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It started the day Angharad read Chaucer. The Baker’s Wife, though she spoke in a way different from her daily language, Angharad could feel something. Something powerful. A separate being from that of her husband, an ownership over her own body. Miss Gilly had taught her to read in the quiet of the day, when Immortan Joe would be too overheated to come in. She’d taught her and she’d soaked up works like the floor did spilled mothersmilk.
When Capable came, white and shaved down, Angharad taught her to read too. Once she’d memorized Goodnight Moon, Angharad brought her the Chaucer book. She waited for her to read it, sitting next to her, fingers tapping. She tried to read something else, not to put pressure on her, but it was too much, too close to the bone. She helped with the hard words, and waited, waited for days and days.
When Capable finished reading it, she looked up, red hair just getting its curl back.
“She doesn’t have to say yes to her husband,” she said. Angharad nodded. They kept reading.
The Dag was the one who found Proust and nearly ruined reading for Toast when she arrived. Toast just hadn’t been able to get into it, and she’d flamed out. That had been around the third miscarriage, so she had little time she could think without unmentionable pain. She’d taken to sorting the books to give her hands a break from wringing. That was how she found the Asimov that had fallen behind the bookcase. Reading his orderly world, with his machines controlled by men and no cults to speak of, helped her put her world in order again. It started her thinking about escape, and violence.
—
Angharad read every book in the tomb, then read it again, then again. There were no duties associated with being a wife of Immortan Joe, aside from the odious obvious. So she read. She found John Stewart Mills and Alexander Dumas and Thomas Friedman. She found Herland and Cleopatra and in the back of other book, ripped from its spine and hidden closely in a cookbook for long-dead animals, a chapter of Handmaid’s Tale.
She lived in that chapter of Handmaid’s Tale for that entire first, worst pregnancy. It was exactly right, its rhythms fit hers in a way she thought nothing could. As she read and read, she could feel her thoughts getting clearer. She could think about things a long time ago or far in the future and had the words for them. She could fly or sink beneath the sea when she needed to. She felt a burning like a long day in the sun, but in her mind, to make sure the other women had these vault-exits too, ones they could take with them no matter where they went. She told them what Handmaid’s Tale had told her. She told the others, hushed voice in the constant twilight of the vault: We are not things.
Then The Dag found Catch 22 and gave it to her. The violence, the unceasing griminess easily was in the tune of the world outside of their tomb. There were no pregnant women in the story, but instead rose above their eyes an entire generation that lived and died in war.
She read it and passed it on to Capable to read. They read and thought and read and thought. Until that book, their fantasies of escape had centered on murder—killing Immortan Joe was such a huge concept they had trouble planning past it, but perhaps there would be a welcome for them past Gastown if they did, somewhere out in the further reaches? Maybe there was something in the world that would reward the kind of violence they all dreamed of unleashing on his flappy fapping form.
But after reading Catch 22, they began to wonder at how much killing would be necessary. They had all assumed they would need to slaughter War Pups and War Boys to escape, had begun to harden their hard hearts to the idea of blood other than their own covering the brown-dirt floor. Miss Gilly had taught them the War Boys were monsters who would eat any wife she tried to escape, who ate death. She said sole purpose of War Boys as they’d been taught was to keep them locked up and to die for Immortal Joe. She said this, knowing some of her sons lived warped among them. But perhaps there was more to them, could be more to them, than just dying in his service. Our babies will not be warlords.
They discussed this in a circle around the low water pool which kept the vault cool, all imagining the violence they would do to the War Pups. All except for Cheedo, who sat reading a chemistry textbook on a rug. The book had bright shapes and windows into other worlds, worlds filled with clear glass and many flat tables like the Organic Mechanic had in his workshop. She was reading about how to tell the truth with tests.
As she listened, she thought had no evidence to go on that War Pups were worth saving, because their interactions were too brief. Chedo closed the book and decided to test the theory so she could show them. To test whether they were monsters or people, full of good or bad intentions. Before they could stop her, she ran out of the vault door, past the stunned guards.
She raced through corridors and over and under windows. She had lived as a runnertalker in the Citadel for years before Immortan Joe had taken her. She waited until her pursuit lost her, then crouched in a shadow, waiting for a single War Pup to walk past. She watched the groups, laughing, howling, fighting. They’d never scared her as a child, but they’d never looked at her standing beside their god then either. They seemed like pups in reality, not just in name. Then, all of her stealth hidden again, she stepped in front of him with body stiff and pretended to trip. Not a complex test, but she couldn’t set up a double-blind here. She tripped and looked up, to see if the War Pup noticed and would help.
His eyes were wide and tracked her, and up-close she could see his lips were cut wide and then stapled together again.
“You dying too?” he asked, hunching down and holding his hand out.
She froze and then shook her head slowly, not reaching back for his hands.
He cocked his head and let his hand hang limp on his knees.
“Alright. You gonna sit in the dirt there?”
Cheedo shook her head again, and then unable to keep lying down under his gaze, picked herself up. He rose, joints crackling, as she stood. She put out her hand, nearly touching his chest. He followed her hand, eyes wide. Then they heard Erectus’s steps in the hallway over and the War Pup was running. He might not know if she was dying, but he knew he would if they caught him near her.
Cheedo stepped into the shadows and let Erectus thunder by, then made her own way back with careful steps, brushing the dust from the hallway from her white linens.
“They can speak.” she said. The other women nodded. “I think they might be people too.” She needed to test.
—
Her next test was on a group of them. She waited in an alcove until she heard a good-sized group coming down the corridor. The war drums hadn’t beat in days, so they wouldn’t be frenzied. They hadn’t had a recent harvest from the hidden garden she only saw when she was ordered to be decoration for a trade visit, so they would be weakened with hunger. She thought that might make them compliant subjects.
Once she thought they were near, she stepped out into the middle of the corridor and turned to face them.
“I have a question for you.” she said in a clear voice, and waited. They all stopped. They’d seen the women in white from the top of towers and over the edges of walls, but they had to a boy never seen one in person.
“How old are each of you?” Their blank stares told her she was speaking wrong for them.
“How many harvests have you seen?”
One boy stepped forward, about her height, with large, clustered lumps on his forearm, weighing it down. His chest scars were in straight lines, forming boxes like the charts in her book.
“I have five-and-five-and-five harvests, these ones behind me mostly have the same.” Then he was silent, joining the rest in staring at her. The stares were strange, not the possessiveness of the traders who Immortal Joe displayed her for, but more like the way Capable looked when she started a new book.
“Can we go?” he asked at length. “We have watch and we’ll get creamed if we’re after-clock.”
She stepped to the side and they filed in front of her, unwilling to risk brushing her, crowding against the corridor. Not one lacked lumps, not one lacked scars. Cheedo decided she needed one more test. It would require a helper.
—
She waited and watched until she learned his patterns. Then she stepped out in front of him, like she had those weeks ago. He startled up and looked at her, eyes bright. There was a gash on his forehead, sewn up and covered in white clay that was turning brown. She reached her hand out and he jumped back. She let her hand fall.
“You dying?” she asked, experimental method lost in the strange overwhelmingness of concern.
“Just hurting, hurting for Immortan Joe’s glory.”
“There wasn’t a war raid, was there?” she asked.
“This for his glory,” he said, gesturing to his forehead.
She would take time to think about that hurt, time and quiet. For now, she said: “Can I borrow your time?”
“I have no time of mine, but I am unbusy now.” His voice was slower than it had been before, slightly slurred. She squinted her eyes, trying to get a better look at his gash.
“Alright.” she said. “Why do you fight?”
He paused, and cocked his head again. There had been a trader with a brightly colored bird that had once tried to trade the Immortan his bird for one of her sisters. It had cocked its head like that, before Immortan Joe had pulled it and the man to pieces for the insult.
He was still looking at her, eyes wide and head tilted. “If I fight, I die historic. I not fight, I sleep forever in sandwastes. Do you not fight?”
She paused and shook her head, hair falling across her eyes. “I do not fight.”
He broke into a smile, skin around his staples stretching. “You should fight. Fighting is shiny and chrome.” He started to move past her, the way he had been going before.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said, and before he could run, laid her hand on his arm. He was solid, and she realized a child-part of her had expected him to be the ghost-thing of her nightmares. He looked at her, and then her hand, and then started running, rubbing the clay back over the place where her hand had taken it. She looked at her palm and thought. She let her hand hang to her side as she walked back, and carefully scraped the clay into a small pile near her bed. She fell asleep that night looking at it, and wondering.
—
Angharad had another book for Cheedo, after her experiments were done and reported on. It was a book on plants, on growing things. She had shown a willingness to get dirty, and Angharad thought she might find a way into the gardens, the places that they had seen only during trading missions, when they were brought out for show. Cheedo saw the small pieces, like bullets, that went into brown dirt like she had never seen. She saw tiny things like hairs but green growing in the dirt in the windows in the books.
She read about how plants made air and food. There was a small colored box in the book that showed pictures of great, tall flowers with petals like the sun’s rays that it said could heal sour soil. She read and thought and read.
She shared it with The Dag, whose eyes got big in her mothersmilk white face. She touched the seeds in the picture and then touched her mouth. “We could build the world with these.”
Cheedo nodded. She decided she would find a way to the green place on top of the Citadel. She found it, head draped and body wrapped. There were women in charge of the plants, but they could not speak to her, instead turning away. She thought it was anger, or fear, but too late she realized they had no tongues. Perhaps Immortan Joe did not want them spilling the secrets of a green and growing life. Their eyes told her they had lost more than their tongues, but still they gardened, She tried to learn by watching them.
The day she realized she was pregnant, she wanted to throw herself from the top of the Citadel, to dive under the wheels of Furiousa’s war rig. She knew she could do it, she had learned all of the ways to get into and out of the Citadel. She was walking in the garden, slowly eyeing the cliffs, when one of the speechless women stopped her. She gripped her thin wrist in a scarred palm and took her to a corner where the sun fell. There were rocks bounding a small patch of earth. The woman pointed to Cheedo, then the earth, then reached behind her, to a loop of cloth hidden in her clothes. She pulled out a handful of seeds, thick white ones and a cluster of knotty black ones and a few slender grey ones. She pressed the seeds into Cheedo’s hand and then pointed to the dirt.
“Mother, could you show me?” The woman nodded, and then pointed to the sun, and then shielded her eyes. After dark then. Cheedo decided she could live until after dark, for these seeds.
—
Cheedo slept after that first planting, and then awoke to the other women looking at her, except for Angharad who was deep in a book. They saw the scratches from the dirt on her hands. They knew how a first pregnancy could go. They feared for her, and her late nights. She sat up.
“I have made a garden.” she said, and their eyes widened. “I have a place here while the seeds will grow.”
They nodded, and Angharad looked up from her thick book. “The things you have learned from plants, what do they tell us?”
“Plants can rebuild the world.” Cheedo said with conviction.
“Do you now know who killed the world?” Cheedo shook her head, head down. Angharad nodded. “It’s a start, knowing how to fix what is broken. But we need to know what killed the world.”
—
Angharad had been reading a thick book that had been holding down a piece of carpet. It had a bit title: A Theory of Justice, by John Rawls. She read it, taking days to get through pages, it was so thick with thoughts. She read one page and it told her about the veil of ignorance. She thought about it meaning that no one deserved what they were born with, War Pup or Wife. That death was a heavy gift to give anyone.
She thought about it, and told the others, surer now than she had ever been. Our babies will not be warlords.
She always talked with them, tried to put in all of their minds each of the things they learned with reading. The big thoughts they all had learned were simple. That they were not things. War Boys and War Pups were people. That unnecessary killing was wrong. They read and agreed: these would be their tenets. And she kept reading, and tried to keep them reading, keeping their minds strong. Cheedo she could never control, she would just fly away at the softest correction. She had stopped reading entirely to garden, burying herself in the dirt as the babe grew in her. When she lost the baby, she buried the bloody rags in her garden and let the plants’ roots eat her sorrow with her.
They read what they wanted, but it was Capable who started organizing the books, taking over from where Toast had started. That was how they found the book by Howard Zinn, The People’s History of the United States, covers stripped and entire pages ripped out, the rest covered in scribbles. Through the covering-ink they learned about capitalism and nuclear bombs and global warming, and began to think they might know what killed the world.
They couldn’t find any other histories, but there were ripped pages slipped between innocuous covers. They thought there might have been a culling, someone before them who took that knowledge forever out of the world. To protect them or hurt them, they could not know. They tried to reconstruct what they could, from telling each other what they found, but there was nothing firm. Capable mourned this loss the hardest, because the one history they had had consumed her with hope that they might finally know who killed the world.
—
When Furiosa came to them one night after a screaming night with stories of a green place she’d seen dozens of times in her dreams but not in person in nearly 7000 days, they knew what they needed do. They took dirt from the floor and mothersmilk and turned it into paint and wrote what they had learned on the walls. Capable insisted they write the question too, insisted they remembered what they didn’t know. Angharad had promised Cheedo a new garden in the green place, but Cheedo didn't believe her. She wouldn’t be left behind, but she cried that night, thinking of her blood-fed garden.
It was the darkest part of the night, and they used their hands to kill the sole guard outside of their door. Cheedo showed them the way, over sills and underground. She grimaced as her sisters winced and made complaining faces. Her hands were hard from the garden and her heart harder still.
She got them outside, and met Furiosa’s eyes as they found her in the darkness, half-head covered in grease. Cheedo looked at her, and saw hardness in the glint of her hand. As she bent low to get into the darkness of the tank, she heard Furiosa whisper: “Keep quiet.”
Cheedo knew they would, like seeds in the earth.