The Bookman - Lavie Tidhar [93]
Orphan didn't need much encouragement. He tore a large piece of bread and dipped it into the broth, almost forgetting to chew in his hunger. The hot food burned his mouth and throat. Catherine looked at him with concern. "You must eat more slowly," she said. "Have some water."
From somewhere, too, a jug of cool, clear water and a plain, muddy cup. He drank, and continued to eat with a little more moderation, while the old woman pecked at her food and Elizabeth played half-heartedly with hers. The large chunks floating in the stew, he figured, were mushrooms, though they tasted meaty. He finished the plate and started on another.
"You never knew your mother?" Catherine said, and there was a note of pain in her voice. Orphan momentarily stopped eating (a chunk of bread suspended in the air, half-way to being dipped) and looked at her. "No. I told you, no."
Catherine nodded. "Let me tell you about my daughter," she said.
Orphan made a vague gesture with his bread, as if saying, Do I have a choice? and splattered himself with gravy. Elizabeth laughed, but quietly.
"Very well," Catherine said. "Then I will tell you about Mary."
Even when she was very young (as young, Catherine said, as Elizabeth is now), Mary had begun to exhibit her difference from the others. Though she was generally a quiet, unassuming child, a mischievous streak in her broke from time to time to the surface and exhibited itself, and often at the most inopportune moments. One time, for instance, she was working in the Nursery ("The nursery?" Orphan said, but Catherine ignored him and continued) when her parents heard a scream and, rushing around the corner, saw her holding a bloodied lizard tail in her hands. Catherine herself (so she said) then screamed, but when they reached the child discovered that the thing in her hand was no more than a crude construct, made with fungal flesh and dyed green and red with leaves and berries collected in the jungle (at this point Elizabeth smirked).
As she grew older she began to spend long periods outside of the tunnel system, exploring the jungle and making daring raids onto the beach (or as close as she could come to it) and even to the rim of the crater. Like a small animal, she passed through the island without rousing the automated defences' attention, and she came to know much of its geography in secret.
Once, she made it as far as the sand on the edge of the sea. It was night, and there was no moon. In the distance, lights flashed, followed by the sounds of explosions and the weak cries of men. Mary had turned back on the water and climbed as high as she could, and when she turned again she saw two ships (of what make she didn't know) fight each other with cannon and guns. It did not seem to be a battle for loot or treasure, for the battle ended with one of the ships on fire, and sinking, and the other simply turning away from it. The ship that won the battle soon disappeared, and the other ship burned slowly, and was drowned.
When Mary came back to the sand the next night, she was not alone. In the darkness, not seeing, she had stumbled over the body of a man.
She clamped down on her scream, afraid of rousing the unseen defences, then saw that it was too late. The man was dead, his chest punctured as if by a giant fist. Something, she thought, had come out of the sand and gone through the man, and had then gone back into the ground. She had heard of the sand-worms that guarded the island, but had never seen one. No one was even sure if they were real, a lifeform warped by the ancient impact that had created the crater, or whether they, like the insects, were machines.
She was afraid; but not so afraid that she didn't stop, and let curiosity triumph; and so she searched quickly through the man's pockets, and came back with a–
"A book," Catherine said, and Elizabeth made the warding-off sign he had