The Fire Sermon. Francesca Haig

of the boys spoke: ‘Your kind don’t belong here.’

      ‘I’m leaving,’ I said, and tried to break away, but Nick blocked my way and shoved me back towards the others, who shoved me again. I dropped my parcel and instinctively shielded the wound on my head as the boys’ blows sent me stumbling from side to side within the tiny ring they had formed. A taunt accompanied each shove: ‘freak’; ‘dead-end’; ‘poison’.

      My hands still over my face, I turned to Ruth, a dark-haired girl who lived only a few houses from us. I whispered, ‘Stop them. Please.’

      Ruth reached forward, and for a second I thought she was going to take my arm. Instead she bent down, grabbed my flask, and emptied my water slowly on to the ground, where one of the donkeys made a futile attempt to slurp at it as it sank into the sandy soil. ‘That’s our water,’ Ruth said. ‘From the Alpha well. You’ve been contaminating it long enough, freak.’

      They left me without looking back. I waited until they were out of sight before gathering my things and making my way down to the river. Emptying the flask had been a harmless act: the river water, though brackish and warm, was perfectly safe to drink. But even as I crouched at the river’s edge to fill the flask again, I knew the significance of Ruth’s gesture. To the Alphas, perhaps even my own mother, my life up to now had been a lie, my place in the village kept through deceit.

      For the rest of the day I avoided the road, instead scrambling along the banks of the river. I fastened my shawl over my head, flinching when it touched my burn. The one time I passed a farmer, an Alpha woman bringing her goats down to the river’s edge to drink, I scuttled past in silence, head down. I didn’t stop when I reached the gorge leading west to the silos, but pushed onwards, further south than I’d ever been.

      It had taken Zach more than half a day in the cart to reach the Omega settlement when he collected Alice. For me, on foot, avoiding the roads, my footsteps never quite keeping time with the throbbing of my head, it took nearly three days. Several times a day I stopped to bathe my forehead in the river, and to tear off some bread from the parcel Mum had given me. I slept on the riverbank, glad of the midsummer warmth. On the second morning I re-joined the road, where it curved away from the river to climb up the valley. Although I was still afraid of encountering people, it was for a different reason. I was in Omega country now.

      The landscape itself was different. The Alphas had always claimed the best land for their own. The valley where I’d been raised was good farming country, the soil plush with river-silt. Up here there was no valley to shield the land from the harsh light, which glared from the rocky soil. The grass, where it grew at all, was brittle and pale, and the roadside was covered with brambles. Their barbed leaves glistened with spiderwebs, a thick mist that did not lift. There was some other strangeness, too, that I couldn’t work out until I looked about to refill my flask, and realised that, for the first time in my life, I couldn’t hear the river. Its noise had been the backdrop to my entire life, and I knew it intimately: the surge of the high water in flood season, the heavy buzz of insects that drifted over the still pools in summer. The river had always provided the spine of my mental map of the area: upstream from the village was south, past the gorge and the silos that Zach and I used to dare each other to approach. Further upstream lay Wyndham, the biggest city and the Council’s base. I’d never been that far, but had heard stories of its size and wealth. Even the refuge outside Wyndham, Mum had told me, was bigger than any town I’d seen. Downstream led north, through the fields, larger villages. A day’s walk downriver was Haven, the market-town where Dad used to take us when we were smaller. Beyond Haven, the shallow rapids took the river beyond my knowledge.

      Now, in Omega country, I was still confident that I could find my way – I could usually sense the landscape, just as I could sense emotions and events. But without the river, I felt cut loose, turning about on this unfamiliar plain. There was only one road and I followed it as my mother had told me. I left it only once, following some tell-tale birds to a small spring that bubbled from a crack in the rock, from which I drank quickly before scrambling back to the barren road.

      By the time I saw the settlement, night was lowering on the plain, and the first lamps had been lit in the windows. The cluster of houses was smaller than my village, but substantial enough that there could be no doubt. A huddle of low buildings, surrounded by a spread of fields, where the recently harvested crops were bald in patches and interrupted by large boulders. I pulled back the shawl that covered my head, waving away the flies that made busy with the still-seeping burn. This is what I am, I reminded myself, one hand on the key that hung at my neck. But as I approached, a small figure on the wide and broken road, I wished that Zach were by my side. A stupid thought, I reprimanded myself. Nonetheless, he had been like the sound of the river to me: always there.

       CHAPTER 5

      In the years that followed, I was grateful at least for Alice’s cottage, and the stash of bronze coins that I’d found in the buried chest beneath the lavender. After six years at the settlement there were few coins left, but the money had allowed me to eke out the leanest months of the bad season, to pay the Council’s tithe collectors (who came without fail, regardless of the success or failure of crops), and to help some of those who might otherwise have gone hungry. Little Oscar, from my parents’ village, was there, being raised by his relatives in a cottage near my own. He’d been sent away much too young to remember me, but whenever I saw him it felt like a link with the village, and with those that I’d left behind. But although the others at the settlement still referred to the cottage as ‘Alice’s place’, I gradually began to feel established there.

      The other Omegas had grown used to me, too, though they tended to keep their distance. I understood their wariness: arriving there, newly branded at thirteen, meant that I would never quite be seen as one of them. That was compounded by the fact that I was a seer. Once or twice I overheard mutterings about my absence of any visible mutation. Easy enough for her, I heard my neighbour Claire say to her wife, Nessa, when I offered to help them with the rethatching of their roof. It’s not like she’s had to struggle like the rest of us. Another time, at work in my garden, I heard Nessa warning Claire to steer clear of me. I don’t want her sitting in my kitchen. We’ve got enough troubles without a neighbour who can read your mind. There was no point trying to explain to her that it didn’t work like that – that being a seer was a series of impressions, not a neat narrative, and that I was more likely to catch a glimpse of a town ten miles east, or of the blast itself, than to be privy to Nessa’s thoughts. I kept silent, went on picking the snails from my broad-bean stems, and pretended I’d heard nothing. I’d learned, by then, that if Omegas were seen as dangerous, seers were doubly so. I found myself spending more time alone than I had at the village, where I’d had Zach’s company, however grudging.

      I’d been surprised to find books at Alice’s cottage. Omegas weren’t allowed to go to school, so most couldn’t read. But in the buried chest, along with the coins, were two notebooks of handwritten recipes, and one of songs, some of which I’d heard bards sing in our village. For me and Zach, forbidden entry to school in our unsplit state, reading had been a furtive and therefore somehow intimate act. The two of us, under our mother’s tutelage or, more often, alone together, scratching out the shapes of letters in the clay banks of the river, or in the dust of the yard behind the house. Later, there were books, but only a few. A reading primer with pictures that our father had kept from his own childhood. The Village Book, held in the Village Hall and laboriously inscribed with histories of the area, of the local Councilmen, and of the laws they oversaw. Even in our relatively well-off village, books were a rarity: reading was for making out instructions on a seed packet bought at market, or reading in the Village Book the names of the two travelling Omegas who had been fined and whipped for stealing a sheep. In the settlement, where few could read and fewer would admit to it, books were an indulgence we couldn’t afford.

      I didn’t tell anyone about Alice’s books, but I read and re-read them so many times that the pages began to come away from the spines as I turned them, as if the books existed in a perpetual autumn. In the evenings,