Separation

by James Axler

  “Ready, son?” he asked.

  Jak nodded.

  Both men were armed with short hunting spears, the light shafts made of whittled balsa that were only just heavy enough to carry the finely honed and razor-sharp heads. Double-edged, the heads were barbed so that they would go in easily but resist any attempts by their prey to be removed and, in fact, would cause more damage as the attempts to remove them tore into the flesh.

  There was a window of a fraction of a second. The beast, squealing with fear, moved beneath them. For the briefest moment its back would be directly under their aim. In that moment, they would strike.

  There was no word of command. There was no necessity. Both hunters knew by instinct sharpened by experience the optimum moment to strike. As one, they plunged their spears downward. The balsa shafts were light, but the heads of the spears were of a heavy pig-iron metal; and the weight used the light balsa as a flight.

  One spear struck the boar where the skull joined the spine, the needle-sharp point of the head slicing through the thick layers of muscle that rippled on the creature’s massive neck and shoulders. Simultaneously the second spear arrived at an angle, cutting into the animal’s flanks, a throw designed to slice through the layers flesh, fat and muscle to rip into internal organs, causing massive hemorrhaging.

  The boar simultaneously reared and twisted, the twin points of agony searing into its brain, confusion adding to the pain as it tried to work out where its enemy was and how best it could defend itself. It almost doubled over, flipping around to face the direction it had run, squeals of agony and fear increasing. While it was facing away from Kanu and Moses, the two hunters made their move.

  Darting from their hiding places, the men moved in on the creature, pulling back their arms to strike. They needed lightning reflexes at this stage, as the creature was erratic and unpredictable. It thrashed wildly, its awareness now clouded with a red mist of pain as blood flooded its guts and the barbed spearhead in the neck began to work its way down into the spinal cord each time it moved, cutting off motor neurone action.

  Moses struck first. The creature turned wildly so that its head was toward him. The eyes were glittering and sightless, lost in some private hell of pain. Knowing it could still smell him and strike on reflex, Moses wasted no time in chucking his spear. It shot straight and true, taking the creature through one eye, the heavy metal head of the weapon driving forward to rip into the soft tissue of the boar’s brain.

  The result was almost instantaneous. The creature gave one terrible cry that ended in a rattling cough as it flipped over once more. Blind, buying the farm and now almost completely defenseless, its legs waved wildly as it rolled, leaving the soft, white underbelly open and undefended.

  Kanu needed no second chance. His spear flew straight and true, taking the creature in the gut and ripping the remaining life from it. It flipped once more, snapping the balsa shaft of the spear, as it had done with all the others, and leaving the head embedded in its flesh. Gouts of blood gushed from the open wound in time with the fading pulse, spilling onto the ground and darkening the soil and vegetation, steaming in the cool morning air.

  The creature thrashed feebly a few times and was then still. It was an enormous size, and needed the four-pronged attack to take it in flight. Jak was still of the opinion that this matter could have been settled much more easily if left to his methods, but said nothing as Jules stepped forward to prod the now-still beast with his foot.

  “Big bastard. Should feed a lot of people, and the hide’ll come in useful,” he said simply.

  Moses eyed the corpse speculatively. “I’m thinking that mebbe this is the shadow that comes in the night, spiriting away other creatures to join him,” he said, referring to a mysterious attacker that had been decimating their livestock supplies over the past couple of weeks. It was a hot topic of conversation among the hunters in the ville, and Jak had heard plenty about it during his few days with them.

  “Boar not usually meat eater.” Jak spoke up.

  “Mebbe not,” Moses agreed, “but it could be a mutie of some sort. The long-ago wars have long fingers of fear and hate that stretch through the generations.”

  Kanu shrugged. “Whatever it is, it’ll keep Markos happy, and he is like the gathering storm if he is not.”

  Jules agreed. “That is never a bad thing. Let’s get this back to the ville.”

  The four-man team cut two strong branches from the surrounding trees and, using the vines that curled around them, made ropes to secure the front and back legs of the chilled beast. Running a branch between both sets of legs, they each took one branch end and hefted the creature. The branches creaked and they could feel the vine ropes give under the weight of the muscle-bound boar. To have tried one long branch running the length of the body with all four legs secured would have snapped a branch without a doubt.

  The hunters shouldered the weight and began to move. The boar was a good catch, and would make the journey back to the ville seem much longer than it was. Jak pondered as they walked that it was a simple way of life, but as everything on the island was so close to the ville, it would be hard for the companions to escape without being hunted down like the boar he was now helping to carry.

  He wondered if Mildred had any ideas. He had seen her briefly, but she was showing little sign of hurry.

  Jak was curious—as much as he ever allowed himself—as to why.

  MILDRED HAD FOUND HERSELF faced with a barrage of questions from Sineta as soon as she had awakened. The baron’s daughter had been vexed by the information from Markos that the albino had been “freed” by the pale ones, as this contradicted what Mildred had told her about the companions being friends and equals. However, when Mildred had cross-questioned her about the attitudes of Markos and Chan, she had explained to Sineta that it was perhaps a ploy to allow Jak to go free, and then she did something that she wouldn’t have believed possible. She told a possible enemy that Jak would be free to plan an escape.

  “I don’t even know why I’m telling you this,” Mildred said, rubbing her eyes and forehead as if to alleviate the raging crosscurrent of feelings that built up in her head. “For God’s sake, you could tell Markos and have Jak chilled. But I trust you not to.” Her eyes met Sineta’s, and in them Mildred could see that the baron’s daughter was willing her to explain. She continued. “Look, you see my friends as the enemy because of the color of their skin, and they see you as the enemy because you overpowered us and locked them up. So they’ll use any method to work a means of escape. Isn’t that exactly what Markos would do in such circumstances?”

  “I can understand this, but Markos will not, and if your albino friend attempts to free the pale ones, then he will be chilled. They all will.”

  “Then let me speak to him, try to explain. Let me see the others,” Mildred implored.

  Sineta shook her head. “Would that it was that simple. Markos will not allow it.”

  “But you’re the baron’s daughter, for God’s sake,” Mildred exclaimed, “surely you outrank him!”

  Sineta smiled slowly, sadly. “You forget, I am also a woman. I have no authority while my father lives and I am unmarried. Nor will I have any when I am married and the wife of the next baron.”

  Mildred sighed. “Well, this is just stupid. It’ll end in a firefight where people will get hurt unnecessarily. Why waste life and ammo when it’s not needed?”

  “You speak almost as if you do not know which end of the burning stick to grasp,” Sineta said.

  Mildred frowned. The baron’s daughter was right. Normally she would have no hesitation in saying or doing anything that would help her companions. She would go to any lengths to get them out of that jail. And yet this time it was different. Mildred remained silent, and Sineta left her to her thoughts.

  The next couple of days went by quickly, all too quickly for Mildred. On the advice of the baron’s daughter, she said nothing about their discussion, and didn’t pursue the matter of gaining re
lease for her companions. Instead she immersed herself in the life of Pilatu, learning about the society into which she had found herself.

  She learned that she liked it. It had occurred to her that she had started to use the phrase “for God’s sake” more than the occasional profanity that spilled from her lips. And she wondered why this should be. It took only a day of wandering around the ville for her to realize what was happening to her.

  The people of Pilatu were pleased to see her up and about. For the first day, Sineta went with her. That was more, Mildred felt, to prevent her making contact with the companions than to show her around. The people she met were pleased to show her their part of the ville and to talk with her about their island and the place from whence she had come. It had been some time since there had been new arrivals on the island—particularly a sister and an albino accompanied by whitelanders—so there was much curiosity about her history. Mildred skirted this wherever possible. She couldn’t betray her friends by describing them as her captors, but neither could she follow Sineta’s advice to describe them thus until the initial flurry of interest had died down. Instead she turned the attention back on the islanders by asking them about the ville.

  The actual settlement was about half a mile from the sea, built on higher ground on the side of the island that faced the vast ocean. The ville had been located here to secure optimum shelter from the elements. There was a path that led to the inlet where Mildred could see the fishermen’s boats. The inlet below appeared to be the only safe place for them to launch, information that Mildred stored in her memory as more than useful.

  But her immediate thoughts weren’t of escape. Many of the stories she heard about the island echoed what Sineta had told her. However, she also learned through these exchanges that the people of the island had a strong sense of identity. They were linked by their skin color, and although they were all different—indeed there had been many who had differences between themselves that spilled into bloodshed—still at the end of a day they would band together at a threat from the whitelands. They knew that they and their ancestors had existed as a minority within the whitelands and had been treated as little more than animals during their history. They lived on the island because their ancestors had refused this way of existence and had chosen to live on their own, free terms. Petty personal differences counted for little when ranged against the fate of their people.

  And it was then that Mildred realized that it struck echoes of her own childhood within her, the days when her father had been a Baptist minister, always fighting against those who wanted his daughter, his family, his friends, his flock to use separate schools, restaurants, buses, washrooms…all because they were seen as somehow lesser. She had been using God’s name because it was the strongest curse and the mightiest invocation she could use as a child, and the society in which she found herself reminded her of the one she had wished for when yet another drive-by shooting or attack had stove in the windows of a neighbor’s house, when yet another gasoline bomb had razed a church. As she had grown up and become a doctor, moving to places where things seemed much more laid-back, as the sixties had given way to the seventies and eighties, it had seemed that things had changed, that there was equality.

  Yet the fact that she was black and the majority wasn’t had never been that far from the surface. Some small incident would bring up comments. “You people would say that,” “You wouldn’t understand, being different…” Never outright insults or condemnation on color, but always the implication.

  Here, she found none of that. This was the society of which her father had dreamed, in which black people were just people. At last she felt a sense of kinship that went deep—deeper than the present, stretching into the past.

  When she saw Jak, and he raised the matter of freeing the rest of their companions, she had felt uncomfortable. She knew that rescue should be a priority, yet she mouthed platitudes at Jak about leaving things as they were for a few days while she gained the confidence of the baron’s daughter. It would be a tricky matter to get them released, and escape would be difficult, leaving them with no chance to avoid buying the farm if they were caught.

  Even as she spoke, she could see the disbelief in the albino’s burning red eyes. He knew she was stalling and couldn’t work out why.

  Neither could she. Deep in her heart, she knew what the companions meant to her, and she knew from some of the things she heard the Pilatans say about the whitelands that there were things in this society that were merely the inverse of what they had left behind.

  Mildred was divided. The ideal for the oppressed that she had heard of as a child, and the sense of historical belonging that she had never thought to experience, raged against the ties forged by a life that toyed with the big chilling everyday…ties forged by fire that couldn’t be broken, no matter the color of the skin or the historical antecedent.

  Right now, even Mildred had no idea what she could do to calm the raging sea within.

  Chapter Six

  “It is time that you met my father, but he is like the lion in winter. Where once he was tall, erect and noble, now he is bowed by the weight of years upon him, and responsibility only adds to the burden. He takes much more time to think in these days, and so you must not worry if he does not, at first, respond to you.”

  Mildred chewed on her lip and nodded. She was keen to meet Barras, the baron of Pilatu, but knew that he was a man fading into the final dimming of the light. Everything that Sineta had told her over the past couple of days pointed to a man whose days were drawing to a close. It seemed that the ville’s medic could do little to help, and Mildred was aware that it could only strengthen her position if she were able to assist his suffering in some manner.

  “You do realize why I want to meet him, don’t you?” Mildred asked.

  “I have told you that there would be much opposition to releasing your friends. The untruth spoken to assist the albino will weigh against them in my father’s judgment—and also in the opinions of many within the ville.”

  “By which you mean Markos won’t like it, right?” Mildred queried.

  Sineta allowed herself an indication of agreement. “I believe that you already know the answer to that question, Mildred. Markos will find it impossible to believe that people from the whitelands could treat a brother or a sister as equal. You have to understand that he is not a bad man—”

  Mildred raised a hand. “I know. I can appreciate that. He’s a man who has always thought a certain way, and has no experience to teach him otherwise. But I figure that he’s a good guy, and if he can take the time to learn a little about the others, he’ll see beyond their pale skins.”

  Sineta made a small moue. “If his brother allows him to think in another way from himself.”

  “I had kind of noticed that.” Mildred smiled. “We’ll just have to see.”

  “Then let us depart.”

  The two women left Sineta’s quarters and walked the short distance between her adobe hut and the larger premises where the ailing baron held court.

  As they covered the ground Mildred thought about the decision that had brought her to this. She had seen Jak when the gigantic wild boar he had helped capture had been carried into the ville. When she had tried to talk to him, he had simply asked her why the rest of the companions were still in jail while he and Mildred were free and she had the ear of the baron’s daughter.

  It was a question that Mildred couldn’t, in all honesty, answer. Her conscience was gnawing at her that her companions had been incarcerated while she had been free. And yet, since awakening in the Deathlands, her world had been almost entirely white, with little cultural recognition to the people she had left behind. Not all her friends had been black, but some certainly had, and it wasn’t until she had awakened in Pilatu that she realized how much of her identity had been based on that cultural heritage. However, she had damn near bought the farm with Ryan and his people, and she was as much a part of them as of the people of Pilat
u. When it came down to it, they may share a common heritage, but that was out of whack when you considered that she was, in truth, over a century older than anyone else on the island of the same skin pigmentation.

  It was a balancing act; she had to keep her eyes fixed ahead and her feet sure and true.

  As they approached the baron’s quarters, she saw Markos go in ahead of them. The sec boss gave them a saturnine glare before entering, as though annoyed that his audience with the baron would inevitably be interrupted.

  Mildred felt a shiver run through her as Markos looked away. She had encountered the sec boss several times over the past few days—indeed, it seemed at times as though he were following her, for wherever she went, he would soon appear—and she could feel a frisson whenever he was near. The woman had wondered if he were keeping an eye on her, unsure of where her allegiance lay. Of course, he had a point, but she wouldn’t admit that when considering how irritating he had become.

  They had spoken a few times, and on each occasion he seemed to probe her about her views on the island and the people who lived here. He was blunt almost to the point of rudeness, yet listened carefully and attentively to her answers. It was obvious to her that he had doubt about her—which was, after all, reasonable—but it also seemed as though there was something more. In his earnestness, and totally serious devotion to the cause of culture and separatism espoused by his brother, Markos reminded Mildred of Rodney Stone, an intern at the hospital where she had been resident before her operation and subsequent cryogenic stasis. An intense and dedicated man, Rodney had seemed at first to be completely immersed in his work to the expense of all personal relationships. He appeared completely disinterested in anything that fell outside of the definition of work. When he’d asked Mildred for a date, she had been astounded. In his ivory tower of medicine, Rodney had appeared aloof. In fact, this had masked his inability to communicate in any other way, a problem born of his dedication.