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

as Donal could see, from his red cape. The Keoh was playing dice with the monk when they entered.

"Donal, sir," the Fox Man said. Donal nodded, he hoped deferentially.

"So this is our angry young man. My Fox here tells me you are one hardassed motherfucker," said the Keoh, watching Donal's face.

"I kill my enemies and eat their brains."

The Keoh raised an eyebrow. Donal saw the opportunity to use a saying that Wally had drilled into him.

"Some think the soul lives in the heart," he said. "But I know it lives up here," he said, pointing to his head.

The Keoh barked a laugh. "You're all right, my friend. Have a seat. Let's play." He shook the dice and waved to the guards at the door. "Food and drink." He looked at Donal and his eyes twinkled. "Just no... heh heh... you know." He raised his hand to his head, made a scooping gesture. Laughed. "Yet."

They sat on the floor around the Keoh's table, dipping handfuls of a fragrant grilled bird-and-vegetable mixture onto plantain leaves. "We can save some time and pass both ways," said the Keoh, handing a plastic bowl of crayfish. The conversation was superficial and yet, thought Donal, somehow charged with meaning. The thread repeatedly slipped away from him, and he had to keep reminding Ewen to sit up and pay attention to the grownup talk, which drew stares from the scribe. The Keoh was venting about the killers who had snuck through the gates with their tiny knives, and the need for more guards, more people watching. His hate was palpable but puzzling to Donal.

"They must have known they would be killed," Donal said. "There were only a dozen, and thousands of us."

"True believers," said the Keoh. "Against soft outsiders and members of the priestess caste. If we had an army of those..." he drifted off.

"Believers, but in what?" On this, both Donal and Ewen were clueless.

"Henh. Many beliefs out there," said the Keoh.

"But Emic is the truth," said Donal hesitantly.

"You think so because you've never spent time outside," said the Keoh. "People clutch their ideas tight as you. In the saltlands around us, some people follow the old gods. Farther south, it gets even stranger."

"You have been there?"

"Yes," said the Keoh, wiping his mouth. "I was born there, where the ancients built a river between the oceans. You have no idea about the world outside, Donal, or what you have to protect here."

Ewen hissed a question in Donal's ear. "If I can ask," said Donal. "How is it that you... well ... are so healthy and have traveled so far?"

"Pure chance," said the Keoh. "Do you see this scar?" He pointed to his neck. "That was a tumor. Had it cut out. I was lucky. Never came back. You know how you can't predict the number when you roll dice? It's like that, Donal. People are born with different strengths. Some, like you, are born to be Hunters. The unlucky are born unable to fight off the tumors, and they die. Just by chance, I was born able to remember better than others. And you know what they say, my friend, in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."

"But the tumors -- the forgetting ��� aren't those caused by the tiny monsters left by the World builders, the little dark men put inside our father's-father's-father's bodies." The Keoh's monk laughed. The Keoh, without a word, picked up a stool and hurled it at him.

"There are no monsters. No little dark men," said the Keoh, still glaring at his monk. "As much as Emic tries to scare you. It is only nature and chance. Trust me, Donal. No horror could be worse than now and real."

Donal tried to keep what the Keoh was saying in his mind, but he couldn't. It slipped away like water evaporating after a thunderstorm, turning into wisps of mist, visible briefly, twisting in eddying air currents, then gone, back to the endless blue sky. He realized the Keoh was looking intently at him, gauging his target like a cat readying for a jump.

"I have a mission for you," said the Keoh, in a calm, measured tone.

"A mission?"

"Those men who attacked the Castle. We found they came from Kisk in the far saltlands on the shore of the Ocean. Their leader calls himself the Colonel, and the people believe that he shows them the true ruins of the World builders, and that our Castle, that everything we call the World, is false."

Donal was stunned. Kisk? Donal had known people who had traveled to Kisk as outsiders; a week's journey to the east, just another ruin in a ruined landscape. "But... why would they say that? Look at the age of the World. The materials. The... construction."

The Keoh held up his hand. "I know, I know. As I said, these are matters of final belief."

Donal pondered that briefly, shook off his questions, and focused on the task. "I have never been that far, but I thought there were long fingers of Ocean between us and Kisk."

"We have swift boats, ready to take you within a half day's walk. Then, of course, you are on your own."

"And what am I to do when I meet the Colonel?"

"Donal," smiled the Keoh. "I fully expect you to eat his brain."

Ewen thought it would be a good idea to talk things over with Wally before leaving the next morning, and Donal agreed, so after the Fox Man hooded him and guided him through tunnels and brush (doubling back to disorient him, Donal noted) he was released at the edge of the vegetable patch behind his squat.

The Fox man handed back his machete, shook his enormous, furred head, and for the first time Donal could recall, sounded almost human. "Look at this fucking shit we're in, man." He seemed to be about to shake Donal's hand or hug him. But he just muttered, "Good luck" and faded off into the twilight.

"You have any idea where they had us?" He asked Ewen, who just shrugged. "Never mind. Let's go see Wally," and they trudged off through the pumpkins. This late in the season, they were the size of pigs, giant orange mounds dotting the garden, with now-withered creepers shooting off in manic writhing arcs.

Wally lived in the Dome on the far side of the lagoon with the other monks of Etek. In the time of the World builders, it must have been an amazing sight. Even collapsed, enough of the metal framework remained that generations of workers had been able to prop and patch it over, producing an amalgam of wood and metal, silver and sod, with the random chimneys of cook fires poking from the curving thatched surface.

An apprentice dropped his broom and ran off to get the monk while Donal waited at the doorway. The space under the Dome was the largest indoor area in the World, and it was a buzzing, blooming confusion of activity, smells of people and baking, guides shouting to groups of outsiders, the whine of spindles and the rhythmic chop of hammers and axes, an oddly familiar whiff of charcoal and the clang of hammer on anvil, monks leading groups of children in sing-song chants for remembering that Donal had not the vaguest clue about the referents of: "Come over some day, maybe play poker..."

"It's been a long time," said Wally. Whenever Donal saw Wally, it was as if the months -- or years ���- vanished, and they smiled and hugged. Wally was short, with close-cropped hair and the pale skin of someone who spent their life indoors. He wore pants that ended above the knee and the red cape of his order.

"Sorry I haven't come by," said Donal. "You'd think with all the warm weather the hunting would be better. But it means more wolves."

"And not all with four paws." Wally frowned. "Ugly business at the Castle a few weeks ago. And how is Ewen?" Wally crouched down to Ewen's eye level.

As usual, Ewen was shy in the strange environment. Donal listened to his whisper. "He's fine, thanks. He says he likes your cape."

"Well," said Wally, snapping it around himself. "Maybe someday soon we'll have this weaving process working in a way that scales. Come on over to my room, let's have a drink."

For someone raised on a reed mat against the back wall of a crowded squat, the monk's chambers looked like a castle to Donal. He wondered why the Keoh didn't live in a place like this instead of a hole in the ground.

"You'd think he'd want windows. No, he likes the security," said Wally, guiding them to rough hide cushions.

"Did I ask that out loud?" said Donal.

"Yeah, Donal, you did," said Wally. "I'm used to it. You've done it since you were five." He sliced the wax seal off a fired clay pitcher with the sharpened edge of his ring, and passed a drink that smelled sour and powerful and tasted like jellied fire.

Donal drank, shrugged. He looked around the room, noticing how many books Wally had, and how they all seemed to be in much better shape than the ones in the Keoh's hole. Ewen was staring at a figure of a monk, unmoving, bent over a table in the corner.

"Don't worry," Donal said to Ewen. "It's not real."

Wally followed his gaze and laughed. "Oh, right. That's just Woodrow. I like to imagine that he keeps working even when I sleep." Above the stuffed figure of the monk with its carved antique head, a panel showed the letters of the alphabet, painstakingly lettered on a wooden plaque. He remembered Wally trying to teach him: arrow head, breasts, moon...

They both drank.

"Something's bothering you, Donal. You didn't just come to see me."

"The Keoh called for me. He asked me to kill someone."

"I see." Wally swirled the pitcher, looked in, started to speak, thought better of it. "Anyone we...know?"

"The Colonel of Kisk."

Wally relaxed. "You had me worried for a minute there, Donal. Your reputation is pretty dark. Fox Man has been running around today telling everybody about some woman you hacked to pieces."

"She tried to take my space." He looked at Ewen, tried to remember. "Had to protect my brother. Had to kill her." Ewen tugged at his sleeve, trying to tell him something, but Donal shushed him.

"The cold arithmetic of survival," said Wally. He took a drink from the pitcher, passed it back to Donal. "What can I do to help?"

"You know what they say about Kisk," said Donal. "Everyone who goes there talks about the legend. They say it holds a pathway to the stars."

"That's the legend."

"But is it true?"

"Hm," said Wally. "From tiny acorns, great oaks may grow. Where there's a legend, there's probably a seed of truth. But you know how it is around a campfire. The bears get bigger, a dozen enemy braves become an army."

"Do they believe it? Is that why they hate the World?"

"If I could read half these books, maybe I could tell you," said Wally.

"So you don't believe the legend?"

"There are some things you believe in, like Emic, and some things that you don't."

Ewen whispered to him. "That's the other thing. The Keoh said Emic is just scaring us. He said the only things that existed were...uh... nature and chance."

"There was nothing natural about the great dying, or the plagues," Wally said gently. "Or the way things fell apart. We may not be able to remember, but we have put enough of that together."

"Plagues?"

"Never mind. All you need to remember is that the little dark men inside us