A Town Called Dust: The Territory 1

by Justin Woolley

  She smiled at him, her cheeks nearly splitting open with the unnatural movement. Squid had never seen Aunt smile before, not even to Uncle. It was so oddly unfamiliar that it was more terrifying than reassuring. Normally she wouldn’t even bother speaking to him, she would just glare at him across the room and ask Uncle to pass on whatever message she had for him. “Tell your nephew to clear up the plates,” she would say, or “Tell your nephew to fetch my needles.” At least when Uncle ordered him around he did it directly.

  “Go on,” she said, “your uncle will be waiting.”

  Squid picked up one of the potatoes and took a hesitant bite. As his teeth dug through the springy cold skin he felt the fluffy interior of cold roast potato burst into his mouth. It was good. He was so hungry he would have happily eaten a bowl of oat gruel, his usual morning meal, but this was delicious. He demolished the rest of the potato and grabbed the next one. When he was done with that he came to the generous slice of ham. He lifted it and inhaled. He knew this smell, a tantalizingly sweet aroma, but he had never before been allowed to eat any. He bit into it. The sweetness of the honey and the saltiness of the meat met on his taste buds. He scoffed it down and wished, once it was gone, that he’d taken more time to savor it.

  “Thank you,” Squid said.

  He saw his aunt’s eye float to the stain on his shirt. Her lips tightened but she didn’t say anything.

  Back at the wagon Squid began loading the barrels. He was surprised when Uncle continued to help. Usually Uncle’s idea of helping was sitting back and telling Squid exactly how badly he was doing. Today, though, with Uncle’s assistance they loaded the forty-six barrels in half the time it usually took.

  Uncle turned to him.

  “Time for the horses.”

  Squid felt the all too familiar pang of dread in his stomach.

  “I’ll get that one,” Uncle said. Squid watched him walk away but somehow didn’t feel better. He had a lingering sense that something wasn’t quite right.

  Uncle hitched up The Horse without even asking Squid to try. Squid led the reddish-brown horse, the one Uncle called Bluey, toward the wagon. Where The Horse was a big animal, stocky and strong, snorting and scraping as he waited impatiently, Bluey was skinny. The lines of his ribs could be seen in his chest like depressing stripes. This was not to say that Bluey was sickly or starved; under his droopy eyelids he looked out at the world with a kind of stupid happiness.

  With the two animals harnessed to the tongue of the wagon, Uncle pushed the wheel chocks aside with his foot.

  “All right, let’s go,” Uncle said, climbing into the driver’s seat. Squid clambered up onto the wagon next to him and looked at Uncle. He couldn’t hold it in anymore.

  “Why are you being so nice to me today?” he asked.

  Uncle looked at him for a moment before whipping the reins down.

  “It’s your birthday, you ungrateful snot,” he said.

  CHAPTER 3

  Lynnette Hermannsburg was bored. School bored her. Mathematics and Language Studies were bad enough but Arts and Crafts, the subject she was currently being forced to participate in, was almost as tedious as the afternoons they spent listening to the Sisters drone on about the glory of God and his righteous punishment of mankind. Not that she would ever admit her ill-feelings toward the Sisters; even she knew better than to do that. Arts and Crafts, on the other hand, she could openly despise that. Why would she ever need Arts and Crafts? She wasn’t going to spend her days painting or knitting or making collages of pink ribbon and dead grass. She was going to be a Digger.

  Lynn pushed the needle through her cross-stitch fabric. It slipped through the cotton easily, too easily. She felt a vicious sting as a quarter-inch of needle pierced her finger. Crying out, she threw her cross-stitch puppy dog across the room.

  “Ow! Ancestors’ sin!”

  “Lynnette Hermannsburg!” Lynn’s teacher Ms Apple stared at her. She was wide eyed and open mouthed. “Where did you learn such filthy language? I have a mind to tell your father of this.”

  “He’s the one I learned it from,” Lynn answered quickly, failing as she so often did to use the filter between her brain and mouth.

  Ms Apple breathed in through her nose, short and sharp.

  “That may very well be,” she said, “but it is no way for a young lady to speak.”

  Lynn heard a sniggering behind her and instantly knew who it would be. She turned in her chair and shot Bren Millner a cutting look. The boy nonchalantly tucked a lock of his thick black hair behind his ear and smiled a superior grin, which infuriated Lynn even more.

  “What?” she snapped. “Have you got something to say, Bren?”

  “Lynnette,” Ms Apple said. “That’s quite enough.”

  “He’s laughing at me.”

  “Lynnette,” Ms Apple said with implied finality.

  Of course Ms Apple would side with him, Lynnette thought. Bren was the youngest in the class, having only just turned thirteen, but that wasn’t the reason he was treated with such favoritism. Bren was the only son of the Administrator. Everyone else in the school, the teachers, the staff, even the other children, all of them from wealthy or powerful families in their own right, tiptoed around him, petrified they might insult him and send him crying to his daddy. Despite the fact that he would one day inherit his father’s title and all the power that came with being the head of the Central Territory government, as far as Lynn was concerned Bren was just an annoying boy.

  Lynn opened her mouth to speak but was silenced when Ms Apple lifted her hand, all knuckles and calluses, and raised a single finger.

  “None of your cheek today, child. Your mother would never have behaved in such an inappropriate way.”

  “I’m not my mother,” Lynn said.

  “That much is certain, child.”

  Lynn stared at her. She could tell Ms Apple wished there was a string attached to those words, something she could use to pull them back.

  “My mother is dead,” Lynn said, hoping to compound the old lady’s discomfort with a sting of her own. “It will be four years next month.”

  Ms Apple smoothed her dress with her hands, her expression shuttered. Lynn knew the old woman had taught the children of powerful Alice families since before Lynn’s mother was born, and she would not concede to her.

  “That she is, child,” she said.

  Lynn was quiet.

  “I do not wish,” Ms Apple continued, “for the dignity of her family to be dead with her. You will behave, and you will learn.”

  “I hate all this,” Lynn said. “I want to practice the sword and go shooting and ride the steamcycle. I’m going to be a Digger.”

  Muffled laughter from her classmates greeted this statement, more than just Bren Millner this time.

  “Lynnette,” Ms Apple said, her tone unchanged, “it is not my place to question why your father let you learn to wield a sword or shoot or ride with him on that infernal contraption, but you know as well as I that you will never be in the army.”

  “And why not?” Lynn asked pigheadedly, though of course she knew the answer.

  “Because you’re a girl, stupid!” Bren called from behind her.

  The class giggled a little louder.

  “Shut your face, Bren!” Lynn said without turning to look at him.

  “Now, Bren,” Ms Apple said. “That wasn’t necessary, was it?”

  Bren didn’t say anything but Lynn could almost feel his sulky sneer penetrating the back of her head.

  “Lynnette,” Ms Apple said, returning her attention to Lynn, “the fact remains that Bren is correct. You know women aren’t permitted to join the army. We’ve discussed this before. If you wish to serve the Territory, you’ll have to become a Sister and serve the Holy Church.”

  “I don’t want to be a Sister,” Lynn said. “I hate them!”

  The room went quiet, and suddenly cold; nobody laughed now. Even Ms Apple’s calm exterior was cracked by just the thinnest sliver
of concern. She looked toward the door as if expecting to see it swing open to reveal the red-cloaked clergymen of the Holy Order. No one wanted a visit from the Holy Order, the instrument through which the Sisters acted when persuasion was necessary. The room was silent for a moment, but that ominous knock on the door never came.

  “I think we should step outside, Lynnette,” Ms Apple said before addressing the class as a whole. “Excuse me a moment, children.”

  Lynn followed Ms Apple out of the room and into the corridor. The teacher closed the door behind them and looked up and down the hallway, but there was no movement and the doors of the other classrooms were closed. Ms Apple made her horrible “tsk” noise, the sound she made by pulling her tongue back from her teeth. Then, to ensure the point was made, she followed it with a gentle sigh. Lynn, her eyes on the floor, prepared herself for the lecture she was about to receive, but it didn’t come as expected.

  “You are more like your mother than you know,” Ms Apple said. Lynn looked up. Her features had softened, giving Lynn some hope that she might escape without her father learning of yet another argument between the pair.

  “She had the same fiery attitude. Perhaps it comes from the songstress blood in you.”

  Lynn could not remember her grandmother—she had died when Lynnette was three or four years old—but she had been the renowned singer Gabriella, a woman as famous throughout the city of Alice for her extraordinary tantrums as she was for her angelic voice. Ms Apple had once told her the story of how her grandmother had demanded apple stew after a performance. The stew was to be made only from the left side of apples from a certain tree in the Western Regions. When this ludicrous demand could not be met Gabriella had gone back on stage and attempted to undo her performance by singing the entire performance backward.

  Although she would never admit it to Ms Apple, Lynn was pretty sure she had inherited this predisposition for stubbornness. But that wasn’t all she had inherited. Lynn’s hair fell down her back in oversized blonde curls just as her mother’s and her grandmother’s had before her. Lynn brushed her hair nightly, sometimes for an hour, even though no matter how many times she pulled the coarse brush through it, the locks would instantly spring back into large spirals. Her mother had brushed her hair the same way, every night without fail. Now her hair was all that Lynn had left of her mother. The few trinkets her mother had bequeathed her were cold and soulless, but her mother’s hair was with her. It bounced when Lynn laughed; it was alive.

  Her hair may have been immaculately kept but Lynn’s body betrayed her love of more unladylike activities. Her light frame was strung together with muscles built from riding, climbing and swinging a sword, and her clothes were often soiled with red dirt or grass stains. But at fifteen years of age one thing Lynn did not appear to be inheriting from her mother was her bosom. Her chest was flatter than a dirt farm.

  Lynn looked back down at the floor.

  “But,” Ms Apple was saying, “your mother knew when to hold her tongue, and Lynn,” Ms Apple reached out and lifted Lynn’s chin so that their eyes met, “I do hope you learn to do the same, because I do not want to see you in trouble, especially with the Sisters.”

  Lynn felt her eyes growing hot and her lip quivering.

  “I believe you should be sent home for the day,” Ms Apple said. “Besides, your father asked for you to be home early for your brother’s oath-taking.”

  “He’s not my brother,” Lynn said.

  CHAPTER 4

  There was a knock on Lynn’s bedroom door: two short raps on the wood and then the door swung open. That was the way her father entered a room, confidently, without waiting for a response. Lynn spun to face the door, hiding the wooden sword behind her back as her father, Colonel Alfred Hermannsburg, strode into the room.

  Alfred Hermannsburg was a tall man, wide shouldered, but lean at the waist like a precariously balancing pyramid. He was dressed in his formal uniform, a light green shirt and tie, stiff green jacket decorated with a golden rising sun pin, lengths of colored ribbon above the breast pocket and a red sash across the chest. He wore a sword at his belt. His light beard had been recently trimmed. A single eyebrow lifted above his green eyes as he looked at his suspiciously positioned daughter. Lynn edged slowly toward the bed, squeezing the wooden hilt of the sword behind her back and hoping she could somehow dispose of it without being seen as if she were one of those traveling magicians.

  For a moment there was no sound but the repetitive whomp of the fan turning overhead. It rotated slowly, the grinding of its crankshaft and the clicking of its gears faint through the ceiling. It was doing little but churn the already stuffy air. Colonel Hermannsburg moved over and grasped the chain that hung from the fan, pulling it down with a firm yank. There was a loud click from somewhere above and the mechanical sounds died away. The fan began to slow to a stop.

  “I told you not to waste energy,” he said. “The whole city is on restrictions.” He paused for a moment and then held out his hand. “The sword, Lynn.”

  Lynn, safely on the other side of the bed, collapsed to the ground in an impressive faint. She rose again, the sword hidden from view at her feet, as innocent as a flower. Her father had not moved.

  “The sword, Lynn,” he said again.

  Lynn’s shoulders sank forward and her lips billowed out with a forceful sigh. She bent over, collected the wooden sword, walked to her father and placed it in his hand.

  “This is the third one I’ve taken away this month, kitten,” he said. “Where do you keep getting them?”

  “I make them myself.”

  Colonel Hermannsburg looked at the hilt of the sword; it was engraved with the anvil symbol of a Digger blacksmith.

  “Don’t lie, Lynn, it is unbecoming. Do you have any more?”

  Lynn retrieved another of the wooden swords from beneath her bed and reluctantly handed it to her father.

  “The training yard will run out if you keep taking them,” he said.

  “I usually put them back,” Lynn answered, sitting, deflated, on her bed.

  Lynn felt the mattress sink under his weight as her father sat beside her. She slid toward him, letting herself fall against him, resting her head on his broad chest. He put his arm around her and she inhaled the familiar smell of him, his natural musk mixed with sweat and dust.

  “Ms Apple told me you gave up on your work, and that you’ve been arguing with her again.”

  “The things she makes me do are so boring, Father,” Lynn said.

  “And what would you rather be doing?”

  Lynn looked at the wooden sword in her father’s hand.

  “I’m sorry, kitten,” he said, “but Ms Apple’s right. You know girls aren’t allowed to be Diggers.”

  Lynn lifted her head. “What else am I going to be?” she asked. “I want to be a Digger like you, a colonel.”

  “I don’t doubt you could be, Lynn. You probably have the will to be the general.” Colonel Hermannsburg eyed his daughter with stern affection. “But I’m afraid I don’t dictate the law.”

  “I’m nearly sixteen,” Lynn said. “I’m going to have to choose soon.”

  “I know,” Colonel Hermannsburg said, squeezing his daughter in close to him. “You’re growing up too fast for my liking too.” He paused for a moment and then continued, “I had a visit from the High Priestess yesterday, kitten. She thinks you would do well in the Sisters. She’d like to meet you herself.”

  Lynn pulled away and looked at her father coolly. “No,” she said, verging on tears. “Don’t you make me join the Sisters. I won’t.”

  “I’m sorry you’re not a boy, Lynn, but if you were then you wouldn’t be you. Besides, I’m glad I have both a son and a daughter.”

  “You don’t have a son.”

  “Now, Lynn,” Colonel Hermannsburg said. “We’ve been through this. I’ve adopted Melbourne as my son, which makes him your brother. He’s a Hermannsburg now.”

  Lynn said nothing. Colonel Hermannsburg
smiled at his daughter. He rose from the bed and cut at the air with the wooden sword. Lynn felt the light movement of air on her face and heard the sword’s thick swoosh through the air, but it was nothing like the metallic ring of a real sword.

  “Who have you been practicing with?” Colonel Hermannsburg asked.

  “Nobody, I’ve just been practicing the movements you showed me.”

  “I suppose I must blame myself for your love of swords. Perhaps I treated you too much like a son, but there’s not much we can do about that now, is there?”

  Lynn didn’t answer.

  “Come on, then,” her father said as he tossed Lynn the second wooden training sword. Lynn managed to catch it even though it bounced clumsily off her fingers and a quick dart of pain flew up her arm from the needle wound. Lynn was annoyed that her finger continued to sting when there was little more than a tiny red mark to show for it. She preferred it when she had proper bruises to show off.

  She stood in front of her father and gave the sword a quick twirl around her arm. She had seen Melbourne do that in the training yard and had decided that if he could do it, so could she. She had dedicated herself from that moment to learning it. It was like her father had once said: if you’re no good with a sword, at least look like you know what you’re doing. A little fear can cause some enemies to make big mistakes.

  Her father laughed at her flourish. “Attack then, sword dancer,” he said.

  Lynn swept the wooden blade toward her father’s unarmed side and he batted the attack playfully away. She struck again, this time with a straight lunge, and again her father parried. Lynn moved quickly, just like he had taught her. Short, sharp attacks at first, nothing that would overbalance or overcommit her, but a constant stream of strikes and feints that forced her father to defend himself. Lynn imagined the great ringing as their steel blades clashed.

  Colonel Hermannsburg blocked two or three more of these strikes before he found his opening. Lynn thrust forward. Her eyes went wide in a brief moment of panic as she felt the sole of her light slipper give way beneath her leading foot. She looked down to see that her foot had landed on a discarded dress that glided easily across the polished floor of her bedroom. As her foot slid away her weight went too far backward. She recovered as quickly as she could but she was not fast enough. Her father sidestepped and Lynn felt his wooden sword against her neck. He slapped the flat of his blade against her bare skin, hard enough to hear the thwack but light enough that his daughter would not be hurt.