Aliya Whiteley - [BCS298 S02] Read online

  The Spoils

  Aliya Whiteley

  Some carried their cuts from the corpse of the Olme home with bare hands, choosing to follow tradition. The smell permeated the skin of their palms and became part of them; their sweat would always bear the sweet, rotting scent of it.

  Others used gloves, or held out tins or bags to receive their piece, sliced with such expertise. For those people, there was no smell at all, even if they kept it in the house after the ceremony. It wasn’t the gift alone that created the scent. It was the connection, between human and beast. The flesh of the Olme had to be touched to make the smell.

  1. First Finder: the unused eye

  The butcher made the initial cut across the unopened lid and peeled back the slippery skin to reveal the eye. Then she slid the knife underneath it, pushed down and in at a shallow angle, and the cloudy blue orb came free with a loud, sucking sound that reverberated around the cavern.

  The crowd watched as the butcher chose the saw from her low table of instruments and worked its teeth against the thick veins that joined the eye to the body; it took muscular energy to complete the task.

  “Step forward,” she said. “Michael Rittle.”

  Michael roused himself from his spot next to the far pillar. He found he didn’t want to look upon the bulk of the Olme. It was too reminiscent of the discovering of it, deeper down in the earth, during one of his frequent trips through the lower caves looking for the mosses and lichens that the medic would pay for. By the light of his own torch the Olme had heaved and groaned—how had it managed to squeeze itself so far through such a narrow passage? It had blocked the route entirely, pinned itself solid in rock, and yet it was still living when he came across it. He had not dared to approach it, and he could not bear to leave. So he witnessed its weakening in increments, in the struggles that grew fainter, sighs that faded, until his torch was worn down low and he had to head back home in the last wisps of its light or risk being left in darkness absolute.

  By the time he had returned with the killing crew the Olme was dead.

  “May you see with endless clarity,” the butcher said solemnly to the crowd, and held out the eye.

  Michael took it. He had brought along a pair of gloves, the ones he wore to protect his fingers while down in the sharp-walled mineral caves that made their own light—as blue as the eye he now held—but at the last moment decided to follow the old ways. He’d bear the stink of it all his life, but, well, that seemed right to him. His grandfather had worn the scent, too; that had been the last time an Olme had been found. Now it was his turn. His skin, his gift. A trade.

  The Olme’s eye, now Michael’s, was thought to serve no purpose. A remnant of a time when Olmes had lived above ground, perhaps? Or maybe never an eye at all but used for something else. Some other form of seeing.

  Later that evening, Michael came home to find his house in unusual silence. His talkative pet bird, which had been an expensive purchase from one of the surface traders who would sometimes come to the trapdoor, lay dead at the bottom of the cage that hung from the ceiling. He reached for it, and it was so very light in his hands. Its bright colors were still vibrant; in fact, they seemed more vivid than ever before, to him. Red and yellow. When he put the eye of the Olme into the cage to take the bird’s place, it took on those colors and reflected light around the room for him at sharp, strange angles. He smelled the scent of it, rising up from inside him.

  2. Retriever: longest toenail

  Clare had used her tractor to pull the Olme to the upper caverns, and it was not a difficult job. It came free quickly from the rocks between which it had jammed its bulk, and the body was obedient in its response to the hooks she sank into it and the chains that demanded it follow.

  Moving rocks in subterranean farming was usually difficult, heavy labor; she had been expecting much more of a struggle for this task. But the inexplicability of the Olme’s smooth passage did not bother her. It suited the elements of mystery and ritual that permeated her life, and had been long associated with pragmatic repetition. The things we do, over and over, that create our place; these were the words she had grown up with, spoken so often by her grandmother, and they filled her head as she transported the Olme to a storage cave.

  The words, in truth, had never meant a lot to her. It was by example she had learned, and now she was alone, and aged, and one day soon would have to attempt to explain all this to the next generation. These were concerns that bothered her sometimes, but mainly she enjoyed being left in solitude, and that suited her.

  But a crowd had gathered for the final stage of the retrieval, and that did not suit her at all. It was—she reflected during the ceremony—the first time she had ever been watched at work by others. The butcher seemed so at ease with their perusal of her cuts and slices; Clare did not think she could ever have done such a task, under scrutiny. She admired the precision of it.

  “Step forward, Clare Askett,” said the butcher, so she did so, with reluctance. She had thought the community smaller than this. Before the ceremony she had inquired about the possibility of receiving her gift in private and had been told that was not an option. It didn’t help that it was her lot to receive such an unpleasant object. A toenail, no less. It had a laughable element to it. Would anyone snigger, or make a comment, as she approached?

  They did not. And the toenail was, once sawed through and snapped from the bed of the largest toe on the last foot, a sleek, polished object in a warm shade of reddish-brown that was scored through with curved cream lines. Separated from the Olme, it became a sculpture; a statement divorced from reality.

  It also became familiar.

  “May you cherish movement,” said the butcher, and Clare held out her gloved hands to receive the toenail. It was hard, and very light. She wished, for a moment, that she had not opted for the gloves. But did she really want to be marked in such a way? Impregnated, forever, by this one event? Her grandmother had smelled so strongly of it, and had talked of dragging the Olme forth in a tone of wonder. All the secrets of their trade forgotten, her grand-daughter’s name gone from her mind, but the Olme remembered. A toenail, they gave me, she had said, over and over. It’s my favorite decoration. She had kept it by her bed, at the end. The smell from her skin had been so strong.

  It had never occurred to Clare before, but she could not remember ever seeing that old toenail since her grandmother’s death. Where had it gone? Why was there never anything to show for service but some memories and a bad smell?

  She kept the gloves on and tried to think of this as an unremarkable event. She did not want it to become the one thing she remembered, at the end.

  The toenail came home with her. She tried her hardest to think of it as a curio, a knick-knack. She moved it from one decorative position to the next, and could not find a spot where it felt like a background object. It seemed, to Clare, that it needed to be matched. One of a pair. It was not, after all, unique.

  She took to searching through old possessions, dank corners, and found many strange objects she could not fathom: instruments from older forms of farming, perhaps. There was no matching toenail anywhere. She started to scan the caves where she farmed, searching amongst the pigmentless plants and insects that she cultivated, but the further she walked, the less she knew her place. All things were newly inexplicable.

  She kept walking, between her farming tasks. It became a habit. She did not find another toenail to make her own diminish in meaning.

  3. Reader of Rites: tip of the tongue

  Adam held out his exposed hands. Putting a barrier between his own tools and any surface was unthinkable. And he already smelled, so what did it matter? The pages of the books he read were ma
de of the skin of the Olme anyway, and the act of curing and preparing the skin released the scent.

  “May you learn the gift of sound, Adam Budding,” the butcher said, and passed him his cut.

  The tip of a tongue had sounded like a small gift, but this—this was a heavy mess of flesh, soft, like a haunch of meat for roasting.

  Adam had once read, in Farbington:

  To read in the absolute dark, one needs to learn how to touch. People think they have this skill simply because they are born with hands, but they are wrong. They pick up, they handle, they grasp. They use the tools on the ends of their arms for utilitarian purposes.

  You will learn to embrace the art that lives in the tiny folds of each finger and the curve of both palms. You will translate these sensations to speech. These books are filled with raised marks that contain such nuance. Embrace it. Speak it.

  Adam had lived amongst such books since the age of four. At first Farbington had made him sleep in the library, with the stench vivid in the darkness, thick and curling in his nostrils. Eventually he had learned to stop crying and felt around for the door, which was open. It had always been open.

  First lesson. It had taken him months to learn.

  Was it a cruelty? Well, life was cruelty; the words had taught him that, and nowhere was that second lesson more evident than when holding the tongue of that rarest of creatures and celebrating its death. It had been in pain, confused. Bewildered as it headed up to unknown tunnels—this much Adam could read in the harsh, dry buds of the tongue.

  He lived in a community that made the most of such deaths. He, personally, had been guiltily delighted to have the opportunity to take down the Book of the Ceremony and feel the tender bumps of explanation. Then he had spoken aloud of it to the butcher, outlining step after step. How he loved the butcher. She had a smile made for candlelight.

  She was smiling at him now.

  “You can step back,” she whispered. She had a soft spot for him; he was almost certain of it. If only he could touch her face, then he would have known for sure; could love leave a gentle pattern upon the skin that could be traced? This was not a lesson that Farbington, long dead, had taught him. It was his own theory, that he would pass to an apprentice of his own, when he was ready to accept his own cruelty and had found the will to inflict it.

  He would put a small child in a library, and listen to them cry.

  The gift of sound. To hear his own voice clearly, or listen to the voices of others?

  Years later, he would find himself unexpectedly welcoming the butcher to the library. She inquired after the procedures needed to finish the long-term curing of the skin of the Olme for bookmaking purposes. He found the book in question and repeated passages to her. He was, in that moment, transported back to the time that the Olme first found its way to uniting them.

  On an impulse, he reached out and touched her face. He tried to read it and could not tell if she loved him. She was, after all his dreams, unknowable.

  Then she sighed.

  4. Storage: The Tubing

  A deep slice along the side facing the crowd, and then the boring tool was applied to the precise spot between the fifth and six leg, measured by an ancient angular device without a name. When the butcher pulled it free a thick, blue, rubbery tube came with it, speared upon its point, stretching from the incision.

  “Step forward, Bill and Mary Clement,” said the butcher, and the couple waddled up in their thick matching coats and boots. Bill held a long pole, and Mary had her arms filled with a sturdy net that she found slippery to hold. Mary felt hot and uncomfortable under the gaze of the crowd; she glanced at Bill for reassurance. He, with his nervous expression, looked as if he was about to embark upon a trying adventure.

  “May you bear the gift of forgiveness.”

  The butcher transferred the tubing to the pole, and Bill began to cautiously loop it as it spilled forth. Once the pole was filled with coils Mary opened the net wide and received them. They slid down the pole with ease as Bill angled it with great care into position, and then the whole business began again. The process was repeated four times, until the net was bulging and Mary could barely hold it open. She braced her legs and thrust back her chest, turning her face to the side, as far from the tubing as possible.

  Only a few loops into the fifth coil and the end of the tube popped free to reveal a pink, veined, star-shaped growth that flopped into the net and nestled there.

  “Done,” said the butcher. Bill nodded, took the net from Mary, and slung it over his shoulder. Then the two of them maneuvered their way back through the crowd, who parted wide for them.

  “Yes, but what’s it for?” Bill said that evening.

  The star sat in their largest cooking bowl, in his lap. It had come free from the tubing once they got it to their closest cave and had rolled to Mary’s feet where it glowed so fetchingly that she had scooped it up in the folds of her dress, taking care not to touch it with bare skin, and carried it home. It appealed to her deeply, even though she felt it should have belonged to a different kind of woman. A glamorous one, perhaps.

  “It must have served some purpose,” Mary said. “Bodies don’t have bits without purpose.”

  “In this day and age we should have worked out the internals of the Olme, and why all this ceremonial stuff is claptrap,” he grumbled.

  Brother and sister, side by side in their armchairs, faced the amethyst geode that formed the centerpiece of the room. Owning the largest number of caves in the upper tunnels kept them well off, but it was wealth inherited from the courage and strength of their ancestors who had dug out so much rock with their primitive tools and fought back others to stake their claims. The past was therefore romanticized and inaccessible from their own understanding, and quite useless to them. But now it had been foisted upon them, first by having to accept the bulk of the Olme in one of their caves, then by having to keep a length of tubing that had no obvious meaning. Would it be with them forever? It was an upsetting thought.

  But the star itself was beautiful, Mary thought. It looked alive in the bowl, like a fascinating creature from another world, waving its arms at her. It didn’t look dead at all.

  “Are we keeping that in here, then?” asked Bill.

  “For a while,” she said. She took the bowl from him and put it on her own lap. She watched it rather than staring into the colors of the geode, which had gradually become less interesting to her over time.

  In between the light duties of checking their caves for trespassing, Mary sat with her star and found a curious phenomenon: if she truly concentrated upon it, her breathing would fall to a slow, steady whooshing through her barely open mouth, and her vision would narrow, and a strange calm would spread through her. She had never known anything like it. She craved it. This clear state of being brought her knowledge. She began to understand that she had lived her life so far in a state of permanently suppressed irritation.

  Bill.

  Bill was annoying.

  He possessed a ferocious negativity. It was sharp, pointed, and always on hand to prick her. Doing this appeared to be his only enjoyment.

  “What a waste of bloody time,” he said, without fail, whenever she stared at her star.

  Mary started to wear different clothes to him. She wore Tuesday’s outfit on Monday and Friday’s outfit on Sunday. He frowned, and told her she looked ridiculous, at first. Then he lapsed into a wounded silence.

  Their ancestors had been so brave; where had that courage gone? She could not find it, even when her ritual revealed to her that she irritated him in equal measure as he her, and she enjoyed doing that as much as he enjoyed doing it to her.

  Then the contemplation of the star revealed to her that this relationship would not change because they had grown together into symbiotic beings of mutual irritation; it was much too late to ever work out how to pull apart, and if they did, they would remain two separated, unhappy halves of a whole until their deaths.

  In the wake o
f this revelation, she said to him, aware she sounded unconvincing, “I could leave you. I could go upside,” and he laughed, and said, “Not likely,” but she heard the tremble in his voice and discovered how to love him again for believing that she might actually be capable of such an act.

  So she plunged her uncovered hands into the bowl, and picked up the star. She felt no different to hold it, not at first; then she slowly became aware of the smell she now emitted. It had soaked into her skin. It could never be scrubbed away.

  Bill stared at her as she stood up and carried the bowl away. She took it to the closest storage cave and laid it atop the long length of the tubing. Then she returned to Bill’s side.

  “I’m done with it.”

  “You smell of it,” he told her.

  “I know,” she said.

  When they next changed clothes, she dressed once more in matching materials, and after completing her tasks she took her seat in the armchair beside his and looked into the depths of the amethyst geode. The scent emanating from her was barely noticeable, sometimes.

  5. Watcher: sliced buttock

  “Some jobs are so unpleasant that they come with huge benefits,” said Kim’s mother. It’s the only way they can get anyone to do it. This is one such job. But here’s the thing—you do this thing, once, and then you’re free forever more. That’s what you want, isn’t it? To be free of us all?”

  Ah, the edge of bitterness: it had just crept in on the final words. They had almost been having a conversation as equals. Kim fell back on her usual weapons, since the ceasefire was over. She rolled her eyes.

  “Is that a yes or a no?”

  She shrugged.

  “Right then. I’ll tell them it’s a yes, and you can tell them otherwise if you like.”

  That was how Kim ended up sitting next to the hulking carcass of the Olme before the ceremony, for the allotted length of time as laid out in the old books.

  It had not seemed like a long time in theory, yet was close to endless in practice.