The Nearest Fire (V1.0), page 3
There was an amnesty, and this is a thing I remember very well. About twenty days before New Year, the prisoners serving “fives” or “double fives”—those of us who had been recently sentenced—were brought down to the dining hall. There were about a hundred persons; we stood there while the Head Ward read from a skein. It appeared that our gracious neighbors, the clansfolk of Rintoul, that golden city, had need of vassals. The noble trade partners of Tsagul, in particular Clan Luntroy, were on the lookout for strong workers to take the bond.
Our numbers were reduced even further; I was nudged into the “strong” group. I looked far up the curtain walls of the old jail and saw on a balcony in one of the folds a flash of color. The scene was very gray: we wore gray cloth, the walls were gray; so, I guess, were our faces. But on the balcony leaned a couple of grandees in flame and purple and blue. Beside the Head Ward stood two senior vassals with the flax flowers of Luntroy on their chests.
Luntroy is not a clan with a bad reputation in our p&rt of the world, but the fiery colors of those pale-skinned fools watching us kindled at last a fire in my brain. We were being tricked into exchanging one jail term for a lifetime of bondage. The clansfolk were playing on our sense of dishonor. I thought of the new-made vassals trundling back with their masters over the long red road that leads from the Fire-Town to Rintoul.
My name was called early; I saw the Head Ward smile at the senior vassals. I knew I was accepted before they gave me the word; they were conscious of doing me a kindness. I cleared my throat and spoke up in public for the first time in my life.
“Good Citizen Ward,” I said, loud enough to reach the balcony, “what will happen if I do not take this bond?”
The Head Ward was dumbfounded and angry; there was a flapping of skeins at the high table.
“By the fire, Yolo Harn,” said the Ward, “anyone so careless of Luntroy bounty and the good name of Tsagul might well do a term at Itsik”
Itsik … a filthy place to the southeast where prisoners are sent for punishment. The work is foul and backbreaking, and the smell is unbearable; it is compounded of hides and tallow and the tanning vats and rotting fish, but worst of all is the stench of dishonor. The whole room, prisoners, vassals, even the grandees broke into nervous laughter. I thought of Old Ham and his damned medal, and I knew at last what freedom meant.
‘‘As you decide,” I said firmly, “for I will not be a vassal. I don’t accept this amnesty!”
The Head Ward cut my name from the skein with the flick of a knife blade. Luntroy had one less vassal; a link was forged in the chain; a brick kept the wall standing; the stars whirled fiery in their courses. I was sent to Itsik fifteen days before the New Year.
2
Itsik
I had thought of walking to Itsik by way of the red road for it lies between Tsagul and Rintoul, but instead we went by sea. Two other prisoners went to Itsik at the same time as I did, and we were marched down to the docks as night fell. It was a long walk through the warm sunset streets; I felt as if I were marching back through the byways of my own childhood. There were the familiar alleys, the scurrying children, the gliders at rest in their hangars in quiet Wing-Up-Way.
The guards paused for a snack at the corner of Mill Way and passed out fresh bean bread and small beer to their charges. A few children were still at play, and they sang the song that I remembered. It was part of a long singing game called “Crazy Elbin,” addressed to the mad old grandee Elbin Tsatroy. “Where are you going, Crazy Elbin?” asks the song and the reply rings out … to the Mountains, to Rintoul, to the river Troon, to the Salt Marshes. The verse that appealed to me most was the one they sang now:
“Ban ulrin, ban ulrin,
Dan O dan, dandar…”
“Going to the islands,
So green, green, green …
As we were marched off again the chorus rang out, dark and mocking:
To wel welangar,
To tsa ulstarn…”
“Every tall tree withers away,
Every fire is put out ”
I walked now at the end of a rope behind two older prisoners called Red and Grabber. Every prisoner in the City Jail chose or was given a new name, a gavje or bad-luck name. I was called Cub. Everyone knew what I had done … my crime and the reason I was being sent to Itsik for half a year. I had no idea what Red had done; she was a tall, bony omor, and I had a notion she was in jail for theft, thieving from the docks. Grabber was a short, misshapen creature, and although he stumped along patiently now, with a grin on his broad face, it was obvious to everyone that he was mad. Every so often he went into a kind of slow frenzy and grabbed whatever was nearest to him, especially if it moved, and hung on until someone threw water in his face or felled him to the ground.
We shuffled through the crowded docks, and a few voices called farewell to Red out of the shadows. There was no one who knew me, and I was glad. Morritt had come to me before the amnesty, full of hope, smiling again. She had work with a family out of town, on the Datse. She told me to keep up my spirits; the time would pass more quickly than I thought. I was happy for her and happy that she knew nothing about this next piece of dishonor that I had woven into the skein.
We were led up the gangplank of a big low-slung craft and settled under an awning on the afterdeck. The ship was just about to cast off; the anchor was winched up, and the sails, dank and black, were already set. The guards had gone. The Captain did not come near the little knot of prisoners, but presently, as the ship edged down the harbor, the Rope Ward, or second officer, came aft with a couple of sailors.
He peered at us in the light of a lantern; he was a young male, very tall, with long blood-colored hair in a plait down his back and an enveloping canvas cloak. He did not look unfriendly.
“Hold on tight if the weather gets up,” he said.
“Don’t tell that to Grabber for the fire’s sake,” said Red hoarsely.
“Oh, is that him?” asked the Rope Ward.
Grabber groaned and rolled his eyes. He was already seasick, although the boat was only halfway down the broad bight of the harbor.
Suddenly I stood up. I was drawn to my feet by a great feeling of joy that overrode everything else. A tow-haired sailor by the rail had turned his head, and I saw that it was Len.
“Len!” I called. “Len Ham____”
I was hardly conscious of the Rope Ward and the other prisoners watching me; it was Len, my dear sib, exactly as I had seen him in dreams. I did not know or care how I looked, in prison gray, grown out of recognition, almost, for now I was as tall as Len and more heavily muscled. The tow-haired sailor walked toward me, peering in the dim light, and I saw that he knew me. He did not speak.
“I am Yolo …” I said, still brimming with my discovery.
“I am Len Alroyan,” said the sailor; “there is no Len Ham.”
“Len … do you know me?”
“I know we take prisoners to Itsik!”
He turned his back and walked away.
I sat down again, and the pain I felt seemed worse than anything in my life. Even the horror of what I had done to Tenn the Overseer, my crime, did not match this terrible sorrow. I bent my head and felt tears run down my cheeks. If I had not been tied with rope, I might have plunged into the sea and made an end of my wretched life. I felt a hand on the shoulder and saw that it was the Rope Ward.
“I think you are a good sailor,” he said, “and if the weather gets up you can take a turn on the ropes.”
He was trying to comfort me. I managed to reply, and he went away with the lantern, leaving us in darkness, with a fresh breeze tearing at the awning.
We sailed out of the bight of Tsagul into a growing storm. The salt boat wallowed in black waves that washed right over the decks; clouds hid the Far Sun when it rose.
I forgot everything but the wind and the waves and their battle with the ship. We moved to the gutter at the length of our ropes so that poor Grabber could be sick, and soon he had nothing left. He lay on the deck groaning more loudly than the ship’s timbers*
The conch that counted the hours could scarcely be heard, but I judged that it was about the first hour of morning when the Rope Ward sent a sailor to untie me. She offered to take Red, too, but the omor was almost as sick as Grabber. I followed the sailor into the waist of the ship and was set to rolling a huge sail that had been thrown down unreefed. I did this, with other sailors, then I was given a place at the long sea-brake, a kind of wooden fin that we held at angles to the ship to still her wild passage into die open sea.
I managed to shout to my neighbor, “Where is Itsik?”
“Flaming miles to the southeast!” she roared. “We are so far off-course we will come to the Islands if the storm doesn’t let up!”
We wrestled for hours with the sea-brake and were given strength from a leather drinking skin of thin tipsy mash, passed from hand to hand. Then a cry went up, and we ducked for cover: a scream of breaking wood came from high overhead and a length of the foremast, tall as a young tree, crashed to the deck. The Sail Ward and the Rope Ward waded in with axes, cutting it free.
Still the wind did not abate and we sailed on, fighting with the sea-brake and the tackle, washed up to our ears with the icy sea and deafened by the wind and the rain. At last a smear of light appeared in the east and the wind suddenly died away. The ship hung in the water like a rotten log in the light of Esto, die Great Sun.
I hung gasping over the rail and watched the colors return to the world. The sea became greenish gold, then an oily gray-green, and the sky overhead was blue-white. Far to the southwest hung a thick green haze.
“Yes,” said the Rope Ward, at my side, “those are the Fire Islands.”
“Have you sailed there?” I asked.
“A few times.”
We stood quietly at the rail, and he gave me bara seeds to chew. The chill of the night had passed, and the deck was steaming in the heat of the new day. I pointed ahead;
something moved on the surface of the water, too low for a boat but not a piece of flotsam.
“What’s that?”
“Muck raft,” said the Rope Ward. ‘Towed out from Itsik, or even from Rintoul, and put into the Round Current.”
He told me the path of the great Round Current that moved in an arc from the continent of Torin, through the islands and back again. He stared at me curiously for a moment, and I saw that his eyes were green.
He said, “Yolo Harn, you sail well. You’ve been a help to us this voyage.”
“I don’t get seasick.” I grinned.
“The muck rafts go all through the spring and summer,” he said. “I knew a sailor once, sent to Itsik for wounding. He stowed away on one of those things….”
“And he came to the islands?”
“I reckon he had a good chance.”
“But the rafts will be searched if it is so easy!”
The Rope Ward laughed.
“It’s not easy! The Itsik folk are afraid of the sea and of the islands and suffocated by their dishonor. There are mainly runaway vassals at Itsik. But you …”
“Well, I’m surely no vassal!” I said.
He put a hand on my shoulder and turned back to his work.
“Better go back to the awning,” he said.
I found that I was bone weary, but as I struggled back to my place on the afterdeck, I understood a strange thing. The Rope Ward liked me in a special way that no one had done in my life before. I was puzzled and not displeased; I thought of his green eyes and felt his hand warm on my shoulder.
I reached the tattered awning where Red and Grabber lay sleeping and crawled under it. I slept soundly on the steaming deck of the salt boat as the crew made shift to bring it about and head back toward Itsik.
II
The weather held for the next day and night, and we sailed into Itsik under a clear sky with the two suns shining. The sight of the place surprised me. I had nothing but a confused idea of filth and stench and dirty work buildings like a bad pithead. Itsik was clean and neatly laid out in a series of half-circles, one beyond the other. Between each crescent and the next was a high stockade. The first stockade shut off the tip of the peninsula, leaving it open only to the sea, by the paved docks. In die next crescent there were thick groves of bara trees with glossy dark green leaves and stems that were rendered down for oil. Beyond that there seemed to be folds for wool-deer, a small village, with weavers’ tents strung over the redwood trees.
The smell was certainly real. Even now in the early morning it hung over Itsik like a cloud. There was already a shift working in the big tannery shed on the left of the main compound. Red, who had served at Itsik before, pointed out the tallow works, and on the right the mess hall, the sleeping huts, the sickhouse. I asked about a small inner compound behind the sickhouse.
“Punishment Block!” Red spat on the deck. “But don’t worry, it’s mainly used for the Specials.”
I didn’t ask any more questions because I thought the Specials might be mad persons. Grabber was very subdued still and as sensible as he ever was, but I didn’t want to upset him. I had one hope … to get away from these two as soon as possible and work beside someone else.
We stood at the rail unroped and carrying our gray pouches of personal possessions slung across our bodies— these are called “mothers” in prison slang and the word so used is highly indecent. To my surprise Len came up beside me as we stood there. He was gruff and embarrassed; I wondered if the Rope Ward had made him speak to me, but I believe it was his own memory of Harn’s house. He pointed out the officers’ block and the flensing shed, right down on the dock. Workers were hacking away at tall blocks of some whitish substance. Suddenly I saw bones….
“Great fire!” I whispered. “Is that a sea-sunner they have killed?”
“Winds forbid,” said Len, “they are sacred beasts. That is a toben, a kind of large fish.”
We talked at the rail for some time, quietly and naturally. I could hardly believe that this was Len and that I had lived through the long years since he went away from Harn’s house. But it was Len, and he had hardly altered: he was still that proud, boastful child. I seemed to have grown much older.
Before we parted, he slipped me a small package wrapped in a square of brown oiled silk.
“Hide it well,” he said. “In your boot, maybe. You can trade it better than silver credits. It is brown bark, ‘smack.* ”
Smack was precious. It is a spice that adds taste to food and makes the smack-eater a little tipsy. I thanked Len as warmly as I could. The ship had docked; I came to Itsik and did not look back at the ship to wave farewell to Len or to the Rope Ward.
The wharf had become more crowded; workers were loading hides and tallow onto the salt boat. I was surprised again, this time by workers’ clothes. These cargo movers were all strong, with the sullen look of prisoners, but their clothes had the look of ragged finery, the castoff clothes of grandees. Clan colors—Wentroy green, Galtroy crimson— blossomed on their striped cloaks; a few had tousled wigs of fake hair or leather vests trimmed with fur.
A guard wearing an old Pentroy banner over his cloak collected us and took us to be hosed down. In the receiving depot there were more of these colored clothes, clean and of such a weave as I had seldom seen, but I kept my own gray and was marked out as a Tsagul prisoner.
Grabber had fully recovered from the voyage. Just as the sickhouse team arrived to check us over, he went into a fit and seized a clothing rack. Red and I stood back as the guards tried to pry him loose. A sharp, querulous voice rang out.
“Stop that, you fools! Let it alone!”
An extraordinary creature bustled into sight: a female, short, wiry, with long skeins of dirty white hair tied in bunches. She wore an old vented robe kilted up about her skinny legs, and her patched half-cloak was hung around with bunches of herbs, grips and scissors and shell knives. I recognized the brown of Clan Dohtroy, our own local grandees, and the crest of Dohtroy, flower and gourd, was embroidered on her shabby pectoral.
“Who’s that, for the fire’s sake?” I whispered to Red.
“The Forgan of Itsik, our Healer,” said Red. “That is Gwell Nu—mad Gwell…”
Gwell Nu approached poor Grabber and examined him briefly. She twitched a shell knife from her belt, and I saw ber make a scratch on his arm—which he did not notice at all—and rub in some salve. In a few heartbeats Grabber was fast asleep. I looked at the Healer with respect. If Gwell was mad, it was a kind of madness that worked like good sense.
She was pleased to see new arrivals from Tsagul and greeted Red like an old friend.
“What’s this then? Cub? Yolo Ham?” she cackled when my turn came. “You may call yourself what you will, my dear. Always pleased to see strong young workers from the Fire-Town. How goes good Om Margan Dohtroy? Peace to the good liege’s house. Keep to yourself … don’t mix with this rabble from the Rintoul clans. I’ll see you right, child.”
She knotted at my skein.
“Woodcutting detail!” she called to the guards, and closed one huge tawny eye in a hideous wink.
The guard called back cheerfully: “Privilege! You’re doing favors for Dohtroy landfolk!”
