Pilgrimage v1.0, page 9
“I hear it too,” Brann said. “It’s not monklers, though.”
“It sounds like monklers to me,” Hals said.
Brann shook his head. “No, listen, it’s more like singing, all together, only I can’t make out any words.”
Liza sat up. “The noise is coming from the other side of the gate,” she said. “Do you suppose there are folk in the next gallery?”
“I never heard any folk sound like that,” Hals whispered. “It’s like noises of animals, like the animals the Gads bring when the circus comes. Only sometimes I think I can make out words in it”
There came a long wild calling like the yapping of a wild dog, were there any dogs in the city save for those in the Gad’s menagerie, and a single cracking report Something white and luminous in the dark came fluttering down onto Liza. She shrieked and flailed.
“What is it Brann? Help!” And Brann started laughing.
“It’s your dress, Liza.” The thing had slipped, perhaps moved by the sudden noise (or coincidentally) from where Liza had draped it on the overhanging counter of the stall. The white cloth, ghostlike in the night had fallen onto Liza. She struggled free of the blanket and stood grimacing at Brann. Halsam saw her in the stripe of moonlight that stroked down her spine from the nape of her neck to her buttocks and slipped across arm and breast as she moved. She flung the dress at Brann and would not look when he held out his arm.
Brann stifled his laughter. “Please, Liza. I’m sorry. Come here.”
She turned her face away, but slowly she looked back at him and soon she took his hand and settled back to the blankets. They would not have understood why Halsam picked up his blanket then and moved it outside the door to the stall, lying there with his hands pressed over his ears. Brann and Liza were not especially attentive to the resumed noise from beyond the sealed arches of the gallery, the low, speechless, incessant chant.
“Halsam!” Liza was calling. Brann woke with the dusty odor of wood shavings in his nostrils. He found his way out from beneath the blankets. He ruffled his hair, feeling excelsior there, and sneezed.
He heard Liza call “Halsam!” again.
“He went outside last night,” Brann said. He shook wood shaving from his pants and pulled them on. Taking his shirt like a towel around his neck, Brann stepped out into the entrance of the stall where the full beam of the sunlights made him squint.
Liza squatted amid the disarray of Halsam’s belongings.
“He’s gone somewhere,” Liza told him.
“Maybe he went off to find something for breakfast,” Brann answered. “He’s good at that” Brann moved over to where the stream of water still issued from the siphon in the center of the marketplat. He put his head under the stream and washed away the dust and the excelsior. He toweled the water from his aims and chest with his shirt.
“Brann!” Liza called sharply.
“What?”
’This isn’t funny. I think something has happened to Hals.” She pointed to the contents of his satchel, utensils, matches, a flashlight, odd torn bits of clothing strewn over the flagstones. A packet of dried apples had been tom open and the contents were gone. Crumbs of the fruit, as if hurriedly eaten, lay among toe belongings.
Brann felt ashamed that he had laughed before. Something had happened that had taken Halsam from his bed in a hurry. He joined with Liza and they called for him. “Hals, where are you? Halsam! Halsam!” Their voices went on, repeating into toe silence of toe gallery. Then Brann took his knife and moved among toe stalls looking for some sign of Halsam. His fear now—he didn’t tell it to Liza—was that some straggler from the exodus had murdered Hals, perhaps for his food and dragged Hals’s body to some deserted stall. All toe stalls were empty. Halsam was gone.
Liza and Brann stood together, abject, in toe center of the marketplat, near where toe siphon bubbled and ran. They wondered to each other why Halsam had gone outside toe night before and where he might have gone.
“What made him leave?” Liza asked.
“Maybe we kept him awake,” Brann said. But it wasn’t funny.
In their frustration they began to argue as to whose fault it had been that Halsam had gone. Not looking much at each other, they gathered up their belongings and packed their satchels. Outside, Liza repacked Halsam’s satchel and refused to allow Brann to help. Brann, angry, moved away. He walked toward the wall of the gallery where the gate blocked further passage and he looked through the grillwork into the gallery beyond. From where he stood he could see only ruins. They were the tumbled walls of houses, the stone and masonry worn and dirty. It seemed to predate the shaking surely, as if some disaster had occurred there long before: Dirt had covered the flags on the other side of the gate and only in one place was there a path leading over it where the dirt was swept from the floor. It led back amid the rubble and disappeared. Misshapen walls blocked further view into the next gallery. Brann took hold of the gate thinking to climb a bit and perhaps see where the path led. The gate swung with his weight. It swung silently as if it opened often for some purpose and Brann saw that there were footprints in the dust going both ways. He leaped clear and crouched, breathless.
“Liza, I want to show you this,” he called. “I think “I’ve found where Hals went.”
She came at a run, dropping any pretense of anger. Brann showed her the footprints beyond the open gate.
“Look,” she said, “the lock has been cut open. Was it like this before?”
Brann shrugged; he couldn’t recall.
Liza bent to examine the massive deadbolt which should have held the gate shut against almost any force. The bolt was on their side of the gate. “Someone has cut right through the grill from the other side,” Liza said. “It’s still all fresh, bright metal. Maybe it’s only been a little while since it happened.”
“We would have heard,” Brann protested.
“No, we wouldn’t”
They heard the noise again, the low, eerie chanting which was not quite speech. Its source was beyond the tumbled walls of the next gallery. The cracking came and the loud yapping that they could now hear as words.
Liza called, “Halsam!” cupping her hands and shouting through the ruined gate. There was no reply. The chanting continued. It rose into a grumbling cacophony after the cracking noise and settled into its eerie rhythm after a moment. She shouted, “Halsam!” again and would have shouted a third time—she had her hands cupped and the word on her tongue—when a woman appeared. She came from behind the farthest wall visible on the path.
The woman’s jaw had a dead slackness. Her open mouth showed stumps of teeth. Seeing Brann and Liza there, she peeled her lips back further in a loose-lipped grimace and her pink tongue came uncertainly to her lips. She wore nothing except a harness, and her hair ended raggedly at her waist. The leather of the harness crossed above her flat breasts and between them, coming down over the doughy flesh of her belly. Her color was dark but it was the darkness of dirt, not pigment, and neither Brann nor Liza could tell harness from flesh. Even without the motion of air, her odor came rank and sour so that Liza gagged at it. For the briefest instant the woman remained. Then her arm came up and she flung something which splattered on the gate and through it, and would have splashed on Brann and Liza had they not seen it coming and dodged back from the gate in time.
Liza wrinkled her nose at it “It’s shit” she said, “or something else just as rotten.”
They looked back through the grillwork but the woman was gone.
“I never saw anyone as filthy as that” Brann said. He did not even have time to imagine what else might be in the next gallery nor to do more than lick his lips, which seemed somehow to have become very dry. The chanting picked up in cadence and also the yapping shout The cracking sound rang out several times swiftly. The rumbling of something immense, moving, began and they could feel the vibration of it through the concrete of the gallery floor.
“Hals is there, I bet” Brann said.
“Do you want to go in there?” Liza asked him.
“No.”
“But we have to if Hals is on the other side of the gate, don’t we?”
“Yes, I suppose.”
He saw that she wasn’t angry anymore. Though she tried to hide it, he made out the faintest smile when she turned to pick up her satchel. Somehow Brann had found he wasn’t as afraid as he had been, because whatever had happened to Hals had to do with folk of some sort and he could deal with folk, as opposed to giants or things entirely unknown.
Brann picked up his own satchel and Halsam’s. Avoiding the foul stuff which still dripped from the gate, he pulled the grill open and they stepped through.
The rumble came louder now as something rolled with gathering momentum. The chant picked up in cadence to what might once have been a song. The meaning of it had gone and even the volition until it sounded as if it were imperative, a noise inseparable from action. The hair on Brann’s arms rose and he felt goose bumps. Liza walked on her toes like one afraid to touch the ground. The ground was gritty like sand under their bare feet. Wherever they stepped, little puffs of dust came up. The smell of it was dry and unpleasant.
“I wonder how long things have been like this on this gallery?” Liza whispered. “These were houses once, I think. Maybe like ours, but you can’t even really tell except by the shape.”
The path wound through the haphazard mounds. They were not really used to the dirt Their own gallery had always been swept daily so that the paths and crossroads were spotless and they could go barefoot without a thought Here, a masonry wall leaned over a hill of rubble so that a cave was formed. They couldn’t see inside, but in a cleared space at the entrance there was a fire circle. The stones were sooty as if many fires had burned here. In a midden nearby were dry and splintered bones. Had it not been for the thought of Halsam, one could hardly imagine which of them would have said, “Let’s go back!” first The only colors in this ruined gallery were the grays of fallen stone and the black of soot A fine dust soon layered their clothes. Everywhere in the dust there were directionless footprints, and once they came across a rubble-strewn highroad where the dust was rutted with the mark of great wheels. The air was filled with dust like a dry floating mist The noise was very dose now, just beyond a broken ridge of stone which seemed to have been moved aside by some engine—perhaps a bulldozer of the Structors, though Brann could hardly imagine the Structors coming so far into the city in any past time. The path intersected another one there and turned to parallel the ridge. On the other side they could clearly hear the sounds they had heard before, moving steadily toward them.
Brann found a place where the ridge seemed to have been climbed often before, where dirt was packed into the space between the rocks and the way was easier. He motioned to Liza that they should be quiet, and together they made their way up the ridge. At its crest it reached perhaps a third of the way to the ceiling.
The cracking noise came again very suddenly as they reached the ridge crest. Brann cried out, “Wha…1” involuntarily. A rock rolled from beneath his foot and he went down onto the rock.
“Are you all right, Brann?” Liza asked. She scrambled up next to him. “You’re bleeding!”
“I scraped my knee; it’s not bad. The noise startled me.”
‘I’ll clean it,” she said, and she began to open her water bottle, but Brann motioned her to silence. Dust was floating thickly below, and from their left the rumbling noise grew loud.
“Oh! for the Lord above!” Liza exclaimed.
Brann hissed at her, “Shush…” He lost sense of the hurt knee, and he and Liza both stared at a most remarkable scene.
First in view were the folk, pulling. They were like the woman briefly seen before, naked but so filthy that the dirt almost clothed them. Lines of them spread out, harnesses linked to a fan of ropes which converged behind them and disappeared into the dust The folk, men and women, moved, pulling against their harnesses and ropes like draft animals, heaving step by slow step into their traces, while their slow mouths moved in the mumbled incomprehensible chant. Their eyes had no intelligence at all, no independence, no curiosity. They just stepped and moved, leaning, pulling their weight against the ropes. Then what they pulled came into view, and Brann knew it at once from what Grandmother Ebar had described. It rolled on wheels twice man height, iron like the spoked pulleys of an engine. Over the axle was a platform of meshed boards and metal lashed together and glued together. The two watching could not imagine what the glue was. As Ebar had said, it was more like a nest than the construction of something sentient “Is that Halsam there?” Liza asked.
“It can’t be him,” said Brann.
“Those are his clothes.”
“It’s not Hals,” Brann said.
“Where is he then?”
It did seem to be Halsam standing in the nest. It was Hal* sam’s size, a man as filthy as the rest, but seemingly awake and aware. He guided the team of folk with a long whip which he cracked over their heads. The lash licked out touching one naked back or another. The whip elicited no reaction from any of the pulling folk who seemed not even to feel it The Driver cried out with each crack of the whip in that yipping howl, which might in some precursor of the Driver have been distinguishable as words, but which had become over generations a stylized, empty cry. He wore Hal-sam’s clothes, the blue and azure of diem the only bright color apparent in the gallery. Fixed in the center of the Driver’s chest was some sort of jewel, crimson and large as a fist “There’s Hals,” Liza said, pointing. “See, they’ve got him tied to one of the ropes, pulling.”
“Could that be Hals?” Brann wondered. “How did he get here?”
“They must have heard us last night and seen Hals sleeping outside,” Liza whispered. “That must be how they get folk to pull.”
“I wonder if it’s the same ones Grandmother Ebar saw,” Brann said. “It was when she was just a girl, maybe seventy years ago.” He told Liza what Ebar had described.
“We have to help Hals,” Liza said. “We can’t leave him there.”
“How?”
“I don’t know, but look at him, his back is all cut from the whip. They’ll kill him if we don’t get him out.”
Like the others, the boy wore nothing but a harness and his back was bloody where the whip had touched it. From time to time Halsam looked around hopefully at the ridge line. He’s looking for us, Brann thought. He’s waiting for us to help him. They could see that he had been crying; the dirt on his face was streaked where tears had run and dried. He seemed beyond crying now and it was clear that such treatment for days and longer would reduce him to the state of the other folk, mindless, a draft animal. The stench from below was awful, like the woman’s redoubled, and Halsam seemed to reel along in it hardly aware anymore of his condition.
To the right a portion of the ridge line had slid down, perhaps from the force of the shaking. It covered the road that the wagon would travel, and the folk pulling it came there and stood dumbly. Those behind piled onto those in front and they milled about tangling the ropes. The Driver cried out something else in that yipping voice and the wagon came to a halt. At that, all the folk simply settled to the ground where they stood.
The Driver clambered down from the wagon, and something else climbed down with him, mimicking his moves precisely. It seemed like a monkler grown large, and as the Driver walked up to the slide it paced him step for step.
“That’s a little boy,” Liza said, “a child Driver. Can you imagine them, father after son for generations of the city, riding on that wagon?”
“I wonder how far they’ve been,” Brann said.
“Or where they were ever going in the first place,” Liza added.
The Driver stared at the masonry and kicked it, morosely. He heaved at one immense boulder and when it wouldn’t move, he kicked it savagely, barefooted, and hurt himself. He let off with a string of yipping sounds in which there were almost words buried like tangled obscenities. The miniature copied him precisely.
The scene might have been comic, except that as the Driver cursed he struck one of the nearby folk with the butt of his whip, battering her to the ground. He shouted something else, and with the whip laid about beating at the folk. Slowly some of them got back to their feet and began undoing the links to the ropes. Then one by one they formed into a ragged line. A big man at the front began lifting the rocks one at a time and passing them to the next in line, who passed it to the next, oblivious to the shouts of the Driver. The Driver and his shadow ranted, dancing up and down the line. The first rock reached the far end of the hundred-some folk and only then did the man at the front pick up the next one.
“It will take them forever to do it that way, from there,” Liza said. “Don’t they see what they’re doing?”
Brann shook his head. “I don’t think they know any other way to do it. Maybe one time there was a reason for it. But 1 think they’ve forgotten the reason and don’t know anything else to do but this.”
Some few of the folk had not been unlinked from the ropes, perhaps half a dozen. They all seemed younger than Halsam, who also had been left tied. They looked a bit less subhuman than the other folk. Two even appeared to be talking together, a boy and a girl, possibly in their early teens.
“Why doesn’t he let them up to move rocks?” Liza wondered.
“Maybe they’re new ones like Hals and he doesn’t trust them yet,” Brann answered.
“Pretty soon they’ll be just like the others,” said Liza. “I wish we could help them.”
To Brann they looked far gone, already beyond help, even the two talking seemed so; he pointed out to her how dead their eyes seemed, how listless they were, bow their conversation when it drifted up was a gabble, a play at remembered speech. “We can’t help them, Liza,” he said. “We’ll do well to get Halsam out.”
They watched the slow, excruciating movement of the rocks.
