Free Watershed by Jane Abbott Page A

They’d been heading back when they’d found the group. Dead lucky for you, Burns added. Wouldn’t be another party sent out for a while, and once the pass is closed there’s no way through, ’cept over the mountains. Not likely they’d have made it though, he said, staring at them with his one eye. Not with kids. And even if they had there was worse to follow.
    What do you mean? Cutler asked.
    Burns swivelled his head to better see him, and said: I mean you still got a way to go. But you’ll be in good hands. If anyone can get you to the Citadel, it’s the lieut.
    The lute? Sarah wondered. The Citadel? Daniel said.
    That place you’re lookin’ for, Burns replied. The town that wouldn’t die? Much more’n that now. When they stared, blankly, he shrugged. You’ll see, he said.
    But when they finally did, it wasn’t what any of them had hoped.

3
    Not as big as the old town that’d once sprawled in its place, but a lot more imposing, the Citadel had formed itself like a misshapen wheel. At its centre stood the Tower, half as wide as it was tall, with just a few windows high up to break its grey-stone façade; spreading out from that, and encircled by the original wall, was the inner hub, quartered into districts by the four main roads that spoked from the base of the Tower to run out through the gates and across the plateau. The outer rim, between the old wall and the new, was some forty strides wide in places, and had been given over to an assortment of uses: the east provided for the living; the west was taken up by the dead and the dying. Aside from the Guards who were garrisoned alongside each road to man the gates and oversee any traffic in and out, the only others to live in the rim were the Pickers. And I reckoned living was a relative term.
    Southeast were the trenches, dug deep to escape the worst of the wind, some covered with bits of old glass or plastic to retain any moisture for whatever grew there. Like in-ground glasshouses, my grandmother had explained. Ingenious, she’d called it. Except there wasn’t much to grow; just the pale grain (the Godders could call it whatever they liked, but since hearing Taggart’s non-storyI’d always think of it as Willow grain), sedges and flax, and more of the silver saltbush that already grew in abundance along the coast; the black, bitter berries were no good to eat, but I’d been told they made a mean spirit. Spiky cacti and aloes filled any uncovered trenches, and stunted olive trees lined the walls. Northeast were the yards and cages to hold the goats and seabirds and whatever else was brought in for market, plus a few long pens for the camels. Both sectors had big tanks to contain the water that came from the Port: shunted along by feeble windmills that were always breaking, through pipes that often leaked, it was stored and guarded in the rim, ready for irrigation or distribution; anything recycled was steamed in the main part of the Citadel.
    Southwest, the pyres were lined in rows. They smoked endlessly, the wood fires never kept hot enough for any kind of real furnace so the dead just hissed and bubbled slowly to char, the oily pall of cooked meat hanging like a fog. But it was easier, and a whole lot safer, than trying to bury them all. Every few days Guards would rake out the ashes, crush the burned bones, and cart the mess over to the trenches to nourish the soil, for what it was worth. To save themselves a bit of time and effort, a couple of execution docks had been set up alongside the pyres. Death was usually quick, depending on the mood of whoever had been assigned to the job: beheaded or run through with a sword, but a few were winched up and left to dangle and choke; bullets were too precious to waste on petty criminals. There was another dock inside the Citadel, at the base of the Tower, but you had to have done something real bad for them to make a public spectacle of you. Had