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The Green Place update
🕑 Added 2015-08-06 22:24:27 +0000 UTCThe War Boys were working out well. Respected her to begin with, too sick to learn to hate her to the tunes of the Doog Warrior, revived by the medicine the Vuvalini had brought. She didn’t think they were ever going to be quite right in the head, get out the ideas of being witnessed and shiny, but they respected the hierarchy and were impressed with the Many Mothers’ age, seeing them as desperately experienced soldiers, amazed they had been chrome enough to kill so many warriors, even if the warriors were on their side. And Furiosa didn’t have the heart to purge them. Seemed too much like something Joe would do.
Probably get her killed one day. It could wait in line with two dozen other things. But for now, it’d worked out. They’d gone off to Warlord Bix in the East, a dozen of her best men under the command of Sister Eleanor. Gave away some oil they didn’t need, gotten some salvage. Her War Boys had good eyes. Looked at the wrecked carcasses of eighteen-wheelers, garbage trucks, tractors, whatever those were, and saw the beginnings of a War Rig. It was a good project for Furiosa. Less frustrating than a lot of things.
With the blackthumbs done sketching out how they would smash everything together to hold their tonnage, all that was left was a lot of welding. Late at night, Furiosa gave the others their sleep and kept at it herself. The Rig she’d crashed at the past had been the third one in her time, others fallen to Buzzards and Scorps. She enjoyed working on them, building them. Gave her a touch with them, maybe why the one she’d done up as Imperator hadn’t failed her until that one last rune when she’d sacrificed it like she would anything else.
Worth it. Had to be.
Her torch went out. Furiosa turned, blinding goggles ripped away from her eyes, bad-arm ready to bludgeon in attack, but it was only Cheedo, turning off the gas from the acetylene tank. Furiosa finished the job, killing the deceptively soft glow on her burner in a bucket of urine. Bad idea to have much hot in the Citadel, where it was just warm enough for the real hot to catch, become a fire that could gut the place, show you what heat really meant.
And especially around Cheedo. She was growing up fast, as they all had, her girlish beauty becoming something more mature, understated. Her unfettered hair was now, in worship of Capable, braided into a single black plait that touched her shoulder blades. Her eyes were lined with dark kohl, her lips made purple—dyes from the new plants. But she still had that kind of innocence that made Furiosa want to protect, men like Joe want to use. Open flames, sharp edges, loaded guns, they didn’t seem to belong around her. Furiosa didn’t want them near.
“Cheedo,” Furiosa said, not sure what acknowledgment she should give. Still unsure of this world where she meant so much to so many. Where all of them had deemed her worthy of love, not just one foolish girl. Where there was even more she had to do to keep them safe.
Cheedo held up an earthenware bowl—something Max’s farmer had made. “The first harvest,” she explained.
They were red. Not the red of the sun or of blood, that angry red, but something vibrant. It reminded her of Capable’s hair. Angharad’s lips. The color itself was something soft with the essence of the girls. She reached out and touched one, in its strange skin. Didn’t seem to be red through and through, but her fingernail scraped the surface and there was, underneath, a kind of meat. It looked unspeakably tender.
But her oily hands had marked the red, turned its sheen to black. Furiosa snatched her hands back, as if she could pull back the stain as well, but it lingered there.
“It’s okay,” Cheedo said, setting the bowl down, picking up one of the things of red. She took a knife from her belt—the girls all had belts now, all with weapon and tools, so useful—and cut away a segment from the red like she was removing a part from an engine block. She took the segment, red on one side, pale on the other, and offered it to Furiosa. “It’s called an apple.”
The Citadel’s crops had had fruit before, but only Joe and his kin and his most prized things had eaten them like this. Furiosa had seen them in his quarters a few times when summoned; only been able to guess at them being some kind of artwork. For the rest of the Citadel—the War Boys, the Wretches, the Pups—the fruit was added with cores and rinds to the oats and grains, everything crushed into dust, added to water, made into a kind of sludge with nothing wasted. Furiosa had eaten it. She’d believed others when they said that man-flesh tasted better, even if Joe forbid it. It was no wonder most preferred mother’s milk.
The new operation, with some knowledgeable recruits from the Wretches, with some refugees, with those Max had saved, had given them cereals, bread. Those had been fine. This was sex.
Cheedo gently pushing it between Furiosa’s lips, timid still—she didn’t fear Furiosa, but she was afraid for her, and would’ve been frightened if it were someone else doing something as intimate for her as she was doing for Furiosa.
Furiosa bit down, uncertain, but trusting in Cheedo. The fruit, firm but soft between her teeth, sweetly resisting, relenting as she applied pressure. A crunch that was still somehow soft and then—Furiosa couldn’t help a moan—the flavor! A tang like tasting her own blood when she’d been hit in the mouth, but cleaner, sweeter, nothing of pain or misfortune. It tasted so good, Furiosa thought everything else she’d ever eaten must’ve hurt, just a little, and she’d not noticed.
Cheedo smiled, seeing the uncommon enjoyment on Furiosa’s face, the hapless and misplaced grin over the lingering taste. She wiped a little sheen of wetness from Furiosa’s lower lip without thinking, and took her fingers back from Furiosa’s face—staying near her chin, as if she had another slice of apple to feed her.
“Have you tried it?” Furiosa asked. She felt like giggling, and that she’d almost forgotten.
Cheedo shook her head. “They’re for you.”
“Try one.”
Cheedo took the apple in one hand, her knife in the other, but Furiosa put the cool metal of her bad-arm over Cheedo’s knife hand. Cheedo returned the knife to her belt, raised the apple to her mouth, and used her teeth alone to carve a segment out of the apple’s flesh. Furiosa saw the taste hit Cheedo, saw it written all over her face, and imagined that wild expression on her own face. Hair shorn, eyes darked, nose wiggling as she kept tasting something. She bit her lip to keep from giggling.
Then, quickly, Cheedo sat upon the driver’s seat in the open skeleton of the developing rig. Her body suddenly perpendicular to Furiosa’s. Furiosa hung back, getting a rag to wipe her hands clean.
“I know the others have been with you,” Cheedo said. “Capable and I think Toast too. Not that Toast would deny it, but I haven’t asked and she’s not the type to just make talk. At least, I don’t listen. It seems… different.”
“Scary?”
Cheedo gave a small nod. “Not really scary… we’ve seen really scary… but like…” Cheedo’s face contorted with strain, like she needed to force an explanation out. “We’ve all wanted you. All agreed that there’s no one else, that we’re going to take care of you. And you’re very… you’re very… I don’t think anyone else could make me want this like you do. But I can’t…”
“You don’t have to,” Furiosa said, quick only measured.
“I know. We waited a long time for you to choose one of us—thought you knew how much you meant—and when we saw Capable after and she was so happy, happier than we’ve ever been with each other… I should want this, I should want to be happy…”
“You don’t have to,” Furiosa said again. “That’s the only thing that’s important.
Again, the contortion of trying to explain. “I do want to. I think about it—I thought about it lying against your body, how it would feel to be with you, to really be yours like Toast is, or Capable…”
“That’s not what makes them mine. If they even are mine… I feel like I’m as much theirs as anything else.”
“That’s what I want!” Cheedo cried. “And I want you to be mine, even a little bit, I just can’t… right now I can’t do that again. Even though you’re nothing like him and it would be nothing like that and… and…”
Furiosa held out her hand, silently asking if it was alright for her to touch, and Cheedo pushed forward, rubbing her head kittenishly into Furiosa’s palm, smearing herself with the remnants of the grease on Furiosa’s fingers. She came closer, leaving her seat, and Furiosa pulled her into an embrace. Cheedo sniffling as she felt the warmth of Furiosa’s body and denied it.
“I’m going to make another bed,” Furiosa said, “in another room. I can go there if I want to be alone, or if someone wants to be alone with me, or you can go there if you want to be there. But either way, you’re always be part of this.”
Cheedo nodded against Furiosa’s body. “Imperator?”
Furiosa grinned despite herself, at Cheedo’s sudden stilted formality. “Yes?”
“Could you kiss me? Just that? I’d like to know what it’s like… with you.”
Furiosa showed her. She hoped it was like the apple—that you could take a bite and just leave it at that.
After Cheedo left, the taste remained. To make Furiosa wonder how could there be such goodness left in the world. What she’d do to defend it.
