He looked around the corner again to see if there was some other way of crossing the gap. That was when the first of the followers fell. Through a gap in dozens of heads and shoulders, he saw a meat hook rise high and drop fast. It took one of Collins’s followers full between the neck and the shoulder. Shanti heard the cry of triumph after what must have been a thousand useless blows against them. The moment the hook caught the ragged figure, the wielder hauled the man into the morass of stockmen. Blades reflected dull in the afternoon gloom, first ashen then bloody.
Shanti closed his eyes and made ready to run.
A figure moved awkwardly towards them from the fields. She was dressed in red, though that was hard to see because there was so much filth and mud clinging to her. She was gaunt and pale of face, not at all how he remembered her. Behind her, streaming slowly and confusedly up from the fields were the herds of the Chosen.
All of them.
Bless you, Parson Mary Simonson, he thought.
He turned and began to tap on the wall of the slaughterhouse. He nodded and hissed at the bulls and cows beside him and one by one they joined him. Thousands of finger stumps padded in unison the message that Shanti wanted the rest of the herds to hear. Hundreds of throats rasped out coded sighs. There wasn’t enough space along the slaughterhouse wall for all of them, so many pattered their rhythms on the metal fences further back, others on the corrugated iron walls of storehouses and lean-tos.
Parfitt watched the response of the arriving herds as they heard the rhythms that suddenly sounded to him like a strange kind of music. He saw the Parson collapse near the perimeter and saw the smile on her face; a sadder expression he hadn’t seen. The herds flowed forward and he lost sight of her.
Ten thousand Chosen flooded through the fence into the yards.
The fighting stopped.
Twenty-eight
The Chosen, responding to the beats and breaths of the bulls and dairy herd, poured into the MMP yards.
Shanti saw astonishment on the face of every black-coat and stockman as the numbers of Chosen swelled. The mass of pale human cattle mushroomed towards the two groups of combatants. Armed men began to back away towards the gate. There was no hint of malice in the expressions of the Chosen but neither was there a dipped head among them or a trace of fear or subservience. Chins up and eyes meeting any and all gazes, the Chosen shuffled forward.
Almost simultaneously two scuffles broke out among the stockmen. At first Shanti thought they were fighting each other. Then, to the front of them came all the surviving followers and Collins himself, every one secured by a man on each side.
Torrance and Bruno stepped in front of them. He pointed his finger at the corner of the slaughterhouse.
At him.
‘This is all your doing, Shanti. I’ve been watching you, my friend. You can talk their language, can’t you? You’re controlling them.’
It was like having a spotlight turned on him. Everyone would hear his words.
‘This has been coming for years. If it hadn’t been me it would have been someone else.’
‘Bullshit. You and Collins are uniquely fucked up. If it wasn’t for the two of you, everything would be fine in this town. When we get rid of you, everything’s going to get back to normal.’
Torrance nodded to two of his men. They stepped away from Collins and Torrance whipped him in the back of the legs with a crowbar. He fell to his knees in the dirt. Torrance kicked him with the sole of his boot, knocking him onto his side. ‘Hold him down.’ He took a thin-bladed boning knife from a sheath at his side and held it up. ‘They’re all going to die, Shanti. Unless you call off the herds and send them back to the fields where they belong.’
Collins found Shanti’s eyes with his own. He closed them and shook his head almost without moving. Shanti was the only one to see it. Collins’s eyes were calm when he opened them again but somehow on fire with joy. Shanti could see the light inside him shining.
‘Look at the numbers, Torrance,’ said Shanti. ‘Even with your weapons, the Chosen outnumber you. A few may die but in the end, you’ll be overcome.’
‘You’re not listening, Shanti. Let me explain it another way.’
Torrance knelt behind Collins and pressed one knee down on his head leaving his neck exposed. Shanti noticed for the first time the faint scar that ran vertically between Collins’s Adam’s apple and the notch between his collarbones; the mark of an incomplete ritual procedure. He didn’t have time to think about it. Torrance laid the boning knife against the smooth skin of Collins’s neck and began to saw as if Collins were already dead.
Shanti saw his friend’s eyes widen in shock and terror. Torrance didn’t pause. He was already through the arteries and veins and had severed Collins’s trachea. A shocking, unbelievable out-rushing of blood covered Torrance’s hands and Collins’s face. The ground absorbed it. Collins tried to fight down his survival instinct but he couldn’t do it. He began to struggle knowing the rear part of the blade was already approaching his neck bones. Suddenly the tension in his body released, he slackened, eyes still wide, as Torrance’s knife slipped between the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae. The sawing, laboured now, continued until Torrance had the head off. There was no hair to lift it by so he stuck his fingers in Collins’s mouth and raised the head upside down.
‘Now do you see, Shanti? Now can you understand what I’m trying to tell you? This is over. You send the Chosen back to the fields. Then maybe, just maybe, we’ll do the others the humane way. I might even have you do it. You’re the expert, after all.’
Shanti was crying, nauseated despite his years in the slaughterhouse. He couldn’t allow Torrance to kill the rest of them like that. He could see the faces of the followers, each sallow with this new anticipation. Nor could he let the Chosen come this far and then return to their lives of sacrifice and subjugation.
He would send the herds in. It was time.
He raised his hands to the wall of the slaughterhouse ready to play the order and release the Chosen upon the stockmen and black-coats. He felt sure Torrance would believe he was giving in, sending them back to the fields.
His fingers never made the first tap, his throat swallowed back the first sigh.
His hands dropped.
Bruno pushed his way through the still panting mob.
He dragged Shanti’s daughters into view by the hair. He was grinning.
‘Look what I found.’
Torrance was delighted.
‘Perfect,’ he said, as he looked the girls over. ‘I think they’ve put on a bit of weight, don’t you, Shanti. Must be all the meat they’ve been getting recently. Healthy little girls, aren’t you?’ He pinched Hema’s rosy cheek. She was flushed with tears. ‘Your mama liked a bit of meat too, didn’t she?’ He looked back at the Chosen. They were shifting their weight from one foot to another. He’d seen this impatience in them before. Usually in the crowd pens where they wanted their deaths to be over as quickly as possible. ‘Better hurry up and give that order, Shanti. Or I’ll have to decide which girl to do first. Shouldn’t be too difficult, they’re both the same, aren’t they?’
Shanti stopped thinking then. All he could do was save his girls. A man had no choice in such a matter. He raised his thimbled fingers to the wall. The yard was quiet now; the rest of the herd had stopped signalling while the factions negotiated. The eye of every Chosen was on Shanti now. He knew it and he knew what they were waiting for. What they had waited generations for. The simple freedom to live as humans again, as they had before what the Welfare called the creation and what Shanti and many others secretly believed was the opposite: some kind of cataclysm that had ended a much larger world and left only the portion now known as Abyrne.