The Forever Ship. Francesca Haig

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СКАЧАТЬ he been this afternoon?’ I asked Sally.

      ‘The Kissing Tree,’ Sally said.

      I raised an eyebrow. The huge, hollowed-out stump in the burnt-out forest was all that remained of the hiding place where Elsa and her husband used to go when they were young. It was there that we’d found the documents for which he’d been tortured and killed: the papers that had helped to lead us to the Ark.

      ‘He just took off one day,’ Sally said, ‘when we were out setting snares. He went straight to it, like he knew what he was looking for. Crawled in without a word, and stayed there for hours. Since then, he goes most days.’ She shrugged. ‘It keeps him calm. I go with him if my legs are up to it, otherwise we send a guard.’

      Of all the places in and around New Hobart, the Kissing Tree had the strongest link to the Ark, and to the blast machine. I wondered why the flames in Xander’s head weren’t enough, and why he made his daily pilgrimage to that place.

      He wasn’t going to answer my questions. He sat without speaking, on the low stool by the fire. Beside him, Sally sat in Elsa’s chair by the window overlooking the courtyard. If anyone else had tried to claim that chair, Elsa would have jabbed at them with the broom handle, but it seemed that in the weeks we’d been away she and Sally had become friends. There was at least thirty years between them, and their lives could hardly have been more different. Elsa had spent her life caring for the children in the holding house; Sally had been a pioneer of the resistance, an infiltrator and an assassin. But I watched how Elsa filled her pipe and passed it to Sally without even looking – Sally took it without a word – and how the two of them settled into an easy silence.

      I saw, too, how Elsa bent to prop a cushion behind Xander’s head, where it slumped against the wall. Again and again she wiped the drool that unspooled from his open mouth. Now that the holding house was empty, and its children dead, Elsa was always looking for something to do with her hands, and I knew that she was glad of Xander’s presence.

      I wished that I could say the same – but being in the same room as Xander filled my nostrils with the scent of smoke. He was all fire now, all the time. I thought I understood, perhaps, why he went each day to the Kissing Tree. The flames had been calling him for so long that he had no choice but to answer.

      Elsa was mixing some herbs to help Xander sleep through the night. She showed me how, and I ground the dried valerian myself, felt the satisfying grate of the pestle against the mortar.

      When Elsa poured in some poppy tincture, she raised the glass bottle to the window light, squinting to look closely while she poured. ‘Careful,’ she said. ‘Four drops only. No more.’

      ‘Two spoons of that stuff,’ Sally said, ‘with a little henbane thrown in, and you can knock someone out entirely. A little more, and you can kill them.’

      The way she phrased it, it didn’t sound like a warning. It sounded like advice.

      ‘Shut up and help,’ said Elsa, manoeuvring around Sally with the bottle. ‘We’re not in the business of killing, in this house.’

      I wished she were right. Perhaps it was true for her, and for Xander and Paloma. But I looked from Zoe, to Piper, to Sally, and down at my own hands. There was not one of us who was not in the business of killing.

      *

      That night we all slept together in the dormitory of the holding house: me, Piper, Paloma and Zoe. Zoe and Paloma had pushed two of the small beds together; it was as close to a declaration as we were going to get.

      Both Piper and Zoe were too tall for the children’s beds, and seeing Piper’s calves and feet hanging over the edge of the bed made me laugh. But then Paloma said: ‘Why are all the beds in here so small?’ and my laugh halted, and we fell silent, until Zoe explained about the children that Zach and The General had tanked and then left to drown. Paloma sat on her bed and listened, knees drawn up and arms wrapped around her shins. Every day with us a new lesson in cruelty.

      ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Paloma said to me. ‘When they kill the children, they’re killing their own as well.’

      There had been a time when the twinning had stopped Alphas and Omegas from killing one another. That time was long gone. It wasn’t the first time that humans had turned on each other, and themselves, like this. Whoever had unleashed the blast, four hundred years ago, must have known that they would destroy more than just their enemies. The risk of obliterating themselves, and the world, hadn’t been enough to stop the killing then. The twinning was never going to be enough to stop it now.

      *

      The Ringmaster came at dawn. He led me and Piper around the outskirts of the town, so that Piper could inspect the new fortifications. The encircling wall was topped with wire, and a walkway now ran along it, with slits for archers. The watchtowers were higher, and had been strengthened, squatting solidly against thick wooden buttresses. Beyond the wall, wide ditches ringed the town, and in each ditch sat rows of logs pierced with metal spikes, offering their metal barbs to the sky. There was an orderliness about them that belied their sole purpose: to impale and to kill. I thought of the horses I’d ridden, the soft skin of their underbellies, and turned away.

      The Ringmaster had noticed my expression.

      ‘It’s not supposed to be pretty,’ he said. ‘The Council built the wall to keep the townsfolk in, not to repel an attack. We’d never have taken the town if it had been built to keep an attacking force out.’

      ‘And now?’

      He pressed his lips together. ‘If we have to draw back behind the walls, the fortifications will buy us some time. If they throw everything at us, we’ll still struggle. We don’t have the supplies to withstand a long siege – rations are tight enough as it is. But the Council won’t leave Wyndham undefended. Anyway,’ he said, with the beginnings of a smile, ‘the new defences have kept the troops busy. Idle troops make trouble.’

      He was right. And he was right about the fortifications, too. They were impressive. Even Piper had no criticisms to make, and nodded when The Ringmaster pointed out various features.

      ‘When will the Council attack, do you think?’ I said.

      ‘I don’t know.’ The Ringmaster glanced back up the hill towards the holding house, where we’d left Zoe and Paloma. ‘We struck some major blows – the defection of my army; freeing this town; the destruction of the Ark. But they’ll strike back eventually. Sooner rather than later, if they find out we’ve got somebody from Elsewhere here.’

      There was such audacity in those words: somebody from Elsewhere here. Only weeks earlier, that phrase would have been unimaginable. ‘Paloma changes everything,’ I said.

      ‘She’ll change everything all right,’ he grunted. ‘Bring the Council down on us like never before. All for what?’

      ‘For a chance to end all of this,’ said Piper, waving his arm to include the walls and the trenches below us, and the ruthless metal spikes – all the careful architecture of death. ‘Once and for all.’

      The Ringmaster shook his head. ‘Someone, a few hundred years ago, thought they’d come up with a clever way to end all of this too, with the blast. Your brother—’ he turned to me, his movement so sudden that Piper stepped forward, putting his body between us ‘—he and The General think the tanks are a great way to end it all. When are you going to stop thinking that machines СКАЧАТЬ