Chapter Text
Prologue
Clem
i. When the baby is born, it all comes too fast. The women had come to her room the day before, feeling the stomach where her husband’s son sits plump and proud like a sultan from a story. Sits is the word: he is feet down and head up, little elbows at either side as though he cradles something in his arms. As though he holds her, rather than the other way around.
“Here’s his head,” a woman says with a gentle press. “Feel him under your ribs?”
“Like an apple,” she whispers.
“He’s big. Nice and fat.”
His, he, him. Only ever allow for the possibility of a boy: do not dare to think of a girl or you will make it true. Do not dwell on girl’s names you like; no Lilies, no Rosalines, no sweet little girl called Honey with soft flaxen hair. Do not think of ringlet curls or eyelashes like duck down, feathering a pink cheek as soft as a petal. No – do not think at all.
So that is what she did.
She tried not to think when she felt a shocking twinge between her legs in the day before, tried not to think when she woke sick in the night dripping in the sheets. Her husband would leave her bed next week, when the nurses thought it was time and she would sweat the final stretch alone. But not yet, it was not time: that is what she says when she flinches in the dingy twilight, something bursting between her legs and soaking the blankets.
Not yet. It is not time.
But the water can’t go back, once it is out. Like a leaf breaking from a bough, falling down and down; like a glass shattering against a wall. There are things in nature which cannot be undone (although it feels in that moment that she herself is coming undone). It is all too soon and she is not ready, her husband should not be here, it is bad luck and where there was water on the bed (on the good sheets) there is sticky blood and sweat and they call for the women to come but she does so much alone, so much pain alone whilst her husband is sent out into the street. He will be pacing the ground like an ox stabled too early; restless, impatient. Anxious.
In the small hours of the morning, when dawn spreads pink clouds over a yellow sky, her little sultan comes. Out feet first; tiny and sticky and small and stubborn. There is a sheen of thin mucus over him, like a miasma. She thinks that he is a lump; he has dropped out of her like a stone and she holds him heavy in her arms. The women are looking at the tears between her legs, they are inspecting the placenta. All she can do is cup his head in her palm and feel his hair as soft and brown as a dormouse.
“He looks like you,” she says, and Lanius touches the top of his son’s head with a gentle hand.
ii.
She had been a Follower, once, in the time before.
She’d come from old Boneyard stock: her people came from not the city itself, but the villages and outposts which scratched their living up beyond its walls. Her family had been labourers mostly, of the unskilled variety, until her grandad learned how to weld with the Followers and taught all the men in the family. The women stayed at home and kept the work they always had: feeding chickens, feeding children, feeding the men who came home tracking in soot and oil. She remembered the arms of her father lifting her up and the lumpy burns all along his wrist up to the shoulder; white and glistening like the underbelly of a fish. Her little childlike hands would grasp at them, as though they were tape that could be pulled off.
Her husband now has different scars; long, puckered lines along his back which rise like barrows. Fingers which don’t sit straight; knuckles sunken on the right hand. And burns, too; along the left side of his face like a permanent shadow, mottling his skin light and dark. A gun powder explosion, he’d told her, a long time ago. He lets her touch them and feel the sunken spots near his brow. She does not try to peel them off.
As a girl she had been determined not to succumb to the same dull existence as her mother and cousins and sisters; she would not straighten the gingham tablecloth and wash men’s shirts in a tin basin until the day she died. So she solicited the Followers and took their school exam when she turned ten. She had to do the oral reasoning exam because she could not read or write, but she passed it with flying colours: they marked her out as gifted. What an accolade. Put her in a special program and taught her letters, taught her science, taught her a trade. She was going to build roads. Well, she wouldn’t do the building: she’d do the engineering. She’d manage the local labourers and wear that blazing red cross on the back of her shirt, surveying the local geology with a frown and advise on materials, execution. The work took her out of the Boneyard into the Colorado. The Followers wanted to reach out to isolated communities, provide lifelines which could lead them to the beating heart of civilisation. A road was civilisation: it was a way to better yourself. It was a way to the city, to market, to trade and to the world. That was the idea, anyway.
Of course, the road network was riddled with Frumentarii. They hadn’t realised that then: hadn’t known what an interest the Legion had in the Followers’ version of tribal outreach. How it differed from the Legion’s own plans. She had been naïve and thought her work was neutral. Ever the trap Followers fell into. Still.
Who could object to a road?
Certainly, Vulpes Inculta hadn’t seemed to when he’d infected their Mojave road network in the late 2270s. It still gave her that queasy feeling when she saw him at parties now; that she’d known him before and he had been someone else. How he had changed his face.
Of course, it was a source of endless amusement to Inculta that he had tricked Lanius’ educated wife. He would say, “It’s alright, fructula. Better women than you have fallen for my charms.”
Fructula? Who was he to call her fructula? It’s all she can do not to throw her drink in his face; it’s all she can do to resign herself to a scoff. “Your charms? I seem to remember thinking you physically incapable as a day labourer. I would have never hired you; you’re lucky the foreman did.”
“Ah, yes, my infiltration of enemy camps: purely down to luck. Fortuna was not so blessed.”
Then Lanius is there, putting his arm on her waist. Preventing her from going too far, getting too rude. Tempering Vulpes to the same ends. “My wife built the road to Vegas, Inculta. What’s your wife managed? Besides whelping too many daughters.”
They look over at Vulpes’ wife, who stands across the room in a clutch of women. She is small, a little sickly, a little frail. Thin brown hair, freckles, a terracotta dress. Shaking gently, even when stood perceptively still, like an autumn leaf. They have three daughters together; three children under three.
“Not for want of trying,” Vulpes mutters by way of response. They disperse.
Later, in the dark of their bedroom, she is needled by this moment. So what if Inculta’s wife only had "daughters? Was that her fault? (Yes: Legion thought women chose the sex of the child). But still: so what? She had been a daughter once.
“Is that all I am worth?” she whispers. “Sons?”
“Hmm?” Lanius’ expression is bemused in the gloom. A man jumped by a question his wife is posing, without context, on a conversation hours earlier. “Oh, that. Don’t worry about that. I only said it to get Inculta’s back up.”
She traces the faded marks on his shoulders; the lumpen barrow of scars. “It got my back up too.”
He catches her hand, “You know your worth.”
Her fingers curl in his palm; “Tell me again.”
“Games, woman, games.”
“Don’t you enjoy playing games?”
He pauses in the dark, and is sincere. “I always enjoy your company.”
She settles on her back and closes her eyes. In the dark she just about hears him say, “And I know you shall give me a son.” Then she is not sure that is what he said and she turns back to him. His gentle snoring fills the room and she is alone again.
iii.
When they hold the child aloft, when the boy comes screaming to her breast and clings like ivy, where does the girl go? Where the little daughter that could have been, where the ringlets and ribbons and soft knit dresses? The lilies wither and fade; honey loses all flavour and dries. Here is the boy, and he is your son. All other future is eclipsed. Do not dwell: what if it had not been a boy? It is a boy. Hush, woman.
She had had another name before; another life before. Now she is Clementine (her old name had been too difficult for Latin speakers, apparently). Wife, mother, and Legion. Her old self with its sharpness and an embarrassing not-even-Boneyard family and gifted and that Follower degree – she is gone.
It does not do to dwell on a future that is no longer yours.