Chapter 5
Only twenty paces separated them when the creature–yes, creature!–stopped and half-turned.
The thing was naked, he saw now: what he had mistaken for thick, fleecy leggings and jacket were instead its heavy fur, merging, tangled across its shoulders with the dark strands of hair on its head. Hair too dark to be Amber’s chestnut tresses, even in the spreading shade of the forest trail.
Its face was simian, thrusting jaws and flattened nose bare and pink, its human lineage only really evident in its eyes.
“Stop!”
But it did not. The thing was no mutt, or at least it was no longer a domestic variety–it either had no understanding of language, or it had lost the deep-seated obedience that was in all mutts.
It parted its lips and gave a little snarl, cat-like, and then it darted into the trees, vanishing instantly from his sight.
The fleshfruit, he realised: they had not fallen, they had been harvested, taken neatly in pairs as they came ripe. There was intelligence, then, in this creature, or in its kind. He thought of the seed patches some of the mutts kept in Trecosann when their owners allowed it. Perhaps horticulture was instinctive for some mutts, giving them a special intimacy with the earth and its produce.
He turned, fearful.
A face peered at him from the shadows, barely spitting distance away from him.
And then it was gone.
The same dark hair as the female, but this one was broader of face, squarer, and Flint guessed it to be male.
He felt for Jemmie’s machete and let his hand rest on its well-worn grip. To draw it would be an act of aggression, but it would also prepare him better for any hostility on their part. He already felt himself to be surrounded, imagining untold hordes of the creatures waiting in the trees all about, drooling over the flesh of the True, over the various forms of torment they could put him through before he expired at their hands.
He turned slowly on the spot but saw no more faces, no sudden movements in the shade. Perhaps they had fled. Perhaps they watched him still, waiting their moment or unable to attack him because of ingrained respect for the True.
“Me master out of Trecosann,” he said. “You speak? You been know me words?”
No response. Was he just talking to trees? Talking to illusions?
“Me been look for mistress outta Trecosann. Her got red in hair, yellow in eye, she high like this.” He held his hand level with his chest, struggling not to laugh aloud from panic, from the ludicrousness of him describing his sister to the jungle. “If an’ you see her you treat her plenty good. You been know me words? Her find me Greenwater.” He gestured along the trail.
He turned slowly again. No sign of them, but he felt sure he was being observed.
He set off towards Greenwater, holding himself tall, keeping his pace slow, fighting the urge to keep looking, searching, all around.
You treat she good, he thought. Treat she good.
Some time later, he was alone. He just knew it. He stopped, turned a full circle, felt sudden sweat prickling his forehead.
And then he fell to his knees and vomited into the dirt, retching over and over, as panic belatedly overtook him.
Later, sitting on the trail, knees up to his chin, he rocked back and forth. Eventually, he made himself climb to his feet, and resume his trek.
He recognised this bit of the trail, he suddenly realised: a crook in the path where one last screen of tree ferns shielded the view from a traveller’s eyes.
A few more paces and then a panorama unfolded before him. The trail here wound lazily down a steep scarp slope to the flood basin of the river Transom. The waters of the river were still high from the wet season, still extending out across the forest floor, making it more like a lake with scattered trees emerging.
There, spreading out below, was the town of Greenwater, very much living up to its name, with as much as half of the land within the town’s stockades submerged in placid, leaf-green water.
The stockade itself formed a gently curving arc enclosing the town on the west and north; the other two boundaries would normally be marked by the snaking meander of the river, which was now only discernible as an area of slow-moving water not broken by emergent trees and huts.
The northern end of the stockade was completely clear of the water, the land raised to form an island. As the ground fell away from there, the stockade followed its contours until its mud and timber construction formed a dyke enclosing the flooded part of the town.
Within the defences, walkways raised on pontoons connected the dwellings, narrow thoroughfares dipping and bobbing on the water. The podhuts themselves were supported by inflated bladders, anchored in place to great stakes that had been driven into the ground.
Flint had never seen Greenwater in flood, had never quite been able to envisage it like this, despite the tales of Clarel, Mesteb and the others. He wondered at the mentality of a people–his relatives!–who lived with this annual inundation.
Even at this distance, he saw the figures of people in the town, on precarious walkways, in boats and rafts, passing along the top of the stockade, and out in the open streets in the dry sector of town.
And already, he felt his pulse quickening, wondering if Amber was here ahead of him, if it really could be as simple as all that. He prayed fervently that it could.
With one last glance over his shoulder, he started to walk down the track to Greenwater.
~
“I am Flintreco Eltarn,” he said again, his voice raised to carry across the water. “I have come to visit my Aunt Clareltreco Elphelim.”
The boy atop the stockade still stared, still kept his wall-mounted crossbow directed towards Flint. The boy was barely into adolescence and his grubby features and tattered clothing–and that mad stare–made Flint suddenly fearful of what he would find in Greenwater. Had they all been struck by the changing plague? Had they been taken over by some degenerate subhuman mob?
The boy glanced to one side, as a man came to join him. “Flintreco?” he said. “Travelling alone?”
Flint thought he recognised this man as an occasional visitor to Trecosann. He nodded. “It is a matter of urgency,” he said. “My sister, Amberline, is in danger. I’m looking for her. Can I come in?”
The man nodded. “I know him,” he said to the boy with the crossbow. He reached down and did something behind the wall and suddenly great eructations of gas popped from the water before Flint, as a series of bladders inflated, thrusting a walkway above the surface.
He stepped onto the bridge, more stable than he had expected. Ahead of him, a gate opened outwards, welcoming him, finally, to Greenwater.
~
“Petertreco,” said Flint, stopping before the man, just inside the Greenwater gates. The name had come to him as he traversed the walkway, waters thick with green algal scum lapping tamely to either side. “Thank you for allowing me to enter.”
Peter stood nonchalantly, a small-axe hanging loosely from one hand. “It must be urgent indeed for you to travel alone through the wilds,” he said. His eyes were calculating, assessing Flint for threat, for signs of change.
“I travelled in a group as far as Farsamy Way,” said Flint. “I came directly here when my friends headed south. My sister Amber disappeared two days ago. Despite our searches, we have not found her. She has quite clearly left Trecosann and, if she travels voluntarily, then her most likely destination is Greenwater.”
The two of them stood on a narrow wedge of raised land behind the stockade. Above, the boy and some other young men stood on the town’s defences, leaning precariously down to hear what was said.
It was only when he saw how poorly these people dressed that he recalled his impressions of this place from his earlier visit as a boy: of people who had to work hard merely to carve an existence out of the jungle, a meaner, leaner level of subsistence than he knew from Trecosann.
“Your sister isn’t here, Flint,” said Peter gruffly. “I’m sorry to let you down.”
They were the words Flint had anticipated. If she were here then they would have been far quicker to tell him so.
Flint looked away. The ground here had been submerged until recently, and its surface was slick with green slime. He wondered again at how they could live like this.
They climbed the mud slope to the top of the stockade. Its exterior surface fell away vertically to the frothy waters. Flint saw that the walkway was deflating and sinking again. He looked back towards the fringe of the jungle.
“Your defences are impressive,” he told Peter. His words masked an unspoken question: what have I just passed through to get here?
“The wilds,” Peter said, simply.
“I saw... humanoids, in the jungle,” said Flint. “Mutts, perhaps. Only a few minutes’ walk back to the west.”
Peter nodded. “If we had the resources we’d purge the wilds around Greenwater,” he said. “There are mutts, as you describe, and there are all kinds of changed beasts out there. They’re getting closer all the time, getting bolder, too. A lot of them are reasonably harmless: the subservience to the True is ingrained deeply even in the wild stock.”
“But...?”
“You can never be certain. Sometimes the changing fevers can remove the shackles, although thank the Lord we don’t see that often. It’s not just mutts out there, though: the humans are the worst. Some of them are Lost–”
Victims of the changing fever, Flint thought, chilled by dark memories, dark fears.
“–and some of them are just bad to the marrow. You’re lucky you got here in one piece, cousin Flint, lucky you got here at all.”
~
The hard lines of Aunt Clarel’s face made him think of his father. He flinched as her hand brushed against his face, but it was a gentle touch, a sympathetic gesture. The bruising on his nose and jaw was still evident.
“It’s okay,” he said. And indeed his breathing had been easier today, the healing speeded by Lizabel’s therapeutic herbs. “My nose will never be straight again,” he added, softening his words with a smile.
He saw in her eyes that she knew that it was her brother who had inflicted Flint’s injuries.
“Whatever possessed you to come all this way?” she asked.
Flint had been mulling this over throughout his journey. Love for his sister, yes: for years they had been there for each other. He had spent much of his life looking out for her and now she might need him more than ever. But also it was less noble than that. It was an opportunity, a chance to seize the freedom he so fervently still hoped that Amber had seized.
“Can I stay for a while?” he asked. If he had passed Amber en route, if she had, as he had suspected, hidden herself off the track whenever she encountered other travellers, then she may still be on her way to Greenwater. He could head back, he knew, but if he did so he might just as easily miss her again.
Clarel tutted somewhere deep in her throat. “You think I’m going to turn you away do you, you silly young bugger?”
She turned and headed back along the narrow walkway in the direction from which she had come.
Flint shouldered his pack and followed.
~
The small raft maintained its position on the water, despite the steady tug of the Transom’s current. A fibre net trailed behind it, steadily filling and swelling with green scum. According to Clarel’s partner, Chendreth, the locals called this process “skinning the river”.
The algal blooms at the end of the wet season were rich in minerals from the Elphine Hills. Rich, too, in a particular strain of changing vector. Fed into the bladderplant nursery beds at this time of year, the scum instigated vigorous growth, and a promiscuous exchange of traits between varieties. Many of the resulting sports would be useless, the changes too extreme and damaging–like that young mutt pup that had died after its dipping in the changing vats in Trecosann. But many would be promising enough to be maintained, nurtured and perhaps propagated and grown for trade.
Mastery of the changing arts was Clan Treco’s greatest achievement, something they did better than anyone else, with the skills passed down through the generations.
“Yes, I do think Tarn would sell Amber,” said Flint in answer to Chendreth’s question. “If not into the mutt trade, then as a bondsman. He has always treated her as little better than a mutt–she always said that.”
Chendreth worked at winding her cord, hauling the nets in behind the raft. She kept her head turned slightly away from Flint’s gaze. Barely a year or two older than him, but yet he was struck by a gulf between them: Flint awkward, unsure of himself; Chendreth a woman comfortable with herself and with her role in Greenwater life.
“I have never met your father,” she said now. “Clarel talks of him sometimes... She won’t go to Trecosann any more.”
Flint knew that Clarel had stopped visiting, but nothing had ever been said and so there had been no finality to it.
Over in the settlement, there were voices and Flint spotted a small group passing through the stockade. There were at least six people, and they had a wagon being hauled by a team of four mutts. He wondered how they had manoeuvred it over that inflatable walkway.
“Mesteb,” said Flint. The trading party was back from the market festival at Trecosann. There would be news! Clarel had been urging Flint to wait for Mesteb’s return, assuring him that he would bring news of Amber, news that she had shown up at home, after all.
At a nod from Chendreth, Flint squeezed a valve on the bladderpump engine and the raft surged gently for shore.
In his five days at Greenwater, he had spent long hours at the stockade, staring into the wilds for any sign that Amber was out there, always disappointed at the end of his long vigils.
In that time the waters had receded a long way, but many of the riverside streets were still awash, the anchored podhuts still connected by walkways suspended across bladderplant pontoons.
Now, he guided the raft past the normal landing jetty and through the centre of Greenwater. A short time later they bumped against the pontoon that abutted Clarel’s podhut.
One of Clarel’s mutts reached down and secured the raft with a loop of cord and Flint and Chendreth clambered up onto the walkway. Instantly, the mutt jumped down onto the raft and started to gather up the skinning nets, deftly trapping the harvested scum in a floating cane basket.
Flint trotted along the walkway, almost missing his footing at one point and plunging headlong into the thick, scummy water.
Soon he was in a street slick with the green froth of the algae.
Mesteb and his party were still by the gates, chatting with Peter and some of the other townsfolk.
Clarel was there, too–so calm on the surface yet here she was, eager to find out what news Mesteb brought.
Mesteb was a tall, broad-shouldered man, unhooded despite the sun’s glare, his long hair threaded with silver, tied back from his face. His eyes had the look of someone who had lost much, betraying his normally jovial nature.
He spotted Flint and instantly gave a slight shake of his head. “Clarel tells me you’re looking for your sister,” he said. “The two of you are the talk of Trecosann: the runaways. Everyone knows what a bastard Tarn is.” He glanced briefly at Clarel, then, as if only just remembering that Tarn was her brother.
“She didn’t run away,” said Flint. It was a conclusion he was finally starting to believe. “She took nothing with her. I checked her room and nothing was gone. Amber’s impulsive, but she’s not stupid: she wouldn’t just go off with nothing. And if she had fled she would have come here.”
She might never have made it this far, of course.
Or she might never have left Trecosann voluntarily in the first place.
He remembered play-fighting on the Leaving Hill. We’d just sell you to the mutt trade, he had teased her. And he remembered the Tallyman’s appraising eyes, putting a price on Amberlinetreco Eltarn.
~
He peered at his aunt from under the wide-brimmed hat she had given him. His presence made her uncomfortable, he knew, but she tried hard to hide it.
She had followed him out here to a rocky promontory that cut straight out into the Transom’s flow. Great rubber trees hung out over the river. Lines of land anemones clung to the underside of the trees’ boughs, feathery tentacles trailing down to the water, trapping moths, birds, fish in their downy grip.
Flint held a long, arching cane across the water, its tip raking the current, accumulating a knot of algae: glistening, glutinous stuff.
“What will you do, Flintreco?”
Where Tarn used his fullname as a weapon, distancing himself from his own son with inappropriate formality, Clarel used it to draw him in: Flint of Clan Treco–he belonged. People cared.
It was a calculating use of his fullname, too: a deliberate gesture. Warmth and spontaneity were hard for Clarel. Flint had seen it often in Chendreth’s looks, the hurt at the distance Clarel maintained even from her lover. The affection between the two of them was so brittle, he was impressed that it endured.
He raised the cane, watched water dripping from the captured algae, then dipped it again.
“She may be dead,” he said. “In which case I am wasting my time. She may have run away and I have simply got it wrong that she would head here–maybe she has gone to Farsamy, after all. She may have run away and fallen into the hands of traders, or she may have been sold directly into the trade.
“If she is still alive out there then all that I can do is spread word. You told me yourself that Clan Treco is more dispersed than most: there are Trecosi in most of the major settlements of the region. I even know some of these people from their visits to Trecosann.
“I’m a free man, Aunt Clareltreco. I intend to travel and ask people to watch out for a foolish girl with chestnut hair and jaundiced eyes.”
“Your mother...”
Clarel stopped and Flint waited for her to go on.
“Your mother is a difficult woman,” she said. “I don’t defend my brother–I was glad when Mesteb told you that the people of Trecosann are finally seeing him for the beast that he is. No, I don’t defend him. But I do think that he and Jescka deserve one another. He’s devoted to her, despite everything: that’s why Amber’s presence affected him so ... so adversely.”
“What do you mean? What are you telling me?”
“If Tarn never treated Amber like a daughter, it was because he had good reason,” said Clarel.
Hindsight. A lens that sharpens recollection, reshapes memories.
“My mother took lovers?” He had known. But he hadn’t made the connection. He had known that she had a lover, once, but that was more recent than Clarel implied.
Clarel nodded. “Mesteb has been one,” she said. “But there have been others, too. Mesteb confessed to me last year, when he was sick with the gripes and scared it might be changing fever. He wanted to off-load his guilt while he could. So he told me. And he told me why he stopped seeing her. He couldn’t stomach her visits to the seed patch.”
Flint moaned, turned away. He knew the euphemism: visit the seed patch and that’s where you find the mutts.
He had always thought Tarn’s cruel jibes at Amber’s nature related to her illness as a child, not to her parentage!
If Clarel’s claims were true then the only wonder was that Amber had not been exposed on the Leaving Hill as a pup, or that Tarn had not sold her into the trade at his first opportunity. Only Jescka could have stopped him, he realised.