Pilgrimage v1.0, page 17
“Yeah,” Halsam grumbled. “Always.”
“We’ve kept something, though,” Liza said. “We can be together.” She grinned at Brann; were the light not so yellow, perhaps he would have seen her blush.
“Together, yes!” Leoht agreed. She hadn’t lost that, they discovered again.
“Is it the ocean?” Halsam asked. The dead place ended at a rusty beach which extended miles each way toward the city’s flanks. A constellation of sunlamps burned in the ceiling high above, still yellow as the dead place’s diffuse lights were, but bright with single points. The water lapped up onto the beach. It was red and murky with dissolved rust. In its depth were the encrusted shapes of machines. Their structures were bitten off by oxidation at the waterline.
“The water falls under the ceiling?” Halsam wondered. “Where could it go?”
They were not used to a horizon. The view from Tailend was of abrupt ending at the mountains and of a skyline merging with the floor of the tier above. None of them had experienced a place where the ceiling was so high and the surface below so flat and extended that curvature alone brought vision to an end. (In the Farmy Fields during the short time they had ventured outside the city, vertigo had stolen the horizon.)
“The ocean was different,” Leoht remembered. “It was outside the city, not beneath it. It moved, boiling and crashing down. This is something else.”
They moved along the shore for a time, testing the warm rusty water with their feet Even this minor sea seemed endless compared with the tiny swimmingpool on their tier at Tailend. While the water scared them, it was Leoht who seemed tom. She knew nothing of water at all and yet the voice among the dead machines had grown more insistent so that only Halsam’s proximity seemed able to hold her from joining the speaker of that voice. And here they made no progress away from it, but only went perpendicular to their old path, with the mechanic pacing them. Halsam saw it “Well,” he said, “we can’t go any farther here.” He searched about for something to test the depth. There was only sand and metal that powdered in his hands. “I’ll wade out,” Hals said.
Liza protested. “Hals, Lord above knows how deep it is.”
“We have to get away from that” Hals pointed back into the dead place. Perhaps a ruddy light glimmered there for an instant. Leoht shivered. Hals went in.
“The water is very warm.” He progressed up to his knees.
“I can see machines in it,” Liza warned. “You’ll get hurt.”
“I can feel them. I’m watching out”
Brann, Liza and Leoht squatted on the water’s edge, intent upon Hals, wading deeper. The water came to his waist. “It smells when you stir it up,” he said. “All sour and disgusting.” “I can tell,” Liza said. She wished he would come out His obstinacy sometimes could make her scream.
It rose to his chest. “I feel something solid in here; I hit some metal.”
“It’s all metal,” Brann said.
“No, that sort just breaks when I touch it, Brann. This is solid and smooth. I can’t get hold of it”
“I can’t summon any alek now, Hals,” Leoht said. “Please, don’t go any farther.”
He turned, shoulder deep, moving his arms in a swimming motion. A line of rusty orange marked the high-water line on his shoulders. Then only bis head was above the surface. “I can’t feel the bottom anymore,” he said. “I’m coming out.” Abruptly his head went under. For an instant there was a thrashing and the sour rust smell rose from the water.
Brann came to his feet crying, “Hals!” and moving toward the water. He was knee-deep when Halsam surfaced again.
“What happened?”
“I tripped.” He brushed water off his face. His hair was plastered to his head. He sputtered and began to splash out, noisy and angry. “I felt a cable underneath, a rope made of twisted wire. I caught my foot on it and got pulled under. Something big like a machine only not all ruined is under there.”
Brann helped him out His skin was gooseflesh though the water was warm.
“You’re bleeding,” Leoht cried. “What will we do? There are no aleks here.”
Blood ran down Halsam’s shin from a long scratch. Leoht made to touch it, fascinated at the idea of blood outside. Never having known death, she didn’t comprehend a scale of injury. He would bleed and die! Hals motioned her aside, impatient Leoht (of the thousands of years, of the tremendous power, of the vast machines which sustained a city) was awed that a trickle of blood did not bother Halsam.
“It’s not deep,” Hals said.
The roiling of the water didn’t subside. A fountain of water foamed up above the surface, driven by air escaping from something still submerged. With it came the prow of a thing they would have known as a boat if ever they had seen one that large. The pond in the parkplat had been only a puddle next to this and the little boats the folk rowed there like toys. It was fifteen paces long and perhaps four wide, shaped like a large canoe. Its sides were dull silver. A rosette of the Post Guild had been painted on the bow. A cable of wire ran tautly into the rusty water.
“It must have sunk there a long time ago,” Brann said, examining it critically. “Why do you think it came up now?”
“Maybe someone from the Post Guild hid it there,” Liza remarked. She pointed to the rosette symbol which marked all Post Guild property. “Maybe Hals accidentally unhooked the boat from whatever held it under water.”
The boat was of the same intricate workmanship as the dancing dolls and as the devices of the Structors, seamless and dully shining without a hint of corrosion. It rode for an instant awash to the gunnels, and then pumps hummed alive, sending rusty fountains out onto the surface of the water. Dry inside, the boat swung about on its mooring and a low, insistent thrumming, as of some engine, came up from the water.
“It wants to get away,” Liza said. “It acts like it has some place to go.”
“Probably it does,” Brann answered. “This is a Post Guild boat. If Post Folk come this way, they need something to take them over the water.” He looked to Leoht. “Do Post Folk come through here?”
Leoht shook her head. ‘I’ve not seen them. You are the first of the city folk to come in…” She paused. “…in a very long time. I don’t know how to count it.”
Leoht, alone of those on the beach, seemed inclined to accept the boat without wonder, perhaps even with some affinity. Brann watched her. She followed the motion of the boat on the water and she seemed to hear something in the note of its engine. The voice spoke to her out of the dead place and she heard it and heard the engine, and Brann was aware—as Halsam strangely was not—of a fierce brief combat within her. He saw that it had not been finished at the chasm, not so easily at all. The voice was one of those mechanics who had not broken entirely away and it held no power over her, no compulsion to stay. The compulsion was within her and she stepped into the boat. It was a tiny moment. Brann saw it A smile broke out on Leoht’s face. She held her hands out to Halsam and he joined her in the boat where he stood rubbing at the rust on his skin, Brann climbed aboard and then Liza, orange to the knees with the rusty water. Then somehow the engine shifted. The twisted cable dropped away from the prow. The boat came about and surged out onto the underground sea toward the place where the roofline vanished and the orange water seemed to tumble away.
Once, Grandmother Ebar had described such a sea under the city. In the plant room at sunrise had been Brann’s favorite time with Ebar, the horizontal light very red, the leaf shadows projected onto the white wall.
“A great sea is said to be beneath us, Braun. Very deep. In it tiers are lost, all flooded.”
“Where does it come from, Grandmother?”
“From the weight of the city. The city had the mass of the mountains themselves. If we were on a plain above an immense aquifer, if the city’s weight pressed it, if the soil were deep and unstable, we would sink, the city would sink and water would rise to fill the lowest tiers.”
“The schoolmasters say nothing of this, Grandmother.”
“Some know, some don’t”
How had Ebar, only a schoolmaster herself, come by the peculiar knowledge she doled out to Brann?
“An aquifer?” Master Gelde said. “Ebar certainly has some notions. Wouldn’t the city have sunk into such a thing long before this?”
“But if it moves7”
“Pah! Moves! What does she fill your head with, young Brann? Does she still hint to you in secret that the Post Guild is the place to learn what we don’t know here?”
How did she know? Master Gelde was almost as old as Ebar, had known her since she had come to join with his grandfather at age seventeen.
“She embroiders, Brann. She adds to things. Ebar is a bright woman. I know of none with a keener mind. But I’ll tell you—she is right in one thing. We have forgotten more than we are aware we knew. What is forgotten is gone. Ebar knows this, but she must know what is gone so she embroiders, invents things. Things to tell a young grandson.” “Master Gelde, she came to teaching when she was in her middle years. What guild did she belong to first? She won’t tell me.”
“Eh? What guild?”
“Yes!”
“I’ve never known.”
Hegman Branlee knew, or so he said. “It is the Lord above’s will. Cold is above and warm below. Snow above, lad. Thus, water below. It falls and warms, collects beneath the city.”
Brann plucked at the hem of his Sabbath shirt He stroked a finger down the Gad’s-cloth scarf his mother had made him.
“There is snow on the city roof, Hegman?”
“Ah, yes. It is well known, the pilgrims say so.”
“And there is water underneath? A great sea, just as Grandmother Ebar says?”
“Yes, some have seen it.” He glanced at the outer sky; it had reddened in time with the coming interior evening. The chime in the dome of the Isocourt Hall would ring soon and the Sabbath meal would be served. Branlee was willing to endure even Brann’s ceaseless questions for a place at the Add-bran Sabbath table—a frequent place—best laid in the parish, even though the questions were a source of indigestion for the Hegman.
“Where does the water go?”
“It collects in the subcellars, young man. Where else?” He grinned at the class, slapped his ample belly. “Things fall down, as you well know. Do you suppose it rises up?”
“Then why haven’t we drowned long since?”
“Huh?”
“We don’t know how long ago the Lord above created the city, Hegman. You said it yourself.”
“Not quite accurate, Brann. Why, I’ve told you about the speculations of Surhegman Pandatta, of the thirty cycles since creation. Oh, if only we had the old books!”
“But in all that time wouldn’t the water rise and drown us?”
“It has not, young man, has it? There is your refutation, heh, heh, heh.”
“Then where does the water go?”
“The Lord above knows. He provides and removes. Ah, there’s the dinner bell. Class dismissed. Come, young Adelbran, let us not keep your father and mother waiting.”
Whatever its source, the sea was interminable. The boat ran upon it for five days and nights as the cycle of the sun and moon lamps told them. The shapes of corroded machines still showed in the water. But they seemed to have risen several tiers, as if the city slanted downward here. It was not quite clear what had happened, since a misty obscurity had come to the air, shortening visibility to a few hundred feet.
Perhaps they moved through slanted, broken stairwells, perhaps they were in open space vast as a gallery. They were never sure. The boat’s direction was certain. Some device of the Post Guild guided it.
“I can’t believe the city is like this,” Liza said. “All these places were near us and we never knew.”
“A Gad told me once,” Brann answered. “I thought it was another of their stories, all to get you in to the sortileger and have your future read in dice.”
“When was that?” Liza asked. She sat in the bow, hair lank about her face in the mist She had been watching the water surge up beneath. Brann had been watching the fine beads of mist which collected on the tiny hairs along her spine. They felt more comfortable in their nakedness now. The experience in the quick place had joined them in a way. Halsam and Leoht were in the stem. Mist came between the two couples. Leoht and Hals were obscured, edges softened. But Brann felt their presence. He heard them talk and giggle softly.
“You remember last summer,” Brann asked, “when the Gads’ carnival came to home from one up? There was the short, dark Gad with the puffy clothes?”
“With the bristly eyebrows and the fake scar?” Liza nodded.
“You went off,” Brann laughed. “You and your mother to the wrestling. This Gad started to talk to me. He acted like he hadn’t told this to anyone else, like it was a grave secret that he was giving me. He had a peculiar accent.”
“They talk all the languages, Mother said. I bet they only used our own tongue when they were on our gallery. I never thought about it I wonder how many languages they knew.“ She frowned.
“Probably as many as the Post Folk,” Brann said. The boat made a small change in its motion in response to a shift in the current. Liza peered over the side, saw nothing and shrugged.
“ ’Eet ees minny weird places een thees city, boy,’ he said to me.”
“You’re making fun of him, Brann. He didn’t talk so stupidly as that. I heard him talk a little, too.”
“It’s pretty close. Do you want to hear this or not?”
“Okay.”
“He said, ’Ees different, so close you tink ees other place entire. Thees place Tailend may be last civilized place left. You theenk Gads’ show ees weird, all the animals, all the weird folk, short and tall, ees far more out there.’ He got very quiet and he leaned over, acting as if he wanted to give me a secret He whispered in my ear, his breath smelled of allium root all spicy. He said, ‘You go to Frontend, ees something you will never see here, ees all civilization end, ees tom down and folk scrabble to make a living, ees been mess.’ Then he punched me in the shoulder. ‘Go,’ he said. *You don’t believe me, see for yourself.’”
“Maybe he was right” Liza said. “I never thought things would be like this.”
The boat bumped, seemed to scrape over a shallow obstacle. Halsam came forward. “Did you notice that the water motion is changing? It’s rushing along past us. I don’t know what is making the boat go against it.”
A warm wind swept over the water, clearing away the mist They saw that they were in a narrow hallway, high-cielinged and flooded halfway. Doors, shut tight swollen and overgrown with moss, lined the corridor. They were all crowded forward now. The way was visible ahead until distance narrowed it and brought the ceiling down to the water. The rust color was gone. Sunlamps created ripple reflections on the walls so that where water began and air ended was not easily told. The boat nudged into a turning where corridors intersected. The left hall was narrow and dark and the water exiting it musty. The wind blowing over this water was stale and chill. The boat swept past but not before Liza saw the mark at the wall and the arrow pointing.
“It was the rosette mark again,” she said. “like the ones Post Folk use at delivery points for a marker. There’s another.”
It marked a door which stood open against the current. A dark stairway led up from it, away from the water. The boat hesitated for an instant as if waiting for instructions. Liza pointed out a light at the stair top and more markings pointing along an upper corridor. Had the boat hesitated longer, they might have gone—anything seemed preferable to this interminable boat ride, even a meeting with the Post Guild. But the boat carried them by and, while more rosettes appeared at intervals, the arrows only pointed on down the corridor they were traveling now.
“Maybe Post Folk are near about,” Brann said. “I hope we find them.”
“Do you want to find them?” Liza asked, her voice small.
“Yes,” said Brann.
“I’m not sure if I do,” Liza said.
“Nor I,” Hals joined.
“Tell me more of these Post Folk,” Leoht said,
Brann began to explain.
Organisms were appearing in the water, eel-like wrigglers that hid among the now prevalent moss and algae. The colors moved toward green and the smell was of plant life and silt gathered in every bend of the corridor. Water plants floated, lotus and water lilies. Reed grasses obscured the walls. The waterway forked and forked again until there were numerous duplicate passages overhung with heavy growth. Trailing vines began to appear, hanging low over the boat so that the four had to hunch down behind the gunnels. Soon it became impossible to tell they were in any sort of corridor. Perhaps the walls had been made of less permanent stuff than the city structure itself; perhaps they had been taken down over a long time by water action and the weight of vines and trees. The air was dank, suffused with odors of growth and decay. Perhaps there were sunlamps in the ceiling somewhere, but the ceiling seemed to have receded above the water, and beneath it were canopies of interior jungle.
“Something’s in the trees.” Liza pointed. “I saw eyes.”
“Don’t be stupid,” said Brann.
“I saw it tool”
“Yes,” Halsam agreed. “Lizards like in the Gad’s menagerie, and animals like monklers.”
“Maybe this was where the monklers came from, where the Gads got them,” Liza said.
A bird crossed over from one wide-leafed tree to another. It landed in a flurry of bright-colored feathers and cocked one eye suspiciously toward the boat.
“Do you suppose a parkplat went wild here?” Liza asked. “Maybe folk have been gone from here a long time.”
