Pilgrimage v1.0, page 6
She slung a satchel from her back and dropped it to the ground. “Give me your light,” she told him. She opened the satchel and showed him its contents. “A blanket, clothes, cooking things, food.” She held up a thin-bladed knife. “I brought this, too, Brann.” She looked at him. “What if there are more like that dwarf? My mama said there might be.”
Brann took the knife from her. “Could you use that?” he asked. “Could you protect yourself with that?”
She was quiet and packed the knife away again. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “We’ll find out maybe.”
“I brought one, too,” Brann said.
As she replaced things in the satchel, Brann saw that she had brought one of the silver dancing dolls that he had given her (and he almost smiled about it, knowing that it meant something special).
She shined the light on his satchel. “What did you bring?”
“The same as you,” he answered. He showed her. She came to the coat given Brann by the boy from the 113th tier. “Oh, that’s beautiful,” she said. “Will you need it?”
“I don’t know what we’ll need. It’s cold at the roof of the city. It could be we’ll go there. The boy who gave me this said it’s cold there, that there’s snow even inside of the city, not just on the gallery verge.”
Liza surveyed her own light clothing. “I have nothing like that,” she told him.
He clicked his tongue and put the coat away. “It may be that I won’t need it” He took out his blanket and tied the satchel tight She helped him spread the blanket.
“I brought 200 Paad,” Brann told her. “Did you bring any money?”
“860 Paad,” she said. She opened her belt pouch to display a sheaf of orange-red crinkled bills.
“So much!”
“It was school money. I got it out of deposit yesterday.” Her voice was wistful. “I don’t suppose I’ll have that chance now.”
They smoothed the blanket and spread hers on top.
“Have you heard from Hals?” she asked him. “Is he coming?”
Brann shrugged. “He said so. I don’t know. I was by there this morning and they were already gone.”
“From here, do you think he went down already? He has no brothers or sisters. They keep a close watch on him.”
“Hals is my best friend,” Brann said. “We all said we’d go together, you, me and Hals. I think he’ll come.”
Brann was afraid in a way and it had only partly to do with the turmoil of the folk below. He was going to spend the night with Liza. They had planned it. They had decided to hide here in the parkplat and wait until the gallery cleared. They had planned it very carefully. Brann would come here first and Hals would come and Liza.
“The streets will be filled with folk and there will be officers. When they’ve decided, they won’t let us stay behind, and our parents won’t, surely,” Hals had said.
“We’ll hide from them,” Brann had told them, “in our place at the parkplat.”
But Hals had not come; he’d said it would be difficult to get away from his parents. “Fll do it though,” he’d assured them. “We will all three stay together.”
It was dark there and very still in the trees. Brann wanted to take Liza’s hand and he was afraid to do even that. The wind from Frontward had stopped blowing two days ago. It had stopped with the shaking that had come then. The shaking was responsible for it all. It had_ been dark then, too, and Brann’s family had been at their meal. Then the tiny vibration had begun. The dishes had rattled in the cupboard and fallen. There had come a distant humming noise like that which Brann and Hals had heard in the closed elevator shaft Then for one sharp instant the house shook as if the plat below them had been lifted. The rest of the dishes had sprung completely from the cupboard, shattering with a great noise on the floor. Little Thod had cried out at it. Brann had wanted to and had not, looking instead to his mother and father for strength. Baby Nam had wailed. They hadn’t known what it was.
In the streets a house here and there had collapsed. In one place the street itself had caved in, exposing great conduits like those in the secret room below Brann’s house. Another shake had come, smaller than the one before, and after that others still less violent. But the winds from Frontward had stopped abruptly and it had become so quiet for an instant that the gallery seemed dead.
Then the folk had fled without voting, without the poll which would have said whether they would go or not The most frightened of the folk had crowded the elevators from the first instant after the shaking. Folk from the south flank of the gallery had come north. One of them said that the elevator there would not run, that cars hung without motion and that folk had to be helped out. Not even the Magistors or the school Masters had known what had happened.
Brann and Liza and Hals had talked before about what they would do when the folk went on Pilgrimage.
“I’m not going with them,” Brann had said. He’d told them of Grandmother Ebar’s pictures and of Hegman Branlee’s confusing argument for the rightness of the Pilgrimage.
“Everybody goes on Pilgrimage,” he’d said, “and none is ever heard from again. I want to go to Frontend myself. Everything has changed. Now we’re no longer going in an orderly way. We’re running away headlong. Nobody knows why. They say it’s all one thing, the dwarf, the shaking. Mara says that the Isocourt doesn’t know, either.”
Brann had been surprised. He’d thought that Liza would perhaps go with him. He’d not been all that sure and her decision to come had unnerved him. It was what scared him now that he was alone with her. He didn’t even move past that to any concept of her loving him. He’d been surprised when she had said that she would come and that she had said it without any hesitation, as if her promises to her parents and her plans to join the Healers’ Guild were nothing, and he was much more than nothing to her. But Halsam, who had always scoffed at Brann’s notion (secretly held and secretly confided to Hals), to look for that place where he might join the Post Guild, had said that he also was coming.
“Aren’t you afraid, Hals?” Liza had asked him. “Didn’t you always say the safe route was best?”
“Yes,” Hals had answered, “I think maybe I’m ashamed of that now. Besides, doesn’t the shaking change it all?” He stood with Brann and Liza and looked at the great hole in the floor of the gallery and all the cables and conduits exposed. “What do you think happened?” he had asked.
“I think the Structors did it,” Liza had said. “From there, maybe a block broke loose up above somewhere and it crashed down into the lower tiers of the city.”
Brann hadn’t told them that Grandmother Ebar had thought it much worse. ’There has been some immense happening,” she’d told him. “From here, maybe the city itself is finally down.”
Of this he’d said nothing to Halsam or Liza.
Now they waited on the hilltop, and Brann felt Liza’s fingers come between his hands. He sat with his arms encircling his knees, and she sat next to him so that their bare legs touched. They’d done this so many times before and nothing had come of it but now the same touching terrified Brann. Where was Hals? Liza laid her head on Brann’s knees. Their fingers played.
“We’ll stay here the night, won’t we, Brann?” she asked.
He knew then that Halsam was not coming that night (he was sure of it). He thought at once that it didn’t make any difference. Liza was coming with him. The touches that had been sufficient before were not so now. The things he had feared before were not terrifying now. Her face was hot. He kissed it. “Your face is all warm,” Liza said. (His also? That surprised him.) They kissed again and he pulled away. An orange light had sprung up among the buildings on the highroad farthest south.
“It’s a fire,” Brann said, “in the houseplats nearest the flank.”
“Maybe someone set it,” Liza answered. “They are all so crazy tonight.”
“I wonder if Papa will go to fight it?”
“They won’t; they’re running. They won’t come back.”
Liza seemed to know how it should be. Their bare legs were against each other’s and that was not enough now and they played with snaps until they were almost unclothed. And almost unclothed, they moved against each other, lost thoughts of the flight in progress, lost fear that Halsam would find them. He wondered if he should enter her, perhaps tried and did not, the motion—silky, effortless—was enough. She moved beneath him, they lost the outside entirely, moved very swiftly and things were done.
“I was so scared,” she said. He lay on top. of her, his arms around her bare shoulders.
“I was too,” he said.
They pulled the rest of their clothing off, burrowed into the blankets and slept.
There was another shaking in the night. It was slighter than the others but it lasted a long time. The smell of smoke drifted up on air currents that had a directionless and fitful quality now that the breeze from frontward had ceased. South in the darkness they could see the fire and its orange reflection from the roof of the tier, blended. They didn’t sleep much, the noise was ceaseless, and it grew after the last shake. It became panicked and strident The traffic on the highroad grew. From time to time there would come metallic sounds from the highroad, as of vehicles colliding—where none had ever gone faster than a walker’s pace before. And from the market square there was the noise of a crowd gathered and the eternal opening and closing of the elevator doors.
After the shaking, Brann heard noises in the parkplat: the voice of one of the folk, a man calling, “Treena, come!” and a woman’s which was indistinct. There were more voices in the parkplat that night and Brann found his knife and had it ready next to their blankets. But none of those in the park came to the top of their hill. Another shaking, the worst yet, came.
Brann heard Liza take a breath and hold it. When the shaking stopped and the noise of the branches falling and of houses somewhere coming apart stopped, she breathed out again. “Is the city falling?” she asked Brann.
“I don’t know,” he said. This time he told her of Grand* mother Ebar’s thoughts.
“I have read of where this occurred before,” Ebar had told him. “It was a time perhaps two hundred years ago and it was much worse than this. It was written that smoke came on the wind from Frontward for weeks and that there was no water in the conduits so that the folk almost perished for thirst. It was written that the Structors came here from Tailend, right into the heart of the city and tore into the streets so that the water came again. The crematorium burned the dead with a constant flame for five days and nights. They said that was when the small elevator shafts were closed and the cars never ran again…you know the broken arch near south crossroad 81?”
Brann had nodded, recalling the pillar that had somehow been tom free of the ceiling and lay toppled across the crossroad, a section cut through it at some time past so that traffic could flow.
“It is written that the shaking did that,” Ebar had said, “and that some had feared the tier over would buckle and fall onto ours. There are other scars from that shaking if you look for them. There is the small motion of the highroad where it jogs past the parkplat. There is the row of sunlights above the school that darken out of sequence from all the rest”
And Brann thought of the conduits in the secret room beneath his houseplat, of their hollow sound and the rotten cable and its smell.
“It is said among some,” Ebar had told him, “that the city itself is too heavy, that the Foundations cannot support it here, that they are giving away, year by year.”
“What will happen, Grandmother?”
“I don’t know, Brann. Perhaps the city will fall, perhaps the Foundations will crumble.”
“You’re not frightened of it, Grandmother?”
“The city is of an age beyond knowing, Brann. So old that the twelve hundred years of this gallery are only a small fraction of that time. If it has lasted so long, it will last a bit longer. It will outlast me, maybe it will outlast you.”
A shaking then had rattled the pots of her green-planted room and sent one ivy-like growth to the floor where its pot burst with a dull noise.
All that night and into the next morning Brann and Liza stayed in their hiding place in the parkplat. The sunlights grew brighter and the noise of the crowd did not diminish. There was an awful crying in the bushes below them. They could hear a muffled scream and the sounds of a fight. There was an inhuman cry of pain and the noise of someone running headlong down through the bushes. The cry subsided and Brann went to see. He held his knife and he crept down on hands and knees through the low growing shrubs. Liza followed. There was a clear spot in the trees and the two moved up to it belly down on the wet grass.
“Do you see anything?” Liza asked.
“I see a man,” said Brann. He wondered how someone could lie so still. The grass was tom until the bare dirt showed, dark and steaming in the cool morning.
“I think I see blood,” said Brann. Liza came up next to him; together they stared at the form.
“Is he dead, Brann?”
“Let’s see.” Brann moved out in a crouch and knelt over the man. “Lord above, Liza, look at this.”
She came out. “Someone’s cut him, cut his throat,” and she went to her knees then, puking into the wet grass. Brann felt the same way and wished he could let himself go, also. There was a tight heaving in his stomach but it quelled and he stood up. Liza wiped her mouth with a handful of grass and stood, too.
“He was robbed,” she said. “Someone has cut all his pockets open.”
“And his satchel,n said Brann, nudging the tom thing with his foot. “Why would they do that, Liza?”
“I don’t know. They’re all crazy now, all running away.”
Could they just leave him, Brann wondered? “We’U take him somewhere,” he said.
“No we won’t,” said Liza. “Weil go back up onto the hill and wait until they’re all gone. This could happen to us.”
They hid again and listened to the sounds of flight throughout the day. One time there was the ululation of fire carts moving south, and Brann wondered if his father was among those who must be going at last to fight the fire. But the fire sirens did not come again, and the smell of smoke grew heavier.
“I think they’ve given up,” he said to Liza. As the sunlights faded into night, they could see the glow of the fire closer, yellow now behind the farthest buildings, and the dark ragged skyline southward in sharp silhouette. This night they saw few lights on the highroad and the crowd noise was gone from the marketplat. Only the intermittent sounds of the elevators coming gave evidence that some still waited to leave.
They hid in the blankets again, had each other almost completely again and did not even hear when the noises ceased entirely outside and the elevator doors closed for the final time.
“Brann?” they heard. “Liza?” Someone was shaking them through the blankets. Brann came awake to silence and pushed the covers from his face to see a sharp-faced boy with gray eyes and dark hair which was tousled and speckled with dust and soot.
“Halsam!” Brann cried. He reached for the other boy and wrestled him to the ground with happy laughter. “You came!”
“I came,” said Halsam. “It took me a while to get away from my parents.” He saw the girl’s red hair and sleepy face emerge from the blankets. “Hello, Liza.”
“Hello, Hals.”
“What happened?” Brann asked. He crawled out from the blankets and then felt inside them for his shirt and shorts. Halsam reddened perceptibly at Brann’s nakedness. Liza crawled out, too, and turned her back to dress.
“My papa wouldn’t let me out of his sight,” Halsam said. “Do you know from here what I had to carry? Tools—garden tools I Papa said that those had been in the Orbenn family for generations and that he wasn’t going to leave them for any reason. We got down to the marketplat two days ago, just at sunlight…Lord above, Brann, there were folk everywhere all crying and shouting. They had bundles and people couldn’t find each other and babies were getting lost. Every time an elevator car came, they just pushed on, maybe a hundred at a time. I don’t know how they breathed in there. The drivers were running them so fast I thought maybe one would come apart. I never saw it like that before.”
“Did you see Vill?” Brann asked.
“I think so,” answered Halsam, “but I couldn’t get close enough to talk to him.” He sat on the rumpled blankets. “Do you have anything to eat? I didn’t eat since yesterday morning.”
Brann dug into his satchel and came out with a chunk of bread. They split it three ways. Hals resumed his tale, punctuating it with bites of bread and sips of water from Liza’s bottle.
“They just kept crushing onto the elevator,” he said. “Sometimes the cars were already part full from up above. I think the whole gallery up and down on Tailend might be moving. Anyway, we pushed into a car, Mama and Papa and me, and somehow they got the doors closed…Then we started down. There were so many folk on the car I could hardly move; I almost couldn’t breathe. It smelled awful, like the cars had been running for a long time without cleaning. So we got down one level without any problem. But when we got two down, there was a fight. A whole crowd of folk was waiting for the car, and as soon as the doors opened, folk started pulling us out of the car. I don’t even know why the runner opened the doors because the car was so full no one else could have even gotten inside. Then a man took hold of my arm and started to drag me out. Papa shouted at him, saying, ‘Bastard, leave off of my son,’ and Papa jabbed a pruning shears at the man. There was a terrible fight and someone pulled the elevator runner out of his cage. I didn’t see Mama and Papa anymore. I got shoved out of the elevator entirely and I lost everything I was carrying except my satchel. I went over by a pillar out of the crowd and saw the doors of the car close again somehow. I guess Mama and Papa were on it. The car went on down. I didn’t know what was happening then and I thought that I would try to come back up here and see if you had gone yet.
