Shanti put his hands in his overall pockets and put his head down as he walked towards the bull barn. It didn’t really matter if he was noticed but he wanted to feel anonymous nevertheless. In the barn there were no stockmen. All the pens were locked and secure and with more hands needed elsewhere, the bulls had been partially abandoned. He walked the rows until he saw BLUE-792’s familiar bulk through a gate slat. Using his fingertips and rasps that he’d practised thousands of times when alone, he beat the steel panel softly, breathed the secret language of the Chosen.
This time, when he’d finished, there was a long reply.
It was unusual to come home in the evening and find no light coming from the house. He was accustomed to seeing the glow of firelight and candles at the very least. Of course, with the power down, Maya would be making do with what they had and that would mean trying to stretch every stick of tallow and every fallen branch.
As he stepped past the kitchen he expected to see the flicker of a single wick burning but there was nothing. It was still too early for the girls to be in bed; too early even for dinner to have been served. Perhaps Maya was working out how to cook her filthy meat over flames of an open fire.
Stopping at the back door, he listened. No sound from inside.
Nothing.
Instead he noticed his own heartbeat and realised he was afraid.
He opened the door silently, knowing exactly how to twist the handle and pull the door towards the hinges to avoid any sound. Pushing the door wide allowed a little of the final light of dusk to show him the deserted kitchen and living room. He stood just inside the door for a long time listening for breathing, watching for the slightest movement. There was nothing.
When he was satisfied the downstairs was deserted he checked upstairs. The house was empty.
So. She’d taken them away, just as she’d promised she would.
He ground his teeth together as his anger rose up. That tainted woman assuming charge of his precious girls. She was the one who deserved slaughter. She was the one who should experience death at the hands of MMP stockmen.
In the gloom something almost glowed on the dining table. A white rectangle. A letter.
He reached for it but it was too dark to see any writing.
In the kitchen he fumbled for matches, lit a stick of tallow.
It was worse than he’d expected:
Mr. Rory Magnus kindly asks that you join your family at his mansion at your earliest convenience. Tardiness will not be well received.
His hands shook. Melted fat dripped onto the table.
His pupils constricted in the candle flame. There was a noise at the back door. The flame whipped out in a draught. He saw not faces, but shapes, figures, steal into the room with speed and purpose. He dropped the letter.
They took him.
The back door had been left open and she walked in without knocking or calling out. It was clear there was no one inside. The Shanti place was silent and still. The house seemed to be listening to her.
She found the note from Magnus and was too jaded to despair. What did it matter that Magnus got to Shanti before the Welfare? What did it matter that the town fell into the hands of a Meat Baron or even those of the insane John Collins?
Her indifference astonished her. All these years of piety and adherence, all these years of service. Where was God now that she was dying? Where was God when lunatics threatened to take over Abyrne? She listened. If God heard her questions, He made no answer.
Weakened, she sat at the table where they had eaten the night she’d inspected the house. The children had pushed their food around on their plates before eating. Shanti himself had not touched the food until she’d left the table. Only Maya ate with gusto. Had Shanti even touched his meat that night? Quite suddenly, she was certain he had not; that he had not eaten the flesh of the Chosen for some considerable time. He was thin, yes, but he looked far fitter and healthier than most in the town. Could that really be attributed to his bizarre running habits or was there more to it? According to the Book of Giving, no townsperson could survive without the nourishment of the Chosen. Now, such folk were abroad in the town in numbers. Collins and his acolytes. Shanti too probably. How could God explain this?
God did not explain.
When she thought about it, had God ever truly spoken to her? Had He ever answered a single prayer? Had He appeared in the form of signs or portents? Had He shown himself in the shapes of the clouds? Had His presence ever given her comfort on the decades of nights she’d spent alone and chaste?
Dear Father, surely this is not the time to doubt You. Not when I approach the threshold of the next world. Not when my soul is about to fly to You. Perhaps this was the Lord’s greatest test of her, the final examination of her faith. Perhaps everyone faced this test at the end.
She felt an emptiness within herself she had always expected to be filled by the divine light of the Lord’s spirit. She had saved this cold space for Him ever since she’d entered the Welfare as a novice. The hearth within was swept and clean, the wood lay ready in the grate, the chimney was clear.
Fill me up with Your flame, Lord, for I need no other nourishment now. I shall not eat again nor wake from my next sleep. I come to You. Place Your gentle fire within me.
Many hours passed in the kitchen and Parson Mary Simonson sat unmoving with her hands folded on the table in prayer. The light moved across the room indistinctly through the clouds but she sensed the day growing old and the approaching twilight. There was nothing inside her. Not the merest spark of the Lord’s presence.
Instead the foetal canker in her guts stirred as if turning in a womb. It unclenched, at least that was how it felt to her, and the points and blades of its body wounded her from within. She had swallowed a baby fashioned from splintered bone and broken glass and the baby was growing, trying to get out. Nausea accompanied the churning, expanding pain in her abdomen. The trembling returned to every part of her body and as she sat, she was unable to keep even her head from shaking side to side.
Was this, then, her answer? The absence of God?
Or was it worse than that? Was their town’s God a God of cruelty? A God whose mission was to inflict pain on His creations?
She could sit no longer. Before the darkness came she wanted to move on. There was one last place to search for answers. Then she would rest and gladly.
Since the blast at the gas plant, the roads had become very still. What little gas was left was being reserved for emergencies only. No trucks grumbled back and forth from the meat packing plant to the town.
But the wind still blew and out here, much nearer than she normally came to the fields of the Chosen and to the plant, the smell was very strong. So many odours combining on the cold air. She tried to isolate each one. Faeces was the most recognisable and it smelled no different to the stink that arose from the town’s sewers. Almost as strong was the smell of rot and decay, the smell that came off meat left too long to be edible, the smell of flesh breaking down. There were living smells too. Sweat from the Chosen; not unlike that she might smell from a group of workers on a hot day. With all this came the aroma of fresh blood and the thick odour of the butcher’s shop, of cleaved, hanging meat, of ground meat, of cutlets and chops, of steaks and raw sausage. These were the smells that had once caused her mouth to water; the smells of her daily dutiful intake.
Now those smells only added to her deep nausea.
Despite the weakness of her knees and the strain in her legs, she walked on. She pushed through the pain inside her as though through a high wind, leaning forwards slightly. Like a starving woman climbing a steep hill into a gale. She kept her head down. She did not imagine that there would be a return journey.