Paradise: Chapter 4: Numbers (5557)(DRAFT!)

 

Chapter 4: Numbers (5557)

Helen nodded at the Red Cross agent, a tough looking man with an eye-patch. Either a soldier or a swashbuckling pirate in a former life, she had no idea.

‘Thanks, Ned,’ she muttered as she handed the phone back to him, hoped down out of his truck and shuffled back to her dormitory, following a line of grey-clad women who were coming back from their evening meal.

It would be an hour before lights out, the women were expected to patch up their clothes in that time or perform other mundane tasks. Some had jobs to do outside the dorm. It was a wooden structure, a hot sweaty box that didn’t get much air. It was cooler up here on the hillsides than down in the jungle, but not by much.

Helen lay down on her bed, the lower bunk of a crude wooden bunkbed and stared up at the half-rotten beams and tatty mattress above. She was beyond self-pity now, two months in the gulag had scorched away all her protective layers of bluster and self-delusion.

More women filed in, mainly black skinned, locals from the Delta. They sat together, fanning themselves with bits of cardboard, talking and laughing, a sound like exotic birds. The locals were the kindest of all the slaves, but Helen found them difficult to talk to, her skin colour marked her out. To them she was “one of dem left-over women”, a displaced person, not worth getting to know as she’d soon be dead of a splinter virus, worked to death or burnt. They were the originals, the first women on the farm, from a congregation of Methodists that had been rounded up by the Committee. Since then, others like Helen had arrived. There were stories about a men’s camp not so far away, but only stories.

Her bunkmate, a large Delta woman with her hair tied up in a plastic bag, ignoring Helen completely, heaved herself up onto the top bunk, sending down a small shower of dust that landed on Helen’s face. She took off her round glasses, and after rubbing her eyes for a bit, cleaned the lenses on her sleeve.

A big black hand loomed down from the top bunk, tough and gnarled like a bear paw. It waved for attention then pointed at a folded magazine lying on top of a basket beside the bed. Helen picked it up and passed it up to the hand.

“There you go Melissa,’ she squeaked. There was a grunt from above.

Ten minutes before lights out a group of women came in, recently fed and washed, workers from the backdam, returned after a week of brashing and undergrowth clearance in the Brown Ebony and Ironwood forests. A thin young woman, very dark skinned and with a shaved head had been using one of the women’s bunks. She was new and would not have known she had been sleeping in another woman’s bed that last three nights. The backdam women were the toughest of the slaves in the entire farm and despite the young woman’s apologies they began to kick her about.

Helen sat up on her bunk and watched on. She knew not to get involved but the young slave was so pathetic in appearance, in a ragged and dirty smock, with not even a pair of sandals for her feet.

The backdam slaves pushed and pulled her around until the smock was ripped off her body entirely, revealing her thin, breastless and naked body. The backdam women laughed all the harder as she tried to cover herself again.

‘What you trying to hide there, missy?’ they hollered. ‘You as flat as a saucer.’

Then they saw a witch’s mark on her body, a pale mole on her left hip and the pushes and kicks became more violent.

‘Obeah! You a witch!’ they cried. ‘Church slave! Dey burn you witch!’

This was finally too much for Helen. She was timid and half broken by her time in the camp, but before the reditus, her and Gary had run a hostel in Australia for eight years. She was used to bossing people around and settling disputes in dormitories, and now all that muscle memory kicked in, catapulting her across the room in the young girl’s defence even before she had time to think of what exactly it what it was she was going to do when she got there.

‘Hey!’ she yelled at them. ‘Leave them alone you big bullies!’

There was sudden silence as they all turned to look at her. She stooped to pick up the girl’s smock from the floor and handed it to her.

‘Stay out of this, bule,’ said one of the backdam women, using the local racial slur for white people.

‘It’s over,’ snapped back Helen. ‘If she’s a church slave then she belongs over there with the rest of us.’

Helen made to leave but one of the larger women grabbed her by the arm. She towered over Helen who was barely five feet tall. As the women pulled her arm to hit Helen, a shadow passed across them. They both turned to see Melissa looming at Helen’s side. Melissa, with her forehead as flat and as broad as an anvil, well over six foot tall, wearing a ragged t-shirt and a pair of men’s jeans, she was a walking wall of intimidation. The backdam woman released her grip on Helen who then took the opportunity to yank the girl away.

‘Come on over here with us,’ said Helen, soothing the sobbing girl. ‘Me and Melissa and a few of the others are all from the church. You can bunk with us.’

Melissa silently turned and when to her bunk, where she once more climbed up into the creaking upper berth. Helen ushered the girl into the lower bed, saying, ‘look, you can share my bed tonight and we’ll get you sorted out tomorrow,’ as she again picked up the dropped magazine and handed it up to Mellissa.

Both Helen and the girl were small, so they fit on the long bunk together easily. By the time they were settled the custodian had been around to blow out all the lamps and as Melissa caused the whole bed frame creak and groan above them as she tried to find a comfortable position to sleep in, they had a whispered conversation.

‘Thank you miss,’ whispers the girl, her head beside Helen’s on the narrow pillow.

‘How old are you?’ asked Helen.

‘Sixteen miss,’ answered the girl. ‘My name is Tina, miss.’

‘Do they have you detailed yet?’

‘Dey got me working in de kitchen, miss.’

‘Oh, that’s ok then,’ said Helen, trying to sound comforting. ‘You should be fine there.’

Helen herself had started in the coffee plantations but was too small and weak to be much use, so they had moved her to the orange orchard where she worked with one other woman watering and weeding around the Parson Brown orange trees.

‘Better sleep now anyway, Tina,’ whispered Helen. ‘They don’t like it if we talk too much after lights out.’

The next morning Helen had come back to the farm to fetch a ladder for the orange grove. As she exited the barn, she had gone to get it from she was confronted by two of the backdam women from the night before. They blocked the doorways with their bodies, menacing silhouettes again the bright sunlight outside.

‘Hey, where you going, scunt?’ one of the snapped.

Helen stopped in her tracks and dropped the ladder. ‘What do you want?’

‘What you tink?’ the smirked. ‘We guna box you up prappa!’

The woman who had just spoken lunged and caught Helen on the nose, a blow that caused blood to flow, but it was the only hand they were ever going to lay on her, because the smaller women dummied to the right then fled to her left, up a pile of hay bales and hurled herself bodily out of the window at their summit.

She landed in the dirt and was on her feet and running as the two larger turned and chased after her. She sniffed and spat out blood as she ran, heading for the main gate where there were two guards who might rescue her, or maybe they would watch and laugh and she was beaten. If she could get to the grove her boss would protect her at least.

As she reached the gates, a big black church SUV rolled into courtyard and stopped right in front of her. She tripped over her own feet and fell to her knees. Glancing over her shoulder she could see the other women had stop too, they looked as confused as she was. Church cars were rarely good news. The passenger door of the sinister vehicle opened. Helen awaited her fate.

***

Father Nimite had decided to make the best of the journey as he could. He was not a smart man, he told himself, but if he trusted in God, how could he go wrong? He didn’t really know what to expect to find in Goldengreens. Something pretty awful, if half the stories were true.

He sat in the back of the church SUV with a large bag of cassava pone and sugar cake that he shared with the driver. He was regretting sitting in the back of the car. He had planned on having a nap, but the road was too uneven for sleeping and now every time he wanted to talk to the driver or offer a sweet, he had to lean forward.

The next time they stopped he’d move through to the front he decided, but for now he leaned his arms on the seat rests, watching the roadside shops roll by and making conversation. The driver he knew from before, a tall and raw-boned fellow by the name of Samuel Benjamin, who was currently keeping his eyes on the road, watching for potholes and fallen branches.

‘You been down this way recently, Samuel?’ he asked.

‘Not since de reditus, Father,’ replied the driver.

‘How long we got to go do you think?’ asked Nimite.

Samuel shrugged. It was anyone’s guess. This road along the coast was in a sad state of repair and the road through the jungle was expected to be a whole lot worse. Beyond the thin line of civilisation, the jungle loomed, a sweltering mass of untamed vegetation. Somewhere in there was Goldengreens, and beyond that Zion, then Paradise, names from the before times that seemed quaint now, then – eventually – the mountains, and beyond that no one from Evermarch or the Delta had so far dared to go. Before the reditus it had been the Amazon basin, but now? God only knew.

The car ground its way along the brick-topped road all the way to Adelphi, where they would have their last look at the sea before plunging into the hot green gloom of the forest. Nimite was dreading it, so he signalled Samuel to stop, and they got out and stretched their legs. They walked down to the wild wide beach, for lack of anywhere better to go.

‘This is it, Father,’ said Samuel as they came to a halt. ‘You naw see the sea again until we get back.’

Nimite breathed in the cool sea breeze as if he was drinking it. He looked out across the water, the gentle sound of the waves rolling in soothing his nerves. Well, at least the blood tide had gone now, swirled away to where he did not know, but it had coloured the coastline red for a whole year right at the start of everything. It had killed a lot of the sea life too, and the stink had been so bad that people in the Delta had moved inland to be away from it. Evermarch had managed a little better due to the lower temperature, and when the rivers had clogged up with dead fish, dolphins, whales, seals and everything else, the city had at least been organised enough to have the manpower to deal with it. Not so the Delta, where whale corpses still lay rotting up and down the coast. Not only that, but wrecked ships. Nimite could see three big ones from where he was standing, dark shadows in the sea haze. People lived in some of the wrecks, he had been told.

‘All as foretold in Revelations,’ he remarked to Samuel, sweeping his right arm across the view of the coastline. ‘Although the same verse foretells a great mountain burning with fire cast into the sea, but I don’t know where that went.’

‘We are probably better off not knowing,’ said Samuel.

Nimite turned and headed back to the car.

‘You still got that cat?’ he asked conversationally as he got in the passenger seat.

‘Enid?’ replied Samuel. ‘Yes Father. She managed to survive everything.’

Samuel started the engine and pulled the car out onto the main road. There had been a little traffic coming to Adelphi, but the road they were now taking was deserted and overgrown.

‘Here we go,’ he murmured as he turned on the headlights.

‘I remember dat cat,’ went on Nimite with a melodious laugh. ‘And that woman. You here from that woman you used to… What were she name now…’

‘Desdemona?’

‘Oh!’ laughed Nimite. ‘Desdemona, that right! Now there was a woman. She used to shack up with that fella O’Henry. You remember? She lash him up with a cutlass then ran away to de refuge on St George Street. What a fine figure she had. You know what happen to her?’

Samuel shrugged again. ‘Me naw no.’

‘I remember it so well, Samuel’, Nimite ever tugging on the driver’s shoulder. ‘One of the last days. Days before de change you know. And O’Henry comin to look for her… Oh I remember, I hear it from de nuns at the refuge, he and his men were there, comin to taker her out and do God only knew. And then? I don’t know what happened after that, because then the refuge was gone and all de nuns in it and we had the clansmen instead. Do you know what happened to her, Samuel?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ replied Samuel, although he knew very well. Desdemona was in his own flat, lying on his sofa watching TV and eating metemgee bought from a street vendor.

Nimite patted his driver on the knee and leaned back in his seat. ‘Well. I hope she ok, but you naw, she was a wild one. I hope she’s ok.’

Nimite turned to the left and watched the jungle slowly go by for a few minutes. He was not a subtle man, but his vocation had made him sensitive to people’s feelings and he could see that Samuel was getting a little defensive about his line of questioning, so he dropped it.

Nimite slept through much of the rest of the journey. It was early in the morning, still dark, but getting lighter when Samuel woke him.

‘We are here, Father.’

‘Oh,’ groaned Nimite as he came to his senses. ‘No trouble?’

‘No trouble, Father,’ replied Samuel. ‘We went through a couple of unmanned checkpoints coming up.’

Nimite sat up and stretched, then opened the car door and slowly worked his way out of the seat.

The hot humid night air was a striking contrast after the cool air conditioning of the car. He had not been to Goldengreens since before the reditus, but he still recognised it. Samuel had driven them into the carpark by the church. Looking left and right he could see the main street of the town, dark and silent, not even a streetlamp to light their way, only the light of the moon showing the outline of the roofs against the sky.

The door of the church opened and an old man in shorts peered out at them, silhouetted by the light inside.

‘Father Nimite?’ gasped the old man. ‘Is that you?’

‘It is, its!’ beamed Nimite. ‘We tried to call, Father Dekulos, but could not get through. So, I have been sent!’

‘Well come in then, come in,’ muttered the elderly priest, chewing on his cheek.

While Samuel was sent through to the kitchen to rouse the maid and get some breakfast, the two priests went through the Dekulos’s office where he found and threw on a T-shirt, covering up his skinny ribs and wiry white chest hair. The office was dark, lit from moonlight only, until Dekulos located and lit an oil lamp. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw a wide desk with empty bookcases behind it. Stacks of newspapers lay about on the floor and were piled up against two over-stuffed filing cabinets. Father Dekulos did not keep a tidy home.

‘I’m glad you are here,’ muttered the older priest as he moved a cat off his office chair and sat down to needlessly arrange some papers. ‘We’ve been cut off for such a long time. Just a few hours of electricity each day. It was ok, we was doing ok, but…’

Nimite waited, but the old priest had evidently finished. To Nimite, the old man looked lonely and exhausted. A shadow of the man he had known only a few years ago when they had both lived and preached in Georgetown.

‘Well,’ the younger man began with a cough. ‘Perhaps you can guess why I’m here. The bishop sent me down to find out what’s happenin wit deez farms you got here.’

Dekulos looked forlorn, huddled on his chair with a knee up to his chin. ‘It’s the Committee. They are a law unto themselves. They take over the farms and make many camps in de jungle around here.’

‘Where are the papers? The need permission from the diocese for such things.’

Dekulos made a token movement towards some of the papers on his desk.

‘What even are they producing?

‘Sugar cane, coffee, fruit, they got pigs I think.’

‘Where does it go?’ asked Nimite with a yawn. ‘It doesn’t come up to Evermarch.’

‘I think it goes south.’

‘South?’ asked the younger priest sitting forward, suddenly more alert. ‘There is nothing to the south!’

‘This is what I hear, but they keep the gates shut, no one is allowed in. The trucks leave, but to where I don’t know.’ The kitchen maid came in with a tray of tea.

‘What about the slaves dey got there?’ ask Nimite as he accepted a cup with a nod of thanks.

‘A big parcel of Leopard Street Methodists, that’s what they say,’ replied Dekulos. ‘They all up in de backdam. The women’s camp at Develde Farm is the closest, that’s where the gossip comes from. They have other camps further back, or so they say.’

‘Maybe we go there then,’ said Nimite as he drank his hot cane-sugar sweetened tea.

For a moment Dekulos looked alarmed. ‘Better not, Father Nimite. They will not let you in. I tell you what, there is a logging camp, now that I remember, that is just as close. I can take you up there.’

They talked a short while longer, then Nimite was shown to his room. He made sure to say good night to Samuel.

‘Everything ok, Father?’ asked his driver.

‘Father Dekulos is a good man,’ whispered Nimite. ‘Or he used to be. There is the devil’s work here.’

Samuel’s eyebrows raised, but Father Nimite said nothing more, turned and went to his room.

The next morning Father Nimite talked to Samuel alone after breakfast. ‘Father Dekulos will guide us to the woman’s camp after Sext prayers. I’ll call for you after lunch, keep your eyes and ears open Samuel.’

***

There was an air of menace as they drove through the town in the afternoon. To Father Nimite’s eyes the people looked haunted. They had been cut off for a year after the reditus, an event that had been confusing and chaotic enough on the Delta was even worse out here. Right at the start several hundred clansmen had been dumped in the area, but they had all been picked up now and resettled in the Delta projects. What was left now was a portion of the original people of Goldengreens, dressed in colourful patched up clothes that seemed out of place on the gaunt shuffling frames of those that wore them.

It was three miles to the farm, and they rode there in silence. There were armed men dressed in black at the gate, but when they saw the church plates on the car, they waved it through.

Samuel rolled the car into the main compound then followed a lane round to where several other vehicles were parked. The two priests stepped out just as a woman was being chased across the farmyard by several others. The pursuers’ shouts stopped abruptly when they saw the expensive church SUV and the priests. Their quarry tumbled to the ground, a small white woman with blood in her mouth.

‘What is the meaning of this?’ asked Nimite, pulling himself up to his full height. With his sunglasses on his round acne-scarred face he was an intimidating sight and towered over the slave woman who had just fallen at his feet.

He leant down and she scrambled back, but he was only reaching for the spectacles that had fallen off her face when she had tripped. Nimite blew the dust off them and handed them back to her.

Just as he was about to say something, a Committee woman, dressed all in black, came rushing up to them and called over two guards to take the slaves away.

‘Father Dekulos?’ she wheezed through dark fat lips. ‘What is this?’

‘Do not worry, Anjulie. We are just visiting. This is Father Nimite from the Evermarch Temple.’

Anjulie took them to a shaded area where tables and chairs were laid out for the Committee members.

She arranged her long black skirts around her legs, revealing gout-ridden toes in loose dusty sandals. She fanned herself with a piece of carboard torn from an orange box as they spoke.

After some small talk Nimite asked, ‘can I see where the slaves are kept?’ and rather reluctantly the Committee woman toured them around some of the barns where the women lived and slept. As they went between the buildings, he noticed something.

‘And what is that?’ he asked, pointing to an area of ground that was scorched black and littered with burnt wood.

‘That’s where we burn the witches, Father.’

He went over and kicked up some of the ash.

‘And how may have you burned here?’

‘I’d have to check the records Father, but at least thirty.’

Nimite looked up again and let his eyes rest on the horizon for a moment, a distant tree line of brown and green, sweltering under the rich blue sky. He could tell he was making Anjulie and Dekulos nervous, and he was leaning into his stern demeanour to make sure they stayed that way. Underneath he was overcome with emotion, and fearful of what they might do if they stopped fearing him. All this sort of thing was supposed to be done with. After the madness of the first year, there were laws in place to stop this sort of thing. Laws that were enforced by the church.

After a long silence he cleared his throat and said, ‘show me your records, Miss Anjulie. Specifically for the acquirement of slaves.’

***

Samuel had found his way to a shady spot by the main gate that overlooked some of the coffee fields, where he now sat, watching the workers come and go. He was a city boy and the farm looked almost idyllic to his untutored eyes. The women tended and harvested to some schedule that was utterly mysterious to him, but it seemed like good honest work, out in the fresh air. It was a shame that slavery had to come into it. While the clergy dealt with the muta woman, he drank a cup of iced sugarcane juice one of the kitchen women had bought him. He was tall and well dressed in his driver’s suit and he could see that he was drawing their eyes.

A large clansmen came across the yard and sat on the log beside him, then offered him a cigarette which Samuel declined. The tanned and muscular man wore a patch over his right eye.

‘You the Red Cross man?’ asked Samuel.

‘Aye,’ nodded the man, breathing smoke out of his nose.

The man introduced himself as Edward McQuade and went on to tell Samuel something of the farm. ‘Aye, my beat is this place, the men’s camp further in and two more farms on the other side of the river. This place is the worst, so I stay here most of the time. It would be a decent profitable farm if it wasn’t for that fucking Anjulie. She roasts about a woman a month at the moment.’

‘Can’t you do anything?’

‘Not much,’ admitted Ned with a shrug. ‘Last week I could at least make sure they got phone calls, but my troposcatter back to Evermarch is down, so I’m pretty redundant. I can mostly stop the burnings if I’m here, but my boss gets mad at me if I don’t visit the other camps.’

‘Troposcatter, what’s that?’ asked Samuel.

Ned nodded over to what looked like an army truck with a satellite dish on it.

‘Don’t let that dish fool you. It’s not satellites, it bounces microwaves on the troposphere layer of the atmosphere. Got a range of five hundred kilometres, but is doing bugger all at the moment. The fucking receiver must be down again.’

Samuel, intrigued, got up and walked towards the truck. An hour later this was where Father Nimite found him, sat in the back of the MAN truck as McQuade talked him through the intricacies of microwave communication.

‘Samuel!’ Father Nimite called up to him. ‘Are you in there?’

‘Yes, Father,’ replied Samuel as he hopped down from the back.

‘It’s worse than we could have though Samuel,’ said Nimite wiping sweat off his face with a handkerchief. ‘They have no law here. No church. The Committee are slaughtering dem up here. In this camp and de other places.’

Samuel nodded. He had been hearing all about it from the McQuade.

‘No phones here, so you’ll need to go back by yourself,’ went on Nimite.

‘What about you Father?’

‘I’m going to stay here and see what I can do,’ said Nimite. ‘Some of these women. Dey belong to the church. I see the paperwork. Get them out of here and give them a good wash and a feed. How dey end up here God only knows, but they are church property.’

Samuel seemed about to say something, but then appeared to think better of it. He looked over Nimite’s shoulder, scanning for Father Dekulos.

‘What is it, Sam?’

‘Well,’ hedged Samuel, trusting Nimite but knowing that telling on a priest had to be done carefully. He drew Nimite away from the vehicle and in a low voice said, ‘the Red Cross man, he be tellin me. Father Dekulos has been selling the church slaves to the farm. He allowed to do that?’

‘No,’ sighed Nimite. The priest then kissed his teeth. ‘If Father Dekulos has sold them to the Committee, then he would have needed to get a writ from a bishop. And where he get that out here?’

Nimite thought for a moment. Samuel looked up at the sky.

‘We take them anyway,’ he said. ‘Likely Dekulos sold them illegally. He never tink we come down this way again, I’m sure. You take them Sam, then we see what happens. I’ll write you a letter to take back to Bishop Thorman.’

‘What you think the bishop do?’ asked Samuel.

‘I don’t know,’ admitted the priest. ‘Shut it all down I hope.’

***

Three hours later, as the sun was beginning to head towards the horizon and Wormwood was rising in the south, Samuel set off with four women in his SUV. They all smelled of the fields, sweat and sunburnt skin. There was a clanswoman in the back along with a skinny backdam girl and a monstrously large woman that had to hunch over even to sit down on the back seat.

In the passenger seat was a middle-aged heretic woman in a tattered floral dress who prattled on about her missing husband until Samuel had to tell her to shut up.

After another twenty minutes of silence, the clanswoman leaned forward and spoke to him. ‘Tina needs to pee.’

‘She just have to hold it in,’ said Samuel without turning. ‘I’m not stopping until Goldengreens is far behind.’

‘This is a nice car,’ replied the clanswoman, apparently not scared of him at all. ‘Won’t you get into trouble if she pees in it?’

Samuel was about to tell her to shut up as well, but then he saw up ahead that one of the check points they had gone through in the dark on the way down was now manned. Four armed men, dressed in black, were waving at him to stop. Samuel hit the central locking button and opened the driver side window half-way.

As they slowed down, he told the women, ‘don’t speak and don’t get out of the car.’

The evident leader of the men leaned down to the window, his broad face dripping with sweat. He was very dark skinned with crooked yellow teeth. ‘Who are deez woman?’ he asked.

‘Slaves,’ replied Samuel. ‘Dey is church slaves. I’m on church business. This be a church car.’

The armed man stepped back then went round to the rear of the car to look at the license plate. When he returned he said, ‘show me your pay-pas.’

Besides his Evermarch ID, Samuel only had the letter from Father Nimite for the bishop and he had a feeling it would be fairly anti-Committee so showing it would do more harm than good.

‘I do not have any papers for you,’ he said eventually. ‘Just a letter for the bishop, but it is…’

Just then, the woman in the passenger seat started talking. ‘Brother!’ she cried, addressing the Committee soldier. ‘Brother! You must help me! I have been sold and gone from here to there and gone to everywhere! I am a God-fearing woman! My husband has been taken by bandits in the hills.’

Another of the guards taped on the window with the barrel of his gun, and she opened the door.

‘What is your story, Sista?’ asked the younger, taller Committee soldier. He was holding an AK-47 in both hands and stepped back as she got out of the car.

‘I do not want to go to Evermarch, Brother!’ she sobbed. ‘I need to go back to find my husband.’

‘Come with us, Sista,’ said the young soldier, motioning to the guard hut with his gun. ‘We can help you.’

The woman in the patterned dress took a few steps, but then turned back to the car, suddenly in doubt.

‘Heh,’ said the large-faced guard. ‘Heh, driver. We take all these women, eh? Maybe dey are all looking for dey husbands?’

Samuel looked over his shoulder. The two other guards were at the rear doors trying to get in. The three women in the back cowered, sheltering behind the big woman. He looked to his left again and saw the woman in the patterned dress being dragged off. When his eyes caught hers, she screamed, a feral cry of terror. Samuel put his foot down heavily on the accelerator and the wheels spun kicking up stones into the faces of the guards at the back. As the car sped off, the women in the back screamed, but no shots were fired.

As they disappeared into the jungle, the clanswoman said, ‘you can’t leave her there! You can’t just leave her! What do you think they are they going to do to her?’

Samuel had a fair idea what was going to happen to her but said nothing.

‘Do you hear me?’ she said, louder this time as she all but clambered into the front.

Samuel pushed her back. ‘What could I do woman?’ he demanded, almost yelling. ‘What could I do? In another second you would all be in the same pot, and I would be dead.’

The big woman silently pulled the clanswoman back.

‘I told you not to talk! I told you not to get out!’ continued Samuel, on the edge of hysteria. ‘Nothing like this ever happen to me. The muta in Evermarch, dey respect the church. Those were bandits, dey bad men. We respected in Evermarch…’

Samuel went on talking, but eventually he ran out of breath. After a few more minutes he had recomposed himself enough to ask, ‘did you know her?’

‘No,’ admitted the clanswoman. ‘We did not know her.’

Samuel glanced back at the small bule woman but said nothing. After another minute or so, she tapped him on the shoulder.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘Sorry driver,’ she replied quietly. ‘Tina peed herself.’

Silently he reached into the glove compartment and passed back a box of tissues.