Simon Spurrier - The Culled

"Party…" Rick murmured, slightly more enthusiastic.

Slowbear ignored him. "The means of living vary, stranger. That is my point. Does it matter if a man sleeps beneath a pelt or a… a duvet? In a wooden lodge or a… hah… a TrekMaster 3000? The circumstances by which he acquired items do not lessen their value. It is the ways that matter. The councils. The families. The beliefs."

I felt my fists tighten, just a tad. Bugbear.

"What beliefs?"

He met my gaze, and we held eye-contact for a long time, without any sense of threat or status. It was an extraordinary sensation.

"Consider," he said, pausing to slurp on a flask of something that smelt like lager. "What is unchanged?"

He passed it to me. It tasted okay.

"What do you mean?" I said, wiping froth off my lip.

"This… this Blight. The 'Cull'. Call it what you like. What didn't it affect?"

I wasn't in the mood for a guessing game. "Tell me."

"Ha. The world."

I scowled.

"Do the animals care?" He said. "Did the deer fall down and die? Or the crows in the trees? Did the soil turn barren, or the rains stop? Did the earth care?"

"I guess not. Unless you count the minor case of nukage…"

"I don't."

"Figures."

"The point is, why look to some… heavenly God? Some crucified idiot born of mortal man." He stretched his arms out wide and gestured across the fields and hills, the glittering water of the reservoir and the clear sun in the sky. "Isn't this enough?"

I gave it some thought. It was a cute speech. Tempting, even. But still…

"Sounds a lot like just another faith-specific boys' Club to me." I said. "You don't believe, you don't get to play along."

He didn't look offended.

"You must understand," he smiled. "It's not the tasks a man performs that defines who he is. That's just staying alive. That's just being. It's what sings in his heart as he does so."

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Rick rolling his eyes.

"And what sings in these peoples' hearts?" I said, only a little wry, gesturing around me at the beered-up white-man-Injuns with their polished guns and rattling pickups.

Slowbear smiled faintly, and took a long time to answer.

"Freedom." he said.

I stared at him. Worked my jaw. Thought about it. Said:

"Just another way of saying 'nothing left to lose'…"

We finished the journey in silence.

They took Moto away to be looked after and sat the others down to eat and drink. Pork, bread, freshly harvested vegetables, thick soups and wooden bowls of porridgey-paste and whiskey. I eyed it all longingly as Slowbear led me away. Nate tried to follow, shivering as he came-down off whatever he was on, but a couple of big guys wearing freaky blue masks politely told him to get some food in his belly, and steered him back towards the campfire.

I made a mental note to have a word with the guy. He looked like death warmed-up, and things had been far too crazy for far too long for me to find out what he was taking.

Where he'd got it from.

What the hell he was doing…

The big mobile home was a lot more impressive on the inside than the out. Someone had stripped out most of the dividing walls and blanketed the floor in a cosy mish-mash of cheap Persian rugs, animal skins, fur-coats and a thick pile of carpet off cuts. It was like wading through the shaggiest patchwork in the world, and contrived to give the structure an earthy, russet-brown air; helped along no end by the chipboard walls. Each panel was so industriously graffitied with a swirling combination of text, iconic drawings and childlike scribbles that each component ceased to have any meaning on its own, and became just a part. A raw splat of language, of culture.

I caught myself getting abstract again, and noted the thick pall of smoke in the air, the sweet-sour smell of something that wasn't just tobacco.

Ah-ha.

It was weird. It was like I'd stepped through the door of this whitewashed suburban kitschism and entered some magical beaver-lodge. Some ancient cave, or skin covered bivouac. It just happened to have a few more right angles than you'd expect.

Slowbear lurked at the door and waved me inside.

"Who'm I looking for?" I asked, irritated by the mystery.

"The boss." He grinned, and closed the door.

At the end of the hallway I came to a large chamber, where the windows were boarded-up and the high ceiling lost behind a canopy of drooping skins and weird shapes. Knotted ropes and dyed fabrics, a mournful cow-skull and a stuffed eagle turning on a string tied to the roof-joists. There was a very old man sitting beneath it, hunched over an electric fire, wearing a bland little chequered shirt with a brown waistcoat. His hair was almost white, and pulled back in a silvery ponytail that left his face uncovered; magnificently under lit by the glowing heat. Each line on his face was a fissure in a great glacial surface; ruddy-red but still somehow icy, like it radiated age and a slow, unstoppable determination.

There was absolutely no doubt at all that this man was in charge, in every sense, and despite the lack of gaudy costumes and outrageous symbols, I had to wrestle with my own desire not to dip my head.

He was smoking a pipe in the shape of a bear-totem. It looked cheap.

"Please," he said, and waved to a low chair placed opposite him. I made a move towards it, not thinking, and hesitated. Call me shallow, but the memory of the food cooking outside and the hole in my stomach was more powerful than I'd expected.

"No offence," I said. "But is this likely to take a while? I'm fit to fall down, here."

And then I smelt it.

Rich. Gamey. Good enough to kill for.

Vegetable aromas mixed with the smoky emanations of the old man's pipe, underscored at all times by the unmistakable scent of cooking meat. I realised with a stomach-gurgling jolt that the chamber led – via an archway in the corner – into a kitchen, and from inside caught the shadow of movement and a fresh burst of steam and smoke.

I almost dribbled.

"It is on its way." The old man smiled. He had a kind voice, and spoke with the thoughtful enunciation of a man to whom English is a second language.

I sat.

"Who are you?"

"Tadodaho." He said. "You would say… Chief. Over all the Haudenosaunee. Over the sachem council."

"And why have you brought me here, Chief?"

He puffed on the pipe, letting white coils billow upwards with that curious slowness of silt sinking through water, but reversed; rising to the surface, lifting up to Abstract bollocks.

Hold it together.

"You are here for a talk with the highest authority within our great Confederacy." He smiled, rotating the pipe in nimble old fingers. "The Haudenosaunee have been waiting for you."

"You knew I was coming?"

"Yes."

"You sent that kid to fetch me."

"Yes."

"How did he know where to look?"

He held out the pipe.

"A better question is: how did he know how to look?"

I pursed my lips. Stared at the pipe for a long time, then slowly shook my head.

"No thanks."

Clear head.

Know everything.

Cover the angles.

If my refusal constituted some big bloody cultural insult, or whatever, the old man gave no sign; shrugging good-naturedly and continuing to smoke himself.

Eventually, as the silence was killing me and the desire to blunder through to that kitchen and go crazy was starting to hotwire my muscles, he sighed through eddying clouds and said:

"My blood is not like yours."

"Excuse me?"

"Blood, Englishman. Blood types. I assume you are normal? Type 'O'. Rhesus negative. Yes?"

It was fucking weird, I don't mind telling you; sitting there in that warm lodge with a genuinely creepy tribal mystic, listening to him go off on one about bloody pathology. Like a brontosaurus with an MP3 player.