“I know, I know, but, Father—she’s with child again and this time it isn’t mine! Couldn’t be! And I want a son by her. Is that wrong?”
“Patience, son. It will come. And if your son is by Greene or Brown Spots or White Streak, will that make the child any less yours or any less important in God’s eyes? You do not own her, nor she you. We are all the property of God, but, beyond that, we are all equally part of the Family. All sons are our sons and all daughters are our daughters. I believe you should think on this and pray to God for enlightenment. You must cleanse your soul and accept with joy what you have and purge these feelings of evil and possession of another. Otherwise, one day, God will lose patience with you as He did with others of the Old Book and discard you as He did them.”
To anyone of the Family, that was a scary idea. All had been born and raised to believe that a real God was up there, and all around, looking at each and every one, watching and judging and testing, and that the sole purpose of existence was to please Him so much that when you died you went immediately to His right hand along with Jesus and the Holy Spirit. The Old Book stories, memorized and passed along now, of men who God hated in the womb and others who had waited too long and found God had abandoned them were real and frightening, more so than the Hunters or even the demons.
They could only kill or maim your mortal body. If God turned His back on you, then that might be the only body you had, or, worse, you would find yourself not at God’s right hand in heaven but instead in the fire at the center of the sun at the left hand of Satan, never consumed but always in mortal pain.
Father Alex tried to help, by forbidding Littlefeet to have any contact at all with Spotty, to speak to her or ask about her or even acknowledge her existence. Mother Paulista laid the same injunction on Spotty, and there were always those around who would report any breach of these injunctions, which had the force of law. Anyone not reporting would also be committing a sin. This made it really tough.
So Littlefeet prayed and tried hard to get it out of his system, but it was pretty stubborn. And, hell, boys being boys, he knew who was lying with whom each time and that didn’t help a bit.
After several Starnights and a great deal of other activities, he found himself adjusting pretty well to the situation, although he didn’t really forget her and he still wanted her. Lying with the other girls, and being with the other young men talking and bragging and the like, though, he did find himself no longer feeling so possessively jealous about her, and that at least helped.
As the Family’s traditional route moved further north again, though, it also took a less traditional jog further in-land, to avoid an increasing number of taboo sites where things had happened that shouldn’t have happened in the past. The new routing was far enough inland that they could no longer even see the great rock where they’d found the dead man and almost been captured by his ghost. Some of the men didn’t like such a radical change, since it meant more intensive scouting by more and more warriors, leaving the camp less protected, more vulnerable. Even Father Alex was concerned that Mother Paulista’s fear of the unknown was threatening them in more pragmatic ways, not to mention the fact that the trees and bushes and ancient gardens where they foraged for food were not as plentiful in some of those new inland areas, while some natural barriers, particularly some decent-sized rivers, were real impediments.
So it was that they were camped one evening near the edge of a mighty river that seemed to go on and on. None there could remember seeing such a river before, nor hearing of it, so they knew that they had perhaps come too far from their traditional territories. There was no way to cross the thing; it was easily several kilometers to the other shore, and there were currents and eddies and small whirlpools in the mud-brown water that clearly showed that it was not just wide but also deep and treacherous.
Littlefeet knew the river, though; at least, he remembered seeing it from the heights above before he’d stared too long at the distant demons.
“I cannot say where we are compared to what I saw,” he admitted to Father Alex, “but I can say that several great rivers flowed from the mountains out onto the great plain and that most of them joined into one at different stages, or flowed close enough together that they probably joined beyond where I could see. That may not be a shore over there, but merely a dividing part of land between two great rivers yet to merge.”
Father Alex nodded. It was not good that they were this far east and backed up against such a barrier. If Hunters came in force, there would be no way to run, nowhere to hide, and he was not sure that anyone could stay afloat if they fell into that thing. Worse, the bluffs along the river were not good for growing edible things, at least not here. The pickings were fairly poor even though the vegetation was dense. He went to see Mother Paulista with the intent of insisting that they move back inland as quickly as possible and spirit dangers, real and imagined, be damned. This was not a fit place for the Family.
He found her surprisingly unnerved and in agreement. “I did not see this,” she admitted to him. “This is a barrier we were not meant to cross. If God does not part the waters, then we shall do as you say.”
Nobody liked the river, and when Littlefeet slept, even his dreams were about the river, and the unholy things beyond it.
He could sense them, almost hear them talking one to another, although what they said made no sense and was like the banging of drums and hollow rocks, reverberating back and forth into a babble.
And yet he knew, he’d always known, that it was some sort of speech, that this was their language, their tongue, and that they heard and spoke and thought in ways far different from humans.
Words…? Littlefeet couldn’t call such a cacophony words or thoughts, but occasionally through the din he would get other things: pictures that partly related to things he could understand, and sometimes even odd feelings. Like now, he was convinced that the din was some sort of argument. Not a violent argument, or a heated one, but an argument nonetheless. And, occasionally, in the flashes of color and rippling patterns that floated through his sleeping mind, there were pictures, almost snapshots of events rather than full observations. Most made no sense, at least he couldn’t make sense of them, but sometimes there were—faces. Human faces. Faces in many cases filled with fear, or, worse, worshipful devotion to something he could not see, but with eyes that showed little or no thought, just an achingly single-minded desire to please.
And they were in some ways like no humans he knew. They were humans without scars, without blemishes of any kind, with smiles full of perfect teeth and proportions that said they had never been hungry or had to keep in the kind of trim that a Family member must to survive. They also had no tattoos, and the only jewelry they all had was a kind of shiny diamond thing in their foreheads that seemed to pulse off and on, almost like the city itself had seemed to pulse when he’d looked at it.
The other images were of the demon flowers, those great flowers whose rippling rows covered the center of the region and possibly much of the continent beyond for all he knew. Gigantic flowers, planted in perfect rows, growing to two or three times the height of a man, with varicolored stalks and even more exotic patterns in their huge petals. Every color of the rainbow was there and more, and patterns made of those colors in almost any variety or configuration. Unlike the confusing and scary other scenes, these were very pretty, although the view was distorted and the groves were being seen from a vantage point that was moving very, very fast over their tops. He began to get dizzy, even a little sick, and he felt suddenly that he was not alone, that someone or something was there with him, and that the thing was now abruptly aware of his presence and turning to look at him, to reach out for him…