Chapter 16: Bone Tithes – Part 5

That night, when the boy placed the fingerbones the woman had given him by his feet, he looked at them for a while. Tomorrow he would have to look for more. He had hoped the woman might have had enough to last them both two days, that with enough luck they might reach the gardens without ever wanting for tithes again, but she was gone now, and all she’d left behind was a stick and a map.

He hadn’t kept the stick, for he had no use for it, but the map he kept carefully tucked in a pocket inside his coat. He had opened it already, and he thought it very strange. It had not seemed large enough to cover more than ten miles, let alone however many the woman must have travelled with it, and the gardens were not on it; instead, an arrow labelled with the word pointed off-page. But after he’d walked a bit, he’d looked down again and the map had changed. He’d realised soon that it always placed him at its centre, and after that he understood. He had not seen a thing like it before, but he did not want to question it out of an odd fear that it might cease to be.

After the Proctor came for the tithe, the boy drifted into an uneasy sleep. He did not dream, for although he knew what dreams were, none ever seemed quite able to take form in his mind. Instead he saw only flashes, suggestions of ideas, a suggestion of grasping bony claws, a suggestion of a cry echoing through the fog, and in the morning he awoke and forgot them.

He set off that day with the map in hand. He remembered the woman saying the gardens were close, but he soon realised he had no idea what she considered that to be. She’d been old, probably far into her sixties; perhaps to her they would be close at weeks away. Or perhaps she simply hadn’t known, and only said it to convince him to follow her. As he looked down at the map for any indication of distance and found none, he began to realise that was most likely.

Later, looking again, he realised that there was no guarantee the gardens were anywhere near. All he knew was he was going in the right direction. What if they were months away, or years, or even decades? What if he spent his life following this map, as she had, until he grew older and slower and weaker and came across someone young and quick, and told them of the map, and they went with him and watched as his age gave him to the screechers? Would they then take the map and follow the same fate? The same thing, again and again, for all time?

Then a quiet voice whispered in his mind, ‘But what if the gardens are only just off the map?’ If he chose to disregard it, to throw it aside and follow his own whims as he had before, then the woman’s entire life would have been for nothing. All that time she spent trudging through this old city, facing the fear of screechers and gangs, of the Proctor and of unknown dangers lurking in the fog, all for the promise of paradise ― if he abandoned it now, it would all have been pointless.

So he kept going. As the day wandered on, so did he, as he always had, except now he had a direction to keep to. In some ways it felt better. There was reason to his course, a proper intent with a destination in mind rather than simply meandering on because he was afraid to stop, and that seemed good.

After a few hours, familiar sounds drifted to him on the air: the rumbling of machinery and tramp of boots. Another gang was approaching. Rolling up the map, he tied the string around it and stowed it back in his coat, but he knew that might not be enough to hide it. Sometimes gangs were desperate. They didn’t have enough bones, or water, or food, so whomever they came across they searched, and a map to the gardens would seem very good to them indeed. So as the sounds grew, the boy hurried to the side of the street, ducked into a doorway, and hid.

He did not dare to peer out at them as they passed. He only listened, to the march and to the trembling of the earth beneath iron beasts, and to the sounds of their voices as they conversed in gruff tones not quite loud enough for him to make out the words. Some of them walked right past the door where he was hiding, but by whatever slim mercy the city played host to, they did not look within. Only once the last echoes of their movements had faded away to nothing did the boy clamber back out from his hiding place and resume his journey.

The rest of the day traipsed by without event. Evening came, and the boy looked down at his map and stopped in his tracks. At the very edge, the arrow had vanished, replaced instead by a long wall with a gate where three streets met it, and the space beyond was labelled ‘Gardens’. Only, it was too far. He would not make it before nightfall and the Proctor’s visit, not even if he ran. And he had yet to find bones that day.

The fear of the Proctor rose in him again and he began to wonder if this was the city acting as his mother said it did: disliking his progress, his strength, and so choosing to snuff it out. He was so close to the gardens, to salvation, and yet twice now in only a few days he had found himself at twilight without a tithe to pay. Gripping his knife, he kept on, and the world afforded him one more turn of grace before the last light of the day died.

But it was not good grace. The first he knew of it was the sound of ragged, heavy breathing a small distance away, which he approached with a cautious step, entering between two tall columns into a large building with one vast open room inside ― a hall of some kind, he supposed. As he turned, his eyes fell on someone crouched by the side of the entrance, their leg covered in blood and their brow drenched with sweat. They stared up at him with suspicion in their gaze, and as he glanced down, he saw bones by their feet.

Crouching in front of them, he looked again at the leg. For a few moments there was silence as they glared back, but then their scowl relented and they reached out to grasp feebly at his shoulder.

‘The bleeding,’ they whispered. ‘Please…’

Sheathing his knife, the boy slowly unravelled the scarf from around his neck and reached out to bandage the wound as best he could with it, but something stopped him. Looking at this wounded stranger’s face, he saw skin white as ash, eyes half-distant, and he knew it was the face of death. It took a lot of strength to do what he knew he had to do next, but he managed it by biting his lip very hard. He wrapped the scarf around his neck again, and scooped the stranger’s bones up in his hands.

They tried to kick out at him with their good leg, but even that one didn’t have the strength. ‘No, don’t…’ came faint, plaintive words that froze the boy where he was as he made to stand.

He met their gaze again, suddenly sharp and frightened and furious in a cruel moment of clarity. But it was still not the face of life. He couldn’t bring himself to say anything, so he just shook his head a little, then stood up and hurried away, trying not to hear their fruitless efforts to scramble after him.

That night, he did not even look at the Proctor’s feet. Part of him wanted to the shout at it that the bones were not really his, but he kept his silence and with it his life. He slept little and instead spent most of the night listening to the screechers call and swoop, and at one point he thought he heard a person scream, and wondered who it was, and decided he preferred not to know. The next morning he stood again, tried to forget the events of yesterday, and set out to find the gardens.

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