(Nothing But) Flowers - John G. McDaid (the reader ebook .TXT) 📗

stones, but he pushed her back, and she fell, off balance, against the wall.

Out came the machete.

He raised the blade, started to swing, then realized she was hunching over, protecting her daughter. At the last instant, he lunged forward, sending not the blade but his fist on the matted fiber handle into the woman's face. Blood ran from her nose and she whimpered softly. Gathered up her girl, limped off his mat.

"You are a crazy evil fuck," she said. "And you..." she turned on the squatters who ringed them, watching. "You should all be ashamed. Using someone like this. You are animals. This land is not fit for humans."

She took her daughter by the hand and left.

"Hard fucking core," someone muttered. Neighbors patted him on the back, but he did not feel reassured.

"Come on, Ewen," he said. "Let's get some sleep."

He saw that the Fox Man had slipped in and was watching from the shadows. By tomorrow, this would be all over the World.

When Ewen had fallen asleep, Donal rolled over and coupled with the woman on the next pallet, quickly and efficiently. She seemed to enjoy it, and her husband was used to this and seemed not to mind. Although, Donal guessed, he hardly could have said anything if he did.

The next day, Donal let his junior braves go off to check the traps. He had enough of a reputation, and in the World, reputation was all that mattered. He made sure to be there with them for the hard work of clearing brush, but he was a good boss who let them take credit for kills and bring meat back to their squats. Instead, he wandered over the trackway to watch the action at the front gate. It was partly idle mooning over the fine blades on display, and partly hope that something violent and entertaining might happen.

It was a typical morning at the Castle. A line of outsiders, families mostly, milled in the damp, steamy sunshine waiting to get into the grounds. They had to pass through gates where Castle guards were inspecting for weapons, poking through bags and under skirts of the farmers and foreigners, and taking their trinkets and goods in trade for admission. Even in decay, their Castle was the tallest building in a week's walk. Outsiders were willing to offer perfectly good food and trinkets for a visit, even though there was no guarantee they would get to see Emic.

The sun was only up about four fingers, and already the air was humid and stifling. In addition to the ever-present mosquitoes, biting black flies hovered, lured perhaps by the crusting cut on Donal's face. These flies were new. Every year, it seemed, there were more flying pests, bigger and nastier. Though, he thought, if he were a bug, he might see things differently. The insane plant growth made it a paradise for insects. He wished he had ten arms and ten machetes.

Donal elbowed into the line at the gate, silencing outsider muttering with a hand on his weapon, and spend the wait watching the Castle gang strip and harass anyone who put up a fuss. Once again he envied those lucky enough to be born in this part of the World: they made sure everyone on the line had wicked blades. There was no local smith who matched the fine metalwork of the village to the northeast who ripped and sawed apart the fallen hulks of their strange, curving buildings and melted them down. Donal had made the trip to take delivery of his machete, and had seen the grimy knife makers, with their leather aprons and huge muscular arms amid the perpetual smell of hard charcoal smoke.

Arming everyone with such weapons cost a lot in trade, but when there was trouble at the gate, it was over quickly. And on those nights, they ate like kings.

"Can we go see Emic?" Ewen interrupted his thoughts.

"Ewen, it's really hard to..."

"Pleeeease?"

"Okay. We can try."

The Castle had clearly once been a serene dream of perfection, dark stone blocks with pale bricks inset in attractive, rhythmic patterns; all meticulously worked, craftsmanship of the highest order. There must have been pinnacles and banners, fences and ironwork, a riot of decoration, and it had surely been home to a very important royal family. But all that was not stone had been eaten away by plants and the perpetual drip of water. The Castle they approached now, amid outsiders chittering in strange accents and pointing at everything, was a tumbled ruin, slumped in the soil and grasses of many seasons. Vines and creepers covered much of the visible structure, some native, some planted by the priestesses.

"Yag��," Ewen pointed.

They seemed to be in luck. A group was gathering beneath the surviving balcony fronting the moat. An acolyte dressed in a tattered green costume was doing a familiar call-and-response with the crowd, something Donal had no use for, but Ewen seemed to find comforting. She was clearly meant to be some kind of bug, the costume stuffed and rounded so that only her hands and feet stuck out.

The green bug worked the crowd into a soft frenzy, then left them to wait, a sea of sweaty faces with anxious eyes, eager for a once-in-a-lifetime glimpse of the priestess.

Donal had seen her, many times, so he was prepared, but the outsiders in the crowd gasped and recoiled. Emic wore an outfit of black fabric -- actual, made-by-the-World-builders fabric, patched and stitched meticulously. It was smooth and slick and glinted when she moved, dancing and leaping around the balcony.

And then, there was the mask.

It covered her whole head and was easily twice as big, with an enormous painted face, huge eyes, and a gaping, smiling mouth. It had always seemed to Donal the face of a small mammal; not a fox, but a skunk, perhaps, or a possum. There were seams on the side of the head where something -- horns, maybe? -- had been attached. How long ago? He marveled at how the priestesses had managed to keep this one icon in pristine condition. He could understand why the pilgrims felt

the magic in it, even if he did not.

"Estamos refugiados en una zona de apagon." The priestess, in a high, squeaky voice, rained down nonsense from the balcony. "Nuestras casas desarraigados, arrastrando ra��ces profundas de concreta, fibrosas con tubos y conectores, giran y saltan a las fluctuaciones del campo de gravitacion. ��La gente tienen miedo." She droned on like that, and Donal found himself scanning the crowd, idly yet thoroughly, to see if anyone unsavory might have snuck through the front gate.

There had been a small group, armed with pieces of metal no larger than their fingernails but sharpened enough to cut, and they had slipped in and managed to kill a handful of guests and Castle workers before they were hacked to bits. The memory was bitterly fresh. But no one in the group of soft, milling sheep around Donal seemed like a threat. Eventually, the priestess stopped and the crowd drifted off.

"Happy?" Donal asked Ewen, who just smiled.

Donal took the long way home, following the north bank of the canal, and then around past the sunken Dome, over to the Volcano lodge to check on his wild boys. Even though it was only mid-morning, there was a group huddled off in the rear of the squat, beneath the decayed altar under the faded image of a volcano. They had clearly been into the fermented shine already, and there was a good deal of laughter, metal clanging, and shouts of "Glory be to steel!" He could hear cats, mating loudly off in the dank recess of the building. Conscious of Ewen next to him, Donal paused at the front door to the hall, listening to the revelers, invisible past mounds of collapsed ceiling and the squatters' rough lean-tos. He had just decided to skip it and head home when suddenly, there was a figure beside him. It was Fox.

"Donal. You are wanted."

"Who?"

"The Keoh wants to see you."

The squatters work -- the hunting, cooking, farming -- was purely ad hoc, but there was a loose network of bosses, rolling up to the Keoh who decided all the practical things the priestesses did not. Fox answered to him, and so, ultimately, did Donal.

"Hunh," said Donal. "Of course, I serve the Keoh. But I don't know where to go."

Fox slid a rough fiber sack from inside his costume. "On your head," he gestured. "I'll take you."

"What about Ewen?" said Donal.

"Oh," smiled the Fox, "The Keoh isn't worried about him."

Donal's childhood friend, Wally, who had gone off to become a monk, had often tried to explain the alphabet to him. Even as a kid, Wally had seemed like a grownup; the forgetting hit him as it did everyone, but he seemed, if not immune, at least less susceptible. His recall astonished Donal. He couldn't actually remember the alphabet -- such a thing was impossible -- but he could recite the letters off a carving. "moon-fork-sun," Wally had tried to explain to him, pointing to a letter at a time. "Keoh."

Their paths had slowly diverged after his father's death, when Donal had to begin hunting. Between that and caring for Ewen, he hadn't had time for childish things like alphabets. But at least he could recognize the letters for Keoh, and he saw them now over a doorway as the Fox Man removed his hood to reveal a dripping stone tunnel. The walls were florid with white scale and rising spikes of yellow and black mold; the only illumination ragged holes punched in the ceiling. It smelled like the basements of squats around the lagoon, rank and fungal.

Donal looked down at Ewen. He was quiet but seemed unafraid.

Two guards stood before a doorway holding swords. Not the swords of the Castle guards, these were antiques, long, curved blades forged with the skill and craft of the makers of the World.

"Your weapon," said one of the guards. He surrendered it without question, and the Fox led him in.

Donal had only met the Keoh once before, in passing, during solstice prayer at the lagoon. He wasn't sure what to expect from the big man's quarters, but he was not anticipating the wild jumble of mysterious junk. The walls were the poured stone of the builders, but jutting irregularly from the spalling surface was a grid of rotting greenish wire, as if the whole room had been, in the past, some sort of bizarre cage. The space was stuffed to bursting with furniture, life-size dolls with human faces, rusting hunks of metal whose function Donal could neither discern nor guess, boxes, made of gray plastic stamped with ancient letter forms, from which poked colored strands of shining wire. Racks along the wall were packed with a profusion of books that would have had Wally goggle-eyed, yet most were furred with black mold. In one corner, the smudged remains of what had been a tall white cylinder tapering to a narrow point at the top, on which the signs for cup���snake-arrow head were still faintly visible in a faded red.

The Keoh sat in an dark leather chair big enough for two people. He was nearly bald, with a paunch and man-boobs, and had the hard face of a bully, his fixed smile a cheerless grimace. The Keoh wore pants; whether as an affectation for company or as part of his everyday dress, Donal could not tell, but they were of a finely-tanned leather, a few shades lighter than the chair. They could not, possibly, have been comfortable. Next to him was a low table at which sat his scribe -- a monk of Etek,