Free Genetopia by Keith Brooke Page A

first place.
    He remembered play-fighting on the Leaving Hill. We’d just sell you to the mutt trade , he had teased her. And he remembered the Tallyman’s appraising eyes, putting a price on Amberlinetreco Eltarn.
    ~
    He peered at his aunt from under the wide-brimmed hat she had given him. His presence made her uncomfortable, he knew, but she tried hard to hide it.
    She had followed him out here to a rocky promontory that cut straight out into the Transom’s flow. Great rubber trees hung out over the river. Lines of land anemones clung to the underside of the trees’ boughs, feathery tentacles trailing down to the water, trapping moths, birds, fish in their downy grip.
    Flint held a long, arching cane across the water, its tip raking the current, accumulating a knot of algae: glistening, glutinous stuff.
    “What will you do, Flintreco?”
    Where Tarn used his fullname as a weapon, distancing himself from his own son with inappropriate formality, Clarel used it to draw him in: Flint of Clan Treco–he belonged. People cared.
    It was a calculating use of his fullname, too: a deliberate gesture. Warmth and spontaneity were hard for Clarel. Flint had seen it often in Chendreth’s looks, the hurt at the distance Clarel maintained even from her lover. The affection between the two of them was so brittle, he was impressed that it endured.
    He raised the cane, watched water dripping from the captured algae, then dipped it again.
    “She may be dead,” he said. “In which case I am wasting my time. She may have run away and I have simply got it wrong that she would head here–maybe she has gone to Farsamy, after all. She may have run away and fallen into the hands of traders, or she may have been sold directly into the trade.
    “If she is still alive out there then all that I can do is spread word. You told me yourself that Clan Treco is more dispersed than most: there are Trecosi in most of the major settlements of the region. I even know some of these people from their visits to Trecosann.
    “I’m a free man, Aunt Clareltreco. I intend to travel and ask people to watch out for a foolish girl with chestnut hair and jaundiced eyes.”
    “Your mother...”
    Clarel stopped and Flint waited for her to go on.
    “Your mother is a difficult woman,” she said. “I don’t defend my brother–I was glad when Mesteb told you that the people of Trecosann are finally seeing him for the beast that he is. No, I don’t defend him. But I do think that he and Jescka deserve one another. He’s devoted to her, despite everything: that’s why Amber’s presence affected him so ... so adversely.”
    “What do you mean? What are you telling me?”
    “If Tarn never treated Amber like a daughter, it was because he had good reason,” said Clarel.
    Hindsight. A lens that sharpens recollection, reshapes memories.
    “My mother took lovers?” He had known. But he hadn’t made the connection. He had known that she had a lover, once, but that was more recent than Clarel implied.
    Clarel nodded. “Mesteb has been one,” she said. “But there have been others, too. Mesteb confessed to me last year, when he was sick with the gripes and scared it might be changing fever. He wanted to off-load his guilt while he could. So he told me. And he told me why he stopped seeing her. He couldn’t stomach her visits to the seed patch.”
    Flint moaned, turned away. He knew the euphemism: visit the seed patch and that’s where you find the mutts.
    He had always thought Tarn’s cruel jibes at Amber’s nature related to her illness as a child, not to her parentage!
    If Clarel’s claims were true then the only wonder was that Amber had not been exposed on the Leaving Hill as a pup, or that Tarn had not sold her into the trade at his first opportunity. Only Jescka could have stopped him, he realised.
     
     

Chapter 6: Dinah’s story
    Dinah sniffed. She tasted change on the pre-twilight air. She knew that was not usually a good thing to taste.
    She