Freda: Volume III in the New Eden series (3 page)

CHAPTER 3

The barn used to be a vibrant red, but the late hour, the gray day, and its faded, peeling paint give it a sickly pallor. Any joy I might have gotten from memories of autumn harvests and spring seedings drains away when I see it. It hunches against the winter, larger than I remember but threadbare and leaning against the wind. I suppose when a whole people rush off to war, things that should be kept up fall into disrepair.

The snow around the barn, particularly in front of the giant sliding doors at the western end, has been churned a mud-brown and frozen into a dry, lumpy wasteland. Farther away, tall, brown grass pokes up through the snow in shivering tufts to announce that even there, where the children played and the fire pits cooked the festival feasts, even those places lay neglected while the faithful were away at war.

The silence of a cemetery covers us, extending up onto the southern hillside and down into the scattered houses to the north between the barn and the lake. Certainly there is no sound from the “hunnert or so” people supposedly locked up inside. As we approach the barn, each of the others wears an expression as grim as the feeling in my heart.

The giant doors are shut. A chain hangs loose through the latch, connected by a large padlock that dangles open.

“Anyone walking up could unlatch these doors,” I mumble, my words falling to the snow almost unheard. “They were so sure no one would come that they didn’t even bother to secure the lock.”

Patrick replies, “Or so unsure of their own righteousness that they couldn’t bring themselves to take that one final step.”

I watch him for a moment, but he doesn’t look at me. Patrick knows such doubts perhaps better than anyone here. All through the war with Tawtrukk, he struggled with his conviction. As with Dane, his doubts took over when he met a Tawtrukker face to face for the first time. Patrick clung to his old beliefs for months, though, until he met Lupay in the field and realized, eye to eye, that she was not his enemy.

Perhaps it was a mistake to have Lupay stay behind. If it took meeting Lupay to extinguish Dane’s faith and turn Patrick’s allegiance—

With a clunk and a rattle, Dane knocks the lock away and lets the chain slip through its rings and run to the ground in a heap. He hauls back the giant latch and then heaves the door with his whole weight, pushing it on its track until a tall, narrow gap opens.

An indistinct murmur of voices lurks in the darkness. Patrick rushes to Dane’s side and pushes along with him, widening the gap with a screech of wood sliding along its iron track. The afternoon sun dips behind the cloudy western peaks, but its twilight reaches through the gap into the darkness to illuminate a solitary figure. It is a man, rigid and tall.

“Freda!” It is my father, and his stiffness melts as he lurches forward and wraps me in a tight hug. His warmth and strength feel so good after more than a month apart. “I thought we’d never see you again.”

I hug him and rest my chin on his shoulder. “Daddy,” I say, and somehow the word seems right even though he should be calling me First Wife. “So did I.”

He keeps holding me tight, longer than really I want him to, even though his embrace comforts me. Over his shoulder, I see my mother waiting her turn. She smiles as she shuffles closer, joy and tears filling her eyes as she lifts her hand to my father’s shoulder.

Dane and Patrick watch, but they do not smile.

I push away from my father. “Do you know Darius’ intent?”

The light that filled him moments ago winks out, replaced by a dark frown. “Yes.”

My mother steps forward. “Can he really do it?”

“Yes,” I reply, and sadness fills me when I see the little remaining hope drain from their faces.

Other people appear out of the darkness behind my parents like ghosts solidifying in a murky gloom, a growing throng with a murmur that is at once threatening and curious. Dane pushes himself away from the door and stands before the crowd in the gap, as if he has become the door keeping them inside.

“There’s not much time,” he says loud, and his words echo off the distant back wall. The murmur subsides. “We must leave at once, make for Strawberry Pass and—”

“You’re mad,” shouts a voice from the back. “Into the Radiation?”

“Look,” Dane says, but he’s already lost them. The murmur grows again, woven with all the protests I thought we had answered last summer. Where had Dane and I gone when we were exiled? Had we forsaken God and joined the heathen mutants? Had the prophecy come true as Darius claimed? Was Dane trying to kill them all by marching them into the wastelands? “Listen!” he shouts, barely audible over their growing tumult.

The people press forward, fear and anger evident in their tight shouts and rough faces.

Patrick stands hard next to Dane and yells back at the crowd, telling them to listen, telling them they don’t know the truth, telling them all the things that will only make them angrier and more deaf. In seconds, Dane and Patrick are nose-to-nose with several angry old men, their white hair and crooked teeth and wrinkled eyes a harsh contrast to Dane and Patrick’s youth and strength.

I put my hands together and wedge my way between the two boys like pushing through summer cornstalks. As they shuffle aside I raise my hands above my head, parting them in a wide arc as the First Wife would in the chapel during a sunrise reading of Redemptions. I gaze up at my hands and peer at the ceiling of the barn high above, rising to a distant, dark peak much higher than the chapel’s ceiling.

I stand unmoving and ignoring the roiling mob, staring up between my outstretched hands, thinking of the heavens beyond the roof and pleading to God for His help. The shouting continues. After a few seconds I begin to feel silly and pointless, but I keep still. A few seconds later, the mob begins to settle. Curiosity, respect, or wonder—it doesn’t matter what quiets them, but I wait until the mob has become a congregation once again. Even once they’re silent I hold myself steady, peering into the dark heights above, trying to feel reverent and humble.

After a time, I lower my hands and paint calmness over my face, infusing confidence into my gaze. A large group waits, a hundred or more. I look into each individual’s eyes near me, one after another. They question, they wait, and they doubt. They fear. And I know why.

I keep my voice soft and gentle as I explain it to them. “Darius will explode the Bomb,” I begin, and a few voices strike up in the back. I pause and glare, and the protests fall silent under the weight of the crowd.

“You all know this. Surely he told you that when he shut you in here.”

“Can he do it?” The question comes from one of the older women right behind the old men in the front.

Dane replies, “Yes. Though it will take him a day or more.”

I grasp his hand and pull him to my side. It will be better if he does not talk.

Another protest barks out from the middle of the crowd. “Why didn’t you stop him!”

Patrick says, “We were too late.”

“Too late!” The murmur resurges.

Dane shouts out, “Yes, too late! Why didn’t
you
stop him?”

Oh, Dane, it is a proper question but we already know the answers
. We’re losing them. Their indignant shouts are filled with anger and accusation.

I look to my father with his powerful voice, and he shouts over my head for order and calm. “Please,” he says after the room has settled again, “listen to my daughter. Listen to the First Wife.”

A man not far off mumbles, “The
exiled
First Wife,” but others hush him.

“Thank you, father,” I say and turn my attention back to the crowd. “Much of what Darius has told you is wrong.”

Dane adds, “He’s lied to you,” but he stops when I squeeze his hand hard.

“Not lies exactly,” I correct, and I silence Dane with another squeeze before he can contradict me. “At least, not everything he said was a lie. Darius thinks his actions are righteous.”

An old man up front with a thinning, white beard and broken teeth growls out, “Darius says he’s finishing the work God set out for our ancestors. That them mutants up north need ta be cleaned off the Earth. I say he’s right.”

Take care, Freda
. This man and many others are old enough to have known Dane’s grandfather, Semper David. David’s views lay closer to Darius’ than to Linkan’s. When Linkan was promoted to Semper, David complained to all who would listen about how many of the old traditions were fading, how the people were getting lax in their worship. David favored Darius. Some of these people may even have been part of Darius’ inner circle, may even have helped him plot to kill Linkan and start this war.

I continue in a slow, crisp voice. “Darius no longer aims only to clean the Earth of the mutants.” Dane bristles at my side but does not protest the vile word this old fool used to describe the Tawtrukkers. Dane’s learned many things in these past six months. He’s still easily frustrated by idiots, but he’s grown very different from the boy I met at Judith’s side during the Wifing interviews.

I pause to let their imaginations work out the rest, then I finish it for them. “He aims to clean the Earth of all living creatures. Including all of us.”

The old man sucks his broken teeth as his unblinking, ice-blue eyes pierce me. A kind of glee fills the creases around his eyes and his mouth twitches up.

“And that’s the right of it,” he says. “Darius is doing right. Doing right by The Lord.”

“No!” I yap, embarrassed at my own haste and panic. “It’s not right. Darius has misinterpreted—”

The old man cuts me off. “You don’t know nothin’. Maybe you think you’re wise cause your daddy learnt you to read, but let me tell you you’re still just a girl. You don’t know nothing’ bout God, not really. Maybe you think you do, but God don’t reveal himself to little girls. Darius, he’s a real Semper, son of a Semper, growed up right.”

Dane releases my hand and steps up chest-to-chest with this old man. The old man looks bent and wizened compared to Dane’s lean youth, but he doesn’t back down. He just squints up at Dane, and I can see he’s measuring Dane and wondering if there will be violence. It looks like this old man would welcome it, but Dane would never strike him.

Instead, Dane hisses straight into his face. “This sixteen year old girl has a thousand times the wisdom you think you have. You’re too blind to see it and too prejudiced to understand. Step aside and shut up, you old goat. Your time is over. Go and die with Darius.”

A shock of silence washes over those nearby, and I am grateful. I don’t know if Dane really believes what he’s just said, but the simple fact that he said it makes me glad and, in a way, unworthy.

He pushes the old man to the side with a gentle but firm nudge, and he addresses the crowd. “Some of you think Darius is right. Go. Leave. Go down to the lake. He’s going to set off the bomb some time tomorrow afternoon off the Tawtrukk shore. Don’t worry. You’ll have a great view of the end of the world. Enjoy incineration.”

He gives the old man another light shove toward the door.

“But know this: Darius is wrong. He’s misread the prophecies, misinterpreted everything. And how do I know?”

I swear he gets three inches taller before my eyes.

“Because I am Semper. Darius may have been my father’s brother, the son of David, but he was never really Semper-son, and he was never truly Semper. Darius heard a voice, yes, but it was not the voice of God. Darius murdered my father and lied to you, to all of us. These are not actions led by God. These are actions of a madman.”

My heart flutters as Dane speaks. For a moment, I see the fire and presence of his uncle in the way he speaks, hear deep conviction in his clear tone. He’s learned more than I realized. He and I have discussed these things, and I know Dane has discarded his faith. But he’s learned how to speak to his people. He understands what they need to hear in order to be led.

On the other hand, these people have never seen the real Tawtrukk. They imagine only the horrors of a wasteland overrun with mutants. Although some of them met Lupay once, few of them accepted her as a person. Most treated her as a curiosity, I see now. A wild animal to be captured, costumed, and trained. Something perhaps no longer to be feared, but not something to be welcomed.

If only they could have seen her at her house, with her mother and among her friends. If only they—

“Semper Dane is correct,” my father says from my side.

The old man turns on him like an angry dog. “You ain’t got no say here no more, Tailor. You just shut up.”

Dane pushes the man farther toward the door, and a rumble of protest rises from the crowd as he stumbles a little but rights himself.

“And who are you,” Dane asks the old man, “to order around Southshaw’s citizens? If Darius appointed you Captain of the Guard, then Southshaw has fallen far indeed since my father was murdered.”

The rumble of protest rolls in on itself into a murmur of agreement which subsides even before the man can straighten his coat.

He glares at Dane but says nothing, his wispy beard wriggling around his narrow face as he tries to keep his rage under control.

Dane dismisses him with an impatient wave of his hand. “Go to the lake.” He addresses the crowd again, huddled in the dark of the barn like fearful sheep. “Any others who think Darius gives a damn about you, or about God—go with him. The rest of you must come with us. We have to get out of the valley now.”