Cup of Blood, Renew these Fallow Lands

The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room.

“I can always refuse,” said Kajori. She looked straight out through the thick, smoked glass, and stared with a frozen face at the land beyond the compound. “I can withhold consent.”

“And now why would you want to start talking like that again, darling?”

Kajori winced. The Deputy had come to the window and was standing just behind her to the left. She smelt the sour note of unwashed armpits from his white coat and pissy britches and felt her gorge rise to gagging as the man put a tentative hand on her shoulder. His clammy hand massaged into the crook of her neck like a damp, dying moth. Kajori willed her body to show no reaction at all.

“Have I not been so good to you?” he said. “Are we not a team anymore, my darling?”

If Cú were here, she thought, that hand would be testing the cutting power of a kukri blade, and those fluttering fingers would soon be pulsing out their last moments in bloody gobbets on the grubby lino. Cú was a second-generation cozentor, from a respectable officer-Souljer family. He was proud of protecting Kajori’s dignity.

“Everything has changed, Deputy Director. I need to know. I have that right.”

The ever-present hill faced them, with the hawthorn tree at its crest, and the ramshackle hut made of bright, painted wood. Above a service hatch, wobbling in time to the undulations of the collapsing roof in the wind, there was a statue of a boy holding a strange torch. From the torch came a mound of white, like clouds, with a brown branch pointing to the sky from which a banner saying ‘Ice cream’ danced in the direction of the blowing wind. There had once been an area in front of the cabin with white tables and chairs that gleamed in the rain. They had gone since her last visit to his office. Blown away, no doubt, during the storm months.

As often as she had looked through this window, and as dull as the view was, she appreciated how the world outside always seemed to change, even minutely. It was part of the obsession that had grown in the weeks since they saw the woman.

“You have a duty, Kajori. It’s why we showed you the truth.”

“Ah, and that’s why we’re in his room then. It’s not a decision that you can make, is it, Deputy Director?”

The Deputy stiffened and withdrew his hand. He rarely showed his temper, but the man could be as moody as one of the old apes in the labs. Kajori continued watching the hillside, knowing that the Deputy would be huffing and pacing around the room, his hands in the pockets of his flapping white coat, the mark of high office in the Research Council. Or he’d be huffing and fiddling to clean his glasses, the ceremonial garb of the Deputy Director.

Either way, Kajori watched the hill and listened to the raindrops hitting the laminate glass. She couldn’t actually hear the rain through the triple-layer bomb-proof window, of course, but she could imagine. She had once found a copy of an old sound-file called ‘Rainstorm’ and tried to remember the relaxing pattern of wet soft brush-stroke sounds the clip had conjured for her. She even added some rumbling thunder, which matched her mood. She was tense. Somewhere in the background, the Deputy huffed in mutters, and Kajori felt like the clouds near breaking on a day of rain.

It was a day of rain when they saw the woman, too.

***

Kajori had been sitting right in this same spot, facing out to the hillside, as the Director had lectured the SaveGen kids on the importance of public service and Newton knows what else. It had been Eve’s Day, and also near the time for Geefer to start his trials, so it really became a bit of a party. A wake for him, but one that he could attend. Put any number of twenty- and twenty-one-years olds in the same place for long enough, and it will turn into a bacchanal. Kajori had enjoyed a discreet indulgence in her own vice (a confection that she imagined would be particularly unrecommended by the Research Council), and had enjoyed a little private moment with Geefer, much to Cú’s displeasure, and then she was curled up with a glass of wine, and just starting to feel the delicious honey-crunch effects of the sweeties, when the Director’s Speech began, and she spaced out.

She had been luxuriating, sipping wine and daydreaming; watching one of the white chairs wobble back and forth up on the opposite hill under the hawthorn. She had placed a bet with Geefer that it would blow over before she started her trials.

“But your trials aren’t for months. It’s not a particularly appealing bet for me to take, is it? Not much in the way of sport, babe.”

She had felt the usual cold-stab of dread at that, a twisting ice that slashed across her gut and up her spine. This lasted only a moment and then she felt the soothing caramel warmth of the inhibitors kick in. In Geefer’s face, a sad and frightened tension, smoothed away.

“I mean, there’s no way you’re not going to be a great success, right? You’re going to be one of the successes,” she wrapped her hands behind his neck and kissed him. “You wouldn’t make me have to do the trial on my own, just because I’m the youngest, would you?”

It had felt a bit shallow, but she could see it excited him when she spoke like that. She accepted the guidance of the inhibitor and kissed him again.

“You’re on Kaj.” He grunted.

A gong sounded and they all made their way to a seat to listen to the latest of the Director’s speeches.

“Oh don’t be so jealous.” mouthed Kajori to Cú. He stood with an arm resting on his belt, quite near, you could say, to the huge curve-blade kukri knife that he carried. He frowned at her and somehow managed to look both far-from-gruntled and emotionally wounded at the same time. She blew him a kiss, which he grudgingly moved his face to accept from the air. Then, under her stare, he gave a barely-discernable smooch to the thin air in front of him, before looking around in horror as if to confirm that he had been noticed. Kajori plucked the kiss from the air and smeared it across her face with a giggle. Getting Cú to show a glimpse of silly was a treat in itself.

Then the sweeties took her, and she stared out at the ice cream hut and the wobbling white chair. The Director’s words floated around her like dust.

A naked woman crested the hill and sprinted down the valley towards the bay. As she did, the banner on the statue’s torch swung away in disgust. No, not naked, dressed in skins, perhaps? The woman’s uncovered skin, that Kajori could see, was pale. Her waist and arms were bare, as were two areas of shin above her boots. Her figure was very lithe, and she moved as if the sea wind helped her to glide across the wet grass of the hill. The wild woman had her long hair woven back into itself, and it danced behind her like electrical liquid as she ran, showing her features as she raced closer into view. Her face was like the pictures of marble busts that were held in the Library Banks except this wild woman had dyed her skin in places. Blue ink spiralled up her arms and looped around her chest, shoulder, and neck. It streaked up her face in an intricate pattern of swirls.

Kajori felt scandalised, tattoos were frowned upon in the Compound, an ‘interference to the human body’, and the only people who ever dared showed them were the elders and heads of the Souljer clans. These were the older men and women; the ones who lived down by the shoreline, or in the deepest levels of the Compound, down in the mines dug into the side of the valley, the ones whose families worked with their hands to keep the Compound alive. These were the men and women who had accompanied the First Research Council around the time of the Grey. They had been warriors during that time, and their weapons were still guarded down at the security level, the guns and armour and shields and batons of their old careers. They all worked the land now, bare-chested in the fields or the fishing bridge, or else covered in mud and dust from the mines, and one could sometimes see the old emblems that the Souljers had tattooed into their skin.

Kajori had once seen a man with a naked lady tattooed onto his stomach. She had noticed him as she walked down to the mine-garden last year, a man and a woman lying on the grass with a bottle of potch between them. The man must have been sixty and had a furry trail of dirty-grey hair spiking up from the waistband of his green trousers to…to connect with an integral part of the tattoo woman’s anatomy. This part of the tattoo woman’s body was artfully rendered in such a way as to utilise the natural dip of the man’s bellybutton, and the balloon-knot scar there, to ensure that the visual joke could not be missed.

Kajori had spent the afternoon teasing Cú about whether the old Souljer had met a woman before the Grey who liked that sort of thing. She wondered aloud whether that sort of thing was pleasurable, and then listed the pros and cons. Cú had been too bashful to retort. He just walked along stiffly, a little way behind her.

After the Reorganisation, and the installation of Kevin the Second, the new Director, the Whitecoats had taken over the role of security under the Principal Investigator. The Souljers were left to find their own way in the world, and most had turned to crop-growth and space acquisition. Before too many years the last of the tattooed inhabitants of the Compound would have been recycled into the biosphere to help generate food. It would mark the final end of all the little symbols. The final sparks of the world’s armies would go extinct, one at a time.

***

As she considered this fact, another part of Kajori’s mind was being rocked by the understanding that this woman was from outside the Compound. Sweet Isaac, she was probably from outside the entire Project. This woman must have found a way to infiltrate their little world, no doubt by some nefarious means. She was dangerous, terrifying, sexy and beautiful and wild. She was a threat and an intoxicating lure. Kajori held her breath as doodlebug drones zipped out from their hutches and buzzed over to engage the Wild Woman.

Geefer was on the platform by the current Director, the Deputy, and the Principal Investigator. When Kajori glanced over at him, she saw that he too was tracking the Wild Woman as she ran. The microphone was picking up his commentary.

“Bit close there, oh I thought she was over…I’m not sure what she’s up to… I see, she’s heading for the woods…those doodlers are nearly on her…what’s she up to…something from her backpack…Oh Isaac she’s taken one out…good sport this…was that a sling shot?”

The Principal Investigator cut off the microphone before Geefer could yell ‘She’s made it to the treeline, what a legend!”, but the words carried across the room and caused hell.

***

“So you saw this savage running over the hill and you decided to lose your wits, is that correct?”

The Director was pristine in his white coat and his glasses. His name was stitched into the fabric of the chest. Tobias the Third. He was powerfully built, and his eyes seemed to glow. Kajori couldn’t help but glance at the Deputy, whose coat seemed tinted with a buttery saturation, and whose glasses were a thumbprint haze of foggy smudges. The Principal Investigator was somewhere in the room behind her, she moved about quietly.

“No Director, I did not. I decided that it was vital to the project that I learn more about the world outside.”

“You are in no position to dictate the methodology of the experiment, young lady. Surely you are aware that the method-“

Kajori held up a hand. Her chest rattled with an adrenaline thump and she felt like visiting the latrines, but she kept the posture.

“It’s a question of resources, Director Toby, that’s all.”

The Deputy made a huffing-sucking sound like a mop being withdrawn from a bucket. Kajori’s eyes stayed on the Director’s when they met.

“There’s only me left. I get to make a few demands.”

***

She had walked home after the memorial service for Geefer with her heart in her boots and her vision blurring. Cú led her on, his hand behind him as he gently dragged her back to her quarters.

They had put Geefer’s essence in the quiet shadows of the eastern mushroom field near the mine-garden. It had been a favourite haunt of Geefer’s, and he had brought her and Cú there once before, along with his own cozentor, Amber. The four of them had practised kissing and being grown-ups in that spot after that when lessons and check-ups weren’t taking their time. It had been fun, and beautiful, and grown into something bigger. They had been a small family.

Before she poured her portion of Geefer away, a large portion of her love, Kajori had looked over to where Cú and Amber stood, in their own rank along with the other cozentori. The young woman was shaking with suppressed grief with Cú’s arm around her shoulder, gripping the grief it felt. Kajori noticed Cú’s eyes scanning his fellows, before landing on her. Perhaps he was realising how little time he had left with before her trials began. Ensuring she poured some of Geefer over her fingers, Kajori wiped her hand with a scrap of linen and smeared a small part of him into the cloth. It would join the others in the small box beneath her bed that evening.

The first cloth in the box had belonged to Eve. Eve with the perfect hair and the dimples and the straight ivory teeth. The souljers and the smallfolk all had loved Eve. She was quirky and cute and had a way of saying little comments that made everyone laugh. She was pretty and her accent was charming when she spoke Standard. She was Dutch, or Belgian, or something else protestant and white. Kajori had always been a bit afraid of Eve.

They would pass the statue, she knew, the direction that Cú was leading her. The huge statue of Eve was right in the centre of Quorum Square. The first of the short-lived gods to be worshipped. Kajori was fucking sick of the statue.

When Eve had undergone the trials, she had tested as an instant success. It must have been a relief to Director Kevin, who had been heard to declare that the SaveGen kids had ‘been chosen by the divinity of Mother Gaia to defeat this terrible plague for humankind’.

Some souls knew that the second Director’s penchant for synth-gin should stand joint-trial alongside ‘unscientific idealism’ for the crime of uttering such a definitive and unprovable claim. The then-Principal Investigator and the Whitecoats suspended the creation and distribution of Team notices for a moon and swore all participants to the dinner, a smattering of the Compound’s mercantile class, to silence on pain of recycling. In spite of these warnings, word of the Director’s indiscretion got out. The merchant captains of the Compound, in a mundanely inevitable move, began to promote the idea of the SaveGen children as godly. They lobbied the Research Council for a series of public statues, to honour those brave young souls who risked their lives to find a cure for the Grey. Whiffs of old religions emerged from smallfolk and souljer families. The SaveGen kids were modern godlings, preparing to meet an uncertain fate in the name of exploration. They were beings of near divinity. They were to be loved and celebrated on their journey to pupation, or crucifixion, or transformation or confirmation. People argued over jugs of potch about just how the SaveGen kids all met their final form and what it meant.

Two months after her trials started, Eve began to weaken at an alarming rate. The merchants, of course, had a field day. Two local smallfolk, a pair of brothers named Spudd who entertained people with amateur recitations and performances, began to preach about the need to honour Eve’s bravery with offerings. Soon, the base of the statue was busy with plates of delicate food and woven flasks of potch, and the cold stone of her likeness was bedecked in richly dyed fabrics. The merchants grew rich, as did the whitecoat guards, and it became dangerous for the SaveGen kids to be without their cozentor, for fear that they might be revered into an early recycling.

Kajori pulled the hood of her cloak up to hide her face. There would be a statue of Geefer there now, in his little grotto off the square, staring at where Eve smugly held the focus of the space.

‘Oh fuck, please don’t let them have covered him in orange cloth and carrots’, she prayed.

The idea of the familiar charade being played over poor Geefer’s memory made her feel sick. She had already set her thoughts in anger against the stupid believers, with their credible faces and useless fucking prayers.

In the small box under her bed, she had put Eve’s cloth.

And Plaisk’s

And Zerra’s

And Nakta’s

And Too’s

Then Jerrew’s

She had Geefer’s in her fist, and soon there would be her turn, and…and no-one to stain a cloth with her.

“Cú.”

She saw his feet stop and then change stance to turn and listen.

He was silent as ever.

“When I die Cú. After it. I want you to pour some of me into a scrap of cloth. I have one for all of us, and I want to go in with them. Keep us all together, would you?”

And then his feet danced, and her face was thrust upward, and he was kissing her like a sweet dreaming echo of a perfect moment. It was a fleeting moment, and yet she felt like she had long-travelled in a heartbeat.

“Together, forever. Always, my pulse.”

His voice had been as rough and deep as a flint-mine, as sweet as heather smoke in sea-air.

And then he had gripped her shoulders as they hugged and there had been wonder in his voice.

“They’re not celebrating Kajori.”

***

“So what, the Smallfolk get nervous .”

The Director tried to look nonchalant, but it was rather unconvincing. Kajori saw some distinct streaks of chalant in his face as she did her explaining. Some of the things she described were too horrible to be fiction or jest. The Director was an engineer seeing multiple stress points on a load-bearing beam flicker on and off.

“They were angry, Director. They were beyond angry.”

“What in the name of Isaac where they angry at, Kajori?”

“They were angry that I was not getting my wish.”

A tide of stress points flickered in front of Tobi’s glasses. His white coat seemed to be wilting.

“And that’s why you went out? One of your wishes?”

“You could say that,” said Kajori, taking a sip of her wine.

“Well, it’s increasingly clear that the strange young man Cú failed entirely in his duty to stop you.”

“I have a demand with regards to Cú, Director, as it hap-“

Kajori’s request was interrupted by the arrival of clinking chains. A thumping slap jiggled the chains, and then clashed them as a body collapsed on the floor.

“As requested, Director,” the Principal Investigator’s voice. It sounded like the lonely snapping of a young branch in winter.

“You bastards.”

She heard a voice of deepest flint that shook her heart with terrors.

“Yes, it’s as I say,” said the Director. The smug bastard appeared to be rubbing his belly with glee. “Young Cú must be made to suffer for such a dereliction of his duty.

She heard a rough growl of pain.

***

“Follow me, love.” Cú was panting as he led her away from Quorum Square, towards the foyer. He lolloped along, hurrying her in a direction she had never travelled before. The SaveGen kids were not allowed near the Foyer.

Behind them, Kajori caught glimpses of Amber, hurrying to keep up from as respectable a distance as possible. The cozentor’s eyes were like spark-powder when they caught the sunset. Behind Amber, Kajori sensed, instead of saw, a shadowy rumbling of dark-clad anger. The lightening air of the hallway made the angry Believers appear darker than they were, in the distant roiling of passages within.

The Whitecoats at the main entrance did not even raise their batons when Cú led Kajori up to them. His left hand had pulled hers a little in front of her as he walked somewhat ahead. He curved ahead of her to put his side in front of the Whitecoats, to whom he gave a little bow. Kajori looked down to check out his butt. Well, she naturally found her eyes glancing down, perhaps. She saw that the courtly bow had allowed Cú to place his right hand on his hip in the prescribed manner. As he pivoted to face the Whitecoats, Kajori imagined the smoky smile her cozentor would give. It was the charming smile of a fighter talking to a brother-in-arms. Cú was wonderful, she thought.

This idea changed rather abruptly when Kajori saw that Cú was clutching the folds of his cloak with his left fist, which he rotated around and around in both directions. It was very similar to the exercises she had seen Cú practice every day of her life since she was nine years old. Their joint birthday. Those were the exercises that prepared a cloak fighter, in this case Cú, to be able to cloak fight correctly. Cloak fighting was a specialty of Cú’s, rather famously his specialty, it happened. His prize-winning duels had been the talk of the Season for Compound society. A Souljer with charm and refinement, a cozentor to one of the last SaveGen kids, and a cunning duellist. It seemed rather urgently clear to Kajori that Cú was preparing his wrist in a manner that was rather similar to the one that involved fighting.

Another, competing, point of concern for Kajori was the rather terrifically awkward realisation that Cú’s right hand was still on his hip. If possible, his right hand was even closer to the large curved blade on his belt than it had during the bit when he was bowing.

“Hello fellas, how are you doing this evening?”

The Whitecoats somehow managed to both perk-up and slump in relaxation and the eager greeting. As the men chatted quietly, Kajori could almost sense the hair-trigger tremor of Cú’s waiting muscles. He was ready to act. Kajori was feeling rather breathless, but she soon impressed herself by beginning to try and calm Cú’s hasty thoughts. She could always tell herself she had tried.

She began to say, “Oh, you know what Cú, I’m not sure about this,” when he somewhat hopped and twisted around in a pirouette and Kajori undoubtedly beheld that the two men were on the floor. Cú was breathing heavily and smiling as he put his huge knife into the sheath at his back.

“That wasn’t too bad.”

“You didn’t kill them did you?”

“Nope, just knocked them out with the haft.” He pulled the kukri out again. Honestly, men suck sometimes, thought Kajori. Any excuse to whip it out. “You have to move quicker with the cloak: flow, and strike, more accurately, you see? They’ll have a bump on the head, but not a deadly one, that’s the skill.”

“You’re showing off now, chatterbox.”

“It doesn’t kill them,” he said, looking rather defeated, and then demonstrated the fact by bopping himself on the head with the hilt of his knife. “Ow, shit.”.

Kajori thought it was only fair that someone with such a voice should be cursed to say and do stupid things from time to time. He was grinning at her as a trickle of blood flowed over his ear.

“Well done, lover. I’m glad you were gentle.” She kissed him softly.

They looked out the portal into the evening.

“C’mon we still have time. I’ll show you where I think the runner went into the woods.”

***

“So he not only failed but actually abetted you in the commission of this crime.”

“It’s not a crime if we change the methodology, Director effective two days ago.”

“Impossible, he shall swing for this and…oh what is it?”

“Just one thing, Director.” The Principal Investigator was hunched over, as if she had a stomach ache. “The Whitecoat captains are suggesting that we put the Compound on lockdown for a while to help suppress the, eh, ‘spontaneous anti-project behaviours’.”

“Yes, yes,” snapped the Director. “Just take care of it, P.I. Do your bloody job.”

“Thank you sir. They are also suggesting we remove to the Research Council safe rooms.”

The Director was rubbing his hands together as if finishing a great labour. “I want to hear that cozentor scream before I go into the safe rooms. Can you arrange that?”

The P.I. bowed lower with a smirk. “Of course, Director.”

She scurried away, and the Director downed his glass before resting his gaze on Kajori. He looked as if every thought in his head had turned abstract and screamed without meaning. She knew that the time was near. She prayed to the feeling that had awoken to new sensations as she held the gaze of Tobias the Third. She asked the trees that she held her course.

“I want to know something. Your clothes showed traces of river water and the spores of a type of heather that only grows on the far side of the valley, where the concentration of sea-salt is higher. I will ask you once, where did you go, and what did you see?”

There were grunts and the crackling bolts of a stun beam being used.

Please, thought Kajori, oh please, please, please be alright, I beg.

“I’m afraid I cannot tell you.”

“You were gone for three days. Tell me what you did in those woods.”

“No, Director, I won’t share it with you”

The Director was roaring at her now, cramming loud words into the space between them as anger exploded through the finery of his office.

“That is the sound of of your little useless friend being slowly cooked to death you stubborn bitch. Tell me what I want to know, or we’ll cut him in ways that will keep him alive, but in pain for every moment.”

Kajori merely blinked at this, and then drank the rest of her wine. There were footsteps coming from behind her. She held out for as long as she could, challenging the Director with her eyes until her resolve snapped and she turned to look behind her.

Cú was walking towards her with a stun-beam gripped in his hand. They had been working him over since the arrest, it seemed, his face was bloodied and swollen. Flanking him, two men struggled to remove white coats that were clearly too small for them. One the men stared at her then smiled. If she asked him to lift his shirt, she knew she would see a spike of grey hair leading up to a tattoo of a lady. He was alright, that guy.

“They got you okay, love?” she asked.

Cú smiled at her then grimaced. “Could have been a bit earlier, but they meant well.”

Amber was coming up with the Principal Investigator in a neck harness. “Cú, reports from all attack points say resistance neutralised and no loss of life.”

The Director was shaking and had turned a green colour.

“What is this? Kajori, what are you doing?”

Kajori stroked a finger along Cú’s jaw and then turned to look out to where the ice cream shack stood across the valley. The rain had stopped. She thought she saw the Director bend forward in despair. The smell coming from the Deputy was becoming rather potent. She didn’t waver in her glance.

The outside world was unknown to her but less so than before. She would never tell of the wonders she had experienced with Cú, or what she had learned, but the decrepit form of the old shack, under the spread of the hawthorn tree was sufficient to remember it all. It was an image that she could never get bored of.

“We are here to formally announce that a quorate majority of Compound residents have voted to replace the Directorship of the SaveGen Project with a new Research Council headed by Kajori.” Cú’s voice was deep and, for once, melodious as it smiled.

Kajori addressed the window. Soon they all could be out there, beyond the lands of the farmers and the water. They could open the world up a little. There might more to the outside world to discover.

“As the final qualified member of the SaveGen Project, I officially conclude it with immediate effect. All quarantine restrictions are lifted.”

Kajori rose and took Cú’s hand and led him towards the Director's Chamber. She had to prepare a speech.

“Kajori the Fourth,” said Cú. “It suits you.”

She grabbed his hand and pulled him along. There would be time to think of a comeback later.