March 2003
The month before each solstice, the tension grows among the women. They eye each other, assess their own chances, assess those of others. Romy is a long way from understanding this burning urge to reproduce, to fill themselves with baby, but it pours off them like body odour as the nights lengthen and shorten.
A six-month window. It’s likely all you’ll ever get here. There are more women than men in the Ark, and the chances are that if you fail in your first conception window it will be too late by the time your turn comes round again. Lucien, standing on the Great House steps, watching, playing God. He doesn’t like his mothers over thirty, his fathers under. And all the women, even the older ones with their fading wombs, pray, as he passes them by: me, me, this time let it be me. Let his eye light upon me, let him see me strong and young and healthy. If not for himself, let him choose a mate for me.
Lucien knows best. Who’s fittest, who’s ripest, who will make the best babies. Their future depends on his choices, for they can’t afford to carry weaklings. The Ark will need strength, intelligence, endurance, to carry them through the Great Disaster, and Lucien can tell, by eye alone.
Sometimes, when the choice has been made, when Lucien has announced the names of the lucky pairings at the choosing ceremony, Romy sees the unchosen women turn and walk away, bury their faces in their hands and weep.
A change has come over her mother, she’s noticed it. She’s gone quiet, turned inward; flinches if someone touches her unexpectedly, crosses the yard whenever one of Uri’s new squad of swaggering, bumptious Guards appears. Walks with her eyes downcast and sometimes, weirdly, wrings her hands. On the morning after solstice, her eyes were red when she came with the other women to let the children out of their overnight confinement in the Pigshed. And later, in the washroom, with the other women turned away, Romy noticed bruises on her shoulders, her thighs. A fall, said Somer. It’s nothing. Silly me. I tripped on a stone and went for a burton. That’ll teach me, eh? No more cider for mamma. And she was seven and careless, so she laughed at the thought that she should have come from such a clown. Then Farial died, and everyone in the Pigshed was sad, for never speaking of someone is not the same as never thinking, and she just assumed that Somer, who was there when it happened, was sad as well. And then she thought no more of it.
By the spring equinox, one of the current breeders is already confirmed – has adopted the waddle and back-pressing of late pregnancy though she can’t be more than a few months gone – and glowing with pride. The other’s eyes are ringed with dark circles from her sleepless nights, and her chosen mate walks as though he’s carried the good news from Aix to Ghent.
Three days after the equinox, the bell in the chapel tower begins to ring to call a Pooling – the summoning ring, long slow tolls – and the compound drops its tasks and hurries to the courtyard. They know they’re not in danger – a double ring, repeated around two-second gaps – and that the End has not begun – fast tolling, constant until everyone is safe – but that something momentous has happened. A betrayal or a triumph, a water leak in one of the food godowns. They eye each other silently. Will someone be disgraced today? Is it you? Is it you?
Busy planting beans below the trellises surrounding the Pigshed wall, Romy jumps to her feet and runs inside to scoop up Eden. She’s barely beyond the goo-ga stage – but everyone has to come to a Pooling. She is heavy, though, and wriggles, and Romy’s progress is slow. When she realises that they are the last ones left in the orchard, she ignores the squawks of protest and jogs the rest of the way. She weaves a lengthy path around the flowerbeds to get to a place where she will be able to see.
They count off, so everyone knows who’s here, and there’s a gap after 141, before Romy calls out her own number, and her vague sense of unease, the one everyone shares when these gatherings are called, gets a whole lot worse. She and Somer arrived on the same day, so of course they have consecutive numbers. She calls out Eden’s number for her, but she can barely make herself heard, her mouth is so dry.
And then the Great House door opens and the compound sees that the sinner is indeed Somer. A murmur runs through the crowd.
Somer. It’s Somer. Eden Blake’s mother, for God’s sake. How are the mighty fallen.
Downcast eyes with shadows beneath, the skin on her face red-raw from crying, she emerges from the gloom behind Lucien and Uri, Ursola to her left and Vita to her right, four grim Guards in a row behind as though they expect her to make a break for it. Romy doesn’t recognise half the Guards these days. The original corps was made up of people she remembers from the Pigshed, but Uri has brought several in from the Outside, recruited from among his old colleagues in the army of the Dead, some strangers from the Cairngorm compound. Loyalty, he says. The first thing I need from my Guards is loyalty.
Somer’s head is bald as an egg. Someone’s cut her hair off and shaved her right down to the skin. Vita, probably, because it is usually Vita who carries out this harshest of all penalties.
Minutes pass. Lucien’s eyes rake the crowd, search for signs of prurience. His most recent handmaid, a woman so honoured that she bore his child, brought so low that he cannot even look at her. But the Ark see. Oh, yes, they see, now that they’re looking. She carries so little flesh – they all do – that it’s hard to hide the signs of pregnancy once someone is looking: the swollen breasts, the filling belly. A three-month gestation is impossible to hide. Somer looks as though her uniform has shrunk. Yet she herself is also diminished.
Romy is scandalised. Burns with shame. People nearby have edged away from where she and Eden stand, leaving them in a little pool of space as though her mother’s disgrace might be infectious. How could you? she thinks, and her memory floods with images of mating pigs, of the squalls of the semi-feral cats who live around the godowns. How could you? Can you not stop yourself? Do you have no willpower? She’s filled once again with the ignominy of her own conception. She’s like a rutting animal, she thinks, always on heat, always waiting for her chance to mate. Only a couple of children in the compound have brothers and sisters, but they were all conceived when their parents were still Dead. Nobody has two. Nobody. She will be marked forever, a freak. They all will, all three of them. Even blessed Eden.
Poor Lucien. Her heart burns for Father. What an honour he gave her mother, she thinks, and look how she’s repaid him. Eden lets out a squawk, and Romy realises how hard her fingers are digging into the child’s tiny arms.
Lucien clears his throat, and speaks. ‘What shall we do?’ he asks. ‘What shall we do?’
He speaks of betrayal. Somer’s not the first. The shame is on all of them. They stand where they have landed and listen as the day’s light changes, as the fires go out in the smithy and the bread, proving, overflows the pans. Romy wishes she’d brought an overcoat, as the wiser, older hands paused to do before they ran to the courtyard, for once the sun passes behind the house-eaves she starts to shiver. Eden struggles in her arms and, when she realises that she is not going to be let down, begins to wail. Stop, oh stop, Romy begs silently as her neighbours glare at her as though she could, by some magic, shut her up. Her arms are hurting and so are her knees and, for the first time in her life, her back, from the weight of her wriggling burden. And still she holds her, because to do anything else will bring punishment down on her head.
And still he speaks. Vita, Ursola, Uri, the Guards, still like statuary around them, Somer staring at the step on which she stands as the blood crusts on her naked scalp. ‘Liars,’ he says. ‘Lying and thieving and cheating. You swore to us all when you came here that this was an end to that, for you. This woman has stolen from the wombs of her sisters. Every one of you who has done as she has done has stolen their child from somebody else.’
In among the crowd, a woman begins to sob. Because of Somer, one fewer of them will get her own turn, come the next solstice.
‘Does anybody else have anything to confess?’ he asks. Looks out over their heads in the gathering gloom, as they draw in their breaths and search their souls.
‘Not a single one of you? What shall we do?’ he asks, as they shiver in the dark, beset by hunger and thirst and cold and the deep, deep wish to sleep. ‘What shall we do?’
Ursola steps forward. ‘We’ve all betrayed him,’ she says. ‘I’ve looked at my fellows with wicked eyes. I’ve stolen extra bread. I’ve rested when I could have been working for all of us. I am no better than many, no worse than many.’
From the bag tied to her waist, she produces the hair clippers. Hands them to Vita, undoes the tie that holds back her mane of hair and drops to her knees before her.