So it was that he heard the children singing early the next morning, dawn still bleeding the eastern horizon.
He had settled a short distance from the trail and now he worked his way through the trees cautiously.
Another family group approached, heading west into the heart of Ritt territory. They were mutts, or Lost, their near-naked bodies thick with swirling fur.
He emerged and they saw him immediately, the children halting their song and two of the four adults reaching for bows slung across their shoulders.
Flint held his hands up in peace, and waited.
“Greetings. May you travel in the Lord’s peace.”
They nodded, but did not speak. Flint wondered if they had understood his words. “I am looking for two people,” he went on, regardless. “One is a man, tall and bald and dressed in animal skins. The other is my sister. She has chestnut hair, yellow in her eyes. Both are Lost.”
The adults conferred, and then a woman said, “Man been call Cedar?”
Flint nodded eagerly.
She pointed along the trail to the east. “Be find Cedar where the fruit trees grow.”
Chapter 22
It was a grove of fleshfruit, the swollen cobs hanging in heavy clusters, their rich purple flesh cracked open and bleeding red juices.
There had been a settlement here once, but the plantations had long been left to run wild.
Cedar sat by the trail, sucking the flesh of a fruit.
He looked up as Flint approached. He looked confused, and protective, as if he thought Flint would steal his fruit when all around they hung heavy from the trees.
He didn’t appear to know Flint, although Flint knew him. He looked little different from the day he had been banished, a gaunt, bald man with bugging eyes and a lost expression, walking in a daze down the trail that led to a life in the wilds.
“Cedar,” said Flint, opting for the version of his name he used now. “I hoped I would find you.”
“The fruit,” said Cedar, holding up the pulped husk of fleshfruit he had been eating. “You have to know which ones to pick. Most of them are corrupt. Imbuto.”
Flint stared at him. The man’s body was rigid, trembling, his eyes possessed of some strangeness Flint could not identify. Was this truly the person his teacher had become, or was it the temporary result of what he was eating? Perhaps he had not chosen his fruit as wisely as he thought.
Flint eased the fruit from the man’s hand and offered him one of the bladders of sweetwater he had refilled from a trumpet flower the previous evening.
Guiltily, he wondered if he could get through this encounter without revealing the history they shared, without exposing his own guilt.
“I spoke to Henritt,” Flint said. “You helped him in the forest after he had been attacked. Like Henritt I am looking for the Lost girl they call Taneye. Can you help me? Do you know where she might be?”
Cedar’s eyes flitted from Flint’s face to the trail, the trees, the sky. “Don’t know any Lost girls,” he said. “I’m on my own. Anyway: out here you don’t talk about mutts and Lost. We’re all people, blessed by the change or not.”
“My sister,” Flint said. “She is my sister. She has chestnut in her hair, yellow in her eyes.”
“Pretty thing,” said Cedar suddenly, his expression changing, softening.
Flint sucked in a sharp breath. He waited while Cedar drained the drinking bladder. “Pretty thing?” he asked quietly. “You saw her? You know where she is?”
“She came back to me,” said Cedar. “Darling Jescka came back to me after all this time. I didn’t believe it was her until I heard her voice.”
Why did he call her that?
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know,” said Cedar. “Gone off. Haven’t seen her again. Just haunted me the once, darling Jescka.”
“It wasn’t Jescka,” said Flint. “Or a ghost of Jescka. It was her daughter, Amberline. And I am Jescka’s son, Flintreco Eltarn.”
Eyes wide, the man stared at him. “You got no right!” he moaned. “No right to come for me after so long. Her and then you. Isn’t once enough? Didn’t I pay enough for you?”
“You paid too much. I am sorry.”
“What are you saying? What do you mean?”
Stumbling over his words, Flint told him about that night in the seed-patch, about what he had witnessed. “It wasn’t you. My father... after you had gone. He raped Jescka and beat her. I think he would have killed her if I had not revealed myself and so given him someone else to beat.”
Cedar was rubbing the knuckles of a clenched fist. “I hit her,” he said. “It’s not like me to hit someone. I don’t know why I did it, but I hit her.”
“My father hit her worse. You were wrongly punished. They asked me at the hearing and Jescka had already blamed you for the attack. They asked if I had seen it and I said I had. They asked if I had seen you and I said I had. I did not lie, but I did not tell them the full truth of what had happened. I did not contradict my mother and my father. I did not dare.”
“You were a child,” said Cedar.
Flint had not expected understanding.
“I don’t remember much,” Cedar went on. “Sometimes in dreams. I remember hitting her, and I remember the fevers. You say I was a teacher: was I good?”
“You were popular and so we listened and so, yes, you must have been good.”
“I would have been good,” said Cedar. Then he repeated: “You were a child. You wouldn’t understand. You wouldn’t know that change can be a blessing–that’s what I say to people: we’re not Lost, we’re blessed with change. We are the beginning of what humankind will become.”
Cedar was becoming animated, now, becoming more the Cedero Flint remembered.
“You’ve travelled, haven’t you, Flintreco? You must have, to be here on the edge of the Badlands. So what did you see? You saw all your so-called True humans cowering in their self-imposed pens, like mutts up for auction. All of them, hiding in pockets of managed sterility, in the middle of all this richness and diversity! And living out here in the wilds, adapted to the wonders of our world: the Lost, the changed. Your kind think we are damaged, but we are not: it is the True who are stunted in their understanding of what it is to be human.”
Cedar scrambled on the ground for the split fleshfruit Flint had taken from him earlier. Finding it, he pressed it against his mouth and sucked at its sweet insides.
“What is it to be human?”
“To be human is to be fluid, unfixed. Open to change. Humanity is uncertain. Humanity today is not what it was yesterday, and it is only the start of what it will be tomorrow. All the time, your kind cling on in desperation: biological artefacts fighting the stream of time. Out here we are truly
post
-human.
“To be changed is to be blessed. It is to welcome the future with open arms. You should try it, Flintreco. You should move forwards. I will show you how, if you wish...”
Flint stared at him, his mind racing to comprehend his arguments. The purgists of the Ten saw change as a force to fight, a fate to resist. The Riverwalkers saw it as inevitable, a force to be accepted, if not actively embraced.
And now Cedar wanted him to welcome change on a personal level, to step with him into the future of humankind.
“So tell me,” he said, some considerable time later. “What do I do, Cedar? What is the secret?”
~
A fruit. A simple fruit.
Here, in the heart of the corrupted plantation, the fleshfruits hung thick and shiny.
“People used to live here,” said Cedar. “Your kind. They couldn’t keep the wilds at bay, though. They fled. Eat their fruit, Flintreco Eltarn. The fruit from their wild garden. They are packed full of changing vectors. I had a friend who knew this place. I think she grew up here. She knows each of the trees here, like a relative. I’ve been waiting for her, but she hasn’t come yet.
“The vectors won’t do you any harm, Flintreco. They were made that way: catalysts of change, communicants of traits that modify and enhance. They will rewrite you from within. They serve us: tiny mutts, if you like. Let them in, Flintreco, and see what you become.”
Flint took one of the fruit and split it in two with his knife. It looked and smelled normal. He lifted a chunk on his knife and studied it: no different to fruit he had eaten a thousand times.
He looked up to see Cedar watching him intently. Was he fooling him? He always did have a way with words. Was this some kind of revenge, at last?
“It’s your choice,” said Cedar. “Are you ready for the future yet?”
The fleshfruit tasted just the same as they normally tasted.
~
Night-time. They sat at a fire and swapped food: dried pork strips and berries for flatcake and rice biscuit.
“Is this it?”
“Give it time.”
“But it’s had plenty of time already.”
“Give it time.”
“You were making it up, weren’t you? Seeing how much I would believe...”
“Give it time.”
“You deserve revenge.”
Silence.
“What is east along the trail from here?”
“A few settlements. Ritt clan. And then the Badlands.”
“You have been there? What are they like?”
“The Lost live there. I haven’t been.”
“You are still clinging on, aren’t you? Even after all this time you can’t let go. Living on the fringes of the True. Hanging on.”
“Many Lost live here, in the interstices between Truebred settlements. The land is rich. And yes, some of us have not yet fully embraced the future. One day. I’ll head out there one day. When I’m ready.”
“When will it happen?”
“Give it time.”
~
He hurt, deep within.
An ache, an internal shifting. Maybe he was just imagining it, picturing the changing vectors at work.
Tiny mutts
, Cedar had called them.
Little machines
, the Riverwalkers called them. Inside him. Making him something other than human.
When would it start?
Cedar sat a short distance away in the dark. Not sleeping, although the night was old. Wrapped in his furs, he looked like some grossly changed beast of the jungle.
This was the end, Flint realised. This was the end of his quest. He had travelled so far–from Trecosann and his family, from the foolish young man he had been. And now he was travelling further, heading away from the True.
Belssed by change, if it would ever start.
Humanity is uncertain
. Cedar’s words from earlier. Cedar, still the teacher.
Humanity today is not what it was yesterday, and it is only the start of what it will be tomorrow
.
The journey Flint had started, the great distances he had travelled: his journey was the journey being taken by all humankind.
~
He lay, wrapped tight in his blanket and longcoat, and his body was wracked with trembling and sudden, spastic convulsions.
He cried out, and mumbled, and sometimes he laughed.
He tossed from side to side and his arms lashed out, striking tree trunks and ground, becoming rapidly bloody as blow after blow met hard resistance.
He lay rigid, sometimes. Not even a breath entering or escaping his lungs.
He was alone.
~
Daylight hurt his eyes and he whimpered and tried to bury his face in the dead leaves.
Pools of sunlight broke through the canopy of the abandoned fleshfruit plantation, and he squirmed into them, wriggling within the wrapping of his blanket and coat like a dying caterpillar.
Sunlight moved across the ground and he followed it during the course of the day, still shivering, still sobbing in inner pain.
~
Darkness.
He slept, still shivering.
Chapter 23
He walked through the jungle.
Chapter 24
The gentle sound of water formed an aural backdrop to the
kerchee
of a red-faced monkey, the nasal chuttering of a warbler, the pips of tree frogs and fleshpeckers. Misty droplets hung in the air, beading his skin, chilling him.
He walked.
Tall, his beard tangled, his hair ragged and long, and littered with debris from where he had slept on the forest floor, he looked like a True human, and walked like a True human.
He did not speak. He had no one to speak to.
He walked through the jungle, following the singsong summons of the water.
~
The water was cold, running shallow over a bed of pebbles and small boulders in a gentle loop around a clump of silver-barked gum trees.
On the inner curve of the meander a bank of rocks had built up. Flint squatted here, bony knees protruding from the folds of his cloak.
Some of the stones were rounded, their creamy surface pitted with tiny holes as if pocked by disease. Some of these had split open to reveal the dark, shiny mysteries of their interior: glassy, polished, magical. It was as if they were two different stones, or a stone caught in the process of change. Inner and outer.
He took a nodule and struck it on a large rock.
He dropped it, gasping, clutching at his hand.
He tried again.
Third time, the stone split into two pieces and a shower of smaller fragments.
He placed the two halves carefully on top of a flat boulder, shiny side up.
He looked around and gathered up some more of the stones and put them into his otherwise empty backpack.
~
He walked through the jungle, sticking to patches of sunlight wherever possible.
He listened to the birds and the insects, to the calling of the trees and the tune of the earth.
~
They took him in and fed him. The Lost have a knack for finding their own.
“Be call me Treacle,” said a young woman with a coating of fur on every exposed surface and a reptilian beak instead of a mouth. “What name they be call you?”
He gestured at the pack on his lap. “Flint,” he said, his first word since he had changed.
He slept in a communal lodge, body heat and odours thick in the air.
In the morning, Treacle and an older woman washed him in a tub of cold water. He protested at the chill, but they soothed him with hands on his chest and back and words of kindness.
He subsided.
It was as if they still talked to him, but not with words. A music in his head.
He heard a forest wren trilling, felt hands and scrubbing stones on his shivering body. He clung to the music.
Dressed again, his clothes clean as if new, he clutched his pack to his chest. “I must move on,” he told them. “I must keep going.”
He thanked them and walked into the jungle.
~
The storyteller became known widely in the wildlands between clan settlements–known to True and Lost alike.
They said he was a Riverwalker. Such was apparent from the clothes that he wore and from the way he kept his hair and beard long and tied in bunches. It was apparent, too, from his fondness for telling stories which made moral points about the wickedness in the human heart and the time when trials would be over and Judgement would arrive, the time when humankind would find its destiny.
They knew he was a spiritual man because he spent long parts of every day in meditation, hands pressed together above his head, motionless and not breathing for longer than any normal person could manage. It was clear that he saw the world more deeply than they did, and that sometimes he saw into their hearts.
They said he was a madman. That was apparent to anyone who met him, but his madness was of a gentle sort–a look in the eye, an eagerness in the manner, a tendency to repeat himself and to forget who he was talking to.
No one objected to a greeting from the storyteller, as they passed along the thoroughfares between settlements. Indeed, some even went out of their way to encounter him and offer him gifts in exchange for his time and words.
He was a man who carried riverstones and left them, split in two, by the side of the road and at junctions. They were his message to the world, his signature: Flint has been here, and left a part of himself.
He was one of the Lost, of course.
Most knew. He was too different ever to conceal his nature–different inside–even if he had wished to keep it hidden.
Most of the passing travellers of True breeding chose to ignore this. Some of the more enlightened even invited him into their settlements to teach and entertain their children.
He learnt to spot those for whom his embracing of change was a problem and those were the ones he avoided.
He was a wild-looking man, covered in sun blisters in the dry season for he refused to stay in the shade, preferring to bask in the sun’s rays.
He learnt to heal himself, and then also to heal others.
In the wet season, he wrapped himself in many, many layers and still he shook from the cold, warming himself by telling stories of the dry season. He did this even when he was alone.
People liked the storyteller, but they never knew precisely where they would find him, where he would turn up at any particular time. He travelled continually, through the wilds and the territory they called the Badlands, which were not bad at all, but merely less populated with the True.
Always seeking, although he knew not what he sought.