Crecheling

by D. J. Butler

  “I understand why you pretend to be surprised,” Zarah said. “You do it for my benefit, and also for your own. You don’t want to admit that a Landsman might have captured your heart. Especially one whom the System has designated you to Cull.”

  “It’s horrible.” Dyan’s whisper was tiny.

  “It is horrible.” Zarah leaned in closer. “Life is horrible, Dyan,” she said softly. “It is a series of terrible tragedies, and we choose the things we choose in life in order to soften those tragedies, and brighten the dull stretches between them. Do you understand me?”

  “I think so.”

  “I’m like you, Dyan. I can imagine myself in your place. I can do it better than you can, because I am older than you. I’ve seen many things, experienced many things, stood in strange and unexpected places. Your gift is a Magister’s gift, and the System is right to think that it can use you in that Calling to great effect.”

  “Once it can be sure of my loyalties,” Dyan conclude. “Once it has placed on me the burden of collective guilt, and taught me that life is cheap, and that there is nothing so horrible that I wouldn’t do it to save my own life. Once it knows that the thing I will choose to soften my tragedies and brighten the dull stretches between them is participation in the System.”

  “Life as an Urbane is not the worst life there is,” Zarah whispered. “Urbanes have the best food to be had, and shelter. And medicine.”

  “And funvids,” Dyan said bitterly.

  “Distraction is a powerful and important thing,” the Magister said. “And funvids can be considerably more than mere distraction.”

  “They don’t teach you how to escape from having your hands tied,” Dyan told her. “I know, because I tried.”

  Zarah chuckled dryly. “There are other things to be learned.”

  “So I’m finding out.” Dyan huddled into her coat. The moonlight about her felt stern, and the stars cold and remote, and she wondered how Zarah could possibly be comfortable wearing only her simple clothing and cloak of office against the cold. “Magister Zarah, what are you doing here?”

  Zarah sighed. “Most Creche-Leavers walk a pre-determined path,” she said. “We show them blood, we lead them into the wilderness, we show them joy and community, and then we make them dip their own hands into the blood they’ve seen. We bring them back to the community sober and adult, broken down and rebuilt again.”

  “I see now that this is the heart of what a Magister does.”

  “It is. And you see that because it is in your gift to be a great Magister, a great builder, breaker, and re-builder of human spirits.”

  “But it went wrong this time.”

  Magister Zarah hesitated. “Something unexpected happened,” she said. “Death has resulted, but death was always going to result, death always does result from the Cull. Some people have been Culled who were not supposed to be, and others, who were supposed to die, have not. Yet. But death still shows us that he is king, that he is the darkness around life’s flickering match, the eternal silence around life’s short, tuneless warble. No mysteries have been disturbed, no revelations cast into doubt. But a new path has opened. A different choice. Perhaps.”

  “For me,” Dyan realized.

  “For you.”

  “You’re saying I have a choice.”

  “I am.”

  “I could come back to you.”

  “You would still have to be Blooded.”

  “What about Cheela?” Dyan asked. “She told Shad that I attacked her. She told you that I killed Wayland.”

  “You would have to do something sufficiently … dramatic … to convince everyone that Cheela was mistaken.”

  A thick, cold feeling of horror choked Dyan’s windpipe. “I could Cull Jak and Eirig,” she said. She wished the cold had rendered her completely numb, but it hadn’t, and she felt sick at her own words. “For instance.”

  “Shad would remember that you spared Cheela when you could have killed her,” Zarah predicted. “Others would be persuaded. Then you would cease to be a Magister-designate and become a Magister. You would soften the horrors of life with the pleasures of the System and the company of its people.”

  “Shad would still love Cheela.”

  “I don’t imagine that Shad will ever forget the image of you standing over Cheela, threatening to cut her head off,” Zarah said. “Do you?”

  “No,” Dyan agreed. “He won’t.”

  “Nor would you ever forget Jak, a boy for whom you once had feelings.”

  “And whom I had to kill, to make my own life easier.”

  “Don’t say easier. Say bearable.”

  “Would it be bearable?” Dyan asked.

  “Eventually.”

  “And the other choice?”

  Magister Zarah was quiet. “What do you think the other choice is?”

  “The other choice to is to go with Jak and Eirig,” Dyan said.

  “There is life in the Wahai. There are outlaws, to be sure, but there are also the Shoshan and the Basku.”

  “Are there other Systems?” Dyan asked. “Other cities, like there were before the Cataclysm?”

  Zarah shrugged. “If anyone knows the answer to that, it isn’t I. I can tell you that in my travels, I have heard many rumors, and never anything more definite than a rumor. But there’s something else I can tell you, something that will interest Jak a great deal more than the possibility that there might be other Systems.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Jak’s sister Aleen is not dead.”

  Dyan inhaled sharply. “Is she in Buza System?”

  “She escaped the Cull. That makes her an outlaw. I believe she is in the Wahai.”

  “So I would be like Aleen. I would fill my life with Jak.”

  “And he would fill his life with you. If he feels about you like you feel about him.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Maybe he isn’t sure yet, either. There’s time. You’re leaving the Creche now, but you’re still young.”

  “That might mean children,” Dyan mused.

  In the System, when a Love-Match resulted in the birth of a child, the child was turned over to the Nursery. Mothers delivered their babies and were not allowed to see them, not at all, not once. Dyan had witnessed more than one birth, through one-way glass and under Zarah’s supervision. In the Wahai, she assumed, if you gave birth to a child you had to actually raise it. Which made every mother a Magister. It didn’t sound horrible to her.

  “But no funvids.”

  “This doesn’t sound quite like the Blooding,” Dyan said.

  “No?” Zarah asked. “Maybe all of life is the Blooding. Maybe life in the Wahai will be its own Blooding to you, and that will be enough.”

  “Is that how the System sees it?”

  “Or maybe my role as Magister is to prepare you for life, whether that is through the Blooding and transition to being an Urbane … or otherwise.”

  That definitely wasn’t how the System saw it. The choice to become anything other than an Urbane was a choice to run away. That meant being an outlaw, and a special kind of outlaw at that: a renegade. Renegades were hunted.

  “Cheela might come after me,” she said. “If I were a renegade, and she were an Outrider.”

  “Which she will be. She’s not Blooded yet, but with her attitude, it’s inevitable. For that matter, Outrider Shad might be sent to capture you.”

  “Capture or kill.” Dyan considered. “Are you going to get another Landsman for Cheela to … Cull, then?”

  Zarah stood. “That isn’t your concern, my child.” She gathered her cloak about her.

  “What is my concern?”

  Magister Zarah disappeared into the darkness, her words drifting over her shoulder and reaching Dyan’s ears on the cold night breeze.

  “Your concern is to consider the consequences, and to choose.”

  ***

  Chapter Fourteen

  Dyan let the boys sleep through the nig
ht, and they both slept hard. The more she thought, the less it seemed to her that she had anything to think about, and when Jak opened his eyes with the first gray light of dawn, she handed him a flask of water.

  “I have something to tell you,” she said.

  “Thanks.” He took the water and drank.

  She told him that Zarah had said Aleen was alive. She had to lie about when she had heard it, of course. She couldn’t admit that she’d let her Magister into camp the night before, and considered the possibility of murdering Jak in his sleep. Instead, she said Zarah had told her the night before the Cull.

  He took the news quietly, without showing any visible reaction. Then he kicked Eirig awake and insisted they start immediately.

  Dyan couldn’t be sure, but she thought that Magister Zarah’s words to her the night before had meant that if Dyan chose not to return to the System, and instead to flee with Jak to the Wahai, she wouldn’t be followed. Or at least, she wouldn’t be followed now.

  Still, Jak went out of his way to hide their tracks and thwart pursuit, and she let him. She could have misunderstood Zarah, or Zarah could have lied. Or Cheela or Shad might pursue Dyan on their own, against Zarah’s wishes. Or someone else might pick up their trail—outlaws or indigenes. So they walked on long stretches of rock, or single file on trails when they had to use them, and when the canyon walls dropped and the Snaik again became accessible, they crossed the river daily.

  Jak and Eirig took rabbits with snares, and speared fish. Dyan shot a small deer with Shad’s bow—with her bow. She knelt beside the animal’s body and laid a hand on its neck to ask its forgiveness before Jak skinned it and cut up its flesh.

  It wasn’t the Blooding the System had intended, but it seemed sufficient to her. In her heart, she pronounced herself a Magister.

  She and Jak were never alone together, except for brief moments when Eirig slipped away to check a snare or to deal with some bodily need. She cherished those times, and tried to smile at Jak even more than usual when Eirig was gone to show her feelings. He smiled back, but they never touched, kissed, or did anything that Dyan would have expected to do with a Love-Match.

  Jak didn’t talk about his sister, other than to mention to Eirig on the first day that he thought she was alive, and somewhere in the Wahai. But the closer they got to the Wahai, the more excited he seemed, the earlier he was awake each morning, and the further he insisted they all walk each day before resting.

  They skirted around the broad open southern end of Treasure Valley before finally slipping into it at Nemap, on the shores of the Lull Sea, a week later. Like Ratsnay Station, Nemap was a settlement whose heart was a town enclosed within a stockade wall. Nemap was much larger than Jak’s home settlement, though, and boats from its wharves plied across the Lull to visit Marsick and Cowell, and trading grounds of the Basku and the Shoshan on the Wahai-side shore. The Wahai themselves stretched up tall and brown on the other side of the Lull. The Jawtooths were visible on the opposite side of the valley, their tallest peaks capped with white snow.

  Looking down from a high grassy ridge at the swarms of people moving in and out of Nemap, Dyan had a realization. “We’re going to need new names,” she said.

  “Ah, if you’re bored of Eirig already,” said her one-armed companion, “you’re going to be bored of anything else I can think of even quicker. My old dad had a better imagination than I ever did. I expect it had something to do with how much beer he drank.”

  “How much did he drink, then?” Dyan asked, recognizing the prompt.

  “My old dad drank so much beer that the day after he died,” Eirig told her, eyes glittering, “they went to cut his hair for the funeral and discovered that the stuff growing out of his scalp was hops.”

  Dyan laughed, and it was sort of funny. She wished she had an old dad to tell jokes about. “We still need new names,” she persisted. “At least here, so close to Buza System. Maybe out in the mountains it won’t matter so much.”

  “How about Arik?” Jak suggested. “I’ll be Jass, and Dyan can be Dana.”

  “That’s very fancy, my old friend Jass,” Eirig said, “but of course we can’t take Dana here into town with us.”

  Jak bristled. “Why not?”

  Eirig laughed. “Look at you both, you’re so excited to be having an adventure together,” he swung his arms to mimic a marching pace, “choosing false identities and looking for Jak’s sister, you’ve forgotten that Dyan here is dressed like an Urbane.”

  Dyan looked down at herself. It was true, she had forgotten, but everything about her clothing, from the hat to the coat to the rider’s boots, marked her as being from Buza System. “Blazes,” she cursed.

  “You even swear like a Systemoid,” Jak laughed.

  “Sorry,” Dyan snorted. “Blazes! There, is that better?”

  “It is. But the clothing is still a problem.”

  “Going naked would be even more of a problem.”

  “Would it?” he asked, and Dyan blushed. Jak’s eyes twinkled, and for the first time in many days she felt attractive.

  “Come on then, you nitwits,” Eirig said. “You hang out here naked. I’ll go down and get the girl some decent clothing.”

  “I’ll go,” Jak insisted immediately. “I can ask about my sister.”

  “You can’t go around asking if anyone knows Aleen from Ratsnay Station, either,” Dyan said.

  “Don’t be silly, I know better than that. I’ll say I’m looking for my cousin, who might be using any name, and describe her. The reason it has to be me is that the single best tool I have for finding Aleen is my face.”

  “What?” Dyan asked.

  “She’s a few years older than Jak,” Eirig explained. “But other than that, people always said they could have been twins.”

  They sat down off the crest of the ridge and examined the remaining items in their saddlebags. When they had segregated out what they thought they needed from what they thought they could spare, Jak shouldered the bag full of their tradable goods: flares, one of the medikits, a light stick, a field lens, water purification tablets, some concentrated rations, several microfiber blankets. He gave Dyan an excited hug, gripped Eirig’s arm, and then traipsed down the long slope into Nemap.

  Dyan and Eirig sat and waited.

  While they waited, Dyan whistled tunes. After she cycled through various Crecheling songs she knew, she found herself whistling the Gallows Song.

  “Ah, I love that one,” Eirig said.

  “Do you know the whole thing?” she asked.

  He sang.

  “Sally she married a soldier,

  A Captain named William Lee.

  And I guess in his fashion he loved her,

  But Sally always loved me.

  Now I sit by this stone and remember

  Her blue eyes and tresses of gold,

  And how we said when we were younger,

  We’d be together when we grew old.

  Oh, sweet Sally,

  Dear Mrs. Lee,

  Your footsteps are gone,

  But your memory lives on,

  And you’ll always be Sally to me.

  The Captain was usually sober.

  At night he was usually home.

  On bad days he yelled and he beat her

  Breaking her pride with her bones.

  You know I was never her lover,

  But not because I never tried.

  She lay every week on my shoulder,

  And whispered my name as she cried.

  Oh, sweet Sally,

  Dear Mrs. Lee,

  Your whispers are gone,

  But your memory lives on,

  And you’ll always be Sally to me.

  He found us one day by the river,

  Just talking, our feet in the foam.

  Pulling his Pistol, he shot her,

  And I ran to the forest alone.

  Some say they drowned there together.

  Some say he hanged from a tree.

&
nbsp; I guess it doesn’t much matter,

  Since the Captain took Sally from me.

  Oh, sweet Sally,

  Dear Mrs. Lee,

  Your kisses are gone,

  But your memory lives on,

  And you’ll always be Sally to me.”

  It was a simple melody, but pretty, and by the end it had become haunting. Listening to the words, it seemed perfect that the hanged man had hummed this tune as he had gone to his death.

  “I don’t understand a lot of that,” Dyan said, “but it moves me. It seems terrible and beautiful at the same time.”

  “What don’t you understand?” Eirig asked.

  “Just some of the words. What’s a missez? You sing that over and over again, in front of a name, like it’s a Calling. Missez Lee. And I don’t know what a pistol is. Or a Captain. I think a soldier is a pre-Cataclysmic word for something like a Guardsman or an Outrider, and that makes sense in the song. And of course, the names are strange.”

  Eirig shrugged. “Old songs,” he said dismissively. “Who knows? Maybe the words made sense to someone once. Maybe they were always gibberish. Like fa la la.”

  “Coo coo ca choo.”

  “Rock-a-bye, baby.”

  “Eirig,” she asked him, trying to sound neither too frivolous nor too serious, “what about your family?”

  “Well, there’s my old dad,” he said. “The first thing you should know about him is that stuff on top of his head, it isn’t hair.”

  “Eirig!” Dyan punched him in the arm, and he faked a punch back at her—with his missing arm. When he missed and stumbled, she caught him and held him upright. “Be serious.”

  “Jak’s my family,” he said.

  She furrowed her brow at him.

  “Serious.” He had a solemn face. “My old dad wasn’t a drunk, he was a good man. But my mother died when I was young, and folks say my dad took it hard. He was a fighter and a scout, like an Outrider, I guess, only without all the fancy gear. I only have a few memories of him, and in my memories he’s always just come home from some trip up the Snaik or into the Jawtooths, and he’s filthy. And then one time he just didn’t come home. He was out alone, so no one really knows what happened. Could have been a wildcat or a bear, or a Basku. Maybe he got on the wrong side of someone from the System, or maybe he just fell, broke his leg and died of starvation.”