The Fire Sermon. Francesca Haig

and the man who stepped away from the fire and accepted the bundle from Mum had done so in silence, gesturing at his throat to indicate that he was mute. I tried not to stare at the brand on his forehead. He was so thin that the knuckles were the widest part of each finger, his knees the widest part of each leg. His very skin seemed insufficient, stretched miserly over his bones. I thought perhaps that we might join the travellers at the fire for a few minutes, but the guardedness in Mum’s eyes was more than matched by that in the Omega man’s. Behind him, I could see the group gathered around a thriving blaze. It was hard to distinguish between the strange shapes thrown by the firelight and the actual deformities of the Omegas. I could make out one man who leaned forward and poked at the fire with a stick, held between the two stumps of his arms.

      Looking at the group, their huddled stance, their thin and cowed bodies, it was hard to believe the occasional whispers of an Omega resistance, or of the island where it was supposed to be brewing. How could they dream of challenging the Council, with its thousands of soldiers? The Omegas I’d seen were all too poor, too crippled. And, like the rest of us, they must know the stories of what had happened, a century ago or more, when there’d been an Omega uprising in the east. Of course, the Council couldn’t kill them without killing their Alpha counterparts, but what they did to the rebels, they say, was worse. Torture so terrible that their Alpha twins, even those hundreds of miles away, fell screaming to the ground. As for the rebel Omegas, they were never seen again, but apparently their Alpha twins continued to suffer unexplained pain for years.

      After they’d crushed the uprising, the Council set the east ablaze. They burned all the settlements out there, even those that had never been involved in the uprising. The soldiers torched all the crops and houses, even though the east was already a bleak zone on the brink of the deadlands, a place so dire no Alphas would live there. They left nothing standing, until it was as if the deadlands themselves had crept further west.

      I thought of those stories as I watched the group of Omegas, their unfamiliar bodies bending over the bundle of scraps my mother had given them. When she took my hand and led me quickly back to the village, I was ashamed at my own relief. The image of the mute Omega, his eyes avoiding ours as he took the food, stayed with me for weeks.

      My father’s twin was not mute. For three days Alice groaned, shouted and cursed. The sweet, milky stench of her breath pervaded the shed first, and then the house as Dad grew sicker. All the herbs Mum threw on the fire could not quell it. While our mother took care of Dad inside, Zach and I were to take turns sitting with Alice. By unspoken contract we sat together most of the time, rather than taking turns alone.

      One morning, when Alice’s cursing had subsided into coughs, Zach asked her quietly, ‘What’s wrong with you?’

      She met his eyes clearly. ‘It’s the fever. I have the fever – your father too, now.’

      He scowled. ‘But before that – what’s wrong with you?’

      Alice burst out laughing, then coughing, then laughing again. Beckoning us closer, she drew aside the sweaty sheet that covered her. Her nightgown reached just below her knees. We looked at her legs, our distaste battling with our curiosity. At first I could see no difference at all: her legs were thin but strong. Her feet were just feet. I’d heard a story once about an Omega with nails grown like scales, all over his flesh, but Alice’s toenails were not only in place, but neatly clipped and clean.

      Zach was impatient. ‘What? What is it?’

      ‘Don’t they teach you to count at your school?’

      I said what Zach would not. ‘We don’t go to school. We can’t – we’ve not been split.’

      He interrupted quickly: ‘But we can count. We learn at home – numbers, writing, all sorts of things.’ His eyes, like mine, went quickly back to her feet. On the left foot: five toes; on the right foot: seven.

      ‘That’s my problem, sweetheart,’ said Alice. ‘My toes don’t add up.’ She looked at Zach’s deflated face, and stopped her grinning. ‘I suppose there’s more,’ she said, almost kindly. ‘You’ve not seen me walk, only stagger to and from your cart, but I’ve always limped – my right leg’s shorter than the other, and weaker. And you know I can’t have children: a dead-end, as the Alphas like to call us. But the toes are the main problem: I never had a nice round number.’ She went back to laughing, then looked straight at Zach, raised an eyebrow. ‘If we were all so drastically different from Alphas, darling, why would they need to brand us?’ He didn’t answer. She went on: ‘And if Omegas are all so helpless, why do you think the Council’s so afraid of the island?’

      Zach threw a glance over his shoulder, hushed her so urgently that I felt his spittle on my arm. ‘There is no island. Everyone knows. It’s just a rumour, a lie.’

      ‘Then why do you look so scared?’

      I answered this time. ‘On the road to Haven, last time we went, there was a burnt-down hut. Dad said it belonged to a couple of Omegas who spread rumours of the island.’

      ‘He said Council soldiers took them away in the night,’ Zach added, looking at the door again.

      ‘And people say there’s a square in Wyndham,’ I said, ‘where they whip Omegas who’ve been heard just talking about the island. They whip them in public, for everyone to see.’

      Alice shrugged. ‘Seems like a lot of trouble for the Council to go to, if it’s just a rumour. Just a lie.’

      ‘It is – is a lie, I mean,’ hissed Zach. ‘You need to shut up – you’re mad, and you’ll get us in trouble. There could never be a place like that, just for Omegas. They’d never manage it. And the Council would find it.’

      ‘They haven’t found it yet.’

      ‘Because it doesn’t exist,’ he said. ‘It’s just an idea.’

      ‘Maybe that’s enough,’ she said, grinning. She was still grinning several minutes later when the fever tipped her back into unconsciousness.

      He stood. ‘I’m going to check on Dad.’

      I nodded, pressed the cool flannel again to my aunt’s head. ‘Dad’ll be just the same – unconscious, I mean,’ I said. Zach left anyway, letting the shed door bang loudly behind him.

      With the cloth resting there, over the brand in the centre of Alice’s forehead, I thought I could begin to recognise some of my father’s features in her face. I pictured Dad, thirty feet away in the cottage. Each time I passed the cloth across her forehead, grimacing with every gust of the sickened breath, I imagined that I was soothing him. After a minute I reached out and placed my own small hand over Alice’s, a gesture of closeness my father had not allowed for years. I wondered if it was wrong, to feel this closeness to this stranger who had brought my father’s illness to the house like an unwelcome gift.

      *

      Alice had fallen asleep, her breath gurgling slightly in the back of her throat. When I stepped out of the shed, Zach was sitting cross-legged on the ground, in the slant of afternoon sun.

      I joined him. He was fiddling with a piece of hay, exploring the spaces between his teeth.

      After a while, he said, ‘I saw him fall, you know.’

      I should have realised, knowing how Zach still followed Dad around whenever he could.

      ‘I was looking for birds’ eggs in the trees by the top paddock,’ he went on. ‘I saw it. One moment he was standing. Then, just like that: he fell.’ Zach spat out a splinter of hay. ‘He staggered a bit, like he’d drunk too much, and sort of propped himself up with his pitchfork. Then he fell again, face first, so I couldn’t see him for the wheat.’

      ‘I’m sorry. It must have been scary.’

      ‘Why are you sorry? It’s her that should be sorry.’ He gestured at the shed behind us, from where we could hear Alice, her sodden lungs doing battle with the air.

      ‘He’s going to die, isn’t