LITMIR.BIZ

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say why. Perhaps the piece of her that should know the answer was broken.

      Nona knew she should say something but couldn’t find the right words. Maybe she’d left them in the village, on her mother’s floor. Instead of silence she chose to say the thing that she had said only once before – the thing that had put her in the cage.

      ‘You’re my friend.’

      The big girl sniffed, wiped her nose again, looked up, and split her dirty face with a white grin.

      Giljohn fed them well and answered questions, at least the first time they were asked – which meant ‘are we there yet?’ and ‘how much further?’ merited no more reply than the clatter of wheels.

      The cage served two purposes, both of which he explained once, turning his grizzled face back to the children to do so and letting the mule, Four-Foot, choose his own direction.

      ‘Children are like cats, only less useful and less furry. The cage keeps you in one place or I’d forever be rounding you up. Also …’ he raised a finger to the pale line of scar tissue that divided his left eyebrow, eye-socket, and cheekbone, ‘I am a man of short temper and long regret. Irk me and I will lash out with this, or this.’ He held out first the cane with which he encouraged Four-Foot, and then the callused width of his palm. ‘I shall then regret both the sins against the Ancestor and against my purse.’ He grinned, showing yellow teeth and dark gaps. ‘The cage saves you from my intemperance. At least until you irk me to a level where my ire lasts the trip around to the door.’

      The cage could hold twelve children. More if they were small. Giljohn continued his meander westward along the Corridor, whistling in fair weather, hunched and cursing in foul.

      ‘I’ll stop when my purse is empty or my wagon’s full.’ He said it each time a new acquisition joined them, and it set Nona to wishing Giljohn would find some golden child whose parents loved her and who would cost him every coin in his possession. Then at last they might get to the city.

      Sometimes they saw it in the distance, the smoke of Verity. Closer still and a faint suggestion of towers might resolve from the haze above the city. Once they came so close that Nona saw the sunlight crimson on the battlements of the fortress that the emperors had built around the Ark. Beneath it, the whole sprawling city bound about with thick walls and sheltering from the wind in the lee of a high plateau. But Giljohn turned and the city dwindled once more to a distant smudge of smoke.

      Nona whispered her hope to Saida on a cold day when the sun burned scarlet over half the sky and the wind ran its fingers through the wooden bars, finding strange and hollow notes.

      ‘Giljohn doesn’t want pretty,’ Saida snorted. ‘He’s looking for breeds.’

      Nona only blinked.

      ‘Breeds. You know. Anyone who shows the blood.’ She looked down at Nona, still wide-eyed with incomprehension. ‘The four tribes?’

      Nona had heard of them, the four tribes of men who came to the world out of darkness and mixed their lines to bear children who might withstand the harshness of the lands they claimed. ‘Ma took me to the Hope church. They didn’t like talk of the Ancestor.’

      Saida held her hands up. ‘Well there were four tribes.’ She counted them off on her fingers. ‘Gerant. If you have too much gerant blood you get big like they were.’ She patted her broad chest. ‘Hunska. They’re less common.’ She touched Nona’s hair. ‘Hunska-dark, hunska-fast.’ As if reciting a rhyme. ‘The others are even rarer. Marjool … and … and …’

      ‘Quantal,’ Markus said from the corner. He snorted and puffed up as if he were an elder. ‘And it’s marjal, not marjool.’

      Saida scowled at him, and turning back she lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘They can do magic.’

      Nona touched her hair where Saida’s hand had rested. The village littles thought black hair made her evil. ‘Why does Giljohn want children like that?’

      ‘To sell.’ Saida shrugged. ‘He knows the signs to look for. If he’s right he can sell us for more than he paid. Ma said I’ll find work if I keep getting big. She said in the city they feed you meat and pay you coins.’ She sighed. ‘I still don’t want to go.’

      Giljohn took the lanes that led nowhere, the roads so rutted and overgrown that often it needed all the children pushing and Four-Foot straining all four legs to make headway. Giljohn would let Markus lead the mule then – Markus had a way with the beast. The children liked Four-Foot, he smelled worse than an old blanket and had a fondness for nipping legs, but he drew them tirelessly and his only competition for their affection was Giljohn. Several of them fought to bring him hoare-apples and sweet grass at the day’s end. But, of all of them Four-Foot only loved Giljohn who whipped him, and Markus who rubbed him between the eyes and spoke the right kind of nonsense when doing it.

      The rains came for days at a time making life in the cage miserable, though Giljohn did throw a hide over the top and windward side. The mud was the worst of it, cold and sour stuff that took hold of the wheels so that they all had to shove. Nona hated the mud: lacking Saida’s height she often found herself thigh-deep in the cold and sucking mire, having to be rescued by Giljohn as the wagon slurped onto firmer ground. Each time he would knot his fist in the back of her hempen smock and heft her out bodily.

      Nona set to scraping the goo off as soon as he set her down on the tailgate.

      ‘What’s a bit of mud to a farm-girl?’ Giljohn wanted to know.

      Nona only scowled and kept on scraping. She hated being dirty, always had. Her mother said she ate her food like a highborn lady, holding each morsel with precision so as not to smear herself.

      ‘She’s not a farm-girl.’ Saida spoke up for her. ‘Nona’s ma wove baskets.’

      Giljohn returned to the driver’s seat. ‘She’s not anything now, and neither are the rest of you until I sell you. Just mouths to feed.’

      Roads that led nowhere took them to people who had nothing. Giljohn never asked to buy a child. He’d pull up alongside any farm that grew more weeds and rocks than crop, places where calling the harvest ‘failed’ would be over generous, implying that it had made some sort of effort to succeed. In such places the tenant farmer might pause his plough or lay down his scythe to approach the wagon at his boundary wall.

      A man driving a wagonload of children in a cage doesn’t have to state his business. A farmer whose flesh lies sunken around his bones, and whose eyes are the colour of hunger, doesn’t have to explain himself if he walks up to such a man. Hunger lies beneath all of our ugliest transactions.

      Sometimes a farmer would make that long, slow crossing of his field, from right to wrong, and stand, lean in his overalls, chewing on a corn stalk, eyes a-glitter in the shadows of his face. On such occasions it wouldn’t take more than a few minutes before a string of dirty children were lined up beside him, graduated in height from those narrowing their eyes against the suspicion of what they’d been summoned for, down to those still clutching in one hand the stick they’d been playing with and in the other the rags about their middle, their eyes wide and without guile.

      Giljohn picked out any child with possible gerant traits on a swift first pass. When they knew their ages it was easier, but even without anything more than a rough guess at a child’s years he would find clues to help him. Often he looked at the backs of their necks, or took their wrists and bent them back – just until they winced. Those children he would set aside. On a second pass he would examine the eyes, pulling at the corners and peering at the whites. Nona remembered those hands. She had felt like a pear picked from the market stall, squeezed, sniffed over, replaced. The village had asked nothing for her, yet still Giljohn had carried out his checks. A space in his cage and meals from his pot had to be earned.

      With the hunska possibles the child-taker would rub the youngster’s hair between finger and thumb as if checking for coarseness. If still curious, he would test their swiftness by dropping a stone so that it fell behind a cloth he held out, and make a game of trying

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