The Fire Sermon. Francesca Haig

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       CHAPTER 5

      In the years that followed, I was grateful at least for Alice’s cottage, and the stash of bronze coins that I’d found in the buried chest beneath the lavender. After six years at the settlement there were few coins left, but the money had allowed me to eke out the leanest months of the bad season, to pay the Council’s tithe collectors (who came without fail, regardless of the success or failure of crops), and to help some of those who might otherwise have gone hungry. Little Oscar, from my parents’ village, was there, being raised by his relatives in a cottage near my own. He’d been sent away much too young to remember me, but whenever I saw him it felt like a link with the village, and with those that I’d left behind. But although the others at the settlement still referred to the cottage as ‘Alice’s place’, I gradually began to feel established there.

      The other Omegas had grown used to me, too, though they tended to keep their distance. I understood their wariness: arriving there, newly branded at thirteen, meant that I would never quite be seen as one of them. That was compounded by the fact that I was a seer. Once or twice I overheard mutterings about my absence of any visible mutation. Easy enough for her, I heard my neighbour Claire say to her wife, Nessa, when I offered to help them with the rethatching of their roof. It’s not like she’s had to struggle like the rest of us. Another time, at work in my garden, I heard Nessa warning Claire to steer clear of me. I don’t want her sitting in my kitchen. We’ve got enough troubles without a neighbour who can read your mind. There was no point trying to explain to her that it didn’t work like that – that being a seer was a series of impressions, not a neat narrative, and that I was more likely to catch a glimpse of a town ten miles east, or of the blast itself, than to be privy to Nessa’s thoughts. I kept silent, went on picking the snails from my broad-bean stems, and pretended I’d heard nothing. I’d learned, by then, that if Omegas were seen as dangerous, seers were doubly so. I found myself spending more time alone than I had at the village, where I’d had Zach’s company, however grudging.

      I’d been surprised to find books at Alice’s cottage. Omegas weren’t allowed to go to school, so most couldn’t read. But in the buried chest, along with the coins, were two notebooks of handwritten recipes, and one of songs, some of which I’d heard bards sing in our village. For me and Zach, forbidden entry to school in our unsplit state, reading had been a furtive and therefore somehow intimate act. The two of us, under our mother’s tutelage or, more often, alone together, scratching out the shapes of letters in the clay banks of the river, or in the dust of the yard behind the house. Later, there were books, but only a few. A reading primer with pictures that our father had kept from his own childhood. The Village Book, held in the Village Hall and laboriously inscribed with histories of the area, of the local Councilmen, and of the laws they oversaw. Even in our relatively well-off village, books were a rarity: reading was for making out instructions on a seed packet bought at market, or reading in the Village Book the names of the two travelling Omegas who had been fined and whipped for stealing a sheep. In the settlement, where few could read and fewer would admit to it, books were an indulgence we couldn’t afford.

      I didn’t tell anyone about Alice’s books, but I read and re-read them so many times that the pages began to come away from the spines as I turned them, as if the books existed in a perpetual autumn. In the evenings, when we’d all finished working in the fields and I went home to the cottage, I’d spend hours in Alice’s kitchen, following her compact, scrawled guidance for adding rosemary to a loaf of bread, or the easiest way to peel a clove of garlic. When I first followed her instructions, and learned to crush the garlic with the flat of my knife so that the clove slipped from its dry husk like a sweet from its wrapper, I felt closer to Alice than to any of the others in the settlement.

      In those quiet evenings, I thought often of my mother, and of Zach. At first, Mum wrote to me a few times a year, her letters carried by Alpha traders who wouldn’t even dismount at the settlement to drop them, instead tossing them from their saddle bags. Two years after I arrived at the settlement, she wrote that Zach had an apprenticeship at the Council, at Wyndham. Over the next year or so, more news filtered through: that Zach provided good service. That he grew in power. Then, after five years in the settlement, Mum wrote that Zach’s master had died, and Zach had taken over his post. We were only eighteen, but most Councillors started young. They died young too – the rivalries and factions within the Council were legendary. The Judge, who’d been in charge as long as I could remember, was a rare exception, as old as my parents. Most of the others were young. Stories reached us, even in the settlement, of the rise and fall of various Councillors. In the brutal world of the Council fort at Wyndham, it seemed, ruthlessness and ambition counted for more than experience. It didn’t surprise me that Zach had been drawn to it, or that he should СКАЧАТЬ