The Ishim Underground

by Carrie Bailey

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  A sense of urgency had gripped the camp long before dawn.

  They were leaving.

  Fast.

  Eron may have been the only one who wanted to return to the den, but he soon learned not to voice his opinion. There was not a thief on the hunt who didn't know someone who might have been at Grey Camp. Although smaller than Waimate, it had become during the last month, the new largest nomadic settlement. But, it fell to the guard much faster.

  The sun hadn't time to color the path they were taking when Able lead the thieves out off the plains and into the woods, but when it did, a multitude of colorful birds chirped their unearthly symphony. In one day, they would be at Uri’s workshop. Eron struggled to believe that the legendary alchemist actually existed. Still.

  Eron shuffled his feet heavily up the winding footpath pushing the wheelbarrow with Amit’s flailing limbs hanging over the sides. The peculiar birds haunting the firs and pines were the first of many signs that they were approaching the stomping ground of a rouge scientist who, according to legend, could reconfigure a plant or animal's internal blueprint. The path was rougher than the roads. All of the wooden carts had been steered into the forrest at the edge of the plains, but with considerable effort.

  Although detouring to Uri's workshop was an easy decision to make, not all the thieves and highway men followed. Around half turned back South to meet the newest wave of refugees as they crossed the bay or braved the isthmus at Cookland before heading north to the forest.

  Eron tried not to remember the sight of the nomads bound, chained and hauled away to serve the Auckian Administration in Waimate. It reminded him of his mother. He felt helpless. And in his imagination, Grey Camp must have been worse. And because it was worse there, it was worse everywhere.

  “Do the Auckians talk about Uri?” asked Ester, joining him on the walk. She had pinned her hair back with carved sticks and was looking tired.

  “He’s a legend,” said Eron huffing laboriously straining to lift the cart over the rocks as they mounted an incline. “Not, I thought, a living one, but whether I believe it or not, this is where the refugees are headed.”

  “I heard people talking. Saying that only the alchemist, the warrior and the oracle are act independently anymore,” said Ester looking ahead. “They're the only ones we can trust.”

  “Yeah?” groaned Eron. He heaved up the wheel over a stone on an incline beside a rut carved by running water that had long since dried. He didn't know what Ester was talking about, but he didn't know how to admit that to her easily either.

  "Have you ever been to Auck City?" he asked.

  “I've never met an Auckian," she said.

  "Well," Eron grunted, pushing the wheel out of yet another dip on the footpath by rocking the cart aggressively and shoving as hard as he could. He kicked clumps of pine needles out of the way. "We tend to believe the Ishim are children's stories and all the thieves are killers."

  "That's horrible," she said, looking as mortified as she sounded.

  "And obviously it’s not true," said Eron, panting and taking a quick break at the height of the incline as the other people walked around them. "All I mean to say is that I don't know about the oracle or alchemist or warrior. And I don't always think I can trust my own senses since I left my work in Dunedin. But, after seeing the lamassu, I can’t believe anything that evil was made by a gawd.“

  “They’re not evil,” she said, looking at the leather bound to her feet. “They’re just not human. What would other animals say if they could talk? And not everything Uri made was bad. The beefalo were a good idea. And the moa.” She thought about her words for a moment. “Uri isn’t like other Ishim.”

  “Neither is the spider,” said Eron, knowing Tunkukush probably was hiding in the tube still strung around the boy’s neck.

  “And not the oracle,” said Ester. “Listen, whatever happens when we get there, I just want you to know I think you’re special.”

  Eron flushed. “I’m not special.”

  “I can't read."

  "Does everybody know I can read?" he asked, gesturing to the bulk of the thieves marching slowly between the trees ahead.

  "That's why they hate you so much," said Ester, looking somewhat perplexed. “And fear you.”

  Suspecting he wasn’t wanted and knowing it felt very different. Eron’s gut sank.

  "How long have you known the Ishim were real?" he asked Ester as she took the handles and started to taking a turn pushing Amit for him.

  He would have stopped her, but his hands had grown sore.

  "I never had reason to doubt it," she said.

  Eron noticed that unlike the others, Ester never embellished her language with unnecessary prefixes and pointless suffixes attached whenever and wherever to her words. She was so comely, too. He’d never thought about marriage, especially not to an older woman and a thief, but for a moment, he saw it unfold. No, it couldn’t work.

  “The oracle is a half-Ishim,” Ester started to explain. “Your friend is the warrior. Uri is alchemist. Micah and the others are the monks. Malak and the others in your city are the archivists. Those are the only Ishim we know.”

  “All the archivists are Ishim, too?" said Eron, doubtfully.

  He didn't really want to hear anymore, but she reassured him that she only conveyed what she’d been told about the archivists. Eron told her what his tutor had said about the coffee and the first settlers. After a moment comparing their information, he relaxed.

  Ester stopped and looked at him ominously, "There are no more Ishim, because the Ishim coffee is lost."

  They both gripped one side of Amit's wheelbarrow and pushed. The boy had grown even as the thieves marched. And he was much hairier.

  “Cover your mouth,” said Ester placing the edge of her tunic across her face. “Uri planted amnesia flowers - they’re a type of urigold - around his workshop. Breathing the pollen will muddle your thoughts.”

  Eron obeyed, immediately, "But, I don't see any flowers." He'd heard of the guard talk about the forrest before, but they'd blamed the gawds, not the flowers, for the disturbances in their thought processes.

  "They're up ahead," said Ester, her delicate features and soft voice obscured by the corner of her tunic. "You see the pots?"

  Under a clump of grass on the side of the dense trail, a pile of broken crockery decayed. He nodded.

  "Uri's workshop is a mess," said Ester. "Drops everything and anything everywhere. We're close."

  Amit sat up. “Are we there yet?”

  Eron and Ester both drew back at the same time and shot each other a worried look. The boy sounded like a man. Looked like a man.

  “Get off,” said Eron tilting the boy from cart.

  Though still slightly shorter than Eron, the fine hairs on his face had sprouted and covered parts of his chin and patches around the far corners of his jaw. His body had filled out. His chest and arms widened.

  Amit touched his face. “There’s something stuck to me," yanking at the bits of hair on his face. He touched his body padding every inch with a wide eyed joy at the discoveries he made.

  “I’m a man,” said the boy.

  “Not by the traditional definition of a man,” groaned Eron.

  Ester mustered an uneasy smile.

  “I am a man,” said Amit, pounding his new much more manly chest.

  “You’re a freckled child trapped in a large freckled body that looks like a man," said Eron. "But, that does not make you a man.”

  “I need a sword,” said Amit.

  “You don’t even have proper shoes,” cried Eron. Visions of danger flashed in front of him. Amit starting brawls. Amit talking to girls. The wrong people finding out about the Ishim coffee. Amit actually getting a sword. Amit starting brawls with a sword.

  “Let’s arm wrestle,” said the young man slicing through the air, invisible weapon in hand and feeling his biceps for the third time. “I’ve got a beard.”

  “W
here’s that eight-legged Ishim?” Eron breathed.

  Ester succeeded in convincing Amit to cover his mouth and not draw attention to himself without Tunkukush's intervention. She told him too much commotion would reverse the process. It was an effective lie. Not something Eron would have thought of on his own.

  The path to the workshop was filled densely with pine trees, vardos and nomads camping by the streams. Unlike the groves on the road to Pict City, the pines allowed very limited vegetation to grow under them. The ground cover prickled with dry needles and the bark had the same unwelcoming texture. But, as they walked on, the view remained unobstructed with few bushes and an openness that felt like a house with a roof and many support beams. And there was so much debris scattered against tree trunks and in various piles, that Eron felt they'd already entered Uri's workshop. An endless hoard with no door.

  All the thieves covered their faces with cloth, but the nomadic refugees already camping in the pine forest wore none. And Eron noticed more than one nomad with wounds from the fires. These were the people from Waimate. The thieves wandered among them, searching for relatives, with a hero’s welcome. Hundreds had set up semi-permanent homes, staked claims on sites by the water and in less than a week the number would double, triple, it was hard to say.

  It was going to be very unsanitary.

  Ester stayed with Eron and Amit as they rounded a bend to a section of the forest teaming with mountains of ore and wood. An industrious forest community. Here the homes had an air of time an permanency, rock construction, thatched roofs and more hoard. Supplies. Awnings over fires. Metallurgy. Production. The inhabitants milling about were working in leather aprons and curious amount of yellow orange fabric that matched the clusters of gold and red flowers purposefully cultivated in pots and plots in every available space.

  Finally, the through the parting crowds, they came to what was clearly the center of Uri’s workshop, a building of early Liamic construction, stone jigsawed from modern ruins. One level ran under the shadowy canopy and supported heavy yellow awnings that covered machines clearly visible through the beams made from the pines. Among the machinery, with their loud moving parts and considerable waste piles, were large furnaces spewing smoke. Blacksmiths toiled at the bellows and the anvil while gears turned metal mechanisms Eron didn’t recognize or understand. One round building near the center of the activity had walls, round and jagged, where most of the highway men rested all covering their mouths with whatever ever cloth was easiest to use. The air muggy had grown with anticipation, sweat and steam.

  Able waited by the door to the round building. A baby wailed somewhere in the trees.

  “You’re wanted,” he said, standing tall on the narrow steps. "And the warrior."

  Amit pulled the cord attached to the metal tube off his neck and handed it to Eron. He and Ester left quickly, pushing the empty wheelbarrow, and headed to a spit where fresh beefalo was already roasting as they prepared the other cart loads for the impending influx.

  At the door, which was as narrow as the steep steps leading up to it, Eron whispered to the Ishim, "Why does he want to see me?"

  No response.

  Feeling like a sheep with only two horns being led to slaughter, Eron tried calming his racing thoughts by breathing slower and with intention. He took a quick glance at Ester and Amit who had not seemed surprised or bothered by the fact that the Ishim requested him. Able waited, holding the door open.

  Inside, Eron saw exactly what he imagined a mad scientist would keep in his home. Kettles boiled. Liquid spun through coiled tubes. Clocks chimed. Lights flashed and everywhere thin bits of metal led from one contraption to another stringing it all together for some brilliant and possibly modern purpose. Tunkukush poured out of the canister in Eron's trembling hand and moved like a fog over to a ledge within a circular depression that formed the center of the stone floor. That was when Eron finally saw him. Amid the clutter and chaos, a man, presumably Uri, sat smoking from a hookah, looking like a relic. Eron crept forward and cautiously joined them on the sand filled cushions that lined the ledge of the depression. It was not a sitting area built for comfort. Like everything else, it seemed functional to a fault.

  The alchemist’s most distinguishing feature rose, his hunch, from his back like the hump of a beefalo. Uri was decrepit. One eye opened less than the other and it seemed his ears, nose and the hair from both had been growing all five hundred of his life. He wore glasses and a white robe with a single pocket on the left side that held pens and a clockmaker’s tool set. On his head, a skull cap, also white, partially covered his curly white locks that seemed to float on his head like a fine goose down.

  Eron tried not to gawk, but the contrast between Uri and Tunkukush could not have been overstated. Uri was legend, hardly part of this world. The spider, on the other hand, sounded and appeared in every way, a regular grumpy old man.

  “I see someone needs a steam,” said Uri looking at Tunkukush, now in human form, who was considerably grayer and more transparent than him. Both wore clothes fit for the modern era, tailored, sleek and closely fit to their bodies.

  "And how are all the forest jinn," said Tunkukush, accepting the hookah.

  "Well, and the ifrit?" said Uri.

  Even though he didn't know what they meant, it was clear to Eron that the Ishim were trading insults.

  Another small door in the back of the round room creaked inward and a third Ishim her billowing figure through.

  “I knew you were coming,” said the woman sniffing a card-stock box marked with a popular type of Auckian spicy flavored tobacco. She set a piece on the hookah. It was the fortune teller Eron didn't think he'd really seen in Waimate. She rattled as she sat next to him.

  A moment or two passed in uncomfortable silence.

  And another.

  "What's an ifrit?" Eron asked the woman.

  "A myth that my father thinks Micah resembles," said replied.

  Eron pointed at Uri and raised his eyebrows. He mouthed the question, "Him?"

  She nodded, then got up, floated out of the room and re-entered backwards with a tray of mugs and a coffee pot.

  "No thank you," said Eron.

  "It's normal," she said smiling at him. "And it'll protect you against the pollen."

  Anything that would keep his hands busy while the Ishim sat unspeaking in each other's company would be good, as long as it wasn't the Ishim coffee. Eron thanked her and took a wooden mug. He had dropped his tunic and been breathing the air without even realizing it. And he couldn't bear waiting any longer, but the Ishim seemed to have not gathered to speak to each other. He knew Tunkukush did not eat, but he was nearly ready to remind them that he did.

  “Light it again already,” said Tunkukush.

  “You’re too dry," said the woman. "Let's steam first."

  Uri looked at her and lit the hookah. Eron's head was spinning like the whirling, twisting streams of silver air that spun about visibly inside the Ishim as they drew the smoke in.

  “You avoid your steams and you smoke too much," she chided Tunkukush. "Someday you’re going to start flaking.”

  “Maybe I want to flake,” he said, drawing another smoky breath from the metal mouthpiece.

  “No more of this,” said the woman whose beads rattled as she grew suddenly longer, taller and younger.

  She slapped the cushion beside her repeatedly until wild curly hair sprouted from her old head and fell like wood shavings to her waist. Her eyes blazed almost literally as the beads fell to the floor as if dumped from a bucket. And then disappeared. Tunkukush’s face beamed with a joyous admiration.

  As if in response to the woman’s youth, Tunkukush lengthened and darkened his own hair. His gloriously round potbelly shrank and the jowls on his face and the heavy weight that pulled his eyelids over his eyes both lifted. He grinned deviously with a spark which not contained only within his dark eyes. He leaned over and pulled the woman’s hair.

  She slapped him on the
back of the head, which her hand passed through. And while Uri seemed lost in thought, drawing smoke from the hookah, Eron began to hyperventilate.

  The door creaked open.

  “Decisions must be made,” the woman said, watching Able enter. "You've spoken to them?" Able grunted and the Ishim rose. They were all apparently going somewhere, outside. Eron trailed behind them.

  As could be expected, the thieves drank until the majority lie sleeping around the workshop with mugs half-drained in their hands. Eron, still not having developed a taste for medicinal wine, darted around them as he followed Able and the three Ishim to Uri’s steam room. Amit hesitated to speak when he passed through the trees. The boy stood and watched a moment while Eron conveyed his confusion. He motioned for the boy to wait.

  A loud drunk nomad, was explaining to the wavering crowd how he was going to train the loogaroo to attack to attack guardsmen using a weathervane and copper wire. He keeled over in the path at their feet and old female Ishim grunted her disapproval. Most of people around the workshop seemed deep in calculations regarding the logistics of war.

  How to feed an army.

  How to manage the wounded and the sick.

  The fervor in the air frightened him, but not as much as feeling thrust into the middle of it. Able stocked the fire before they ducked inside the stone structure around and behind the circular building where they had been sitting.The meticulously tiled walls depicted the floods of the apocalypse in incredible detail. It wasn't a wall as much as a living story.

  “Liam," said Tunkukush, tapping a figure on the wall.

  Unlike Able and Eron who had to undress for the bath in the entrance, the Ishim neither changed nor transformed the clothes that were actually part of them.

  Eron recognized the major stages of the story from his Apocalyptic Studies with Achazya. The ship, the founding of Auck City and the religious wars all brilliantly encrypted in colorful shards of tile.

  "We never meant to become immortal," said Uri, easing himself onto the wooden bench in the small room. It almost sounded like an apology. Eron was embarrassed for the man. Warm wet air rose around them. Able's hairy chest hairs flattened.

  "When the old did not die," said Tunkukush. "The young were stunted. They never replaced their parents."

  "We made them eternal children," said Uri in a hollow and distant tone that sound almost as if words remembered more than heard. His back seemed to disappear against the wall behind him as he relaxed.

  "Finally, we did away with the plantations. Burned the coffee, but fast forward a few years and not all of us have retired.”

  “Fast forward?” said Able.

  Eron didn't recognize the term either.

  “But, not all of the coffee was destroyed,” Eron ventured. “And, I want to know what a clone is."

  Uri leaned forward and met him with a dead stare, “About twenty years ago I took a sample of Liam’s DNA and started three new lives.”

  More modern nonsense.

  But, the old Ishim seemed quick to recognize the incomprehension hidden in plain sight on Able and Eron's faces. As he spoke, the steam moved and shifted around to form a model of his workshop. A vision of three toddlers knocking over jars and being scolded by the female Ishim appeared. Then, it changed and the boys were older. The woman carried each of them. One she placed in a village, one with the nomads and the third, deposited on the streets of Auck City where a beautiful woman took the boy from the streets. It was Thadine. As quickly as it appeared, the steam evaporated.

  “I am not Liam,” breathed Eron, suddenly feeling uncomfortable with the heat.

  The three Ishim pried their heavy eyelids open and watched Eron charge to the entrance and pull his boots on his wet feet, but they didn't stop him.

  Eron left.

  And nearly knocked over Amit who was standing by the door to the bath house. Eron elbowed him trying not to reveal his agitation. He couldn't think about it just then. He needed to hide. Amit shoved Eron back taking the wind from Eron’s lungs.

  “I need food,” said Eron. His body felt a bit numb and tingly. Something was wrong.

  “Not hungry,” said the young blond man with the facial hair the shade of Uri's flowers.

  Out of nowhere, Amit ran at Eron and pushed him over. He twisted Eron’s elbow to his back pulling his arm toward the back of his head and pressed Eron’s face against the grass and pine needles, which left a tactile pattern of bumps and lines.

  “I’m stronger than you now, scribe,” said Amit.

  “Let me up, now,” said Eron rubbing the side of his face.

  “Scribe,” said Amit.

  Eron charged, but the boy man deflected the attack as if he were brushing off stray branches in an overgrown path. Eron landed against a tree trunk. He rushed again they tumbled against a cart spilling some bone waste, which rolled down a trail under the feet of a group of thieves trotting up to the main fire. Rolling on the ground, they struggled for a moment. Eron attempted to disengage the boy, but Amit pinned him, knees on arms.

  "Let him up," said Ester, approaching rapidly. She had a skirt on caked with mud, obviously having just visited the local potter.

  “You’re finished talking with Uri?” she asked. "What have they decided?"

  A few of the forest dwellers pretended not to be listening. A man cleaned a copper coil under the awning where tasks no one wanted to do had been collecting dust. A couple younger people joined him, all working too slowly to make headway on the mess. The nomads made no pretense. A group stopped and stared at him openly. Even three of the highway men joined the growing crowd around the two boys.

  Eron tensed up. Too many people. His lungs didn't seem to be expanding fully. Noticing the sudden distress, Amit finally released him.

  "Is it war?" one of the girls in the crowd of nomads asked.

  War?

  It had been a couple centuries since violence, organized, armed violence, erupted anywhere on the island.

  "They didn't say anything about war," said Eron, taking one of the men's hands, who heaved him up.

  "Then what did they want with him?" asked one of the forest dwellers.

  “He's a clone," said a thief Eron recognized from the den. "Exact copy of Liam."

  “Not exact," said a fat old man in a leather apron. His hair was white and greasy. "That one's skin was darker."

  "Are you supposed to lead us?" asked a young man with long black hair and very high cheek bones.

  “Do you have his memories?” asked a nomadic woman.

  "What happened to the other two?" asked one of the women in a red dress. She was middle aged and unusually large around the waist.

  Eron picked up a wire brush from the table under the awning and tried to focus on it. His vision had dimmed. His skin seemed to tighten suddenly. And a sea of pressure and fear consumed him. He was breathing too fast.

  "Give him some room."

  It was the female Ishim. The oracle. She floated in and started issuing instructions to the middle aged woman, who pushed Ester and Amit away.

  "He had too much heat," she said.

  It was lie.

  Even Eron knew that. Able came and helped the older woman in the red tunic lead Eron back into the round building. When he struggled to climb the stairs, Able lifted him. And he was deposited unceremoniously on the hard cushion in the depression in the middle of the room where Tunkukush brought him water.

  Uri had resumed smoking. The old Ishim watched him.

  “I had parents," said Eron starting to tear up. "Ronen. He was a Red Guardsmen. Died honorably for the city. Thadine." He choked a little and burst into tears as his chest continued to heave. "My mother. A weaver. I was going to be a scribe.”

  "We know," said Uri.

  "I'm a coward," Eron sobbed. "Why did you-"

  "Why did I make you?" said the old Ishim.

  "Aden," said Eron curling up on the seating. "I have a brother. In the guard."

  War could mean many thi
ngs.

  "We know," said the oracle taking his glass. "Relax, Eron. Breathe."

  "I can't," Eron sobbed, picturing the thieves and the guards. The death. The destruction. The horror of war.

  Able left the Ishim to tend him. Eron wanted to run. Hide. He felt like crawling out of his own skin and sneaking away from the workshop. Away from everything. But, eventually, the fear abated, as if it had given everything he had to reject the situation though nothing had changed. He was tired.

  “The highwaymen believe it’s your destiny to unite them,” said Uri.

  Eron started grouping the test tubes on the Ishim's coffee table by size and the amount of cleaning they would require while the man spoke. Tunkukush had the hookah. The oracle had visibly aged. But, they all seamed more solid than when he first arrived.

  Still weak, Eron's hands shook.

  "I didn't make you to replace Liam," the alchemist said. His eyes were dark and his nose large and long, but his voice and thought intense, if a bit distant.

  "I don't remember being here," said Eron.

  “I dematerialized, entered your brain through your ear and congeal around the hippocampus and converted protein chains,” said the oracle.

  Eron stared at the wispy creature.

  "She blocked your memory," offered Tunkukush.

  “Eron, I may have started your life, but I’m not the one who has to live it," said Uri. "You may stay and be my apprentice here or you may leave with the thieves.”

  “Right. A life of crime, science or leadership,” Eron laughed dryly. “Not the career choices I thought I would be facing. What if I wanted to be a sanitation specialist?”

  “Larceny, alchemy or hegemony,” said Uri tightening the plate that held their flavored smoke.

  "He does remind me of Liam," Tukukush said to Uri, looking pleased and passing him the corded tube from their hookah.

  "I doubt Liam was a coward," said Eron darkly.

  "Liam," said Uri, leaning forward. "Had worse attacks than you did. "

  "I don't believe it," moaned Eron, sitting up.

  "You don't have to," the oracle reassured him. "We never thought this would be easy for you."

  She reached over to pat him, but he pulled away.

  "Is there anywhere I can be alone for a while?" he asked.

  Eron melted into a puddle of ambivalence in the bath house vapors, the only place it was certain neither a nomad nor a thief would disturb him. The empty room and the cold drips of water from the ceiling and the walls did not comfort Eron, but the Ishim left him alone there and he was glad of it. The crowd had remained circling the slim wooden door to Uri's building like a pack of old women at a discount cart in the Auckian Market. Uri allowed Eron a set of books, which they brought to the bath even though the moist air would cause some damage, they'd doused the fire and brought him a lamp. The vapors were slow to leave, but relief came quickly for Eron as he lost himself in the pages of the text.

  It was a dictionary of word origins. An interesting read. He even found references to modern machines in the entry on 'fast forward.' Screens. Images. The moderns could control theatre and their machines played it all at will.

  In the days that followed, the forrest grew dense with antiestablishmentarianistic plotters and villagers reporting various skirmishes with the guard. The leaves, which had only the whisper of yellow in their xylem, succumbed to seasonal forces and started to drop their red and gold foliage alike onto heaping layers missing neither the curved roofs of the vardos, nor the tents, nor the worn trails through the woods, nor the workshop, nor the kettles of the nomads, nor the thieves’ bowls while they were eating. It was incredible. And neither did they fail to weigh down the awnings, nor muck up any workspace or generally lodge themselves in any place where they were not wanted. A lot of time was spent raking.

  Newcomers all covered their mouths before served the special chicory and coffee blend that combated the effect of the amnesia urigolds. And Eron kept his distance from them. Enough eyes followed him whenever he left the dry bath house that he lost all interest in risking conversation. Ester kept an eye on Amit who stopped in regularly to insult him about being a scribe.

  "Do you want to come with us to the fire?" Ester asked, poking her head in the bath house entrance. "Gawd, Eron, the floor is getting muddy."

  She stayed in the door way waiting for him to answer.

  Between reading indecipherable texts about genetics and looking up complicated words like ’xylem’ and ‘antiestablishmentarianistic’ in Uri’s dictionaries, he took a little time to help peel root vegetables for the hoards of frightened refugees that poured into the forest every day. When he had finished the Auckian etymologies, Uri loaned him books on generators and modern machinery. Between diagram after incomprehensible diagram of buttons, gears and wiring Eron was able to push every worrying thought to the back of his mind. But, no matter how much he wanted to disappear, as soon as he set the books down, he remembered his mother and how she always insisted he made an appearance whenever and wherever things were going wrong.

  And there at the workshop in the woods, they were.

  Eron grabbed his tunic, though it was a bit damp, and pulled it over his undershirt. It was almost routine. Sleep. Eat. Read in the bath house. Then, Ester would collect him to help prepare the evening meal. After, he might hide in a dark patch listening to conversations.

  "Is the beefalo gone?" he asked.

  "They brought a fresh one in from the prairie this morning," said Ester, "But it's not going to last maybe an hour. Probably a lot less."

  Sometimes, during the second sleep, which was still observed by many of the thieves outside the den, Eron caught Tunkukush spidering over to the men and woman sleeping in the open air around the cold fire pits and whispering in their ears. And the next day, they plotted and planned with bits of Tunkukush's influence apparent, if only to Eron. Debates raged later and later each evening as strangers and long associates moved from makeshift kitchen to sleeping zones and the play areas for the young. As new people arrived, new information complexified the situation.

  Eron did his best to avoid all of it. At first, showing his face outside, struck terror into his limbs. His lips quivered. His eyelid, the left one, twitched. Stares gave way to mutterings, which transformed slowly to giving him a respectful, quiet distance, with the exception of Amit and the Ishim. Even Able didn't approach him after his meltdown.

  Tunkukush visited him infrequently. Only once he asked Eron whether he thought he'd go with the thieves.

  "I'll decide when it is time," Eron told him, burying his nose in an anatomy book.

  The spider didn't press the issue and neither did Uri, who most came to the bath house to bring books and check on the condition of the ones he had lent. No one had seen the oracle since they arrived, but when someone said she'd flown west, Eron could only assume they meant it literally.

  "What was he like?" Eron asked Uri early one one morning while the Ishim was gathering a few of his texts from the bench where Eron had made his bed.

  "Liam," said the ghostly creature floating inches above the then dry tile. "He was a friend."

  "I-I mean," Eron stuttered. "Am I like him?"

  The Ishim adjusted his glasses and looked through Eron.

  "You are no more like Liam than you are like Gil or Gil is like Liam," Uri said. "You are you."

  "How can I live up to their expectations?" said Eron looking at the door, imagining the hoards he wanted nothing more than to avoid.

  "Make your own," said Uri. "That will be difficult enough."

  "And that is what Liam did?" said Eron. "How he became great?"

  Uri thought for a moment, "Liam probably would have survived anything."

  "That doesn't sound like me at all," said Eron, feeling both crestfallen and relieved.

  "I didn't make you to be him," said Uri, looking a little confused.

  "Never mind," said Eron, slumping against the white tiles. He had no idea what
to ask the old Ishim. He had questions, but it felt like Uri twisted them until the answer was wise, but it had no immediate application.

  Uri moved directly in front of Eron, so uncomfortably close that he couldn't stay sullen. He cracked a smile. The Ishim stayed uncomfortably close.

  "All you need is a vision," he said. "Everything else will sort itself out along the way. There is nothing you have to be or do," Eron was starting to twitch, his right eyelid wouldn't be still and Uri moved away, floating onto the bench next to him. Eron breathed his relief.

  "Liam was the greatest visionary I've ever known," he continued. "There were two hundred of us on the ship that landed here. Fewer survivors on the island. During the first year, we were building shelters, raiding supplies from the wreckage and mourning. Liam spent a lot of time alone in the Sky Tower. I thought he had taken pharmaceuticals up with him. But, when he finally came down he said he'd been running scenarios. Liam thought that all we needed to rebuild was one thing."

  "What was it?" said Eron.

  "He never told anyone," said Uri looking wistful. "But, we worked for that answer. The Municipal Code. The Archive. The old community. He focused us on the basics."

  "Liam didn't write the Municipal Code?" said Eron.

  "No, he didn't," said Uri. "A lot of people worked on it.

  "I've read his discourses at least fifty times," said Eron, incredulously.

  "He didn't take credit for what we did," said Uri. "He used to sit in the tower and people would come to him with solutions. They would talk. He would listen. He recorded everything."

  Uri was right.

  Nothing in the discourses said the first administrator had been responsible for building the first community, but Eron was going to check as soon as Uri left.

  "Liam tricked us," the Ishim said, getting up. "I don't think he knew anything more than any of us."

  "Even you?" said Eron.

  "Especially me," Uri said, floating toward the exit.

  "What was the one thing?" said Eron.

  "I think it was vision," said Uri.

  "But, you're telling me that he didn't have a vision," said Eron.

  "Maybe he had a vision of vision," Uri said. "

  The weeks came and went while the nomads, the thieves and the highway men planned. Many of the people had began sharpening weapons. Fletchers from the villages and blacksmiths joined the refugees to help. Although it shocked Eron initially, he had come to accept that the villages straddled the divide, juxtaposed between the chaotic politics of the island, never truly Auckian and not clearly nomadic. But, the nomads had their sympathies. And Malak’s aggression toward the settlements violated the Liamic treaty, which gave the villages the right to self government in exchange for tribute and the periodic quartering of Guardsmen. While they accepted and adhered to the Municipal Code, at least in principle, trust and loyalty had been lost.

  “At dawn we leave for Rotorua!” Able cried from the small porch at Uri's door.

  It was a dramatic announcement. Thinking of Liam, he wondered if it had to be. If everything wasn't on some level, a sort of facade.

  The news tore grimly through the huddled bodies all the way down the trail and through the camps. With preparations only half finished, the highway men had taken a vote. Eron had not been present, but Ester told him that the Auckians Guards were occupying the villages of Thames, Rotorua, Plente and Taupo to quash brief rebellions. No slaves had been taken, but the governors' heads had been separated from their bodies in an unprovoked display of blood dripping violence.

  "Rotorua is the least defended," whispered Ester as Eron joined the crowd outside Uri's round house. "Able thinks we can take it and occupy it without resistance from the villagers."

  "Death to the slavers," said Amit, looking strong enough, but not wise enough to carry out his enthusiastic threat.

  Cha! shouted the highwaymen with their braids flopping wildly in the night air.

  Cha! screamed the nomads.

  Cha! bellowed the thieves who toasted what they saw as great news with a clanking wine mugs and a revelry that lasted long into the night.