Desert Flowers by Isobel Ledger & Edward Cooke

Deacon was banking thin ochre soil around her potatoes and the wind was blowing it away when Sexton came to her cottage, the last one in the village. She read the second murder in the fact of his presence, so that the grim look on his face was redundant. Together they walked down Street to the police station and went inside.

Somebody had alerted the shaman, either somebody who had decided on the spur of the moment to display an efficiency rare in Little Woldbury or somebody who just wanted to put one more obstacle in Deacon’s way. The shaman was the plumpest First Deacon had ever seen; although the chair was built on human scale and ought to have swallowed him, he still looked squeezed into its jaws.

Without rising, the shaman said, ‘You want to put the blame on my people. You are looking for an excuse to subject us to the wrath of your God. I am here to tell you we had nothing to do with this. I am here to beg for such mercy as you might have.’

Deacon went through the door marked ‘PRIVATE’, which led to the morgue.

Butcher gave her the tiniest of nods, avoiding her gaze. About the only thing they had ever agreed on was to part as friends. He must have known, better than most, that all the humor had gone out of her. Humor had the potential to change worlds. The only drawback was that changing worlds was a slow and uncertain process. A smile or a kind word might be contagious, but the contagion didn’t last. Little scraps of verdure in the wilderness.

Deacon looked down at the body and saw it was Barber’s. That made no difference to her; just one more thorn to join the bushel in her flank already. Barber was well-liked because he made people look good. He wasn’t one of the religious types who kept rebuking them for doing evil. His murder cried out to be avenged.

"Cause of death?”  Deacon asked Butcher. "Same as Constable?"

"Too soon to say, but right now it looks like it. My guess is Barber got an even bigger dose. Give him a few days in my greenhouse and I’ll know for sure."

Sexton was haunting the corner of the room behind the door as far from the body as he could get, as if he thought its death might contaminate his life. Deacon was tired of Sexton’s shirking.

“Send the shaman away. Then make me an appointment to see Bishop.”

Sexton shuffled his feet and looked appealingly at Butcher, who ignored him. Sexton hunched his shoulders in anticipation of the tongue-lashing he was bound to receive from the uppity First and went reluctantly out.

Deacon went through the connecting door into the office that used to be Constable’s. It had been given to her, at least until the church was built. She sat down at the desk she rarely used because nobody really wanted her to use it. You couldn’t keep a good woman down, but you could encourage her to tend her own garden.

Idly, she leafed through her in-tray. Bishop had sent her an invitation to his next fundraiser, even though he knew she wouldn’t’t attend. It was to be a gala dinner and, inevitably, an occasion for Bishop to preach his usual sermon: God’s justice for the indigenous people, God’s mercy for His own people. All proceeds to the church building fund. So far there was no sign of a church, but Bishop was a shrewd enough operator to realize it made people feel good to be invited to give to charity, and even better to believe they had disposable income. Little Woldbury was no longer the hardscrabble hamlet it had been in the first few years after the Church of England’s missionary expedition landed, but everyone was still struggling. The memory of having come very close to starvation lingered; the way Butcher had tentatively defrosted a few of his precious cattle, only to watch them lie down in their tiny terraformed pasture and die.

Deacon heard the shaman slam the front door behind him. Either the old goat was mellowing with age—not that the Firsts’ natural life expectancy was known even ten years after contact—or he had accepted there was absolutely nothing he could do but pray.

If the shaman’s acquiescence was surprising, the ease with which Deacon obtained an audience at the episcopal palace was downright suspicious. Bishop’s secretary showed Deacon straight in.

“Smoke?” Bishop asked. "I’ve got a few pouches to get through before I quit."

Deacon shook her head.

Bishop stoked his pipe from his dwindling supply of Earth tobacco. He was that ornery miracle, the man who had grown old in habits that ought years ago to have done him in. Deacon had supposed she didn’t like the fellow, but it struck her that she must like him better than anyone else she knew. She didn’t think he had killed Barber or Constable however, even though his desire to be the instrument of God’s Wrath constituted the strongest imaginable motive.

“I’ve nothing to say about this one that I didn’t say about the other fellow, only this time I’m saying it more loudly. Two men have died now, and a culprit must be found." Bishop exhaled a mushrooming cloud. "God’s will must be done."

“You know damn well the village will have my hide if I don’t declare the Firsts were responsible for both murders, and you’ll stand by and watch them flay it off me.”

Bishop winced, as they all did, these self-defined godly people, whenever anyone called a spade a spade. Deacon felt sick of them and faintly envious of the murderer, who had been seized by the entirely understandable desire to kill them all in their beds.

“Standing orders are what they are,” Bishop said. “Diplomacy and good relations with the indigenous culture are all very well in their place, and of course it’s vital to pay due respect to different heritages. When all’s said and done, if there is a credible threat to Little Woldbury from outside, it would be dereliction of my duty not to administer the Wrath of God. It’s my belief that these crimes constitute just such a threat.”

Deacon grasped her temper with both hands. "You’re the Bishop. It’s not for me to discern the higher mysteries of God’s ways. I do find it mysterious that God should get angry with the Firsts now of all times, when the cattle are just starting to breed nicely and we have a menu of options. Can’t the Firsts be left in peace?"

"After what they did to Priest? We should have acted prayerfully then, but you talked us out of it."

Deacon got to her feet, wondering why she had bothered to come. Bishop might look like an absent-minded grandfather, but underneath the genial air was trouble. The trouble was that Deacon’s were the ways that preserved peace, and Bishop’s were the kind that had made Plato come out with his epigram about only the dead having seen the end of war.

On her way home, Deacon passed Cooke’s Bar and Grill and heard the tinkling of laughter and toasting glasses. The faint aroma of marinated meat caught in her throat.

She prepared herself a thin vegetable soup for lunch. Then she sat on her veranda and smoked some of the tobacco that all but grew itself.

After a while she had company.

“How’s it been?” Priest asked.

“Been better.”

“Back on Earth?”

“There, and here before you went away.”

“When you think things were better on Earth, that’s when you know for sure you’re starting to go out of your mind.”

"You've found peace here."

“You could do the same."

“You have a very obvious motive.”

Priest smiled. “For killing Barber?”

“For wanting me to come and join you.”

“It would be dandy for us to be together again, but I’m happy enough to come over here every once in a while and have a smoke with you.”

They smoked in silence until Priest said, “If you’re going to crack this case, you’ll have to go back to the very beginning. Remember Cain and Abel?”

"I remember God declared Abel the winner. I think He was wrong."

"‘God is infallible, just like our friend Bishop."

"‘Cain was the one who wanted to live sustainably off his crops. When he invited God to do the same, God threw a tantrum and demanded meat for His table. Abel delivered, and that pissed Cain off. Are you surprised Abel got what was coming to him?’

"Such a pity Bishop wouldn’t’t let you preach. You tell it like it is."

When Deacon awoke, her mouth tasted like she’d eaten a handful of dust and Priest was dead once more. She forced herself out of her rocking chair and into the windswept garden to turn over the fledgling soil. As she stood on the fork, she pretended her boot was driving the tines into Bishop’s eyes. The same Bishop who sent Priest to deliver the Gospel to the Firsts, even though he knew they would cling to their old beliefs. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and they killed Priest for piercing a cactus in order to drink from it.

Eventually, when she could no longer persuade herself she was achieving anything, and the weight of the task she was putting off became too great, she left the fork standing upright in the sandy soil, where it held its own against the wind for all of ten seconds.

It was late, but the local sun was never in any hurry to set. Deacon circled around the back of Street to avoid meeting anyone on her way to see Butcher at home.

Butcher’s farmhouse was bigger than Bishop’s palace and his acreage was gaining outbuildings all the time as grateful villagers voted him the use of more and more of the colony’s dwindling supply of inflatable concrete. At this rate there would be nothing left to build the church.

The smell of the slaughterhouses made Deacon gag. She wanted to turn back, but she was as tired of her own excuses as of everyone else’s.

She found Butcher in a small greenhouse that could barely contain several barrels and a huge sunflower in a tall urn. They stood and looked out at the beauty of the planet the Church had baptized Abel, which was a lot easier to appreciate without the wind blowing native dust and artificial soil into their faces.

When the time for business came, Butcher said, “I expect you want to take a look at how Constable is doing.”

“That him? I didn’t think plants were really your thing.”

Deacon went and looked over the rim of the urn, which hid from view Constable's face: pale in the brown soil, wide-open mouth emitting the sunflower like a primal scream.

She said, “It’s been long enough that you ought to be able to tell me what you didn’t know before. How much terraformant must he have ingested, and would he have noticed?”

“The short answer is: it depends. My guess is, if he was sober, he couldn’t have failed to realize what was going on. We’re looking at a pretty big dose to have produced a flower like this right out of the gate. You know as well as I do what terraformant is like. Hit and miss, mostly miss, and like watching paint dry. He’s only been dead, what, a couple of months? So, I’d say it must have been some dose.”

“So, it’s more likely someone put a gun to his head and handed him a flask labelled “Drink Me?”

Butcher grunted.

Deacon took a slow breath in and out; if she was going to act on her hunch, there was no better time than the present. "Wouldn’t’t it be awfully convenient if that weapon were not a gun but a bone knife, and if that person were not a villager but an ungrateful First, come back in the middle of the night to poison one of us with the terraformant you said you’d given them? From the smell, I’d guess that was a barrel of the stuff over there.”

Butcher looked wistful. “You remember when you and I used to sit on your porch and smoke your baccy?”

Deacon said through clenched teeth, “Sure, I remember.”

"What we did afterwards? Those were good times, Blue.”

“This was never about the Firsts. You wanted to turn the whole village against me because you knew I’d never accept a First was responsible.”

“I’m not vindictive, you know that."

“You tried to use me, and when you realized I didn’t want to be used, didn’t want to be Mrs. Butcher and think and pray as you did, kill and eat whatever meat we could find as you did, we were through.”

Butcher shrugged.

Deacon said it. “You killed Constable and Barber.”

" I freed their inner flower. Do you know what? I believe Barber is going to be an orchid.” Butcher’s eyes were shining and his mouth broke into a toothy grin.

“I’m going to tell Bishop it was you.” The words caught in her throat as he looked her in the eyes for the first time in months.

"Do you suppose for one moment Bishop is going to believe you? That man thinks he wants to serve God, but the truth about human beings is this: deep down, we all want to be useful to one another in order to be loved. Bishop is no use except to authorize the deployment of God’s Wrath against hostile Firsts. I’ve given him a reason to do it."

Deacon went for him, but her whole heart wasn’t in it and he had been expecting it ever since she came in. He got her down on the floor with all his weight on top of her and his hands around her neck and both his thumbs on her windpipe. He pressed down and her world went purple and black. She saw Priest’s face and wondered whether she was at home on her veranda and would wake up soon. Then she knew she was going to die and tried to pray for her own soul, but no words came because she had lived too closely and too long among other people to believe in God anymore.

The barrel of terraformant smashed into the side of Butcher’s head and jellied his eye. The pressure fell away from Deacon’s throat and she breathed and swallowed and breathed. The effort had torn the sunflower free from the urn and the coils of its stem slackened around the leaking barrel.

Deacon wandered freely in the desert. More and more often she came across war parties of Firsts that ought to have killed her, but they left her alone, because the prickly pear growing out of her shoulder was sacred to them.

Isobel Ledger & Edward Cooke

Isobel Ledger studied Drama and Theatre at the University of Lincoln. She is active in the BookTube and AuthorTube communities as @isobelreadsandwrites.

Edward Cooke has written technical documentation, stage musicals, a short film and a note in class that nearly got him expelled.