Seeder, Chapter Two
2. Yarrow
It’s not the name in the staff sergeant’s book, but the boy is called Yarrow, the only name his heart answers to. It was offered to him rather than impressed on him, and it’s dear enough he keeps it secret. The name the staff sergeant calls him is a garble of sounds that slick off Yarrow’s mind like rain off jade leaf.
“Tell me how much you love the war,” says the staff sergeant. He’s broad, edges filed away. His grey uniform is clean, but has the burnished look of clothes worn two days in a row. Not that Yarrow Achillea can criticize; his long sleeve and jeans haven’t seen the wash in weeks, although he alternates them with an identical outfit, as if his clothes don’t need cleaning but rest. The staff sergeant’s cubicle is one of three in an office that was a grocery before the army claimed it — not like there were vegetables anyway. It contains a bare steel desk, a pastel print of the Urizen family old enough the sick priest, dead three years, lurks in the shadows behind Atma Urizen, his skeletal fingers on her bare shoulder, and a tin type of three young boys with their mother. Yarrow looks at the boys and imagines them growing into three copies of the staff sergeant. Proliferation is the nature of weeds.
Yarrow knows the questions in advance; he’d be an idiot to walk in not knowing. Recruitment interviews are branching paths: early questions dictate what comes later. The staff sergeant might have asked where Yarrow’s parents are from, or what level he’d reached in school, but he’d taken in Yarrow’s skin — darker than Belovodi unionists and topped with jet curls — and assumed those questions irrelevant. The only reason Yarrow’s allowed in the recruitment office to interview for a commission, rather than press-ganged into a train car bound for the front, is his smile: rows of perfect pearls so aligned and symmetrical people invent mythologies about him, treat him kindly on the chance he has fey blood, or wandered out of the Fold. Yarrow’s relieved the interview takes this course; he won’t have to invent himself a history.
“The war’s the most important thing, isn’t it?” Yarrow says, leaning back in his chair as if he and the staff sergeant are old friends, chatting over the state of the nation. “I didn’t understand myself before it. I live in Belovode, was how I thought about it. Maybe I live in the Ramps, or I came up in East Tracks. Local and small, the way you see things from the ground. Then the war came and I knew I wasn’t just Belovodi, or a Ramp Rat,. I was part of a larger whole, a citizen of Lod. Not a filing on the dirt floor but an atom in the ingot.”
This risks going too far; An Atom in the Ingot is the title of a recruitment tract the army distributes in East Track and the Ramps, hoping literates read it to their brethren. Yarrow has the words committed to memory, along with the clunking attempts at folk songs the army disseminates; tuneless ditties like “Cast Me, Molten, Into the Mold” and “Stronger We, Forged in Flame.” Then there are the response songs, songs whose lyrics aren’t written down but sung only when the doors of the union halls are closed and the singers can segue into their patriotic analogues if a pharaoh wanders by. Titles like “Keep My Queen Hot and Wet” and “Rise Up in the Morning, Hard as Steel.” Yarrow can quote the law and yesterday’s broadsheets, and the aphorisms of the Garden and the poetry of drowned Kitezh. Yarrow’s problem is deployment. He doesn’t know when to speak which words, and many of the words in his head could land him in prison spoken in the wrong room.
The moonflower’s petals are too delicate for the sun, its wisdom is that it blooms only in darkness.
Yarrow watches the staff sergeant’s face to see if he’s come off obsequious, revealing a glimmer of intelligence unbefitting a rat from the Ramps.
“That’s good,” says the staff sergeant. “And I can tell you, that’s only the first lesson the war has to teach. The idea of the war has made you a citizen. The front, the war itself, can make you a man.”
Yarrow understands the ground they’re on. They speak in platitudes and slogans. There’s no nationalist sentiment Yarrow can spout the staff sergeant won’t lap up. He lets the staff sergeant fill the space between them with talk and slips his hand into the pocket of his pants, which contains a razor blade and an acorn. The latter he palms, holding it with his pinky and bare ring finger. He feels the symbols Phlox etched into it, lines so thin he couldn’t see them when she gave it to him. The smooth surface is scored with a network of sigils. He fumbles the razor blade in between his thumb and index finger, knicking the mount of Saturn at the base of his middle finger. His face doesn’t betray the wound; he smiles as the staff sergeant talks about heroism. Dulce et decorum est. Manipulating the blade into the desired position, he slices a hole in the bottom of the pocket, barely big enough to slide the acorn through; he has to push the broadest bit through, daubing it with blood. The acorn tumbles a random path down his pants, tickling the hairs on his leg before it drops out the cuff, next to his shoe.
“I came up poor myself,” the staff sergeant says. “Not East Track poor, but we had holes in our shoes. Look at me now.” Yarrow obliges, taking in the broad belly of a man who hasn’t seen combat since the first offensives, five years ago. His grey uniform patched with lesser cloth, bare of decoration. From nearly nothing to barely anything, Yarrow thinks. What a journey. He chuckles with the staff sergeant, but Yarrow’s past poverty makes the slums of East Track seem palatial. Belovodi think they know hardship, but they have the steel without the smoke. At least East Track has sky. With the tip of his hempen boot, Yarrow kicks the acorn into the corner of the recruiting office, behind a metal filing cabinet where it won’t be found.
“I think I have everything I need,” says the staff sergreant. “There’s forms to fill out, because there’s always forms. But if you report back on Monday, we’ll have a place for you in this man’s army. Here. ” The staff sergeant hands Yarrow an iron disc, thinner than a coin, with the seal of the army imprinted on it: a sword and staff crossed over the image of a forge. “Some new recruits do a bit of wilding their last days in the city,” he says. “Not that we condone it. But if the pharaohs pick you up on a drunk and disorderly, show them that and they’ll let you walk.”
Yarrow rolls and flips the get out of jail free coin across his knuckles, and slips it in his pocket next to the razor blade. The staff sergeant puts out his meaty hand and addresses Yarrow by the false name on his commission documents; Yarrow’s head swivels to see if someone else is in the room. There’s only him, the staff sergeant, and the acorn, idling in the corner. Yarrow takes his hand out of his pocket and shakes the staff sergeant’s, leaving a spot of blood on the place where their Saturn’s mounts meet.
