Pilgrimage v1.0, page 21
“You’re not going to the folk on the shore?” Liza asked. “That was the direction you were headed in. We were following you for a long way.”
“Nefekr Zolbek spat. “An evil thing moves among them now.”
“What?” said Liza.
“A nefek, an evil one. He is mounted so, on a great rolling Junk heap, all skin and bones and filth he is.”
“And one like him dances at his feet, a little one,” added Rinka, “with many pulling his cart”
“Very stupid folk pulling it,” Scote said. “More stupid even that my father believes me to be.”
Zolbek sputtered (but perhaps he hid a grin).
Brann caught Liza’s glance and there was no need to speak.
“Yes, many folk pulling,” Rinka continued. “I would not think he needs so many.”
“Many pulling?” Brann asked. “How many?”
“A thousand, possibly more. Many join to pull all the time.”
“Lord above,” Liza interjected.
“What reason have they to join?” Rinka asked. “I saw city folk watch a time then drop what they had to pull the nefek.” “I told you,” Liza said to Brann. “Halsam should have killed him then, or you should have.” To Rinka: “There is something in his head that makes your thoughts muddy, and you join him. He almost got our friend Halsam.”
“The Driver,” Brann whispered. He stirred aimlessly at his stew.
“You know of the nefek?” Zolbek asked.
“Yes,” said Brann, “I know him. I’ve seen him face to face.” But how had the Driver escaped from the sealed gallery and come to Frontend? There were many unknown ways in the city, though, and if the Post Guild knew them and the Huten, why not the Driver?
“Why don’t they stop him?” Liza asked. “You say there are so many of the city folk. Why don’t they just force him away?”
“They think no longer,” Zolbek answered. “Do you not understand? It is not city folk any longer on the ocean shore. It is just frightened animals, like Yakan who is a horse only and has no brains. Yes? You are finished eating? Scote, Rinka, clear away. We will talk of other things; we will smoke.” He pulled a capacious pipe from one pocket and a pouch from another. He filled the pipe. Tobacco was a small crop in the city folk’s gardens, but not so fine and mellow as this. Brann didn’t smoke, nor did Liza, but Liza’s father did—cigars, not a pipe. The Gad offered the pipe around and found no takers save his son Scote who smoked it because his father did and seemed not at all pleased at the necessity.
“Where will you go if you aren’t going to the city?” Liza asked.
’To south.” Zolbek pointed. “A long time south where Farmy Fields are not seen.”
“Are there other Gads there?” Liza asked.
“Oh, yes, many Gads are there,” Scote said. He puffed and choked a bit Zolbek took the pipe back with a frown.
“Gads live outside the city?” Brann asked. He couldn’t imagine it. Never, sitting on the verge of Tailend, watching out over the Farmy Fields had he thought that folk might live out there somewhere. He knew only of the huge mechanical dolls that brought harvest to the city. Were they bringing it to the folk at the shore? How were these folk eating? They had no gardens there, no organized distribution of food. He recalled the greasy bag of flesh from which the Driver doled food to his dumb folk. He thought of the Gads’ description of folk joining the Driver’s cart He put the thought very quickly aside.
“There are very few of us when held up to the number of the city folk,” the Gad said. “We took trade among the tiers in the city to have the tools and such that we do not make. We travel here, but south we have towns where we have spent many years.”
“Many years,” Brann repeated, “without a roof or walls at all.” A feeling such as the one he had felt when first he had ventured outside came to him again, setting the stars to reeling and the fire to a fierce flaming. Liza saw this and quietly took his hand.
In the morning after they had breakfasted, Brann and Liza helped the Gads repack the caravan. It was a wonder of detail with nooks and cabinets and shelves all fitted so cunningly that none—perhaps not the Gads themselves—could have seen first time what it all contained. In helping repack the dinner table, which folded into a compact shelf that fitted for a traveling meal board, Brann moved aside a bundle of bedclothes. He saw a dark-jeweled surface and blinked at it once before Scote whistled quickly. Rinka dropped a pan with a clatter and when Brann turned again, the jewels were hidden. But it was such as Brann had seen before, like the panels of the Post Folk. Deep lights had moved within it. The Gads were more than they had seemed.
The horses stepped placidly into the traces and Scote hitched them to the caravan.
“You may ride,” Tesa said. “We will go far toward the ocean before we turn south.”
Brann and Liza waited for the Gads to find their accustomed traveling places. Blimba carefully settled herself into a high-backed padded seat. She smacked her lips once and bared her gums to grin at Brann in invitation. Brann helped Liza to a seat which folded out beneath the opened roof of the caravan.
“Do you have names besides your first names?” Tesa asked. “Of what families are you?”
“My family name is Brewker,” Liza said.
“Adelbran, my name is Brann Adelbran.”
“Adelbran?” Blimba spoke up. “Adelbran, madzel sphut? Ebar Adelbranf”
“She wishes to know if you are related to Ebar Adelbran,” Tesa said. “You will pardon my mother, she speaks the Tailend tongue well, but most times she refuses to use other than Tsingaro.”
“Ebar?” Brann asked. “She is my grandmother. Do you know her?”
“Ebar Adelbran, your grandmother?” There was a swift conference among the Gads.
“A remarkable thing,” said Zolbek, “a remarkable thing indeed.”
The great horses leaned easily into the traces and the caravan eased into a steady rolling motion. It felt not unlike the motion of the boat over the city’s inner sea. Brann watched the passing view of tumbled galleries through which the road wound as through cliffs and ravines (even the rubble of Front-end was half a mile deep). Monklers played in it in bands infinitely larger than those in the Tailend gardens, and birds—the tame city finches—mostly yellow birds, winged among the ruined galleries. The birds ventured out and cried, startled at the caravan. They scolded the monklers and seemed not unpleased that folk no longer filled the city.
Brann soon became bored with the city, whose character here never changed. Only the sky seemed terrible, entirely uncovered and deep. Brann and Liza settled back beneath the caravan’s open roof.
Zolbek had noted the gait of the horses and, satisfied, had handed the reins to Scote.
“You never said,” Brann commented to him, “how you come to know my grandmother.”
“Oh,” Zolbek laughed, “we know her. Do not fear, we know her.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Liza asked, annoyed.
“It means,” Zolbek said, “that we have had dealings with Ebar many times past.”
“With Ebar?” Brann inquired. He thought of the Gads’ gifts to her.
“Where do you suppose she comes from?” Zolbek asked. He cupped his chin; he smiled between fingers.
“You’re saying she’s a Gad?” Brann asked.
Liza protested, “She doesn’t have the Gad features. She’s different from the Gads; how could his grandmother…?”
“No?” asked Zolbek.
“Zolbek,” Tesa said to him, “do not tease. Tell them.”
Zolbek grimaced as if a good tale had been interrupted, as if the telling were as important as the tale. He massaged his face again and grumbled deep in his barrel chest.
“No,” he said, “she is no Gad. But other folk live with us there.” He waved southward. “And some come back to the city from there. They speak Tsingaro and they know the outside. Some such came one time seventy, eighty years since. I don’t know how many, exactly. One family came back to the city for important reasons, and with them a child, Ebar.”
Ebar? All the talks in the green room returned to Brann. What of the tales about the Driver and of the first storm she had seen and her fear and her father’s fear? If Ebar had been born outside, then it was all just a scheme of stories told—and why tell stories but to tease a boy’s mind and why tease a mind but to discover if it would respond and understand?
“How old,” he asked Zolbek, “how old was my grandmother Ebar when she came to the city?”
Zolbek looked to his mother-in-law who had been following the conversation greedily. She rubbed fingers together.
She nodded, counting in her mind. “Seven,” she said in a thick accent. “We were children together, she was seven years old and she left.”
“Why, she knew, Ebar knew, while she told me stories and let me go out into the city, she knew!” And he wondered what more she knew and where in that he would find her. For the road came straighter about now and headed down a long, slow slope toward the ocean. It was an ocean of folk first, miles distant still. But now Brann could see they were individual folk. Liza touched his cheek. He didn’t see an end to them in their stretch along the ocean where long white lines which Brann didn’t even know were breakers came in toward the folk. Folk walked among the breakers, countless, on the shore.
Chapter Two
The Folk
The Driver’s procession came down the road like a human river. The trolley tracks glinting in the center of the road were obscured by the oncoming people. No more was the procession a hundred diminished folk. Now a numberless crowd pulled the cart, and more lined the road watching. It happened all in a haze of dust carried high above the blunted tiers of Frontend. The dust had the odor of damp concrete and the ocean’s salt and the smell of countless bodies and fires of the folk.
Everyone spoke. It seemed a thousand simultaneous languages blurred, fading across the gathered mass of people into a single undertone of voice. The dumb folk pulled the Driver to the cadence of a chant The cart itself was no longer a little nest. Now it rose as high as a tier and rolled on a score of ill-shaped wheels. Something from every part of the city made up this giant new cart: old houseplat beams and broken iron, odd parts of disused trolleys, here the legs of a harvester doll, here the doors of a power cart It was the city reborn in the Driver’s cart.
Brann and Liza were perched on an outjutting of a gallery which overhung the road. They had come down toward the noise from the spot where the Gads had left them, Zolbek saying, “You be careful now. This is a bad business here,” and lashing at Yakan and Zakan in a way foreign to him and sending the caravan in a wide turn south toward the villages of the Gads. “We have room for you,” Scote said. “Any time you come, we have room.” And the old woman said, Remember me to Ebar, in Tsingaro which Zolbek translated. Brann and Liza waved. Then all that was left was dust where the caravan had stood and the dust in front had drawn Brann and Liza to the procession.
Worse than everything was a growing desire in Brann and Liza to abandon everything, clothes, quest, ego, and descend to the road to take up positions on a rope and pull the Driver. The city petered out here on the edge of the beach. Bits of it stood haphazardly where the trolleys of the Structors had dropped them. The protection that the city offered against the fear of the outside gave out also and Brann and Liza felt the same fear, the same tingling in their limbs and vertigo, that had come before. The western face of the city climbed into cloud and the city roof was obscured by it The bulk of the city seemed distant and the Driver was close and real.
The procession was passing just below them. The cart had many ropes now and the dumb folk splayed in a dozen directions, pulling. Brann could have reached down and plucked at the matted hair of the closer ones. The chant was compelling.
“Can you see the Driver himself?” Liza asked.
“No,” said Brann. He looked toward the shape drawing closer in the haze. “Maybe that’s him way up on top.”
They heard a whip crack and a familiar yipping call.
“He’ll trap us all,” Liza said. “He’s not locked away in a sealed gallery anymore. Now he’s out in the open and folk will come to him until everyone is pulling the cart.”
An image came to Brann of the Driver’s cart grown citysized, rolling back across the continent along the path of the Foundations toward the beginning of it all. It seemed a strange end to a scheme which had gone awry many thousands of years before.
“Maybe they’ll just keep pulling the cart forever,” he said to Liza. “The city has stopped but the Driver keeps on.”
“Maybe,” she said.
The procession moved slowly. There was great confusion among the folk pulling. Brann and Liza lay on the verge the better part of a day watching. The sun once more dropped toward the water. The massed fires of the folk once more burned like stars across the beach and torches came alight on the flanks of the Driver’s high cart. Now near enough for the Driver to be seen clearly for the first time, the cart stopped. A familiar phrase carried out over the procession. Then wherever they were the dumb folk stopped and sat down suddenly in the dust. Brann and Liza watched them eat and knew what they ate. This time it was a spectacle of setting .sun and fires like stars to the horizon and the torches of dumb folks, eating.
“Please,” said Liza, “let’s go and find out where our families are. We can get by the Driver in the dark. They’re afraid at night, remember.”
“No,” said Brann, “we’ll all become like them. Hals should have killed him. I should have. When a thing gets started it doesn’t stop on its own. Ebar told me once.”
“Why do we go on Pilgrimage, Grandmother?” Brann had asked. It was the last time they had spoken before the shaking. She had been packing some things—mementos, letters, gifts—into a woven metallic bag. The bag had hung always on a peg of Ebar’s plant-room wall where it would catch the morning light and reflect it in rainbow colors.
Often when Brann would ask such questions Ebar would answer with a cryptic, “Because we must, because we always have,” and this sort of answer was less satisfying than Heg-man Branlee’s “Don’t think about such things.”
Ebar inspected a curious ring of Gad manufacture, tried it on and finding it would not go on over her swollen knuckle, put it back into the bag. ’Tradition is the strongest force in our lives, Brann. Do you understand that? Truthfully, I don’t intend to put you off by saying that we do something because we have always done it, or that we do not do something because we have never done it. It is the way folk have lived in the city for so long that we don’t know any other way to live. You have watched how slowly and carefully the Structors lower blocks of the city, and how they do not let anything fall free. Why, do you suppose?”
“Because once started they would gain momentum,” said Brann, who had learned the lessons of the School masters well. “It is because of a thing called inertia, a great moving mass takes a huge force to stop its motion.”
“And a city of folk, moving in a way of life for a great deal of time, what stops it?” asked Ebar.
“I don’t know,” admitted Brann.
“Will little questions stop it, will little doubts?”
“Many of them added together will,” said Brann.
Ebar was taken aback at this. She studied Brann for a moment and seemed to derive some satisfaction from this. She resumed packing her bag.
“Good, Grandson Brann, you are who I thought you were. Such a vast thing, such as a block of the city moving, does not stop on its own. A force must stop it, and risk destroying what is stopped. The Structors know this; such a mass in motion is better diverted than stopped, pushed in a less destructive direction.”
“You’re saying that the city is moving toward destruction and that to attempt to stop it would be just as great a disaster?” He looked at her as she touched the strange Gad things of the bag with intimate knowledge. “You’re saying that 7 have to learn where the city is going and divert it! I, Grandmother, II”
“Enough said,” Ebar told him. “An event is coming. The dwarf foretells it and the pictures of the city as it once was, of folk with different ways living on our gallery many years ago foretell it. An event is coming. The Gads have foretold it. This thing will not stop on its own, Brann. I’ll see you again. Now you must go.”
For much of the night Brann lay atop the broken gallery. He watched the faces of the dumb folk and seemed in a fever, muttering as folk came forth from the watching crowd to become part of the Driver’s entourage. This scared Liza no little bit. During the first part of the night she had occasionally shaken Brann, who would glance at her only for a moment, grimacing at the distraction, and would then turn back to the scene below. As the night progressed he wouldn’t even do this, shrugging away her hand instead and saying nothing.
Liza, too, felt the fear and the strange disorientation of Frontend. It made her feel restless and upset. She wanted to pull Brann away from here and take him somewhere the Driver could not find. Her conviction became more firm that Brann was working up to some act against the Driver, toward whom his eyes were now directed.
The mass of dumb folk squatted among the dying fires. The new recruits joined them, finding spots near the heaps of coals. They would settle down, look about themselves as if seeing with intelligent eyes for one last time, and then abruptly a change would come over their features, a veil of stupidity would descend and they would become dumb folk, too.
In the darkest moments of the night, when the moon had set and the fires had died to a glimmer, Liza found that Brann’s gaze had firmly attached to the Driver. He no longer responded when she shook him, and his mouth worked with a half-formed word that came again and again to his lips without sound. The Driver seemed not aware of Brann’s watching. He stood still and angular against the peak poles of his wagon, the little Driver between his feet, aping his pose. A seductive beckoning seemed to come from the mass of the dumb folk. It rose from their bodies like fumes and came in with Liza’s breath, making her dizzy, drawing her close, away from the deep sprawl of stars and the open. Brann began to shiver, to quake, to move into a position to leap out over the crowd toward the Driver’s perch.
