Stone Seeds

by Ely, Jo;

  “And how’s that going Mamma Ezray?” Jengi leans forward, asks her quietly.

  She sniffs. She looks down at the half crushed plant and then seems to relent. Lean towards him a little. “You caint eat this one, not the t’other one neither. Not yet any road, so that’s a wasted night’s work.” She stops. She rests her elbow on the kitchen table, her forehead on her hand.

  “We’re trying to breed the pizens out so we can eat it.” She looks up at Jengi. “But we’re not there yet. Won’t kill you now, those two. But they’ll still leave a stomach ache lie a kick in the stomick. That’s bad. I guess we’ll eat it when we really have to.”

  Zorry looks down. The plate where the first root was pinned is now empty. Zorry curses. Picks Zettie up off the floor. There’s a slightly anxious moment whilst Mamma Ezray locates the escaping plant and then pins it down again.

  “It’s no good.” She says. Skewering it.

  Some days it feels as though everything gets away from Mamma Ezray. She’s struggled with the plant for the last three hours, and they still can’t eat it. And all this straight after a night spent in the killing forest. A night and half a day of effort and her children are still hungry. She feels her eyes closing slowly, she lets her hands fall. And then, blink, blink, and she goes back to attending to the plant.

  “A mother cupboard cannot give up her work,” she tells Zorry now. Sighs. “No matter what. That’s the oath: hope. Hope is the resistance, Zorry. In truth, it keeps us alive as much as food or water.” She scratches the insect bite on her arm once more. “Of course …” She sighs. “Some days it’s easier to hope than others, just as the food cupboard is sometimes bare, sometimes full.” Mamma Ezray turns to look at Zettie. The child is playing on the floor with a stick and a pile of stones. “But what else?” Mamma Ezray says, watching the infant for a moment longer. “There is nothing else but to go on.”

  Jengi places a capsule on the table. It has the shop’s packaging on it. Gaddys’ hair-coils drawn across the plastic lid.

  “What’s that?”

  Jengi pulls the lid off the capsule, by way of an answer. They smell the soup before they see it. “Sweet potato, peppers, chicken, white beans.” Jengi reels off the list, as the aroma of herbs and spices, nourishing cooking oils from the soup hits their noses. “Made it myself.”

  “But … This is a feast, Jengi?”

  “Forget it,” he says. “And I only got a cup for you. Lots of hungry Sinta right now, but I saved this’un for you.” Jengi pushes the small plastic capsule towards them.

  “Give it to them, the children,” Mamma Ezray says, brusquely. Indicating Zorry leaning at the sink, Zettie playing on the kitchen floor tiles. And then, “You are taking over Mamma Zeina’s work then, Jengi?” She smiles. “Feeding the Sinta in the hungry times.”

  “Aye.” He nods. “Well I owe Mamma Zeina that much.”

  “Do you? Mamma Zeina never wanted anything from us in return, Jengi.” The Sinta woman eyes him curiously.

  “Nor do I. Truly.” Jengi looks down at Mamma Ezray’s mortar and pestle, the luminous green paste squelched against the side of the dish.

  The Mother Cupboards often work as cooks to the OneFolk by day so it’s an irony that Jengi enjoys that the mother cupboards cult is all about creating a wealth of secret eating. Keeping alive the very folks that aren’t invited to the feasts in the first place. But they’ve been working day and night since the hungry times began on the Sinta farms, they can’t last like this.

  Mamma Ezray reluctantly accepts the last spoonful of the soup from Zorry, expecting little more than vegetable water, realising quickly that her daughter has loaded the spoon with chicken. Mamma Ezray’s surprised and a little of the red soup dribbles down her chin. Zorry mops it.

  “We’re worried about you, Mamma Ezray. You have to keep going for us.”

  Jengi is winding his big hooked thumbs gently around each other. Watching his thumbs. He’s still looking down at the floor. And then up at Zorry, sensing her watching him too, cat-like, nervous, sinking into her corner. Jengi pretends not to notice. “It’s just … They need a …” He stops himself. “We have no map. What we have really always needed is a … Map of the general’s house, Mamma. The general’s house, the labs, the feast room and the sewers running underneath it. All of it.” He’s still looking down at the floor.

  “My parents were mapmakers,” Mamma Ezray says, after a small pause. “As I imagine you know. My father mapped the mountains for the excavation projects that got folks so excited in the last era. It was stolen from him, and helped guide the Egg Men to every last one of his friends. Got folks killed. He never made another map after that.”

  “Didn’t he? Are you sure?” Jengi is looking at Mamma Ezray strangely.

  “No. And nor will I. A map would only bring trouble to my children, Jengi. A map would bring foreign bombs, death and worse. There is a reason the general built Sinta farmsteads over his most important projects. The man’s not a fool. We are … Dispensable to him.”

  “Understood. But there are other ways in which a map may be useful to the resistance.” Jengi smiles. And then looking up at Zorry wryly. She bows slightly.

  Zettie, sensing something, examines her sister briefly. Just a glance and then gets back to her work. Zettie is making something from the contents of her apron pocket. She’s perked up since she ate the soup and her work absorbs her.

  Mamma Ezray had done so much food experimenting whilst pregnant that before her little sister Zettie was born, Zorry was a little worried that the new baby, when she came, would have the texture of a boiled frog, or loosely veined floppy ears like the pizen leaves which her mother munched as her belly rose. Don’t talk rubbish, child. Mamma Ezray used to say, but with a nervous edge in her voice until baby Zettie came out looking exactly the way that Zorry had looked as a baby, which is to say, shiny and round, with strong little legs that curled toward her chest, trying to take the shape in which she’d been squashed into Mamma Ezray’s womb. She had Zorry’s huge amazed eyes, tinged with green in the first days, and then changing as the seasons shifted. Zettie now has Zorry’s eyes, gold flecked irises. And like all Sinta, Zettie’s eyes shift in colour with her mood, the light, and depending on what she has eaten. Also the shifts in the weather. Mamma Ezray says that this is muddle-headed talk. Eyes don’t change.

  Mamma Ezray gets up now, to fetch Jengi black coffee and a twist of cactus chipotle. She comes back in from the kitchen. Hands the last piece of oat bread to Zettie, who chews the end of it thoughtfully. And then trying to soften it in her tin cup of rainwater.

  “You still teaching her about the edible plants and the pizens too?” Jengi raises his head, looks at Zettie. “That’s a useful thing to larn the child at a time like this, Mamma Ezray. We have to pass on everything we know, that’s a lesson we can all learn from the loss of Mamma Zeina. She took much of her knowing with her.”

  “Zettie don’t listen to me overmuch,” Mamma Ezray replies, “you caint tell what goes in. What doesn’t. Childur go their own way. No way to know for sure what Zettie is learning, if she’s learning anything. She don’t communicate much. But the child’s best quality is that she appears to grow up on thin air. Don’tcha, Child?” Mamma Ezray says, gently leaning down. Patting Zettie’s small knees. “Don’t know … What Zettie will learn to rearrange for her own self, one day. And seeing it all differently in the entire, I shouldn’t be in the least bit surprised.” Mamma Ezray is squinting into the low light at the window. She thinks she sees something moving behind the Egg Man’s farmhouse.

  “Did you see that van?”

  “No.”

  “I heard screaming. I thought … I heard something next door.”

  “You look worried Mamma Ezray.”

  “Aye. Something’s wrong.” She says. “I can feel it.”

  “Wrong more’n usual?”

  “Yes.” She says. “Wrong more’n usual.”

  Jengi gets up and strides toward the back doo
r. But something causes him to stop. Eye the latch. He turns back toward the room. He’s still looking down at the floor.

  Zettie gets up from drawing her lizard, pads over toward him. “Jengi.” She turns toward her drawing, points.

  “Ah, Zettie,” he says. “I haven’t time for playing lizards today.”

  Zettie’s lizards are now in the space left by every broken floor-tile, of which there are three.

  Jengi’s warm smile in the gap between the door and the hinge. Click. Zorry turns back to the room. Small shock. Her mother is standing right behind her. Arms crossed across her chest.

  “Zorry, your work is done. This is too dangerous now.”

  “Yes, Mamma.”

  Zorry feels her mother’s scrutiny all the way to the front door.

  “Where are you going now, Child?”

  “Mamma … I’m not a child.”

  THE SCHOOL ROOF

  THE LIGHT IS FALLING gently, outside. Mottled pattern of leaves on the classroom floor and, in a bit, the edges of the pattern seem to move and change. The OneFolk childur look up to see Zettie’s face upside down at the topside rim of the window. The teacher is writing at the board, has her back to the class.

  Zettie’s grin is warm and slow, turning her head slowly, and her friends, stuck inside, feel strangely honoured by it. Zettie vanishes. The OneFolk childur hear a clatter of bare feet on the classroom roof, and the tumbling gravel as Zettie skids, slips down and bangs herself on something, saves herself at the last minute. Soft, concealed laughter from the OneFolk childur.

  And now the OneFolk childur hear the small thuds of feet overhead, the soft thunk and patter. Zettie is pretty much the leader of the Sinta children, the ones still too young to work by a year or two. And this is a testament to Zettie because Sinta childur are not easily led as a point of pride.

  The large school pond is, of course, a natural attraction, to all manner of life forms, including children. Zettie and her small friends now come in small scouting troops toward the schoolyard most days, and the storms permitting. Mostly they come in the damp, baking aftermath of the storms just to see what’s risen in the school pond just beyond the Furdy. Dead things mostly. And if it’s worth trying to eat or not depends not so much on what it is, Zettie reckons, but on how hungry we are.

  The Sinta children are always barefoot, although Zettie once had a left shoe, three sizes too big and with the sole coming clean away from the body of the shoe, so that her foot flapped like a tongue in the gap. She’d dragged that shoe along to slow herself down for three days until she’d swapped it for an old neck tie that was plucked out of the rubble of a bombed out house. Now Zettie wears that instead. No shirt, just the tie. Red silk, from the old times. The defiant gesture of the tie, and in a banned colour, seems to define Zettie’s leadership. Although her followers are half-starved, mostly exhausted children, with the exception of the children of the Mother cupboards. They are a little better fed, on account of their mothers’ gardening.

  It’s a daily struggle for food on the Sinta farms since Mamma Zeina’s death. Gaddys hopes that by shrinking the rations she’ll persuade somebody to come forward, name the mother cupboards. No-one has, perhaps thanks to the mother cupboards being a more reliable source of food than Gaddys herself is, perhaps due to Jengi and his back door groceries.

  The Sinta childur are mostly attracted to the school roof these days by the smell of cooking food, in the school kitchens. Hanging like bats (the effect of the new Sinta uniforms, with their winged arms and pointed hoods) over the lightning box around the playground. Their newly buzz-cut hair revealing small forlorn-looking skulls atop boney necks, lower still there are protruding rib cages, strong, skinny limbs. If the crop doesn’t come on time there will be swollen bellies on the Sinta Farms by the end of this month, well … “We are not there yet.” Mamma Ezray would say if you asked her. She’s working day and night now on her plant experiments. And sometimes puffing herself up, just a little. Rising. “We may be hungry but we ain’t starved. Least not yet.”

  All the Sinta childur physically struggle against the constraints of their ‘uniform’. Unlike the OneFolks’ childur, the Sinta know what it is to long for comfortable fabrics, t-shirts, shorts and flowered patterns, stripes and shirts and dresses printed with the silhouettes of baobab trees at sunset. Clothes patched up from the old days until they’re mostly, it seems, made of patches. The government uniform is sticky and hot, restricts limbs. Worse, it’s overly tight at the collar and seams, leaves the children’s skin raw and complaining. Welts at the arms and wrists for their mothers to bathe after curfew, which is the only time that the uniforms are allowed to come off.

  The tie around Zettie’s neck is strictly speaking against regulations. She’s also keeping her hair, at least for a little while longer. Worst of all, she has an officer’s button, found by Jengi out beyond the baobab trees and sewn, by him, into the seam of her uniform.

  Zettie has learned to twist the officer’s button when she’s anxious. Jengi told her it was a secret but, not understanding children, didn’t realise that you can’t burden a child with secrets. Of course Zettie has told all her friends.

  One of Zettie’s tiny followers told the school teacher about Zettie’s officer button in exchange for a sandwich three days ago. And then dropping the sandwich, as if the child’s own hands protested at their owner’s betrayal, and the sausage and lettuce, the contents of the sandwich all over the floor and the table.

  TRAINING DAY

  “SO WHAT’RE WE DOING here, Jengi?”

  “Hushhhh. I’m training you.” Grins.

  “You’re training me for the killing forest?” Zorry sighs ironically. “And here I thought you liked me, Jengi.”

  He turns and eyes her. “I do. I do like you. But you is a mother cupboard now, Zorry. Better I teach you how not to get killed in here, since it’s kindly ‘bout to become a home from home, so to speak. Now. Hurry up with that fence.”

  Zorry gently strokes the suture in the fence, and then unpicks it. “You first,” she says. Jengi rolls his eyes.

  “It’s dark,” Zorry says to his back. And then, “I don’t reckon to go right into the mouth of the forest.”

  “Zorry.” He turns. Steels himself. “That’s where Mamma Zeina got all her best plants.”

  Zorry doesn’t answer.

  “Okay. So it’s slightly different every time,” he explains.

  “It doesn’t seem so bad.” Zorry lies. Things seem to move in the darkness around her.

  “Don’t get overconfident,” he snaps. Zorry notices Jengi’s teeth and eyes glitter, he’s striped with moonlight. She takes a step backward from him. She can’t quite say why.

  “At first the forest will just try to learn you, Zorry.” He says, a little softer this time. “It ain’t a regular sort of jungle, Sinta. The killing forest is a single mind, with many parts to it. It will pull you in slow and then swallow you up fast. You have to learn its ways quickly. No room for mistakes. The forest can be … Unforgiving.”

  Dark shapes of tree limbs and curling ferns are outlined against the moonrise. There is something sliding in the ground underneath her feet. “So …” Jengi says, looking at her critically. “Just stay awake, okay Zorry?”

  Jengi can’t tell what the Sinta is thinking just now.

  “As far as I can make out …” Jengi looks around him. “Only the creatures at the edge of the killing forest, those in the low brush, are willing to come out of the killing forest. Through the fence iffen you let them, or leave a gap when you suture it. There are other things that …” She looks where he looks. “Back there. The dark centre of the forest.” He says. “Them things won’t come out for love nor money, they’d rather pull you on in. They have ways. We haven’t figured it all yet.”

  Zorry shudders.

  “We’ll stay on the edge of the killing forest tonight. Most mother cupboards don’t never go in further than this point, not even your own Mamma Ezray. At least not since
her childur were born. Mamma Zeina was … She is a loss. We won’t see her like again any time soon.”

  Zorry understands this to be a challenge. Steels herself. Pushes on through the leaves, just a little ahead.

  “Scurvet.” Zorry points to the tracks.

  “Good.” He says. Turning. “But which kind, Zorry? It’s important to know.” Zorry isn’t sure.

  She feels Jengi’s eyes on her once more. “Stop staring,” she instructs him, angered now. Blinks and scowls. Jengi, leaning forward, plucks an insect off her face. Pins it between his thumb and forefinger, turns it upside down to show Zorry its underside.

  “A fast moving spider with jewelled back,” he explains. “Enters your ears, nose or mouth.” He points to the sharp little pincers, squeezes them expertly, and a little yellow liquid oozes. “That’s the pizen.”

  “Oh.” She says. And in a bit, “Thank you.”

  “What’s that sound?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “But Jengi.” Holds his arm back. “I am worried about it. Tell me what it is. If you know.”

  “A creature you can hear but not see,” Jengi explains. “Sounds as big as six bears but, as you’ve noticed, it’s a strangely human groaning. Spooks you, don’t it? Well don’t let it, Zorry. The forest is just trying to raise your adrenaline levels. It’s a kind of stress test.” Looks around him. “Remember it’s learning you, Zorry. Every step. Who you are. So …”

  “What do I do?” Zorry freezes again.

  “So … Let it know you, Zorry.” He grins. “Push on forward like a mother cupboard. Like Zeina did. You ain’t never been a coward, so far as I can make out.”

  He plunges on through the thicket toward the trees, by the path Mamma Zeina made with her feet over her years of trekking here. Zorry pauses briefly. Looks up. Moon through the tree bowers, creaking sounds overhead. Entwined fingers of twigs silhouetted against the old moon’s singular light. No sign of the general’s second moon yet, the search beam. She follows Jengi in, until she’s enveloped by the dark.