Sanguine

Chapter 3-1

Chapter 3

I was feeling restless again. Perhaps I needed to travel—it had helped in the past. Meeting new people was always wonderful but I still felt so lonely sometimes.

Morning sun filtered through the glossy leaves and into my sleeping space, creating a warm hazy glow. The branches above me stretched apart a little to let it through. Amongst the leaves, pale mauve flowers yawned at the sun. I loved this tree. Wistfully I traced my finger down the edge of Bane’s face. The photo was beginning to fade, it hadn’t coped well with the damp air. If only I hadn’t let it get so crumpled the first time I had come here. What would I do when it was too damaged to look at? It was already so hard to remember details. I knew I was losing memories of my earlier life far too quickly. Like a bookshelf with open ends, the faster I grabbed at the new experiences that Eden offered and stacked them on the shelf, the faster my memories toppled, unremarked, from the other end in order to accommodate them. Sometimes I tried really hard to remember, but all I had were disjointed bits and pieces from my childhood. Often they didn’t make sense and I would realise I was remembering scenes from a TV show or a book. Even the real memories felt like they weren’t mine. Except for Bane.

Closing my eyes, I remembered the time he’d crashed the tractor into the fence post in the lambing paddock, and the time I’d put the rubber snake in the shed and scared the kajeebies out of him. I remembered him playing the old piano in our lounge room, complaining about how out of tune it was. With a deep breath I let myself remember the feel of his arms around me when we’d danced at our graduation, when the other girls had glared in open-mouthed astonishment. I even remembered the surge of jealousy I’d felt when he and Tessa had gone for a walk alone to talk about Guardian business. Although jealousy had no place in Eden, I still remembered how it felt. The memories hurt, and yet I couldn’t make myself let them go. How easy it would be just to eat the honey-sweet Living Fruit again and forget the pain. Perhaps then I could move on.

I’d monitored the Trees of Life carefully after I ate the first time. The one I’d eaten from had wilted at first, terrifying me so much that I hadn’t been game to go near one again despite the urgings from my new friends. Thankfully it had soon recovered. Then came the day I’d joined in a game of running with the herd of giant lizards. What a thrill to race them along the valley like we were part of the pack. They were one of the few herds that us two-legged creatures could almost keep up with. Except that I’d caught my foot on a rock and fallen so badly I’d fractured my femur. Not one lizard had trampled me, but I’d been in enough pain that I’d let someone feed me another piece of Fruit. Although the Tree that time had barely shown any ill-effects, I’d still made a pact with myself to try to avoid the more dangerous activities from then on.

The Trees were the source of Life in the Garden. Their protection was one of the reasons humans had been exiled from the Garden in the first place—that and the fact that it would be a very bad idea for corrupt humans to be able to live forever. Keeping the Trees safe was the main reason Cherubim had been assigned to keep the tainted from returning, so it seemed ironic that Annie and I were the only ones who could damage them. Deep down I knew why, but I didn’t like to dwell on it. I’d figured out that there was only one sickness that my mother and I suffered from that no one else here did, and that was shame. Living Fruit was never designed to deal with that. All it could do was help me to forget the things that caused it, and so I’d embraced the forgetting—except that I was still reluctant to risk eating again. It was so tempting though … If the Fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil had tasted half as delicious, then I could see why everything went to poo all those years ago. And the taste of it wasn’t even the most tempting part.

It no longer worried me that I couldn’t remember arriving in Eden. Noah and Annie had told me not to worry about it and I had seen Dallmin in pain enough times to know I probably wouldn’t like remembering what had happened to me anyway. A few times, when I’d first arrived, Noah had tried to convince me to cross back to Nalong, but I was too scared. I already missed Bane so much that it hurt to breathe sometimes. If I saw him again I would have no hope of letting him go, and I had to. I knew that. He was dead. Like everyone else I’d left behind, the patterns that his soul made were tangled and unable to grow properly. A clean break was best for both of us, so I’d forced myself to let him go when I had the chance.

Distracted by the feel of something tickling my cheek, I brushed it with my fingertips. It was wet. There was a shiny teardrop on my finger. The Trees were producing red Fruit this month. I had been told it was especially good for feeling peaceful when it was red. Perhaps I had forgotten enough now that I could try it without poisoning the Trees. I looked at Bane’s photo again. It was getting harder to decide what to do.

The food preparation area was a central location for our community. Each of the trees here were as tall as a mountain ash, and they were bunched together along a flat patch of the valley floor. A canopy of thick branches formed an impossibly convenient roof that never ceased to challenge my year twelve biology training. How did all the branches start at such a consistent height above the ground and intertwine so neatly? And given that they did such an incredible job at keeping most of the rain out, how did the tree roots get enough water? There was a stream flowing through the centre of the natural hall, so perhaps that helped the trees in the middle a bit.

I was still craning my neck upwards when my mother slipped her hand into mine and tugged me into a welcoming hug, saving me from inadvertently hugging one of the tree trunks instead.

‘Annie,’ I greeted as I breathed in the scent of her hair. I had never accustomed myself to calling her ‘mother’. She looked to be my own age—perhaps a few years older—and hadn’t been around throughout my childhood. She’d moved to Eden when I was three years old, and I’d only found her again when I finished school. Getting to know Annie Gracewood was a delight and a privilege, but she felt more like a long-lost sister than a mother to me.

She let me go, smiling, and led me to where she’d been sitting and shelling peas, so I sat down next to her and grabbed a handful. It was a relaxing thing to do. The feel of the crisp shells popping open to reveal the tiny baby plants inside was strangely addictive. I liked peas. They were innocent. They suited Eden.

‘Someone’s coming,’ she told me in English. ‘Can’t you feel it?’

We didn’t often speak English unless we were talking about the other side of the Boundary, so I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate. There was something tenuous … a presence, approaching from the north. Not from across the Boundary, but from within Eden—and not a threat. I didn’t understand. Usually I only felt someone’s presence if they were too close to the cave, so I could go and distract them from being too interested. Even then, it never felt anything like the urgency I used to feel on the other side if somebody came too close. I’d been wondering whether that meant we shouldn’t stop people crossing over if they really wanted to go. There were no rules in Eden. No right or wrong. If someone had a desire to do something, then I desired it too. Conflict didn’t fit here.

‘How can we feel someone so far away?’ I queried, selecting another handful of peas to shell.

‘We can sense other Cherubim, if we pay attention,’ she explained, juggling four peas at once and then tossing them one by one into my open mouth. ‘So this person approaching must be a Cherub.’

Something felt very wrong about that but I couldn’t quite put the pieces of my memory back together enough to know why it disturbed me so much. I pushed into the discomfort. It felt important to remember and after a minute of thinking hard about it, something clicked. ‘Two Cherubim in each generation only,’ I insisted.

‘That’s right,’ she agreed, ‘and yet we are both here.’

She was messing with me. Making me figure it out.

‘So this Cherub is of another generation?’

She nodded, with a soft laugh, and refused to elaborate, so I just continued to shell the peas. I would find out soon enough.

Music that was full of the soothing energy of the autumn sun echoed throughout the Garden. Everyone played or sang. I was learning to play a flute-like instrument and was slowly improving. The others were very patient with ‘Shaky-Tune Lainie’, considering they’d all been practising for centuries. All of them indulged me like a child learning the recorder, except they never tried to find any lame excuses not to listen. My dancing was a bit better. I was no longer in the least bit worried about how I looked in front of others, which made it much more fun than ever before. I spun and skipped and twirled and laughed, even throwing in some gymnastics my new family had taught me. I wasn’t quite as daring as they were though, because I couldn’t afford to get seriously injured. The few times I had hurt myself I’d needed solitude to recover so I wouldn’t be pestered by people offering me Fruit. They always got so confused whenever I refused to eat.

When the music twisted into an even more rollicking tune, I joined in one of the more organised dances. This one had steps I had learnt. It was extremely complicated, which was what made it so much fun. We swapped partners every couple of minutes and sometimes someone would think of a new sequence and we would all madly try to learn it, laughing at ourselves when we got it wrong. As Dallmin swung me around I noticed someone new out of the corner of my eye. He had light hair and pale skin, which was a little unusual for this valley, although not unheard of. Remembering what Annie had said about someone new arriving, I tried to feel if he had some sort of an aura that I could perceive with my cool preternatural Cherub-detector. All I had to do was focus on his vibe while keeping up with the slide-step-and-spin tempo shift while changing my grip from my dance partner’s shoulder to his elbow … Luckily Dallmin caught me before I hit the floor.

The newcomer was not the person I’d been sensing, but I was still curious. He watched me with sparkling blue eyes as he tried to learn the steps. Although quick on his feet, he wasn’t just trying to learn the newest variation but the whole sequence at once. I giggled as he spun the wrong way, colliding with us in a predictable misstep. Both Dallmin and I gripped the stranger’s elbows and guided him out of further harm’s way by keeping him moving along with the fast-paced flow of dancers. Dallmin placed my hands around the man’s waist and then demonstrated the steps for him again. The visitor looked pleased with himself when he got it right in the next progression. Dallmin nodded and then grabbed hold of Annie’s hand as she swung past us and she spun into his arms with a laugh. I danced with the stranger through another sequence, but when it came time to swap partners again the guy didn’t let me go. We stopped dancing and I blinked at him. He kissed the inside of my wrist in a formal greeting, and then led me from the dance floor. Curious, I followed him out. I liked meeting new people.

Heading away from all the noise, the stranger took me up to the top of a grassy hill where we sat and looked up at the stars.

‘Pallano,’ he said in a sweet husky voice, hand to his chest.

‘Lainie,’ I replied, still puffing from all the dancing.

Narrow path? he signed.

I looked at him in confusion.