The Lawgivers: Gabriel (29 page)

“This forest,” she began, gesturing
toward the thick trees that edged the open space of the field, “was
husbanded by the udai when we came to this world two decades ago.
The plants here—all that you see—are native to this world just as
you are and from what we have discovered forests like this once
covered much of the world we now call Sho-dan, which in our tongue
means blue gem—for the vast oceans that cover so much of this world
that you natives once called Earth.”

Lexa stared at the woman, wondering how
she could know any of the things she was telling them if they had
only come to it two decades before—whatever decades
were.

The Lawgiver, Raphael, leaned closer to
Phil-a-shee and spoke and she nodded. “A decade is a measurement of
time—something you will be taught. It is the world’s natural clock
that will be important to all of you in rebuilding the civilization
your people once had. You must know the seasons and be able to
count the passing days and seasons in order to grow
food.”

Despite her misery, excitement flooded
Lexa at that. They were going to teach them how to farm? How to
make plants grow so they could have plenty like Sir had told her?
She’d had no idea that that was what Gabriel had meant when he’d
said his people were going to teach hers how to have a better life!
Truthfully, she hadn’t been completely convinced, before, that that
was what the udai intended.

“This forest, as I said, is the result
of husbandry—taking care of the land, nurturing it. The forest had
already begun to grow when we came, but it was in need of
nutrients—food. The soil was poor and acidic. We had to achieve
balance in order for the plants to grow strong.”

Lexa lost interest about halfway
through the speech and allowed her gaze and her mind to wander.
There were too many words the woman used that she didn’t understand
for her to really grasp what the woman was telling them beyond the
fact that she was claiming they, the udai, had made the
forest.

Everyone else had begun to shift
restlessly and a low murmur of speech began to make it difficult to
hear the woman anyway.

“Silence!”

Lexa jumped when the woman abruptly
called that out in a commanding voice.

“You’re here to learn and to learn you
must listen!”

Resentment flickered through Lexa and
apparently she wasn’t the only one who felt it. She could see from
their expressions that many of those around her were also
affronted.

“The first lesson will be in erecting a
proper campsite. This is where you will build your new
village.”

Everyone in the group turned to the
people around them and stared at them blankly.

“We already got a village,” someone, a
man, called out.

Phil-a-shee’s face tightened. “Did you
build it?” she snapped.

Everyone stared at her blankly. “Mostly
it was there,” someone else volunteered.

“Scavenged! Food and shelter are the
basics of survival and learning how to provide for yourselves is
the foundation of civilization. No one knows exactly how long you
people have survived by scavenging from the civilization that
collapsed, but there is a limit to those resources and it’s past
time you learned to provide for yourselves.” She cowed anyone else
that might have thought to comment by glaring at them for several
minutes and finally turned to the man with her, smiling. “Thank
you, Lawgiver Raphael. I’m sure they appreciate your help in
bringing them here as much as we do.”

Lawgiver Raphael gave her a sardonic
look. “Yes, they do look overjoyed,” he murmured. “I’ll leave them
with you.”

Phil-a-shee reddened, her smile turning
a little brittle. When he turned and strode away, she stared at his
back for a long moment and finally glanced at the people seated on
the ground and then turned to look back at the sea of activity on
the field, waving imperiously. Two udai men detached themselves
from the mass and started toward them. “Tur-ic, Ka-den—divide them
up and assign each group a task.” She turned to look at them again.
“The sooner you perform the tasks set, the more comfortable you’ll
sleep tonight.”

That part was almost inspiring after
the miserable trek they’d had—except that they were exhausted
already and too weak from very little water and food to want to do
anything but drop where they stood. That, they quickly discovered,
however, wouldn’t be allowed.

Lexa was part of the group Phil-a-shee
assembled to gather food. She then marched them away from the rest
of the group, lecturing them every step of the way on which plants
were edible and which weren’t, and that selection should also be
made carefully to ensure that they didn’t destroy as they were
collecting so that there would be more food to collect
later.

Lexa couldn’t speak for anyone else,
but she was so exhausted by the time they’d put together a camp
Phil-a-shee found satisfactory and gathered food and found water
that she had no interest in doing anything but sleeping.

That wasn’t allowed either. They had to
eat to gain the strength to work more the following day.

They worked from dawn till nightfall,
an endless cycle of work, eat, sleep, only to get up the next day
at dawn to do it all again. Lexa lost all track of time rather than
gained a better understanding of it. She didn’t have a clue of how
what they were doing was supposed to help them build a
civilization. It seemed to her that the vicious, repetitive cycle
was nothing more than a means unto itself, possibly aimed at
working them to death but not likely to get them anywhere
else.

They were ‘allowed’, translation
ordered, to clear a patch of dirt to begin a garden that would
eventually, they were told, sustain them without the need to hunt
and gather. Phil-a-shee produced seeds with the air of a magician
and emphasized their great value until everyone began to think
that, maybe, the seeds were magical.

They didn’t magically plant themselves,
however, or magically clear the ground needed to plant them or
magically water and tend themselves. All of that was a new task
added to the tasks they’d already been given and everyone got the
chance to experience that joy.

When everyone began to grumble, the
angels—the udai—merely drove them harder.

Lexa didn’t know about the others, but
she was pretty outraged when Phil-a-shee finally informed them that
they were struggling for the next generation and the one after
that.

Their struggles would build a world of
plenty and comfort—for somebody else.

Even Phil-a-shee seemed to realize that
that wasn’t much to inspire the people she was driving like slaves,
so she revised it to point out that it would improve their lot,
also—in a few growing seasons.

* * * *

As Lexa straightened from the task of
dumping yet another wicker basket full of clay for the cabin they
were building, she caught a glimpse of a woman heading toward the
forest and her heart seemed to stand still in her chest. She forgot
to breathe for several moments.

The woman was nearing the edge of the
thicket of woodlands when it occurred to her to call out to her.
“Maura?”

The woman turned toward her and Lexa
saw her full in the face. A mixture of joy and disbelief filled
her. Before she thought better of the impulse, she dropped the
basket and raced toward the woman.

There was no sign of recognition on the
woman’s face. Instead, she looked for many moments as if she would
run, but Lexa knew it was her. The closer she got the more certain
she was. She’d changed. Her hair was darker than it had once been.
Her face had lost the roundness of babyhood. She was taller and
thinner, but it was her. She looked so much like their mother, Lexa
knew it to the depths of her soul. “Maura!” she gasped
breathlessly. “It’s me, Lexa!”

Just as dismay and doubt began to war
with the joy and excitement of moments before, she saw the woman’s
eyes widen, saw the emotions flit across her face that she’d felt
herself. “Lexa?”

Lexa laughed with sheer joy. “Yes! It’s
me! Maura!”

They collided in a tangle, laughing and
crying at the same time and squeezing each other with bruising
force.

“I never thought I’d see you
again!”

“We thought you were dead.”

“I can’t believe it! It’s like a
dream!”

They stopped exclaiming their wonder
and disbelief at almost the same moment, pulling apart to examine
one another, to note the changes they saw, to grin at one another.
“You’re so grown up now,” Lexa said with a chuckle. “I was afraid
it wasn’t you. I was so afraid, but I knew it was you.”

Maura laughed. “You didn’t think I’d be
a baby forever? I have babes of my own now.”

Releasing her hold on Lexa, she turned
and gestured toward two children Lexa hadn’t noticed, a boy that
looked to be nearing puberty and a girl about half his age. “John,
Sara, come and meet my big sister … your Aunt Lexa.”

They both stared at her distrustfully,
their eyes round with both hunger and uneasiness. It hurt to see
them like that, to think of all the time she’d missed never knowing
they even existed. She smiled at them hopefully. “I don’t look that
bad, do I?” she said jokingly.

The little girl giggled, but it was
more a nervous laugh than a carefree one. The boy’s face lightened,
but he didn’t quite smile. They moved closer. Lexa wanted to grab
both of them and hug them as she had her sister, but she knew
better. Instead, she crouched a little lower so that she wasn’t
towering over them.

Well, she didn’t tower over John
anyway. He was at that stage where he was shooting up very
quickly.

“Where did you get that hair?” It was
Sara who’d asked.

Surprise flickered through Lexa, but
the question reminded her instantly of Gabriel. A sharp shaft of
unhappiness went through her. “Gabriel told me it must be from my
father.”

“Here now! What’s going on? You won’t
get things done standing around! Were you not assigned
tasks?”

All four of them jumped at the sharp
intrusion and whirled guiltily to gape at the udai woman marching
toward them.

Maura grabbed her arm and leaned close.
“Meet me at the stream after supper,” she whispered.

When she straightened, she met Lexa’s
gaze for a moment. “Moon rise,” she added and then summoned the
children and rushed away. Lexa watched them go with a mixture of
unhappiness and resentment. She hadn’t seen her in so long! She
didn’t want to let her go.

When she saw the udai woman was nearly
upon her, though, she rushed past her and retrieved her basket once
more.

She discovered her exhaustion had
vanished. Excitement and anticipation threaded her veins. Questions
filled her mind when she wasn’t reliving the experience over and
over. Inevitably, weariness began to take the upper hand long
before dusk fell, however, and the anticipation began to wane with
her energy.

She was almost afraid to eat when she
was allowed to, fearful that she would lapse into the exhausted
coma that generally overtook her when she was finally allowed to
sit down and fill her achingly empty stomach. Instead, she decided
to compromise, to eat just enough to ease the pain and save the
rest for after her visit.

It wasn’t difficult to slip away.
Despite the fact that the udai always kept a watchful eye on them,
they were encouraged to go down to the stream and bathe before
settling on their pallets. Not that many people did. The fear of
fouling the water and making it undrinkable was ever present and
far too ingrained for them to take the udais’ word for it that
merely bathing the dirt off wouldn’t contaminate it.

It was pretty much the only thing about
the udai that gave Lexa any sense of kinship—echoes of her mother’s
reminders that bathing was a necessity, that cleanliness helped
prevent sickness. It didn’t cause it.

Unless of course the water was foul or
poisoned.

Fortunately, since it was almost too
dark to see her hand in front of her face beneath the trees, a
narrow path had been cut, or worn down, between the field where
they were building their new village and farms and the stream that
supplied them with water. It seemed to Lexa—well everyone had
grumbled—that it would have made more sense to build next to the
stream, but the udai had berated them for laziness at the
suggestion and pointed out that living ‘on top’ of the stream and
disposing of all of their waste in it would contaminate the water
far faster and irreversibly than bathing in it. Waste was disposed
of on the other side of the clearing—all waste.

The first time one of the udai saw one
of the men pull his dick out and piss where he was working, Lexa
had thought they might kill the man on the spot. The udai had flown
into a righteous rage. They’d all been berated as stupid,
disgusting animals and lectured for hours on the poisons they fed
into the soil every time they urinated or defecated, reminded them
that their water supply was close enough to be contaminated beyond
use if they all decided to expel body waste practically on top of
it, and that their food supply would become poisonous. By the time
the furious lecture was over no one knew whether they most wanted
to kill the man who’d tried to poison their water and the food
they’d spent backbreaking hours and days trying to grow or the
udai. It might not be reasonable to blame the udai for the
incident, but resentment of the udai was growing by leaps and
bounds, their fear of the ‘superior beings’ slowly but surely being
eroded and replaced by a hatred powerful enough to submerge all
other considerations.