Kalik by Jack Lasenby Read Free Book Online

not know my good intentions. I had to bring a guard to order themoutside. Even then, they stayed close, ready to dash inside again.
    Three had to be carried outside. They were dying. I made the guards bring water, wet their mouths. One looked as if she had the wasting disease, tuberculosis. The other two, a girl and a boy, responded neither to touch nor sound. Their pulses a tiny thread; their eyes did not focus. These were beyond my help. At least they died in the warm sun.
    Many of the others showed the same apathy, eyes that saw nothing. The guards were unwilling but, when I threatened to complain to Lutha again, brought baskets of cooked fish and potatoes. The Children bolted the food, most cowering away from each other. I helped the smallest, a boy who whispered his name was Chak and smiled.
    “While I am here, you can stay outside. Don’t go near the stockade or the gates,” I told the Children and went to work. Splinting several broken limbs, ordering a fire lit, water heated. I set several bigger children to washing the cuts, the sores, ugly wounds of neglect.
    I noticed the other signs of damage: slumped bodies, the closed faces of children who had been treated cruelly, had no trust. Some responded to my first words of kindness. First Chak, then a girl, Kimi, who played with Nip. I wondered again why some people give in, why some survive. Kimi and Chak were the youngest of the Children. Perhaps that helped.
    In the other hut two corpses lay inside the door. The same stench, apathy, and terror. We got those children out into the light, and I called for more food. I washed, bound, and treated what wounds and sores I could see and set several more broken limbs.
    One of the satisfactions of being a Healer is that children get better so quickly. Some. Others die just as quickly. After the first desperate days, I got permission to dig graves. A clever-handed older boy carved stakes with faces of the dead, quickly done, just a few lines cut in the wood. It might help the Children, remembering them.
    We scrubbed the huts. Cut windows in the walls. Sun sweetened the air and the dirt floors. The guards scoffed but did not interfere when I built bunks and strewed them with fern. Until then the Children had slept on the fouled earth. We dug latrines, separate ones for boys and girls.
    There were over twenty children, some captured by Kalik several years ago. The ones who had been here longest were quickest to seize any food, grabbing the best for themselves. They had learned to survive at the expense of new arrivals.
    The strongest were used as slaves to fetch firewood from the beaches, carry water, dig rubbish pits and latrines. They dragged up the canoes before storms. They were on call to anyone repairing the buildings, maintaining the palisade, fences, trenches.
    Some of the bigger girls were used to look after babies. One helped me with the smaller children, said her name was Maka. A bruise covered one side of her face, that eye bloodshot still. “You’re the one Lutha struck?” She said nothing.
    As they got better, the smaller Salt Children helped the older boys in the gardens, the orchard, tending the grape vines. Each day they carried in fruit and vegetables: greens, potatoes, onions, beans. Lutha agreed their work was valuable. “Just don’t go thinking they’re human,” she said.
    The Children had survived on scraps, gnawing vegetables raw, stealing fruit. We built chimneys on the huts, and I taught them to cook.
    Each day, fish were speared and netted, and people helped themselves from the racks on the beach. Any left over were smoked. There was always a good supply to carry through bad weather – or another attack by the Salt Men.
    When hunting parties brought in carcasses of deer, goats, the occasional bear, the best cuts went to Lutha and her Maidens. Then the hunters themselves. The remainder was distributed through the settlement according to need.
    My claim of fish for the Salt Children raised no