Pilgrimage v1.0, page 18
“What a place,” said Hals.
“There are still the Post Guild marks.” Leoht pointed.
Brann nodded. “I keep seeing them scratched into the trees. All the arrows point in this direction.”
“Somehow this boat is being guided in the right path,” Leoht said. Her arm was around Halsam, leg next to his. This seemed ludicrous, she being taller by a head than Halsam, and yet she was timid here. “I have never left the quick place before, not in more time than you can imagine,” she had told him once. “All my knowing of life isn’t more than yours though you have lived much less.” But there were freckles across her nose and her eyes were open in a sort of awe that such as this existed in the city she had known for ten thousand years.
The noise which sounded clearly through the trees was unmistakable, the sound of metal clanging shut and a lock snapping-to. A high singsong voice called; another answered. Then little folk surrounded them, hanging in the trees and staring as the boat made a turn into the open water of a small lagoon. Around its banks were cages, and the cages merged into cages farther back into the jungle, and in the cages were more of the little folk, peering. The singsong speech was taken up among them. They watched with wide, flat faces beneath dark bangs, dark eyes fixed upon the boat Brann picked out one word which perhaps meant something in the inflected tongue of the little folk: “ ’eudgen, eudgen; (or “Hugen, hugen” were they saying?) mlwa-wlwa-mlwa.”
Leoht retained the gift to know what they said (her communication, as has been said, bypassed surface speech).
She turned ashen, even a bit pale green in the green-lit jungle. “They say that we are taken,” she said. “We go no farther, ever.”
The boat slid into a groove in the bank, bobbed for a moment and then something left it, some force escaped, and it came to rest. A woman of the little folk stepped forward. She was bandy-legged and her feet were large with toes splayed, holding to the muddy bank. She wore a short kilt of rough cloth, which appeared woven from the fibers of some large-leafed plant She wore a jacket of the same material. Both were dyed bright yellow. A flower with huge, luminous orange petals was fixed in her hair. The hair itself was black and shone as if oiled, close to her head. All these folk were so dressed, the women’s clothing dyed brightly and variously. The dress of the men was uniformly gray.
An item of well-worn brass hung at her waist by a thong. She plucked it up with a quick little motion and gestured sharply toward the four in the boat, demanding that they come out.
“The thing is a key,” Brann said, “an old skeleton key such as they used on the Isocourt Hall doors.”
“Mlwa-mlwa,” she repeated, and it was echoed from all sides. Big feet stamped out the sound. Cage doors clanged open and shut incessantly. Many of the little folk carried hand-sized squeeze cans. As Brann watched, one somberly dressed little man swung a door open and closed and listened critically to the hinges. Then he applied a quantity of oil from the can.
“Mlwa, baddidma oa, feedse mlwa: oat”
“Mlwa: oa!” the little folk replied.
Several of them walked purposefully down the bank, stopping in a circle. From somewhere one man drew a knife, which Brann, in a funny, fleeting thought, saw to be a knife of workmanship common on his home gallery, perhaps hand-honed and stamped with a known craftsman’s mark.
“They have Halden knives,” Hals remarked. “Do the Gads peddle here, too?”
The woman repeated the incessant demand while the man augmented it with a purposeful wave of the knife.
“We are to get out now,” Leoht said. “She says he will be compelled to hurt us if we do not”
One at a time the four climbed from the boat. The little folk made no effort to steady the craft—some even grinned at Braun’s awkwardness. Brann stumbled a bit “All that moving water,” he said. “Now I don’t think I can stand up on the land.”
There was a terrible commotion among the little folk. Many arms were pointed. Some of the folk jeered. One woman spat and stamped her foot The woman with the key gestured with her empty hand, taking all four of the visitors in with one sweeping motion.
“Begga nu sedda, led nammpa, ha?”
Leoht laughed. The little woman reddened. ”Nu sedda?’ she repeated.
“She asks why we are bare and disgusting. She asks if we have any shame.”
A boy of the little folk, doll-sized but with feet so large he stumbled over them as he walked, came down the bank and pushed a kilt toward Brann. He held it to his waist where it went barely two-thirds around. Laughter rang and the cage doors clamored. The woman snatched the kilt back from Brann and flung it at the little boy. She rattled a sharp sentence at him.
“They will make us clothing,” Leoht translated. “Until then we must wait here on the bank. They are going to surround us with screens until our clothes are ready.” She was not certain whether to be amused or not There was more than a bit of menace in the way the little man brandished his knife and in the piping voices of the little folk.
“What do they call this place?” Liza asked.
Leoht said something entirely unlike the speech of their captors. Nonetheless the woman seemed to comprehend.
“Ebbadad,” she replied. She swept her hand again, taking in all the cages and all the surrounding jungle. "Dad-dad!”
“Oh!” Leoht exclaimed.
“What?” asked Brann.
“What’s the matter?” Liza joined.
“This,” Leoht said slowly, “is the city prison.’*
“Upmah oa sed, bleb bed.” The woman pointed; she indicated all the little folk in view. Then she indicated the four. “Blebbed oat”
“They are inmates,” Leoht told them. “Now she says we are, too.” .
“I don’t understand you, young Brann,” Hegman Branlee said. “It is maddening the way you do not accept truth when truth is apparent Why do you badger me with this constant inside-outside prattle when we know, and we see with the truth before our very eyes, that the inside and outside are the same and that which appears otherwise is simply, a—urn—an hallucination.”
“A mass hallucination, Hegman?” Brann had asked. “So that I see it and Liza and my friend Halsam see it, and you, too, Hegman Branlee? It appears to you also that outside the city there is land that extends as far as the eye can see and that the city is just a small part of it”
“No, young Brann! It is nonsense. I do not see that and neither do others, except when their vision plays tricks.”
“I don’t understand him, Grandmother,” Brann said to Ebar. “Can he really not tell that the stretch of Farmy Fields to the mountains is there, that there is a real sky over it much, much higher than the roof of the city? Doesn’t he see it Grandmother?”
“Do your friends see it?” Ebar asked him.
“Hals and Liza do.”
“How do you know it?”
“They told me, Grandmother.”
Ebar shook her head. “The eyes lie. Most in the city have never had a view of outside. Even here on Tailend to most folk what Branlee says is the truth. Vision itself is nothing if not given an interpretation by the mind. Perhaps it is so for Liza and Halsam also. What they see and what they tell you they see may not be the same.”
She gave him cakes from a little inlaid box. She poured tea from the silver urn—a strange pattern, a gift of the Gads, she would imply when asked, but it was common knowledge that the Gad’s gave nothing, and the value of this little urn was beyond imagining. More of the mystery about Ebar became clear to Brann as he passed through the reaches of the city. For didn’t Ebar have a tapestry on a wall of her seldom-used dining room? And on that tapestry was there not a scene much like the one the dwarf of the Hugens had described, depicting ships on a strange sea larger than the one he crossed in the Post Guild boat and wilder? The ships only touched the curling tips of waves in that weaving, and their sails caught a sun in an impossibly bright glare. Elsewhere on the tapestry, folk fought with swords and over them the great flank of the city rose.
Also he asked her, “It is said we can’t leave the city, Grandmother; why?”
“Why do song finches perch on the verge, Brann? Have you seen one fly away from Tailend?”
“They’re afraid, just as the monklers are, bred to captivity and…
His grandmother smiled, in one hand a saucer, in the other a cup, now away from her lips. Her eyes looked through him as he had seen them do before, and she nodded as if a great truth had been revealed.
“Bred to captivity,” Brann said to Liza.
“Eh?” Liza asked. They trooped past a gaping breach in the jail wall where bars were bent outward by the force of some ancient explosion. Through the hole the four could see a stretch of Farmy Fields. A path wound among open cells and through barred gates in the heavy jungles that filled the gallery. Constantly, the little folk passed from gate to gate with endless checking of credentials and endless frisking. Keys rattled and jail doors came open and shut. Jailer and jailed interchangeably, the maintenance of the prison was the little folks’ sole occupation. The path Brann and the others walked skirted the opening but didn’t go through it into the fields. In fact it bent inward at this point. And Brann saw that the little folk avoided entirely this immense hole in their prison wall. Several of the little ones accompanied them on a trip to “eh keepla,” the judge, as Leoht explained the term.
Brann pointed out the hole in the wall. “Why do you think they stay here in this smelly jungle when the Farmy Fields are just outside?”
“It does smell here,” Hals agreed. “I think the same thing keeps them here that made us sick when we went outside.”
“But they have exits into other galleries,” Brann said. “And they don’t use those either. We haven’t seen them leave. They said that they are inmates here, too. We can leave though. All we need is the boat again.”
“Tell me what you mean by ‘bred to captivity,’” Liza said.
“It was something my Grandmother Ebar said to me once when I asked why the monklers and the song finches wouldn’t leave the city. She said that they had been bred in the city for so long that they had no capacity to understand a larger place outside. The fear of it was bora in them and nothing a human did could remove it. They couldn’t leave!”
The rough-woven cloth of Leoht’s skirt clung and moved on her long legs as the light cloak had once done. Something about her would always be beyond explanation. “You’ve described the way the mechanics are in the quick place,” she said. “Tied there so that we feel as if we will die when we go away.”
“You left,” Hals said simply. He walked in front of her on the path, complaining now and again that the rough cloth scratched his legs. “I felt better without it,” he said.
“It was the rule about nudity that got us into this trouble in the first place,” Leoht answered. “They’re taking us to see the judge because we broke the rule and they are angry.”
“Well,” Hals complained, “these stink like the jungle. “I’d rather have my Gad’s-cloth clothes back.”
“It hurt to leave the quick place,” Leoht said. “For a time I thought I was dying. I thought it was disease because alek were no longer there to repair me. But really I was sick because I was leaving the quick place. That’s what you mean, isn’t it, Brann?”
Brann stopped suddenly on the path. Immediately from behind the file came a chattering of little folk. A woman the height of Liza’s waist stalked up and began chattering excitedly, pointing down the path.
“Let’s go,” said Hals. “She looks like she wants to do something with that knife.”
“I hadn’t thought!” Brann said. “Lord above, I just didn’t see it at all. It applies to all of us. That was what Grandmother Ebar had wanted me to see last summer. When I didn’t understand. But she smiled because she knew I would understand soon. Something in the way we are bom keeps us in the city. It had nothing to do with gates or locks or keys at all. It is our own heads that keep us in the city.”
The little woman pushed Brann hard and gestured with her knife; the brass key rattled against other peculiar implements on her belt.
“We should go, Brann,” Halsam said. “I think she will stick you.”
Brann began walking again. The woman grimaced, squinch-ing up her face as a petulant child might. But this child and her companions were armed. Bright birds flew screaming in a parti-colored storm across the path.
“What of what the Huten said, Brann?” Liza asked.
“Yeah,” said Halsam. He put a hand to the jewel which still hung from the woven metal collar he wore. “The Huten said there was a key like this one. If the lock is really inside us, what good would a key do?”
“I don’t know,” Brann answered. He fell silent and put a hand beneath the rough shirt to scratch a sudden itch. “Maybe Ebar would know,” he said at last.
They entered a courtroom beneath the vines. Again Brann had to stifle a laugh because the little folk seemed like children, perched in jury seats too big for them, dark eyes watching. They were crowded twice as many as the chairs would hold, chattering and punching each other, pointing at the four who stood in the leaf-strewn center of the court. The light was yellow-green and the floor was crunchy with the dead leaves. The woman who had brought them made a motion with her knife and Brann began to step forward.
“Ena,” she cried and motioned only Liza and Leoht toward the judge’s bench. She made sitting motions to Brann and Hals, repeating them until the two boys sat.
“I think it’s the women who are in charge here,” Halsam said. “They carry the keys and give all the orders.”
This seemed to be true. The woman with the knife called out, “Ba doona! Ba doona!” and at once all the little folk stood. The noise of someone struggling came from behind the judge’s bench. A little hand appeared; two, and then a face. The woman climbed into a seat built on top of the bench. She was elderly with graying hair. Her expression was stern. She hefted a gavel large as a sledgehammer and banged it twice. Everyone sat again.
“What do you think they’ll do with us, Brann?” Hals asked.
“I don’t like the knives,” Brann answered. He pointed to the woman. “That one looks like she’d just as soon cut us up.”
“I know,” Hals whispered. “Thafs what I mean.”
Their warder walked up in front of Halsam and stared at him pointedly. She pointed toward the judge and held her hand over her mouth. Then she delivered a stinging slap to Halsam’s cheek. The audience of little folk began to jeer. The judge banged her gavel.
“I think we’d better be quiet,” Brann said. The woman glared at him and stalked away.
The judge spoke to Leoht and Liza. Leoht answered. The judge tugged at her robes and all at once the little folk were shouting and pointing and making rude noises. The judge made a short speech which the little folk interrupted frequently, thrashing about in the fragrant vines and pointing at die four taller folk. Hie two girls were taken back to Hals and Brann.
“What did she say?” Hals asked.
“We’re guilty,” Leoht answered. “She said we were naked and that broke the rules. She said it was our fault, mine and Liza’s.”
“What?” Liza said. “Our fault?”
“We are female, and thus it was our responsibility to see that you two men did what you were supposed to do. She’s going to decide on a punishment now.”
Meanwhile, the little folk had been throwing trash at the four of them. A piece of rotten fruit hit Halsam on the cheek. He picked it up to throw back. But the woman with the knife looked so fiercely at him that he dropped it “They are like a crowd of babies,” Hals said, disgusted.
The judge hammered the gavel, using both her hands to lift it. “Ota ve mannata,” she intoned.
“She confirms the verdict of guilty,” Leoht whispered.
The judge consulted a tattered black book. She read from it in the same inflected speech. The others looked at Leoht who shook her head. “We’re going to be put into isolation,” Leoht translated. “The judge says we should be grateful. At one time such a disgusting display was punished by death. She says we live in more liberal times now. Instead, they are going to put us into isolation cells for a little while to teach us a lesson.”
“How long?” asked Brann.
“Not long for you,” Leoht answered. “Since it was our fault, you and Halsam will be jailed for six months. For us, two years.”
“Two years,” Hals shouted. He got to his feet and pointed at the judge. “You are crazy, you know. We didn’t do anything. Not Leoht or Liza either. This isn’t fair and so we’re just going to leave.” He had the same mean look on his face as when he had faced the Driver. But there were many knives here and intelligence in the eyes of those who held them.
“Come on,” Hals am said. “They won’t put us in cells for all that time. We’ll just walk out of here.”
Halsam rattled the cell door. “The metal is old,” he said. “Maybe we can break it”
“Maybe we could bite through it with our teeth,” Liza scoffed.
“Six months!” Brann said.
“For you,” Liza answered. “Two years for me and Leoht” They were alone in a long row of empty cells; theirs alone was locked. Vines climbed the bars and the floor was two inches deep in dead leaves.
“It smells like the parkplat after gardeners have watered it” Halsam complained. “It makes my nose itch.”
“Some gardener you are,” Brann answered.
The little folk would come by, sometimes bringing their children to stare at the tall folk in the cell. The children were like the first little boy they had seen, tiny with feet so big they should have been incapable of walking. One tiny girl had offered Brann a biscuit the size of his thumbnail. Her great dark eyes had watched solemnly as he ate it.
“They treat us like animals in a Gad’s menagerie,” Liza protested. She grimaced at the row of little faces peering in through the bars. She snapped at them and lunged toward the front of the cell. The little folk laughed. “I hate this,” she said. “Won’t they ever give us a bath?”
