Old Green World (22 page)

“I don’t want any of you to touch me. I don’t want to be touched by apes.” She sobbed quietly. “I’m like an ape now, too. I’m an ape again.”

“You’re not yourself,” Thomas said.

“Get out! Get out of my house, you . . . you
pet
, you pampered, simpering animal.”

Thomas flushed at her curses. “I’ll leave you to collect yourself,” he said. “I’ll come back when you have your composure back.”

“Get the hell out of my house,” Sister Alice shouted.

He left. Several strides away from the house, he realized he’d left the door open, thought about going back to close it, then let it be.
To hell with her
, he thought.

Some students were beginning to collect in front of the school. “The school is usually open by now,” one of them said to Thomas. “Where’s Sister Alice?”

“School is cancelled today. Sister Alice is ill.” He dismissed the children. He crossed the street to the house, went to his mother’s chamber, and related the incident to her. Lady Newton was incredulous and went to Sister Alice’s to see for herself. While she did so, Thomas composed a sign for the door of the school and posted it. He then returned to Cynthia, who was having a cup of tea with Anya at this point, and told her. As he was finishing the story, Lady Newton came back.

“So?” Thomas asked.

“She called me a deluded old hag.”

“She’s very ill.”

“Let’s send a letter to Cynthia’s family and see if they can spare Brother Benedict for a day or two. He should be able to get to the bottom of this. She seems to have some sort of brain fever.”

“Is it a mistake to leave her alone?”

“She just seems to get agitated when we are there. Let’s leave her be and check in every once in a while.”

Lady Newton sent a horse messenger to the Kelvins. They let Alice have the day in solitude; the next morning, both Lady Newton and Thomas went to her door, knocked stiffly, and let themselves in when there was no response. They found some drawers pulled open and empty, the cat curled up in one of them. Sister Alice was gone.

Two days later, they received word back from Over-town. Brother Benedict had been found in his room the same day Sister Alice took ill. He had hung himself.

“She said to me that she didn’t think there were any more Adepts. That morning,” Thomas said. “I thought that she was just talking nonsense. But something has happened.”

“Of course there are still Adepts. How could there not be?” Lady Newton said. “How would one stop being an Adept? That makes no sense. Certainly, something happened, and two Adepts took ill. That’s troubling, but I believe in facts. Facts and reason. And there’s no sense in dreaming up a conspiracy before we know the facts.” The militia was lean in Eden-town—most able troops had gone to Baixa—but Lady Newton found two to send to the Old City. “There are plenty of senior Adepts there. They’ll know what is happening and what to do.”

“What about the baby?” Thomas asked. “What do we do without an Adept, with Cynthia almost ready to have a child?”

“In Baixa, we had plenty of babies without Adepts,” Anya said. Everyone paused and looked at her; she didn’t speak much. “When the Lady is ready to have the baby, we’ll have the baby.”

Cynthia smiled. “Anya’s right. We’ll be fine, Thomas,” she said, patting his hand to calm him.

+ + +

That autumn, a bit later than expected, Cynthia gave birth. Anya tended to her, and indeed knew the process. They had a daughter, born with a full head of her mother’s brown hair. They named her Cydney, after a pet name Thomas had given to Cynthia, and immediately started calling her Cyd.
 

It was a difficult birth, and long. Cynthia stayed in bed for a week, but started working as soon as she was able, despite Anya’s protests. “Without Adepts, we all need to help each other,” she said.

The troops that were sent to the Old City never came back. Thomas finally convinced his mother to consider contingency plans, in case they were without an Adept for some time.

“I’m sure it’s going to be fine,” Lady Newton said.

“The only town we are in contact with is Over-town. They’ve sent troops to the Green Island, with no response. We need to consider the possibility that it’s not going to be fine.”

Between elders trained in old ways and students who had learned some medicine in school, they had a small group of nurses who could tend to the sick. They were comforted by the yield from the farms, which had been good that summer. Cynthia even opened the school once a week, acting as the teacher, though attendance was low.

“I wish I knew what was keeping them away,” Thomas mused at the table one day, during breakfast. “It’s still a community service that helps, even if there’s not an Adept to teach.”

“What is the point of it now?” Anya asked. She was nursing month-old Cyd at the time. “The learning was Adept, right? Learning to do Adept things? What you talk about, physics and meditating and words and money. There’s no time for that now. It’s time to learn to defend yourself, fight, grow food, make medicine.”

“You’re probably right. Maybe we could change things for now. Teach more useful things.”

“They are all learning it from their families. The families will stay to their land and survive. The town here, with the trees taken away, and the houses all next to each other, and the tiny gardens, they know it’s not the way to live now. It only makes sense with Adepts to protect you.” She paused. “It won’t last long.”

“I think you are having trouble translating from Baixan, Anya. I’m sure I don’t understand what you’re saying.” Thomas poured himself some tea. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“I know what I am saying. I think you do, too.” Anya looked at him. Cyd was nursing happily, eyes closed. “You aren’t your mother. You know what is going on. You should be ready when we have to run away.”

The next day, Cynthia woke with a high fever, and wasn’t able to keep any liquid down. Thomas brought the elder Muriel to her; Muriel lit some pine incense and placed a poultice on Cynthia’s bosom.

“The smell is invigorating,” Thomas said. “I’m glad we brought Muriel in.”

“It’s not a good medicine,” Anya said. “The sickness is too strong.”

“What do you think we should do, then, Anya?” Thomas asked impatiently.

Anya stared at the wall as she rocked Cyd’s crib. “I don’t know.”

Thomas spent every night by Cynthia’s side. On her sixth day of sickness, at sunset, she woke for a short while. They held hands. “I’m very lucky,” she said. “I have a beautiful daughter and a beautiful husband. You’re always so good to me. You always look out for me.”

“Of course,” he said. “What else would I do?” Cynthia smiled and closed her eyes. Thomas watched her for some time in the dark, her chest rising and falling. When he woke the next morning, she was gone.

The sickness went all through the town. No one would send their children to school; no one went outside unless it was absolutely necessary. Thomas would make and post announcements; he knew it was important to bury the dead quickly, to keep houses clean and the sick isolated. He shouted announcements from the square, posted notices, and talked to anyone who would face him.

He had to. He was the acting mayor. Lady Newton took ill not long after Cynthia’s passing. Every moment she was able, she drilled Thomas with instructions: diplomatic protocols with other nobles; the finer points of dispute adjudication in Eden-town, including many unspoken, long-simmering feuds of which Thomas was completely unaware; the locations of all important records; the care and feeding of the bank.

Lady Newton had become chief financier of Eden-town with the departure of Sister Alice. Like the school, the bank had seen a drastic reduction in traffic, but there were still many accounts in place. Thomas, frankly, still found the bank to be the most confounding subject of all, especially now that the Adepts were absent. “What happens if the majority decides that the capital the bank holds is worthless?” he asked his mother.

“Can’t you say the same thing about civilization, darling?” she asked him.

He smiled. In the sadness and chaos of the past months, he had lost the will to maintain bitterness toward her, and she had lost most of her tendencies to formality and dogma. They had become friends again. She passed away, quietly, not two weeks later.

+ + +

When the sickness had run its course, everything had changed. Dozens and dozens had died. People didn’t meet on the street to talk about the progress of the town or the war in Baixa or the world around them. They stayed at home, and they stayed alone.

It was late in autumn when the boats came. Old dugouts and canoes, a couple of pockmarked catamarans. They came into port slowly, almost with a sense of fatigue.

Thomas took a group of townspeople to the shore and found a group of soldiers from the boats, more than twenty. He recognized a couple of them from town: Daniel Bohm, the furniture builder’s son, and the second-oldest Planck boy. The rest of them were new faces, soldiers from other parts of the Islands.

“Welcome!” Thomas said. “We’re so glad to see you. We’ve had little news from anywhere outside of town. Daniel, have you come across misfortune? How goes the progress in Baixa?”

There was a bitter laugh from the back of the crowd. Thomas looked up and saw a large, unfamiliar, one-eyed soldier, who had just finished grounding the catamaran. The soldier was almost as tall as Albert and wore a chain shirt of the darkest iron Thomas had ever seen. “How goes the progress? The progress is over. Baixa’s over.”

Thomas approached him. “This sounds like dire news, I’m grieved to hear it. As I said, we’ve heard little.” He extended his hand. “We’ll help you however we can. I’m Thomas Newton, mayor and Lord Eden-town.”

“Are you, now?” The soldier eyed his hand but did not take it. “Well, that makes everything fine then, doesn’t it? Most of us dead and picked apart in Baixa, but the mayor and Lord Eden-town is here now to fix it all.” He met Thomas’s gaze. “You can keep your help to yourself, mayor and Lord Eden-town.”

Thomas, unsure how to react, turned back to Daniel Bohm. “What happened to you?”

“All the Adepts,” Daniel said. “It happened here, too, didn’t it?”

Thomas wanted to say “no.” He thought of his mother’s words and wanted to stick to facts. But in his heart he knew. “Yes. It happened here, too.”

“When it happened, the Baixans turned on us. They overran the city.”

“And they tore all the crippled Adepts, and all of
you
, all the mayors and lords, apart,” the one-eyed soldier said. “They killed them, or made them slaves. And the rest of us, the soldiers, they just killed. We tried to retreat, hundreds of us. When we escaped the city and reached the forest, we thought we’d survived.

“But then we started the road to shore across the forest. Where we came up against the bear-wolves, and the great cats, and the bugs that bring fever, and the poisoned plants. We didn’t have an Adept to move trees or kill animals or heal us. The forest killed us better than the Baixans ever could. There were hundreds of us, and this is it. This is all that’s left.” The soldier looked again at Thomas. “So tell us how you’re going to help us, now.”

“Stay here, with us. You need food and shelter, which we have. And we could use a militia in these dire times. We can survive here.”

“Survive here? Yeah, maybe.” The one-eyed soldier spat on the ground. “I don’t feel like being your militia, boy. Being militia for Adepts and mayors hasn’t gotten me anything but grief. But maybe we’ll stay here and take food and shelter.” With that, he signaled to some of the other soldiers and began gathering their provisions. They hiked up toward the Castle.

Thomas grabbed Daniel to talk. “Who is he?”

“His name is Peter. He’s from the Green Island. He worked for the Adepts for a very long time, even before the war. They were killing people even before the war. He told us.”

“Help me make him understand. We have to work together if we’re going to get through this.”

“Thomas, listen,” Daniel said gravely. He had been two years ahead in school. Thomas remembered him being quiet, pretty average at school, good at archery, and kind to younger students. “If Peter tells you to do something, you should do it. Don’t get into conflict with him. He does horrible things. I’ve seen him do horrible things.” He looked nervously up the hill, to where the other troops were headed. “I have to go.”

Thomas watched him begin trudging up the hill. He watched the soldiers continue to travel to and fro, taking up gear. He hoped to catch Peter alone, to talk things through with him, get him to listen to reason. But the man never returned.

Thomas finally gave up and walked to the Castle himself. The soldiers had set up camp right in the middle of the square. They hadn’t discussed any of it with him, which struck him as utterly improper. But he had no idea what to do. He went back into the house to check on Cyd.

+ + +

Peter came to the door the next day and knocked loudly.

“We need food. Food, water, drink, somewhere to shit.”

Thomas had decided the night before that he was going to try to do this peacefully. They were all traumatized by the war, he thought. Best to give them slack for a while. “We can give you some food from our stores. There is a latrine space behind the hospital, which people aren’t really using now.”

“When do we get the food? We’re fucking hungry.”

“I’ll have some men bring it right away. It may be an hour or two. It’s mostly raw ingredients. Do you have what you need to cook?”

“We’ve been surviving in the wild for months. We can make do with the ‘raw ingredients.’”

“Excellent,” Thomas said. “We’ll have to think through a long-term approach for feeding you all, but this will work for now.”

“I don’t care about the long-term approach. As long as my belly is full.”

“Again, I think this would be a great opportunity to work together. We can supply provisions, and we need a militia. Don’t feel like you need to decide that right away. Just a suggestion.”

Peter glared at him. “We’ll wait for the food.” He walked away.

+ + +

The militia’s tent city became a part of the square. At first, it was relatively quiet, as if military discipline still held sway. Over the weeks, though, the camp became louder and louder at night, with fights and drunken yelling. Thomas put the heavy shutters up on all the windows and fortified the doors. The people of Eden-town stopped going to the Castle at all.