably would be. The younger boy looked uneasily at Garamond, who tingled something reassuring to him before turning back to Murgatroyd and Ann. “The dead one.”
Ann frowned and took the object from Murgatroyd. It was a pouch made of mottled animal hide and fastened with leather string. She undid the string and took out a large flat, irregular rectangle covered in the same material. It was a book. The pages were sheer and iridescent, and as Ann flipped through them, it seemed almost as if they were made of flattened soap bubbles. Upon closer inspection, she saw that they were also faintly crisscrossed with networks of veins, which made them resemble the skeletons of dried leaves. The pages in the first half of the book were empty, but the pages in the second half were dappled in rust-coloured marks and stains. Ann shut the book and looked at the child, making her voice as soft as possible.
“Why did you wait so long? Why didn’t you show it to the One?”
Wide eyed, the boy looked again at Garamond.
“He doesn’t speak English,” said Garamond, explaining the boy’s confusion. Ann often forgot that some of the settlers spoke other languages. The limited materials the Quest distributed about the More Known World were all in English, which resulted in a primarily English-speaking population.
Garamond translated Ann’s questions into Nothing and then translated the boy’s reply back into sound. “His mother said not to.”
Ann was on the verge of asking who the boy’s mother was—and where they lived—but she thought better of it. The questions were beside the point and would be interpreted, to a Flee Town sensibility, as dangerous. Besides, it was obvious that his mother wanted to keep their family out of it. Who could blame her?
Instead, with Garamond as interpreter, Ann asked the boy a series of more useful questions: When had he come across the book and how? Where had the book been in relation to the body? What had the body looked like? Had he seen anyone else?
To her dismay, his answers provided little in the way of new information. The boy had stumbled across the body in the afternoon—he’d been heading home after running an errand in town for his mother and decided to cut across the pasture to save time. The bovquitoes had already drained the body of its fluids by the time he’d arrived. He had found the pouch with the book inside it lying in the bloodgrass a few metres away. And he had just picked it up and was trying to figure out what he should do when he hea
rd the distant clank of milking buckets approaching—the man whom Ann had already interrogated twice. The boy had leapt into a nearby ditch and watched the man examine the body, roll it up, and stuff it into one of his buckets before carrying it away.
Murgatroyd noticed how gentle Ann was with the boy, even though she was communicating through Garamond. She crouched down so she was at his level and spoke in a consistently low, quiet voice. And though she didn’t smile, she nodded encouragingly whenever he answered her questions. Finally Ann placed the book on the ground between her and the boy, as if making some conciliatory gesture. “Have you seen anything like this before?” she asked.
Garamond asked and the boy shook his head. She looked at Garamond, who did the same. But something in the boy’s manner seemed to suggest there was more to tell. Ann asked another question. “Where do you think it came from?”
The boy began to fidget. He hesitated before communicating his answer to Garamond, who in turn didn’t translate the answer right away. They had a small exchange of nervous, excited tingles, and when they were done, Garamond seemed so excited he could barely speak. He took a very deep breath, and another one on top of that. “Savage,” he said, exhaling the word in a loud whoosh. “He thinks it’s from a savage.”
Murgatroyd felt the air around them quiver when Garamond uttered these words. Then he realized it wasn’t the air, but him. For some reason, he was trembling.
Ann frowned. “Why would a savage carry a book around?”
Garamond conveyed this to the boy, and both of them began speaking Nothing to each other again. From their pace and manner, they seemed to be discussing the matter between themselves. Finally Garamond, visibly flagging from all the interpreting he had been doing, reported the conclusion they had come to. “Savagesarestrange,” he slurred.
Murgatroyd couldn’t help but chime in. “Do you think savages killed her?”
Garamond translated the question. Solemnly the boy nodded.
Ann thanked the boy, told him not to tell anyone else about the book, and let him go, which he did, as fast as his legs could carry him.