They didn’t know my history in Cro but they would know me for what I was the moment they looked at me. After all, even the Arraclids had turned away from me. But what were my options, precisely? Walk into the wilderness and die a famished death? No, but neither would I walk onto the spears of the Cro folk or expose my body to their sling stones.
I became a thief. It was what Sethr had been before they Severed him, and so I felt I was somehow earning my exile after the fact. I crept into Cro every three nights or so and I took what I could. I went to the baker’s and I stole bread, the more burned the better. I stole clothes to keep off the rain and hold the cold at bay. I reached through windows and lifted shoes that looked right to fit my feet. I even stole their flowers because for one night I was able to get a little sustenance from them, before they started to turn my stomach like everything else.
The people of Cro worked out quick enough what was going on. After my fourth raid, they had guards out, but it was a big place and my eyes had got used to the dark by then. I would make a commotion near their livestock to draw them away and then run off to the other end of the village to steal everything I could. I took things I didn’t need, food I wouldn’t eat. I was in a frenzy of adrenaline and self-loathing and I hated them for all the things I couldn’t enjoy.
And then their Lawgiver must have made a pronouncement, because they started going out and hunting me, and although I’d had to learn some woodcraft the hard way, their hunters were always going to be better at it.
I ran—I could run by then, better fed and better shod than I had been for a long time. For a whole day they chased me, and I didn’t make it easy for them. I wasn’t some beast to just charge headlong away from their shouts and torches and sticks beating against the branches. I doubled back, I hid, I led them towards where real predators laired. I didn’t recognise myself in that mad pursuit. I made them my enemies in my head, as though they had wronged me. I took up a sharp branch and resolved that I would do mischief to any of them to fall within my power. I had been helpless for so long, ever since stupid Doctor Corto had left his stupid Severance mixture bubbling away untended. I was going to take back control, in blood if I had to.
And then I had my chance, because one of their hunters ended up going down a slope badly and twisting her knee against a tree. She’d been ahead or away from the others, and when she called out for aid, I was the first one who heard. I remember very clearly: me cresting the rise, looking down on her, my jagged branch in hand. Her round face, so much white around her eyes as she stared. She had broken her spear when she fell, and the end she thrust towards me was little more than a knife.
I wanted to make her scared, to threaten her or make a terrifying face or brandish my stick, but she was already plenty scared without me doing anything. The mere fact of me was terrifying, like a corpse come to life or something met in a bad dream.
Any desire to hurt her, or anyone, died in that moment, and instead I just sat down and started crying. I felt empty inside, not for food but because this was the first human being I had come face-to-face with in ages and no matter how close I came, even onto the end of her half spear, there would still be an insuperable distance between us.
“What do you want?” she demanded, and I started. I had almost forgotten what it was like to be talked to. I had to reach deep inside myself to find words.
“I’ll go,” I told her. “But tell me where I can go. Some other village. Just give me somewhere to head for.” All that mischief I had wanted to make, all the vengeful glee at taking away the trappings of their comfortable lives, it left me all at once and I was just exhausted, tired of being hunted, tired of being hated.
She stared at me for a long time, as though trying to see me differently, like a person. Like a boy scarcely sixteen, painfully gaunt with his face streaked with dirt and tears.
“If you go the way the sun rises, there’s Divo,” she told me. “The way the Haffet flowers grow. Divo’s bigger than we are. They’ll have more for you.” And that was a lie, but she was desperate.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I just . . . I’m so hungry. It’s hard. It’s too hard.” I could hear others from the hunting party calling now. I couldn’t just sit here and talk, but the words kept tumbling out of me as though trying to escape. I could see her frowning and squinting like someone trying to bring my predicament into focus. She wanted to understand what I meant, what it was to be me, but she couldn’t. She would have an easier time understanding an Arraclid or a Sherb.
And so I accepted that I had outstayed my welcome at Cro and moved on to Divo, which in fact was smaller and harder to get at, nestled in between hills overgrown with a thorny vine I saw nowhere else. I had lean pickings there but the Divo folk had a similar problem, short of good grazing and farming land. They brewed various goods out of a score of plants, some strange, others familiar but put to novel uses. These they traded for surplus from Cro and a half dozen other communities, and in this way I drifted from place to place, taking what I could, moving on when my feeble depredations were noticed. It kept me alive, but more than that it gave me a purpose and a feeling that I had some control over my life. Better a thief than a corpse, yes, but better a thief than a beggar as well. The world finds it harder to say no to a thief.
So it went until I came to Orovo, which was the largest place I’ve ever seen, surely five times the size of Cro, which itself was bigger than ever Aro was. And at Orovo, my life would change again, though I won’t say I gained any more control over it. Orovo was a place of strange ideas, because it was where Iblis lived.
V.
OROVO MIGHT COVER FIVE times the area of Cro, but it crammed even more people into that area than you’d think. They’d built houses in between their houses, and some of the newest buildings—some still being completed—were very different to anything I’d seen before. I didn’t know it, but they were different to anything there had been before. They were houses built on top of houses, so that the people who lived in the top part went up a ramp or steps to get to their door, and the people who lived below must have heard them clumping about on the ceiling every night and morning. It was all to claw more space without spreading Orovo’s boundaries even further, and even then it was too little, too late. Orovo folk just liked having kids, I think, and so had their Ma’s, and so had theirs before them. There were more people in Orovo than they could easily feed or house or find a use for. The woods had been cut back all around the town for fields, and beyond that they had been hunted until nothing bigger than a Hegelworm was left.
Now normally this isn’t a thing that happens, although I had never asked myself why. Villages only grow slowly, enough that the farming and the hunting could keep up with demands. You almost never see a place like Orovo where too many kids a generation ago means way too many today, and most of them having kids themselves. At the time I couldn’t even understand that something had gone wrong, but now I reckon that, a generation back, something got botched. Maybe they had an Architect who went odd like our Doctor Corto, or more likely there was a problem with the hive itself, that meant it missed what was happening or wasn’t able to correct folk, but by the time things straightened themselves out, the place was too big, the people too many, for the usual controls to get things back in hand. Or that’s what I think now, knowing what I do.