The Ishim Underground

by Carrie Bailey

CHAPTER THREE

  A sharp wind whistled hollowly through the village street like a air passing over the neck of a bottle and was punctuated by a scattering of howls over the hills. The two identical men shuttered for warmth. Villagers in Dunedin typically retired to their pillared houses long before dusk. While on any given night, Auck City might be teaming with activity under the flickering light of the lampposts, in the all night coffee houses or behind the walls of the myriad socials clubs open to the usual urban schemers. But, nocturnal activity was not common in Dunedin, because the villagers lived in fear and respect for local predators.

  Megafauna roamed the wastelands surrounding the villages. The loogaroo, a giant dog, and the panthera, a giant cat, stalked herds of purple beefalo and flocks of moa, a giant flightless bird. Many of the creatures were two or three times the height of the average man. But, they had an uneasy truce with the predators. The animals satisfied themselves by eating other animals and the people of the village satisfied themselves by habitually avoiding going out when it was dark. The exception being an occasional teenage boy who had something to prove. And eventhough the bricks of the village walls protected them, villagers tended to lock their doors while the sun still hung above the horizon. Out of respect or fear, Eron didn’t know.

  “Just one night,” he whispered, tugging on Gil's rope. “And you’re on your own if we get discovered.”

  “Into character fast, aren’t we?” said the juggler. “You almost sounded like a guardsman.”

  “I am a guardsman,” Eron hissed.

  With Eron leading, they treaded quietly between the houses, all of which were cannibalized bits of older, modern buildings, chiseled and repurposed to construct single level homes by haphazardly filling in a square wooden frame. From one of the flat roof tops, a clay pot dropped and shattered on the stone road below.

  A burst of adrenaline shot through Eron’s veins. He pulled Gil into an alley where they crouched behind a pile of broken furniture covered in dead vines. Eron tried desperately to slow his startled breathing.

  "I think I’m going to need you to loosen the rope a bit," said Gil. ”I can feel the blood pooling around my wrists.”

  “I promised to help you, not trust you.”

  “Do you, um, do you enjoy this sort of bondage?” said Gil pulling at the fraying fibers.

  Eron didn't respond.

  “Why not let me go in front?” said the juggler.

  “I think the person in charge is the one who knows where to go,” Eron said. But, he had no idea how to transport a captive authentically. “The guard should be in the lead.”

  Gil nodded. They got up and Eron took the rope end.

  “But,” said Gil after a few paces. “Maybe a guard would want a captive walking in front so that he could keep his eye on him?”

  There were at least twenty more doors between them and the weaver's house. Eron allowed Gil to pass.

  “But, then again, he’d have a weapon to prod the prisoner along,” said the entertainer snapping his fingers. “You should be in the lead.”

  Eron shuffled ahead again.

  “Not that it matters if you have a weapon as long as you claim that you have one,” said Gil. “And you guards always carry knives to threaten your captives with.”

  “You’re the one who would know,” said Eron wedging himself into the narrow space between two stucco walls that would lead them down an alley to the back entrance of the weaver's.

  “You assume, because I’m a fugitive I know about being a captive?” said Gil indignantly. "It's my first time-"

  Eron put his finger to his lips and scowled.

  Gil reached out and pinched Eron’s cheek.

  Above the arch at the rear kitchen entrance, a mosaic of red, green, and blue tiles were pressed into the clay exterior and represented a takahe standing on three stones. Each Auckian family had a similar decoration that identified their homes like a family crest. Eron pushed the wool banner aside. Locks on the front doors. No doors on the back. Eron would never understand Dunedin architects.

  Every home in the village had been built roughly the same. Same layout. Same size. Same building materials. All painted the same sandy reddish hue as everything else in the village although a little more or less yellow in some places. The builders didn’t lack imagination. They lacked time and supplies.

  Most of the buildings had a wall between the kitchen and the main area where the families worked and slept with a large imbedded fireplace open to both chambers, used for roasting and keeping the house warm. Eron checked the dome-shaped bread stove in the center of the kitchen for leftovers from the evening meal. Although supper was included in his rent, it was rarely waiting for him when he came in.

  Then, while carefully circumventing a circular stone bench that surrounded the wide opening to the fireplace in the main area, Eron stubbed his toe. But, his muffled sob didn’t appear to wake the scattered masses of blanket covered lumps. Eron could barely make out the dark hair of the weaver’s children sticking out from their woolen covers, but none seemed to move. He knew there were at least eight in total, but during the day, they moved around so much and the neighbor's children so often added to their number that he could never be sure.

  An eternity seemed to pass as they slowly traversed the main room feeling their way by touch to Eron's bed. It was brimming with looms holding various patterns of bright, unfinished textiles. Fortunately, the weaver and his consort slept in small room built on the flat rooftop above, supported by two rows of wooden pillars that had long since been burried by the weaver's abandoned projects.

  Eron's landlord was a man known for breaking out in a mental rash of brilliant ideas and being equally prone to not completing them. The residue of his genius left a masterful mess between the kitchen, the hearth and the three banners hung from the beams near the entrance to make a private space for Eron in the middle of his chaos.

  Each loom in the weaver's shop was formed by two tall sticks, pressed deeply into the ground, roughly a foot or so wider in distance across than the weaver himself. Long strings dangled from a cross stick set on top. Unlike the solid wooden looms in his mother’s factory, there were no foot pedals to circumvent and no moving mechanisms to disturb. And in between the kaleidoscopic labyrinth of standing looms, stacks of fabric, threads and unused frames rested on the bare ground leaving almost no space to walk. Most nights, Eron would have brought a lamp from the kitchen, because the shop was as treacherous to navigate in the light as it was in the dark.

  In his room, Eron had enough straw, old fabric and wool stuffed under a blanket that he could sleep comfortably. His belongings stood equidistant along the wall arranged from largest to smallest. Eron emptied his pockets and set the contents in order while Gil watched him complete his evening routine. He covered himself with a blanket and turned his back to the juggler who was still standing.

  “Curse the guard,” muttered Gil lowering himself onto the floor.

  “The gawd of the guard can hear you,” Eron warned.“Everything the guard does, the gawd of the guard does better. He builds infrastructure, expands our territory, protects us." He yawned. "Punishes his enemies."

  For a moment, he sounded just like his mother.

  “I’ve never heard of infrastructure,” said Gil. “And if I've lived this long without it, I doubt I need it.”

  “You have heard of infrastructure,” said Eron. “You're just not familar with the word, because you’re a nomad. It just means all the buildings and roads and systems needed to run a city.

  "Eron, why did you join the Green Guard if you were such a know-it-all spongy scribe?” asked the fugitive as he gnawed on the cord around his wrist.

  "It was a dare,” Eron lied rolling over to face the man. “Now, go to sleep or I'll have to gag you, too.”

  “You'd like that!” said Gil putting his head on the edge of Eron’s pad.

  Eron’s had already woken several times when he felt the warmth of the morning fire creep
into his room. It was dawn. His head spun with a disconnected onslaught of vivid fragments of the night's dreams. After shaking the cobwebs still clinging to his sleepy mind, he dozed off again briefly before wrestling his body into a standing position.

  He grabbed a soft merino undershirt and a long sleeved tunic with the green guardsman stripe on the arm. His mother had shortened a few of his yellow tunics before he left so they wouldn’t drag in the mud, but he rarely wore them. She also made him leather knickers with extra pockets and adjustable green suspenders. Still, he missed the longer tunics. If he hadn't been busy hiding a fugitive, he would have taken some time to wash his loincloths. Belting his tunic over his shorts, then rolling up his sleeves and tying them into place with the loose strings sewn on the arms, he then pulled a knit hat over his matted hair and stepped out of the partition that divided his room from the rest of the house.

  Such an incredible mess. The forrest of looms woven with colorful alternating threads, weighted to the ground with stones or bits of bone, looked worse during the day. Eron missed his mother's tidy factory, but nothing as much as the shelving system she used to organize her inventory.

  That morning, the weaver's consort wore a delicate blue skirt under a white tunic. Thadine would have approved and Eron never failed to tell her so. She was beautiful. Her dark hair was already wrapped tightly above her head in a white cloth and she was smiling as she fried eggs on the dome stove. The mother of the weaver's children had died a few years ago and though the weaver had never formally been bonded to the women who now ran his home, he knew he was fortunate. Many of the female villagers and nomads preferred leather pants and she was the perfect woman to advertise the more impractical, but ornate fashions he made that were considered frivilous to the people living in the Eastern Wastelands. It was certain the weaver would soon formalize their arrangement.

  “They ate my dinner again,” said Eron.

  “I can refund you after the festival,” she said offering him some breakfast.

  “It's alright. It's just- I was thinking maybe we could catch the kids in action if we put some dye in a bowl of stew and left it out for them.”

  The woman furrowed her delicate brow.

  “I must trust my kids and believe that they will eventually chose to do the right thing,” she said taking a piece of dough in her hands and shaping it into flat bread. “If I don’t believe in them, they might never learn to believe in themselves.”

  “I know you're right,” Eron gushed although he disagreed completely with the her methods.

  He went back got his tool basket from his room, hefted his wooden spade over his shoulder and slung over his shoulder the leather case that held his copy of Liam’s Discourses Achazya had given him before he left Auck City. He would read it on his lunch break to help unwind.

  Gil would have to stay in his room while he worked.

  The discourses contained the definitive reasons for the apocalypse, the justification for the Municipal Code and a number of general essays on metaphysics. Light reading for Eron and he was going to need it.

  He tried not to look at Gil as he wiped a smear of oil from his knife. The fugitive must have kicked over his little hand-sized clay lamp with the pinched lip that rested a shallow wick. It had spilled everywhere.

  “There is a festival tonight,” Eron whispered. “After work I'll come back and you can leave. Blend in with the crowd. I’ll even get you a mask from the market. No one will notice.”

  Gil nodded.

  Eron had no trouble finding a vendor selling skull masks on the side of the street in the clearing where the villagers had assembled bone fires to burn effigies of their dead relatives on his way home that afternoon. He nodded at a couple of burly nomads unloading bladders of medicinal wine from a wooden vardo and put the mask on. Many were already dressed for the Festival of the Dead.

  Eron thought a lot about death that day. But, not his dead relatives. Not his father or great uncle or any of his neighbors in the city. His death. That was on his mind. All through the day, he was plagued by morbid visions of the bounty hunters finding him with Gil. In each one, he ended up lying in the pit he was digging with arrows sticking from his back looking like the spikes of a porcupine.

  “Would you like to buy some Urigolds?” asked a tired looking nomadic vendor offering him a basket of wilted orange petals.

  Traditionally, the petals were given to lovers to represent all the years they would spend together.

  “I’m not married,” he said.

  “A trag-ifi-cation,” said the vendor departing just in time to intercept another potential customer.

  The golden red flowers, named after the modern scientist that genetically modified much of the Auckian flora and fauna almost five hundred years ago, decorated everything in the village. Heavy strands of the dark petals were drapped over doorways. At the coffee house, the matron was winding garlands in spirals around each beam on the porch. Eron didn’t know how he was going to face her again.

  He was extremely grateful to have had reason to buy the mask.