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Page 6.
 One polar night, Amela was returning to Aerag-78 from a long work detail. With a hundred other women, she came trudging in a long column out of the icy shrub-forest. The women were paired, one in front, one in back. Each pair carried between them a makeshift stretcher of bundled branches and brush tied to it. Each forward woman had to navigate, since the rear woman had no visibility behind that enormous gray heap scratching her face. One supposed that Sekurita could have flown in firewood from the equatorial regions, but it was deemed prudent not to feed the women too much, to keep them from having excess energy that could be converted to mischief. And it was best they be kept busy at back-breaking labor, and—wherever possible to enforce—forbidden to exchange talk. At the moment, Amela was the rear woman. Her view was totally obscured by gray, twisted branches across the field of vision.
On this particular occasion, the file of ghostly little figures had trudged for kliks back to barracks for their sleep phase. They had arrived back within the camp's barbed wire enclosure. The perimeter fence stretched for twenty kliks in an irregular circuit around Aerag-78.
Then, in an event that changed Amela's life, the woman in front collapsed, forcing Amela to spill her end before she knew what had happened. The huge bale of branches stayed bound, but rolled on its stretcher of two long branches tied together.
Three chunky, humanian Sekurita of indeterminate gender came crunching through the snow at a run with their blazers ready to burn humans in half. Several half-feral, half-tamed wolvinels, of wolvine stock, bounded along for good measures. They resembled large, ferocious dogs with powerful, furry jaws and reddish eyes that glowed with borrowed moonlight. As with all nocturnal creatures, their eyes had a tapetum or reflective carpet on the inside rear of each eyeball. These police wolvinels uttered harsh hacking cries, which tore the freezing air like powerful, almost mournful axe chops. Humans were terrified of these slavering, growling animals with bristling fur, which attacked on command.
Now it happened just then that Amela and her fallen partner were on a rough lane, of frozen ruts full of ice and still steaming, foamy green outspill, right by the hospice barracks. This was the euphemistically named house where old women went to die when they could no longer carry loads. It consisted of a compound within the larger compound, separated by a simple line of black, numbered fence markers in the snow. The old women were not expected to run for it, just know the boundaries and stagger around within them while they could still walk. As combat medical service, Amela was on a long queue to work here some day—choice duty—but a long line of physicians, nurses, and unskilled maffea cronies were ahead of her on the list.
The hospice compound consisted of two large barracks, whose two-story hulks blended into the night. One was wanly illumined with service lights that glowed yellow inside. The other was perennially dark, and its windows had broken and fallen in shards. There were never enough inmates of that age and condition to fill more than about a floor and a half of one building. Far more populated was the wasteland of unmarked graves undulating across lumpy, snowy hummocks far behind the geriatric barracks. Most of the mass burials in that field were of young women. Few grew old here. Everything about the place was grim and heartless, making Amela and most women look away rather than stare into their own coming abyss. But it was also a spirit place where any human woman passing recited the sacred anima of life and passing—a song for our ancestors.
As her momentary work partner (whose name she did not know) lay still in the snow, two other women put their burdens down and ran a few heads away to look or help if possible. Loudspeakers began to reverberate with canned warnings. Armed overseer Sekurita women in bleach-blue uniforms with dark, belted tunics began to shrill. Already, Amela could hear the motor pool garage door rumbling on its tracks a few blocks away, and a she-merk or possibly Sekurita skimmer began to whirr as it rose into the air. A heavy klaxon's repetitive, slow burps stuttered and echoed among the frozen hills.
All this, because an exhausted prisoner had fallen—but the Swarm policy was to take no chances, and their terrified Sekurita underlings (and bullies) never took chances. At a moment's notice, Sekurita could deploy a demon horde of officers with slavering broken-in work-wolvinels. Some of the guards would ride out on clattering on larger mammals, like the hoofed hausas of ancient stock that served many civilizations around the Ruby Arm. Let it not come to that, Amela prayed to the gods of Belair. Sekurita often used mass punishments for the slightest infraction or estalinade.
Amela walked forward, bent, and checked the bundle of rags in the snow—her partner of unknown name or origin. There was no pulse. The woman had mercifully crossed to the garden of her mother and father, the spirit house of her ancestors. Amela made a universal sign of the anima, an ancient word meaning spirit or soul. She cupped one hand against her heart, while facing toward the deceased. The gesture took one second, and was all you could typically get away with before angry, terrified guards started barking down your collar.
The rest of the long column trudged on by. Nothing must stop the scheduled labors. All the good ones made the anima sign when passing—as best they could with one free hand while juggling their handles and load with the other hand.
Behind Amela, one particulary shrill Sekurita kept braying hatefully, nonstop. For the guards, the problem was that they could be punished as well, so they vented their rage on the prisoners, on whose terrified obedience their own hides and various little perks depended.
Amela rose, put her arms around herself, and closed her eyes. She thought of #26 Gateway Lane as she waited for the guards to shoot her and anyone daring to stop around her. Surely, this was such a moment.
Before she could even flinch, thinking the guards were upon her, a shadow stole out from the camp of the dying. It was an elderly woman, wasted from illness, so that it was hard to understand how she could move about. Her dark clothes hung in rags. A moth-eaten babushka shielded thin, yellowish-silver hair from the wind. Her eyes, however, were bright and cunning. The woman's lips twisted as she murmured through her two or three yellow teeth: "Don't stop. Lift the front. I'll follow." The woman spoke in a thick Gannar accent, made worse by her tongue tripping over her only remaining three teeth.
"But, Mother…" Amela used the common, polite Humansh.
"Don't mother me, girl. Pick up your damn load before these beasts kill us both."
Obediently, Amela stooped to lift the two handles dropped by her deceased partner. After a moment's swaying and adjustment, she got the stretcher-like bundle of branches upright, and lifted it. She felt some minor movement at the other end. "I can't do much," quavered the granny, "but I'll getcha to the barn. Whoah, Nellie. Off you go, girl!"
Breathing a sigh of relief, Amela trotted anxiously forward. She towed her load and the old lady into the line of other trudging load bearers. "I'll pray to the Gannar gods," Amela said.
"So will I," said the old woman. "Stop talking and keep hauling."
The walk took barely half an ura, taking them to one of the dozens of clusters of huts that formed major prison settlements in the camp. The guards, with grim, unintended irony, called these areas townships. They were weathered, uniform barracks of indeterminate age, whose black windows seemed to Amela like sad eyes overlooking the constant tragedy around them. As the wood crews approached, ragged women waiting in holding barns raised the doors, and stepped out to take charge of the loads. Duties rotated among all but those prisoners on penal detail, who always went out in the cold, and died much sooner. A small number of prisoners, guards' cronies and lovers, got to stay in the barns almost permanently. Nothing was fair—not Manaul, not the Aerags, not the conditions.
Finished with her day's labor, Amela went with the old woman in a small, warm barracks kitchen, to pour them each a mug of hot cafir. Most of the base cafir product originated as an industry of temperate and polar Aerags. The finished cafir was a concoction of bark boiled and reduced into paste, sweetened with an equatorial fungus called cafirein, and loosened with whatever local water was available. Luckily, here you had fresh snow melt. In other places, one had to boil brackish groundwater. Cafiria bark grew on scrag and krum of the same name in the numbing and ripping arctic winds. The thick outer shell of the cafiria bark had evolved with a tough outer layer that reduced into a darkly fragrant, woodsy roast. Equatorial cafirein contained the faint, honey-like sweetness prized by cafir makers. Getting it right was an art passed down from one brief generation of prisoners to the next. Even Sekurita guards and merks had learned it from prisoners, over many years, during the interminable Treaty Marches wars.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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