The Ishim Underground

by Carrie Bailey

CHAPTER TWELVE

  Eron and Amit ran from Moen and his vardo like panthera on coffee until they found a shady grove where Eron lied down on his back and heaved breath after strained breath. They didn't have to run. It just felt good after plodding along with the slow and steady cart. The afternoon wind blew across Eron's skin raising gooseflesh where he was wet and sticky from running. His hair stood on end. Though the vardo had provided some comfort, to venture out alone again was better.

  Alone.

  Alone, but, with Amit.

  Eron loved watching the bobbing motion of the pukeko, a dark blue bird with a long red legs and a fat red beak. It was fearless. A few passed only feet from where he was laying and stepped awkwardly, as they did, onto the road. Eron looked back up to the canopy and tried to judge the position of the sun through the undersides of the leaves. He’d learned to live without the sound of the great Auckian clock booming every day light hour, but he hadn't quite learned to judge time by the position of the sun. He needed practice.

  A rustling sound in the trees preceded a flurry of falling leaves. And Amit dropped his gangly legs from a branch directly above Eron. Then, he landed squarely on his chest, knocking out his wind. He heaved and gasped in desperation while the boy snorted in amusement.

  “I need your map,” said Amit pointing a slingshot he had taken from the nomads between Eron’s eyes.

  Eron gasped.

  "The map," demanded the boy.

  Still in pain, but not wanting to show it, Eron put his hands over his heart as if he’d been shot and lifted one foot stiffly up in the air. Amit waited silently as he conducted his theatrics. For the sake of authenticity, he reached over and picked a flower, closed his eyes and held it against his chest.

  Amit ducked slightly as he crept toward him. With one eye open, Eron thought the boy seemed more like a wild loogaroo than a wild human sometimes.

  “Where is it?” asked Amit, aiming the slingshot at him.

  “Search me,” said Eron closing his eyes.

  Naturally, Eron had already memorized the information on the small leather scroll even the symbols on the back and they were a bit of a puzzle to him.

  Amit reached out a spotted hand toward Eron's tunic when he shot upward, standing and knocked the boy to the ground. They struggled fiercely though neither had the advantage. It felt so good to laugh. While Eron had had a firm grip on Amit’s shoulder, the wild boy had gone for his hair. Which of course, hurt. Like rabid panthera with their eyes locked, they released and circled each other. Eron’s arms were the longest so he batted at Amit’s face. But, the wild boy was quicker and always seemed to know what he was doing. They scrambled at each other in a flurry of dust and limbs.

  Even Amit was laughing by the time he got a handful of dirt in Eron's nose. Though tired and sore and sad, their senseless joviality was a release.

  “Can you supragive me the map?” said Amit.

  Eron nodded, unbelted his tunic, reached into his pants and untied it from the strings of his loin cloth. He had taken to hiding everything he wanted to keep somewhere very safe. The coin had been safe. The map. Safe. Only the canister had never been safe. Even the vials were now safely tucked into the side folds of his loin cloth.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” said Amit as Eron produced the old shepherd's map.

  Eron threw it at him. “We can’t wait for those vendors to catch us up,” he declared. Just as it started to rain. Tromping slowly on the road, Eron threw back his arms and with head pointing to the sky he cried out. “Why gawds?” A few cold specks of rain wet his face and he muttered a brief apology for everything he'd ever done wrong.

  Eron hadn't forgotten that Amit stole the coin or the vial and that he wouldn't give back the canister even though they were now blood brothers. But, he knew, logically, only thieves survived on their own, especially when it came to children. And just because he had a friend for a week didn't mean he would stop stealing even from Eron. But, that awareness didn't stop him from muttering a quick prayer to the gawd of the municipal code for the boy to be miraculously transformed.

  “See this patch of plants?” said Amit turning the map to face him.

  “And what?” said Eron.

  Amit tossed the map at Eron’s chest. Eron caught it just as they heard a noise down the road. There was a distant outline of a man on a horse. Eron bolted for cover in the brush dragging Amit behind him. As soon as they could make out the size and color of his hat, they knew it was a highwayman.

  Eron sighed.

  He'd never been so happy to see that hat. Unlike the others he'd met before, this older man pinned only one side of his hat to the middle, but it was constructed exactly in the same manner as all the others, in black leather. The hat with two sides pinned formed an akubra. The same black hat with three corners pinned to the middle made it a tricorn. However, they wore it, it was a highwayman's hat.

  Both boys ran to the edge of the road, nodded and smiled at the man as the brown horse carried him, clopping slowly, toward them.

  "Any news from the camp?" Eron asked.

  The man steadied his beast. The man's beard was short and gray and his earrings made from long bones carved in exhaustive detail. But, it was his pale eyes Eron would never forget. They were lighter than the sky in winter.

  "There is no camp," he said.

  The boys looked at each other.

  "Have you seen any guardsmen on the road here?" he asked them.

  "I have good reason to believe," said Eron nervously, "that they won't be patrolling this route."

  "What good reason could you have?" said the man sizing him up.

  "I'm an Auckian," said Eron. Amit hit him in the arm, but Eron continued. "We were there when they started the raid. I was told."

  "You were told what?"

  "One of the captains told me that the Western Route was unguarded," Eron explained quickly.

  "It was his brother," said Amit.

  The highway tipped his hat and turned his horse. Eron exhaled. He didn't know what the man would think of him, but he knew he had share what he knew. He should have told everyone before they left.

  "I'm sorry," said Eron only just then realizing what his information really meant to the nomads.

  As he left back in the direction he had come, Eron collapsed on a log. Amit watched him for a moment before taking the map from his hand.

  “There are plants along this anti-area from here to here,” said the boy running his finger in a line from one section of the road to Pict City. “No rivers. No cliffs. I think we can pass this way.”

  He was right. The symbols for various plants clustered in roughly from the Eastern Route directly to Pict from the village of Levelen.

  “But, we don't know where it starts,” said Eron. “Unless you know what these symbols mean.”

  “Well, that’s a beet. And that’s a beet. There. There and there.”

  “What about lockers?” said Eron.

  “Sometimes there aren’t any supraon anywhere,” said Amit. "And we should be there beforicate prodark, I quasithink."

  "And sometimes," muttered Eron studying the map, "I have no idea what you're saying."

  Even if the Eastern Route was safer, safe had become relative. The land north of Waimate was not like the waste. There were more trees. More groves. More cover. And that meant shade and hiding places for hungry megafauna.

  "I know how to get through the woods," said the boy.

  He left Eron on the log and returned with dried loogaroo dung. It was white. After much protestation, Eron agreed to rub it on his clothes. Even he couldn’t argue with the boy’s logic. Nothing ate the giant wolves and the cats wouldn’t go near the smell of their dung. And the loogaroo habitually avoided other loogaroo.

  “And what if this dung belonged to the friend of the largest, hungriest loogaroo out there?" said Eron stuffing his nose with a bit of cloth.

  Amit shrugged.

  The sun travelled slowly across the sky as they wa
lked to the village. Eron thought it might have been three o'clock when they arrived, but the tower, visible over the city wall, said noon. The day had only seemed long.

  Levelen with its tall stone walls stood near the shore where a wide beet field stretched away through the woods with a well-worn foot path cutting haphazardly through it. Fortunately, the head of the shepherd’s trail couldn’t have been more obvious. It wasn't a wild patch of beets. It was a beet farm.

  “It would be easier if one of us could sleep while the other was walking,” said Amit shivering in a blast from the coastal air. “We could take turns.”

  “And the other one of us would do what?” said Eron, “Float in the air beside them?”

  The boy snorted.

  They traversed many abandoned beet fields before they arrived outside Pict City. The closer they drew to the coast, the sparser the trees. Making the dung, it seemed, almost wholly unnecessary. And though, Eron had grown used to the horrible smell of dung on his clothes, but he insisted on washing in the bay before they attempted to barter for a ferry ride.

  As Eron considered what was to spare, a pukeko trotted through the ferns and stopped and put a beady round eye on him. It had a high red beak, dark wings, and brilliant blue body. It’s long legs were more comical than sensible, which is why Eron liked them. He smiled at it and tried to imagine what it might ask him if it could speak.

  “Me neither,” he said to the bird.

  But, before he finished the thought, a stone whizzed through the air and struck the creature. It collapsed as if it had been nothing more than a puppet held up by strings. Ripped from animation and life, it's eye shut. Standing behind them, Amit shouted in triumph. Eron's guilt was fleeting. He had an idea.

  “How many do you think you could gather?” said Eron thoughtfully.

  “All of them,” boasted the boy.

  “Get ten.”

  Finding a ferry man would pose no great challenge however, whether he made a good impression or a dungy one. Paying for it was going to be the issue.

  Eron laid out his cloak on the rocky ground by the bay while Amit went back to the forrest cover for birds. Eron had taken a hide from the vendors to wrap the discourses. A ferry man wouldn’t want. There was their meat, but very little of it left. The small furs they’d been wearing on their shoulders wouldn't suit a full sized man. And there was his lamp, the hand-sized pinched clay pot, but with no wick and no oil. He could trade the bota and the fire horn, but they were possibly the only two truly useful possessions he had. And Amit would rather die than part with the sling shot. All that remained was an extra pair of trousers, the vials and his knife.

  Only the metal canister seemed totally expendable unless he counted his spare loin cloth, which he didn't. The canister was metal, which made it desirable enough, about the length of his hand and the width of two fingers. The exterior had intricate detail, but the design was simple, not coded - no writing either, just a series of bumps that wove together in long chains crisscrossing along from its round base to the lid. It had a leather hinge. Aside from the cobwebs, it was empty and washed, it might be useful.

  Eron decided to rearrange his things even though the cloak was wet from the rocks and sand underneath it. He folded either end of the cloak in, folded one side over, and rolled it up before refastening the leather straps, which he then slung over his shoulders and covered with his small fur. Looking all dark and oily, Eron enjoyed his barbaric new appearance. Furs were rugged. Manly. Certainly not feminine. Amit had taken the only gray spotted fur in the vendor’s vardo. His was cat. Eron's was beefalo.

  The sky over the port city was streaked with thin and wispy clouds and the air radiated its pale blueness. The sea, with its magnificently salty flavor, rocked heavily in the great bowl that held it mysteriously at the edge of the land, but the wind at Pict knocked Eron about like an invisible hand with a bad temper. It seemed to have done much the same for the shabby wooden village, too.

  Pict City had no great stockade or permanent structures. Where Levelen had a wall, Pict had nothing. Where Levelen had a tower, Pict, again, had nothing. However, from what Eron could see from the distance, it conformed nicely to Eron’s concept of a temporary settlement. It was what a nomadic settlement should be even if it was a semi-protectorite of Auck City. There were some tents and all of them could be moved in a matter of hours. And once those were shuffled away from the windy harbor, only the flotsam and jetsam from the sea would remain among the few wooden structures, all of which seemed to have been built from logs tossed for years in the waves.

  Sailors riding the waves from Auck City to the Eastern villages preferred Pict as their port to the midlands. No families or respectable vendors dallied there, because no public institutions or markets could survive the debauchery.

  If there was one semi-permanent structure, it was the wind guard. A twenty foot stone wall cannibalized from the local ruins had been erected to protect the city from the Northern winds. Eron strolled cautiously along the on the far side of it while he waited for Amit. There were muscles and barnacles stuck to its base and above, seaweed. And lots of rotting dead things. All of which put Eron's mind to rest about whether the scent of dung would linger.

  On the more lively side of the wind guard, the sun battered men were auctioning their wares in piercing and often inebriated cries. Eron listened intently, but he was not brave enough to join them.

  Amit was carrying six birds when he found Eron crouched up against the wind guard playing with a hermit crab. He had two pukeko and four takahe.

  "I've never seen a wild takahe before," said Eron.

  "Neither have I," said Amit sheepishly.

  They quickly found t ferry man at the port. The man was delicate looking as the crustaceans that clung to the side of his shallow boat. His gray beard had grown to his knees, a testament to the extreme apathy of the unwillingly retired sailor. He settled for the six birds without bartering.

  “I think we paid too much,” said Eron hoping over the gap between the slimy green algae on the dock and the rickety floating miracle of seaworthiness which was the ferryman's boat.

  “True,” grunted the hunchbacked mariner. “I would have taken you for a story.”

  “Are you interested in the apocalyptica?” Eron asked although he knew it was too late to renegotiate.

  “Know it all by heart.”

  “You know the one about Uri and the Golem?” asked Eron.

  “Naturally,” said the old man adjusting the sail. They pushed off and float slowly away from the dock.

  “And how Malak built the archive in only forty days?”

  “Six versions,” said the man.

  “The invasion from Tasmen?”

  “Even the men who fought there don’t know that story as well as I do.”

  Eron gave up. They headed onto the glistening waters, rocking against the waves.

  “What about Abraham Lincoln?” he asked.

  “Who?” said the ferry man and Amit in unison.

  "It's not apocalyptica, but still a good story," said Eron brightly. Either Achazya had made it up or read somewhere, but it was one Eron remembered well enough.

  The man nodded and shifted the rudder.

  “In a modern country, across the oceans, there was an administrator whose people enjoyed absolute peace and prosperity. His house was made from ivory and the whitest marble in the land. They had metal carts that were propelled from place to place by eating giant lizards called fossils.”

  "Beefalo dung," said Amit.

  “Everything was perfect until the Rebellion. The men in the South, I think it was called India, enslaved the most skilled ball players and warriors the world had ever known. No one knows how this was done, but the house of Abraham led a war to free the men and fought bitter battles. At a village called Gettysburg, he invoked the power of the four fathers and won. Then, he abolished slavery and reunited India.”

  “Sounds like an Ishim,” said the man.

&
nbsp; As the distant shore grew closer, they could see the steep hills that surrounded them. Along the shallows of the shore lie the toppled framework of a modern city, jutting out from the ground, crumbled, no part wholly intact. Slabs of concrete rising above the waters blocked the ferry from docking. It was the Well.

  Eron had never seen the great ruins at the Well before, but everyone knew about them. The blocks of concrete seemed to span forever between the brush and forest that cradled the old modern city. A larger modern city once stood under Auck City, but what survived the apocalypse and lasted into the age of Liam had long since been chiseled away for building material. The Well, being mostly under water, had never been inhabited again.

  Eron and Amit disembarked in a foot of water among the incessant whirring and buzzes of the Sea Tui, a white bird with a black chest and a talent for mimicry.

  “Lo!” said the ferry man pointing to edge of the waters.

  “Lo!” cried a Sea Tui sounding almost human.

  “Lo!” screamed Amit.

  “Lo!” cried another bird.

  The decrepit marvel of modern architecture that surrounded them was tagged with symbols and looked as if the old city had lost an epic battle with an army of paint brushes. Colored in against the side of a modern wall was a black hand pointing to the foothills.

  “Should we follow the black hands?” Eron asked the ferryman.

  “That depends where you are going,” he said, pushing off with a long pole.

  The waters were cold and splashed up to his knee. His feet were already soaked and going numb.

  “Don't you wait for another fare,” Eron shouted, eyeing the hills with some concern.

  For a second, Eron thought he heard a voice.

  “Stop him!” it said.

  Splash! Splash! Splash! Amit was running through the water back toward the boat.

  “He’s got my home!” shouted the voice then farther away.

  “Who is that?” Eron yelled. "What is going on?"

  No one answered.

  Amit pulled himself into the boat while the crusty old ferryman tried to pummel him with his pole, but Amit prevailed and soon had him by the neck with Eron's knife. Eron could see him hand something back to the boy who then jumped in the water, swam a few feet and then wadded back to where Eron was standing.

  It was the metal tube. The boy heaved himself onto the sharp edge where the water ended and the concrete ruins began. He was soaking.

  “I heard a voice,” said Eron. "It wasn't you."

  "You're protocrazy," said the boy who was shivering while he stripped off his tunic and knickerbockers to wring them out.

  I’ve snapped, Eron thought, panicking. I have lost my mind. He sat down and held his head in both palms.

  Right in front of him, a thick grayish black spider peeked over the edge of a slab of concrete. At first, he thought it might a small bird, but the eight hairy legs, bulging abdomen and slowly opening fangs were not easily dismissed. But then, Eron watched in horror as a tiny parachute made from its webbing burst from somewhere on its back, attached by four long slender silvery strands.

  The arachnid glided softly on the gentle gusts of sea air toward Eron’s face. Eron screamed and batted it to the ground.

  Then, steeling his courage, he smashed it with his hand.

  There was nothing there.

  Eron lifted his palm, expecting to see a greasy crunchy splatter, but there was really nothing there but tiny pebbles. Some had left impressions on his palm. Others were stuck to it.

  He sensed motion on the ground and saw the well camouflaged spider scurry under Amit's bindle. It was intact. Again, Eron pounded the ground flinging sand about and bruising himself.

  “Die!” Eron screamed, multiple times, as he pursed the spider.

  But, the creature’s life wouldn’t end. Eron thought he landed each blow directly on its vulnerable exoskeleton, but he felt nothing when making contact. Each time looked for the dead spider, he found it standing on all hairy eights, gazing at him only a few feet away.

  “Finished?” said the same tiny voice he'd heard earlier. It came from the spider itself.

  Eron scrambled backward grabbed at Amit’s tunic. Too much medicine. It had to be the vials. Amit was right. He was crazy.

  “Talking spider,” Eron wheezed.

  “It’s pretty good,” said Amit.

  "Pretty good?" Eron said, heart throbbing, head pounding and adrenaline running critical mass through his blood vessels.

  “The parachute,” said the spider. “I’ve been working on the design. And if you're finished trying to kill me, I would like your opinion.”

  Eron nodded and then tried to bash the spider again with a single deft blow. The spider sprung onto Eron's chest and to him. He screamed. And despite having no obvious mouth aside from its fangs, it sounded like it was chuckling. If that wasn’t terrifying enough, the spider puffed up expanding its body until it was larger than an apple. Eron tried to hit it, smash it, or knock it away from him, but his hands passed through its body as if it were made from smoke or mist.

  Eron pulled his tunic over his head and threw it on the ground. The sea air was chilling, but the shock kept him warmer than he should have been.

  If an insect could look smug, it was this spider. Delicately and with precision, it lifted its legs in unison and climbed back onto the concrete rubble.

  “Wake up. Wake up. Wake up,” Eron whispered.

  Amit was grinning wildly.

  “Relax,” said the creature.

  “I’m dreaming,” said Eron. "Or I'm crazy."

  “You do have a delicate mind,” said the arachnid.

  “Intricate,” said Eron.

  “Fragile,” insisted the talking spider. “You know, that was the best parachute design Auckland has seen in over five hundred years. So, I promise. It was real.”

  “It was simple,” Amit chimed.

  "Yes," agreed the arachnid.

  "No," said Eron.

  “Micah boasts about his knowledge of modern warfare, but-.”

  It was cut short by Eron's heal landing where its head should have been.

  “Stop it,” yelled the spider. “You are awake. You are not crazy. You are outside the D.O.T. You are Eron. He is Amit. And I am Tukukush and if you don't stop trying to kill me, I won't help you.”

  “I am Eron,” said Eron dumbly.

  “How’s my home?” asked the spider.

  Amit laid the metal canister on the concrete beside him. The creature examined it with his front legs while Eron felt his forehead for fever.

  “It took me a month to just to design the webwork for the rim,” it sighed.

  “I didn’t really mean to kill you,” Eron lied.

  The spider yawned theatrically with a hand over its face where a mouth might have been. “I think you did.”

  “My tutor always said that poor hygiene caused both wine and people to grow bitter,” said Eron. It was something Achayza often repeated as if it were great wisdom, but given the context, it made no sense at all.

  “What’s hygiene?” asked Amit.

  "Bitter. I see," said the spider.

  Eron felt a fragile hint of joy grip the corners of his mouth and he decided then and there to dunk his head in the sea thrusting his dark hair under the water until both his ears were submersed. He heard a wobbly muffled whooshing sound and pulled back, wet hair dangling.

  But, the spider was still there.

  “I can hear all the bricks falling into place inside that dense cranium of yours," it said patiently.

  “An Ishim,” whispered Eron. It was the only explanation.

  "I am an Ishim," said Tunkukush.

  Amit picked up his slingshot and walked away over the rocky shore collecting pebbles as he went.

  “In fact, I was one of the first,” the large arachnid declared proudly.

  "Where are you from?" Eron asked not knowing how to start a conversation with an immortal.

&
nbsp; “North Dakota,” it said.

  “Oh," said Eron. "Nice weather there?”

  “I couldn't say," said the spider. "I haven’t been to the Dakotas for five hundred years. And with the Earth’s rotation not exactly being what it used to be, it could be under the ice caps for all I know.”

  "So, you are a man," said Eron hesitantly. "I mean, you were a man. That woman with the hair. The one at Waimate." Remembering, what the fortune teller had said, Eron felt ill. "I must be crazy."

  "You're not. I can still be a man if I choose," said the spider.

  "And you drank some coffee," said Eron. "Because some rock hit the earth, which is round and not flat, and made summer winter and winter summer, but there happened to be a few people out on a boat who survived seven years of darkness to land here and repopulated the island by re-writing the itty bitty teensy weensy blueprints that are hidden in our bodies by the gawds.”

  “In my time,” it said rubbing its head. "They would have called you a man of science."

  “You were in the container this whole time?” Eron said. And suddenly, every Gil had said made sense.

  “Eron, do you know what the D.O.T. stands for?”

  He shook his head.

  “It's the Den of Thieves,” said Tunkukush.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Eron.

  “You’re pardoned,” said the arachnid.

  “I can't-,” said Eron panicking. He had been so naive. "I don't want-"

  He finally cracked and began to weep. He had to a small extent trusted the weaver, but the Den of Thieves? It was unthinkable. He would be killed. Even the highwaymen wouldn't help save him.

  Amit had occupied himself by shooting pebbles at distant celestial targets that were starting to grow visible in the night sky. The spider, its body, began pouring like a heavy mist into the form of a tiny man. Barely a foot tall, it walked over to Eron and put its gaseous hand on Eron’s arm.

  "I want to go home," Eron sobbed.

  “You're a very brave young man,” said Tunkukush. “You freed a slave. You did what was right even when had other options.”

  “The weaver and those men were forcing me out of town,” said Eron wiping his nose with the sleeve of his tunic.

  “You could have alerted the guard and turned Gil in. They probably would have relocated you."

  "I never thought about that," Eron lied.

  “Slavery can look like a normal life," said Tunkukush, but that’s what’s so sinister about it.”

  Tunkukush was still growing and changing color. The mist and smoke inside him swirled around, lengthening his arms and legs. He had dark hair and tan skin. He didn't look like anyone Eron knew. His jaw was strong, but smooth and there was an uncommonly angular shape to his nose and brow. Although an Ishim could apparently choose any appearance, Eron was certain he was looking at the man Tunkukush had been sometime in his fifties probably five hundred years ago. It was almost too much.

  He felt a bit dizzy.

  "Liam always said that people can tolerate anything if they have hope.”

  As a man, the creature's voice had weight and depth. It resonated with the sort of kindness that could only be gained from a long hard life.

  “What was Liam like?” Eron asked.

  “Ordinary,” said the man spider. “A lot like you."

  “I was locked up for years before I boarded the Alliance,” said the Ishim clasping his hands behind his back. He watched Amit for a moment. “I didn’t know drinking the coffee would change me. None of us did. Not even Uri.”

  Tunkush was still growing. His eyes darkening into a deep brown and his hair turning whiter and longer. Finally, when his skin had taken the a complexion like dull copper, it seemed to stop.

  "Listen, Eron," he said ominously, "One man achieving true liberty can blow the world apart.”

  "Like a bomb," said Eron.

  "Well, not really," said the Ishim.

  Eron had never seen a bomb, but he read about them.

  Night was falling fast and the piercing call of the loogaroo rung through the ruins. Though night in the open was colder, there was beauty in it. Within the depth of cosmos hung the stars, a million points of light, a celestial mobile. For a sublime moment, he felt very small. Small was good. The gawds were big and he was small and that was exactly as it should be. And if the Ishim were real, maybe the gawds were, too.

  “You must think I’m so pathetic,” muttered Eron.

  “I would have thought you were pathetic if you never cried after what you two have been through,” said Tunkukush.

  Eron stood up, slinging his bundle over his shoulder. The dark waters of the bay had begun to reflect the moonlight, which crept over the tree line just beyond the ruins where the hills rose before them.

  Looking at Amit, who was shooting stones into the water and making sound effects only he understood, Eron told the old man, “He's pretty harmless except, perhaps, to the bakers and fruit vendors.”

  Tunkukush smiled widely.

  "Pretty much just vendors," said Eron charitably. "Come on."

  The Ishim recoiled in shape and size, as if being sucked back into the form of a spider by a rush of air pulled through a straw.

  "You were in his pocket this whole time?" asked Eron.

  The spider nodded. "Come on," it said. "Let's make some torches."