Banished

by L M Feldt

  The eagles grew incensed by the orange bird’s cries and they flew down and grabbed the bird, plucking it right off the boy's shoulder. Feathers flew and when finally the eagles grew bored the poor mocking bird lay dying.

  The boy ran to where the bird had dropped and cradled it in his arms, crying and kissing it's wounds.

  Suddenly, the bird struggled in the boy's arms. It had been healed by the boy's tears and saliva! What joy!

  Crying anew that his friend was healed, the boy didn't notice the old woman watching.

  Now, to set the scene you have to know that all this took place not long after the Wars, so people were sensitive to anything remotely different or strange.

  The boy returned home to discover the whole village knew he had healed his pet. The orange bird was taken and thrown into a cage and the boy was strapped to a chair. One by one the villagers brought their sick and the boy healed them with his tears. Then the villagers took the small boy and his orange bird and left them in the wilderness to fend for themselves, leaving them without food or shelter.

  A year goes by. Then two, then three. The villagers are happy to be rid of someone so clearly tainted by mutation. They are proud for upholding the laws, pleased that no monstrous dna would be passed down from the boy.

  Then one day bandits attack the village, taking their food, their weapons and some of their women. Those that survived were in bad shape and knew they would die without help. The boy, someone remembered.

  “The boy!” He cried. “The boy can heal us.”

  So a small group of villagers, those that could still walk, made their way to the glade where they had left the boy years ago. They walked around and around, they walked in circles but saw no evidence of the boy. About to give up they were startled by a voice.

  “I was a flower! Not a weed!” cried the orange bird from up high in a tree.

  “The End”

  Thirty Three

  Aito’s horrible story had done little to calm my nerves. The fire is too hot and the odd floor irritates me. To move away from the heat and light and rustling of people trying to get comfortable, I move my stuff into one of the small rooms and flop on a bed. The mattress is dry and rustles worse than the floor but it is cooler here and I have space to myself. I close my eyes and try not to think of the small boy with the orange bird, cast out not because he was dangerous or looked strange but because he was merely different.

  On one hand I understood the villager’s fear, especially after having seen the mutated creature in the vat at the labs. The DNA Wars had been terrible in that they changed the face of the enemy, literally. Men became monsters. Bombs had been dropped, sure, but the majority of the Wars had been fought on ground level as each country turned on itself and it’s neighbors. As governments fell, the large and powerful became fractioned. Disagreements turned compatriots into enemies overnight as everyone tried to keep up with the ever changing field of the ultimate soldier. Our very humanity was the price.

  I finally drift off to sleep, dreaming of orange creatures stomping through the forest, their eyes weeping tears of whitish puss. I wake sometime later, instantly aware that I am not alone. A long muscled body is pressed along my back and a hand is slowly snaking up my stomach. Khane.

  I continue my breathing as though I am still asleep, waiting to see what he will do. I’m shocked. He knows I’m not ready to get physical with him yet, I’d told him so. So what is he up to? The hand continues up to my breast and gives a light massage before heading back down. I try to give him the benefit of the doubt and wait for him to stop himself. When questing fingers start to slide under the top of my pants I realize he has no intention of stopping himself.

  With a low growl I grab him by the upper arm and twist my body, scissoring my legs and propelling him up and over me. Khane lands on the floor with a thump and a surprised yelp.

  “What part of ‘no’ did you not understand?” I hiss. I am angry now, red hot and ready for a fight. This thing between us has been brewing for a while and I am ready to have it out, just not in the way he’d hoped for.

  “I….” Khane starts and then, without further explanation, slinks away into the darkness.

  I am stunned and dismayed. Never had I thought he would try something like this. How far would he have taken it thinking I was asleep? Any romantic feelings I might still have had for him vanish in an instant. I can no longer trust Khane and that hurts. I punch the thin blanket into a ball and lean back, thinking. Ever since the pool of acid, or whatever that stuff was, I’d been fixed but Khane had had a different reaction. He’d said that his empathy had been spotty ever since touching that stuff. I hadn’t given it much thought at the time but now I am beginning to realize that his empathy, while sometimes a burden, also made him who he was. With it now fading or perhaps even gone, Khane is struggling. He is cut off from his connection to other people and maybe that had driven him to seek comfort in my bed? This new insight softens some of my anger…though there is still the matter of broken trust.

  I am not sure I get much sleep after that and when sounds of people stirring drifts through the open door I sit up and rub my face. I feel groggy and lethargic and not at all rested. The anger has burnt itself out….for now anyway.

  We break camp quickly as we hadn’t really set up to start with and continue our underground exploration through a pair of sliding doors opposite the ones we’d entered through. There are faded signs in a language I don’t understand. A lot of the words are colored red and the overall impression is to take caution ahead.

  The tunnel we enter is shored up with thick metal struts but the floor is gravel and the walls, while covered in a sort of mesh, sprout groupings of fluffy gray-brown moss. Aito leads with his light and Khane is by his side. Seeing Khane this morning should have inspired feelings of anger at the very least, but I just feel foggy and somewhat disconnected.

  Planting one foot in front of the other I trudge along at the rear. Naoaki before me stumbles and catches herself. We all seem to be a little off. Then I hear Micha, just ahead of Naoaki. “I’m a flower!Not a weed!” He giggles and catches himself, his fingers clutching at the metal mesh. I realize there is something seriously wrong. It isn’t that we are all overtired, we are poisoned.

  “Stop! Stop.” I pant. I shrug off my pack and start sniffing the dried fish, trying to see if I can smell a foreign substance.

  “It’s not the fish.” Aito pulls the pack from my hands and re-stuffs it. “These tunnels are low in oxygen. The plants must have used it up before they died. There must…” Aito’s coughing fit ends his instruction. “Go!” He rasps.

  We go, aware now that there is an unknown time limit and an unknown amount of travel still left. We have no idea if we’ll even find an outlet before the lack of oxygen takes us but it is way past time for us to turn around. Our only choice is to stumble forward and hope.

  Naoaki flickers in and out of visibility. Micha giggles and mumbles about flowers. So far I am keeping myself upright and mobile but my heart rate is faster than normal and I am starting to pant. I grab Naoaki as she crashes into the wall….we have got to find the way out soon.

  I loose track of time until we finally spill out of the tunnel and into a cavern. I lie panting on gravel and wait for my head to clear, mildly astonished that we have made it. Wherever ‘it’ is.

  As I recover I take in something of our surroundings. The hard gravel under my back is rough. There are some larger rocks scattered around and I hear the sound of water. Aito has extinguished his light but there is still enough coming from somewhere to see easily. I am hoping the light source is sunlight but I am not recovered enough yet to look around.

  “Hans up!”

  The demand startles me and I wonder if I have dreamed it. What are hans? I raise my palm above my head and wiggle the fingers, the roof of the cavern fading to darkness far beyond them.

  “Hans….!”

  There is some muttering and clicking sounds. A face appears behind my raised
hand, blocking out the view of the ceiling. At least, I think it’s a face. I may be hallucinating. There is a pair of beady black eyes, that part seems normal enough. The rest gets a bit wild with a sharp beak, a slitted nose and….a beard of feathered gills. Like little arms waving, the gills curl and flutter as the beak clacks. I am definitely not recovered yet.

  “I think they want us to go with them.” Aito pops up from my right. He must have collapsed next to me and I just hadn’t noticed.

  “You see it too?” I ask.

  “What?”

  “The face with the leaves growing off it’s chin.” I actually didn’t see a chin, I am just making assumptions.

  “The face belongs to one of the guards. There are twelve, I think,….so we’re going to do what they say, for now…..nice and easy.”

  I take in Aito’s worried and serious stare. The face had disappeared but now it pops into view again.

  “Up!” It demands. The beak clicks and the the soft face squishes up in irritation.

  Aito climbs unsteadily to his feet and I follow his lead. I am still lightheaded and stumble, nearly falling over in the process. Naoaki grabs my arm, maybe to steady me or maybe to keep herself from falling down. Looking around I see that Aito is right. We are surrounded by strange guards, identifiable by their spears and official looking vests. One also wears a chain with a large, shiny pendant shaped like a sun. This must be the captain.

  We are herded with the jabbing motion of spears and the occasional demand of ‘Up!’ or ‘Ou!’. Their grasp of language is very basic and I wonder if there a limited number of words their beaks can form. I notice Khane start to reach for his ax when Aito hisses at him. He’s right. There are too many to fight and since I hadn’t even thought they were real…. We are in no condition to fight anyone.

  Thirty Four

  “Jax is hungry.” Whines Micha for the fifth time.

  “Jax is dead.” Naoaki grumbles.

  The tiresome sound of water dripping and the small space fronted by iron bars does not improve my mood. They had herded us in here, a room far too small for a group of our size and then wandered off like a flock of lost ducklings. Only the leader spoke, the others shuffling around us, agitated with their rudimentary yet sharp spears at the ready. I am hungry too but more then that, my head is starting to clear and that’s much more important than a full stomach.

  I must have fallen asleep, lulled by the incessant dripping and the drone of a quiet argument over Jax’s need to eat, because I start badly when a calloused tentacle wraps around my ankle and squeezes. I jerk my foot and kick at the tentacle with my hard boot, getting a rewarding high pitched screech in response. The guard quickly shuffles away, favoring one of it’s four odd appendages. I wonder when the people that are in charge will call for us.

  “It’s awake.” Naoaki teases me. She shoots Khane a dirty look and I sense some tension.

  “But where does the food go?” Insists Khane.

  “Are you still on that?” I growl.

  The object of the conversation is smashed up between Micha and my right arm. Close up, Jax, while still displaying signs of previous rot, doesn’t smell so bad. Mostly earthy, maybe. The creature seems to sense me staring and turns it’s vacant stare my way.

  Feeling the sudden need for space, I carefully climb to my feet and grab the rusty bars. Peering through I can see down a long hallway. There are a lot of other cells, all full, each one with a face or a hand or a appendage of some kind sticking through. We are underground still and as I sniff the air I realize that ours must be the only cell without an overflowing chamber pot.

  “So, do we make a break for it or continue to wait?”

  “My bladder says we need to get out of here.” Naoaki says.

  An hour later, standing in chains, I am mildly surprised. It had been a good plan. Smash our way out, free the other prisoners and use the chaos to get away. Only one problem, where to get away to. As it turns out, the maze of cells and tunnels all feed back into one main hallway with a huge, well guarded gate. No way out. Going back hadn’t been an option either, even if we could have found our way back to the cavern, we had blocked that option with the last sliding door, hammering it shut forever with Khane’s huge ax.

  My eyes scan the room, taking in the variety of twists who had been sharing the cells down from us. All look dangerous, a menagerie of deadly talents. They would have to be to have made it this far on their own. The prison break would have worked with this crowd had they worked together….and if we hadn’t all been gassed as we stood stupidly before the locked gates. Next to me hunches a man with large hexagonal plates down his back, a natural shield. Shaggy, matted hair hangs in natty ropes obscuring his face and his arms are covered in badly healed scars. He had made it this far but barely.

  On my other side is a small waif, wiry thin and equally as dirty as my other neighbor. I wonder how long these people have been locked up and for what crime. Catching me looking the boy grins and flashes his fangs. I grin back, amused at his weak intimidation attempt.

  “Yup, you’ll do fine.” A wink follows this statement.

  “What?”

  “Mmmm. He keeps the pretty ones…or the useful.” The kid shrugs. “The rest of us get broken in them cells and sent to work in the pits.”

  “What?” I hate repeating myself but I am not following anything this boy is saying.

  “Course, you’ll have to let him feed….or offer other compensation. You know, to be allowed into the city.” The boy’s raunchy facial expressions aside, I wonder how this kid made it through the jungle alone, never mind the other trials we have overcome as a group.

  “How on earth did you get all the way here on your own?” I ask point blank.

  “Get here? I was born here. Lived in the Lowers until I got caught. Bad luck is all.” His expressive face switches to gloomy in the blink of an eye. He scuffs his feet on the hard packed earth floor.

  “Born here?” My heart beats faster. This place sounds huge. A city, he said. Before he can answer we are forced to march, up long hallways, shuffling in single file. Talking is discouraged so I use the time to study my surrounding and the other people near me in line. I had not thought of the others in my group in terms of beauty or beast but we are all much easier on the eyes than anyone else in line.

  Our surroundings have changed as we travel up. Hard packed red earth upgrades to cracked tile similar in color and as we continue our march the tile changes again. It is still red from the earth it is baked from but now it is shiny and clean. We file into a large room with narrow windows high up and no other adornments. The tile reaches up the wall and there is a drain in the center of the room. Either they plan to hack us all to death right here or they are used to cleaning up after the wretched state of the prisoners. We are given a scoop of water from a communal bucket which does make me worry less about being dismembered. The water is still cool by the time it gets to me and helps clear my head.

  “What is going on?” I ask the boy.

  “Oh, they’ll parade us before the dais. We’ll recite our crime and maybe, if we are very lucky, get pardoned. Depends on his mood.” The boy shrugs. He doesn’t seem too put out by being chained up like an animal.

  “So there’s a Queen here too?” Have we circled around only to end up right where we’d started. I shudder to think of all our effort coming to nothing. Not to mention the whole bit about being hunted for my parts so my sisters’ clones can survive with the bloodline intact.

  “Just the King, or Commander now what with the War and all.”

  I am shocked by this. War. The word sends a shudder down my spine. It is an evil word and represents everything that I had thought society to be against. What is the point of Banishment if you are just going to start a war anyway? Looking around I realize there is no Banishment here. We have definitely not circled back round to our starting point.

  I want to ask more questions but we are being herded through a pair of tall double doors. Everyone
down the line is silent. The metal rings clank loudly against my ankles and the rust is leaving a stain on my boots. If I weren’t so curious about this King I might be tempted to loose my temper.

  Past the doors everything changes. The floors become stone, a glossy white with veins of red that will have to be cleaned after we have passed. The walls have elaborate decorations, swirls and leaves all carved from wood and painted golden. As fancy as the decor is there are cobwebs up in the corners and dust mutes the shine of everything. It is all a little worn and I wonder if this forgotten show of wealth continues or if it is just this part, the part that the prisoners see.

  Through another pair of doors, these so tall they almost touch the high ceiling, we enter what I assume is the throne room. Everything glitters. The people watching us pass, the floors, the crystal lights that look like drops of water caught in the sun. It is all so much, so overdone. I wonder if my mother’s throne room looks like this. A woman dressed head to toe in red feathers wrinkles her nose as we pass by. I don’t blame her but what did she expect? Here I see what the boy was talking about. Everyone here is beautiful. As far as I can tell they are all twists but their genetic mutations seem mostly limited to appearance. Exotics of all kinds and color but no uglies.