Piggies

by Nick Gifford

  “It must have been close last night,” said Ben. “What happened?”

  Zeb looked away. “Nothing to worry about,” he said.

  Ben laughed. “I’d have been worried if I was you, all right,” he said. “I heard the alarm calls from the lookouts.”

  Zeb shrugged. “We hid. It was okay.”

  Ben pointed at Zeb’s face. “What happened?”

  Zeb fingered his cracked lip. “Shifting livestock,” he said. “Got a bit lively – that’s all.” He turned away.

  “You were rustling?” Said Ben. “You mean you actually rustle their animals?”

  Zeb glowered at him. “There’s a trade,” he said. “There’s a family who take any stock we can shift. They help protect all this in return for a few favours.”

  Ben knew that when he said family he meant a family of beasts... He wanted to find out more, but Zeb was moving away from him, over to where Anna was tying brambles in place with twists of sedge.

  Ben stared at his retreating back. He hated times like this. Times when he was reminded of how little he really understood about this place and how little the woodlanders trusted him.

  Zeb was his closest friend in the woodland community, so why did he sometimes treat him like this?

  Sometimes he thought he would never be accepted here, no matter how hard he tried.

  ~

  When Zeb slipped away from the group working on the barricade, Ben decided to follow. He was still puzzled by his friend’s hostility this morning. Maybe he would be more relaxed away from the others.

  Ben had learnt his lessons well. Moving silently and always in the cover of the trees, he followed Zeb for some distance along the trail that led north from the encampment.

  After a time, he caught up and stepped into the open.

  Zeb looked furious, but also he looked uncertain.

  “I’ll come with you,” said Ben. “I can help.”

  Zeb glanced up at the sun and it was near its highest point – it was almost noon.

  “I won’t cause any trouble.”

  Zeb grunted. “You’re a good kid, Ben,” he said, finally. “But you are trouble...”

  He turned and continued on his way. Ben took that as acceptance and walked at his side.

  “You pull stunts like this and you won’t last long out here, Ben. Sneak up on Robby or Alik and they’d just slice you. They wouldn’t give you a chance to explain yourself.”

  “I know,” said Ben. He’d learnt more than Zeb gave him credit for. “I just want to fit in. I want to understand how things work here.”

  They followed a narrow trail through the trees.

  “Where are you going?” Ben asked a short time later.

  “Business,” said Zeb.

  They walked, mostly in silence.

  Finally, they came to a point where the trees thinned and Ben could see a building up ahead. A farmhouse, he guessed.

  “The Felson family,” said Zeb. “Now listen: you wait out in the woods while I go in. Tom Felson is expecting just me. He owes us for last night. I won’t be in there long.”

  Ben nodded. He knew better than to interfere at this stage.

  They came to the last of the trees and Ben stopped. There was a small paddock just ahead of them, then a cluster of low out-buildings, perhaps containing the livestock Zeb and the others had rustled last night.

  ~

  Tom Felson surprised them, or rather, his dog did.

  Just as Zeb set out from the trees a bundle of black and white fur shot out from nearby and squatted low on its front paws, teeth bared, growling at the two woodlanders.

  “Enough,” said a sharp, low voice. “Lay to.”

  The dog settled back on its haunches and stopped growling just as an old man stepped out into the open. He was about Ben’s height, with thin grey hair and blue denim dungarees buckled over his shoulders. He leaned on a big staff and peered at his two visitors. He nodded at Zeb, then pointed with his chin towards Ben. “A new ’un,” he said. “You bringing presents for me?” He let his upper lip roll back to reveal discoloured teeth and chuckled.

  “You have the goods for us?” asked Zeb.

  Felson nodded and turned towards the farmhouse. “Come on.”

  Out in the middle of the paddock, Ben felt horribly exposed.

  The farmyard was littered with all kinds of debris: barrels, plastic sacks, bits of farm machinery, stacks of tyres, wooden crates. A ginger cat darted across their path, a rat’s tail dangling from its mouth. Instantly, the dog gave chase and the old man started to grumble and curse at the animals.

  They waited in the yard as the farmer disappeared into the house, re-emerging seconds later with a sports bag. Zeb took the bag and peered inside.

  “We asked for a handgun,” he said, glancing at Ben.

  Felson shrugged. “You’re not exactly in the strongest bargaining position, are you?”

  “You’re doing well out of us.”

  “You’re not doing bad, either. There’s medicines and drink in there, and there’s more where they come from. And there’s protection, too. Ed McDonnell is getting antsy, but the families won’t back him while we’re undercutting him and they want to stay in our favour. I’d say you’re doing pretty well out of this deal. Just don’t go stirring McDonnell up any more, okay?”

  “I’ll let Alik know what you’ve told me,” said Zeb. “He’ll want to talk.”

  Felson spat onto the ground. “Talk’s free,” he said. “You want to stick around a while?”

  Zeb ignored him and headed out of the farmyard, Ben following close on his heels. Every so often he glanced over his shoulder and he could see Tom Felson standing, watching, grinning. He knew exactly what the farmer had wanted when he asked them to stick around for a while.

  13 Memories

  She was there again, that afternoon.

  Zeb and Rose-Marie had gone off gathering herbs, leaving Ben free to roam for a couple of hours. So he roamed to the clearing where he had spoken with Rachel the day before, and here she was again.

  He stayed in the trees for a few minutes, watching her. He should leave now. It would be foolish to do anything else.

  She sat on the fallen tree, one foot up on the trunk, her cheek pressed against her raised knee. She had a penknife with a tiny magnifying glass attachment, and she was idly burning charred marks onto the exposed, dead wood. Her pony was tied up nearby.

  She looked up and saw him.

  He stepped out into the open, feeling guilty.

  “I knew you’d be back, Piggy,” she said. “I can see right through you.”

  He walked over and leaned against the fallen tree. “I was just...”

  He stopped. She was staring at him, smirking.

  Finally, she said, “My old man’d go mad if he knew I was out here talking to a feral. He thinks you should all be rounded up.” She made a pistol shape with her hand and lined it up so that she could stare down her forefinger at Ben. She made a loud explosive sound and laughed. “He’d go mad,” she said again. “Mad.”

  “And what do you think should be done with us?” asked Ben. “Do you think we should be rounded up, too?”

  “Of course I do, Piggy. That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? That’s why I’m talking to you. Don’t look now: it’s a trap! You’re surrounded.”

  She was laughing again. She seemed to spend all her time winding people up. Digging deep, teasing.

  “I saw you looking,” she said. “Earlier. Hiding in the trees. Making sure I was alone.”

  “Do you blame me? I’ve been caught once. I’m not going back.”

  “Caught? Who by?”

  So he told her some of what had happened after he had first met her in Kirby: feast night, the policeman, Doctor Macreedie.

  “‘Pure of Blood’,” she repeated, when he told her about the tattooed skinhead. “That’s one of the Purity League’s slogans. My father’s high up in the League, although he doesn’t usually have much to do with skinheads.
Keep the blood lines pure, and all that. I wonder what Dad would do if he met someone with it tattooed across his forehead like that?” She giggled at the thought.

  “What were you doing in Kirby?” she asked, then. “Why were you lost?”

  He looked at her, trying to read her face. Trying to work out if he was just going to make a fool of himself yet again.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t remember.”

  “You never did say where you were from, did you, Piggy? All you said was that you’d been here a couple of weeks.”

  He stayed silent.

  “So where are you from?”

  “I’ve told you,” said Ben. “I don’t know.”

  “Lost your memory, have you? Or don’t you trust me?”

  He told her about that afternoon: the walk back across Barlow’s Patch, the storm that wasn’t a storm, the town that was no longer the town he knew.

  “What was your world like before, then?” she asked. “What was so different about it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said again. He really didn’t know what he believed any more. “What I remember is a world just like this, except there aren’t any ... any people like you. A world full of ferals. Maybe there are lots of worlds, different in subtle ways.”

  He struggled to find the right words for such a big idea. “Doctor Macreedie told me that ... being like me, being a feral ... was some kind of disease. Maybe it’s just different in my world: whatever it is that made people here need to share blood never happened in my world. And in this world people started drinking blood – or some did. Evolution taking a different path. Maybe there are worlds where people are different in some other way.”

  He remembered Old Harold demonstrating the idea with the fingers of each hand interlocked. Different worlds pressed close together, sometimes touching...

  He looked at Rachel. For once she was serious, waiting for him to go on. She was hanging on his words, like the woodland children: stories of other worlds.

  He shook his head. “It seems hard to believe. Even I’m having trouble believing it now. All the memories are jumbling up so that I’m not really sure what to believe. Maybe it’s all a figment of my imagination: some strange kind of daydream. Maybe this is the only world.”

  He paused, then went on: “Someone told me that kind of thing has happened to other people. Something bad happens and you block out your memories and replace them with how you’d like the world to be, replacing your memories with fantasy. Maybe that’s what’s happened to me.”

  “And you believe that, do you? So you think you’ve lost your memory.”

  He shrugged.

  “I know what you’re going to say,” she interrupted. “‘I don’t know’ – right?”

  He smiled, nodded. She knew him so well. “The more I try to remember my past, the less clear it becomes. It all seems so far away. What would you believe, Rachel? Do you find it easier to believe that I’ve blocked out some disturbing memories with something much nicer, or that I really have been transported from one world into another?”

  “They both sound pretty dumb to me,” she said lightly. “You might just be a very dull boy who’s trying to impress me with big stories, of course. Now, of the three, I’d find that option far easier to believe.”

  She leaned towards him, her intense look cutting off his protests.

  She was so close he could feel her breath on his face.

  “But what I do know, Piggy my boy, is that you’re the only one who can work it all out. If you’re telling stories, then that’s fine: I’m used to people lying to me, it happens all the time. But if it’s one of the first two options, then only you can tell. You’re the one who’s been through it, whatever ‘it’ is. You need to trust your own judgement, Piggy. You don’t want to rely on other people when it’s as important as that.”

  ~

  The time talking with Rachel seemed to fly past. She was annoying and arrogant, but there was something terribly straightforward about her, too. Talking to her seemed to make things clearer, somehow.

  Talking to her left him more confused, too. Confused at his own reactions. She was a vampire and yet... that moment when she had leaned so close that he could feel her breath on his face... it would have been so easy to kiss her.

  The thought was startling. It excited him and it scared him, too.

  Most of all, though, talking to Rachel was a big mistake – bigger than he realised at the time.

  Ben left her by the fallen tree, as she prepared to mount her pony and return home.

  A short distance along the path that led to the top lake, Zeb stepped out in front of him, then Rose-Marie a few paces behind him.

  The look on Zeb’s face told Ben everything.

  “I...” started Ben.

  Zeb stepped forward and seized him by the wrist, turning him, twisting his arm up painfully behind him.

  “We saw you,” said Rose-Marie. “With the beast. What do you think you were doing?” She sounded close to tears. Scared, even. Ben could understand Zeb’s anger, but not Rose-Marie’s reaction.

  “We were only talking,” he said. “I didn’t tell her anything impo–” His words cut off as Zeb jerked his arm. Ben gasped.

  Zeb pushed him forward, still holding his wrist high up behind his back. Ben had to walk, and every step back to the settlement sent a sharp stab of pain through his arm.

  ~

  “We were only talking,” Ben said again. He was standing in the clearing, the focus of a small, angry group of woodlanders.

  His tormentor, Alik, was walking in front of him, back and forth, his eyes never leaving Ben’s face. He was carrying a knife with a blade the length of his forearm. One of the onlookers, Robby, had already told anyone who would listen that they should split Ben open from chin to balls and leave him for the crows to peck at.

  Walter had put a stop to that, but even he had stopped short of defending Ben. Now, he stood back with Zeb in the crowd, letting Alik run whatever kind of trial this was.

  “‘Only talking’,” Alik said. He liked to repeat what Ben said, using his words to make him look guilty. “You and a beast ... ‘only talking’.”

  “I didn’t give anything away,” said Ben in a low voice. He looked at Zeb and Rose-Marie but they turned away. No-one was willing to give him a chance. “I just want to understand what this world is like – how it works.”

  “You want to understand,” said Alik, pausing briefly in his pacing. “Let me tell you how it doesn’t work, okay? It doesn’t work by just anyone deciding to talk to the beasts. It doesn’t work by newcomers deciding to endanger the entire community just to satisfy their own stupid curiosity. Okay?”

  “You talk to them,” said Ben, accusingly. “You talk to Tom Felson.”

  That made Alik falter for a moment. Then he said, “Of course. On behalf of the community. Felson’s useful to have on our side. We have to trade in order to survive, but we do it selectively. We do it very carefully. Our lives depend on it. We don’t just go and chat with them because we feel like it!”

  “She’s different.” Sometimes Ben was too stubborn for his own good. He should stay quiet. He shouldn’t provoke Alik, shouldn’t encourage the vengeful thoughts of Robby and his like.

  “‘Different’,” repeated Alik. “There’s no such thing as ‘different’ where the beasts are concerned. They’re all the same.” He caught Walter’s eye, and nodded.

  Walter stepped forward now. “He’s right,” he explained. “It’s the sharing: the mixing of blood. Do you understand why they do it, Ben?”

  “They share immunity to diseases,” said Ben, remembering what Rachel had told him.

  Walter nodded. “Yes, but that’s only part of it. Every time a beast drinks another one’s blood, it picks up traces of memories carried in the blood. It’s a chemical thing, a kind of collective consciousness. Some of them have memories going back generations. They’re not individuals like we are, Ben. They’re like bees in a bee-hiv
e. That girl isn’t any different to the others, no matter what she claims. Her head is full of the thoughts and memories of her parents and brothers and uncles and whoever else she’s shared with.”

  “But what about the ones you trade with?”

  “That’s different,” said Walter. “Blood-sharing is a family thing – the beasts share blood with each other far more than they do with outsiders. We’re careful about which families we deal with and they’re careful to guard their business secrets.”

  Ben remembered Doctor Macreedie’s disapproval of blood-sharing taking place outside the family. He remembered Macreedie’s toddler drinking greedily at its mother’s neck.

  And he remembered Rachel saying how her father would have the ferals rounded up if he could.

  Her father! If blood-sharing was a family thing then he would drink her blood – and he would taste her memories... memories of Ben, of talking in the woods with a feral. Her father would be after them then, for sure.

  Now, suddenly, Ben understood Rose-Marie’s fear, and he understood all the anger and hostility.

  He’d betrayed them, put them all at risk. He hadn’t meant to, he hadn’t understood, but still he had betrayed them all.

  “Every feast day they share blood,” said Walter. “And then they will all know everything she knows.”

  Ben remembered Rachel staring down her forefinger at him, her hand in the shape of a pistol. How could he ever have trusted her?

  He looked at Walter, at Alik and the watching crowd.

  “What are we going to do with him?” asked Robby, from nearby.

  Alik raised his long knife and stared at the blade, as if checking the steel for flaws. “Nothing,” he said softly, unexpectedly. “We do nothing, for now.”

  “What?” Robby was pink with anger.

  Alik silenced him with a chopping motion of his hand through the air. Then he stepped over to Ben and placed a hand on his shoulder. His fingers toyed with the fabric of Ben’s shirt.

  “You know what you’ve got to do, don’t you?” he hissed.

  Ben stared at him. “What?”

  “You’ve got to meet her again before the next feast day. Some time in the next eight days. Before she’s shared her blood with her family. You’ve got to convince her that you’ve only ever been on your own here in the woods and then you tell her you’re moving on. Some place far, far away.”