Pallahaxi

by Michael Coney

  Then the lox lunged forward and the cart lurched into motion, throwing us against one another. We rumbled through the narrow streets and soon reached the main road out of town; the lorin had transmitted the urgency of the occasion to the lox who moved with unaccustomed speed, their shaggy heads thrust forward. There were two lighted torches in our cart and a further bundle on the floor for use when the search began for the time being, however, we had all the illumination we needed. The crimson glow reflected back from the windows around us like a multitude of eyes and suddenly I was conscious of the cold, and shivered. Browneyes glanced at me enquiringly then huddled back into her thick loxhair cloak. I tightened my arm around her and she smiled to herself. Then I think we both remembered just how serious the situation was, and I know that I felt ashamed of my errant thoughts while Squint was lost in the cold somewhere.

  Then I told myself that my feelings towards Browneyes made no difference to Squint’s predicament, and I felt better.

  The lox’s claws scrabbled at the loose road surface as we climbed the long hill out of Pallahaxi and the lorin moved closer, its thick arm around the neck of the lead beast while it presumably emitted thoughts of encouragement. I saw Silverjack sitting in the next cart ahead and caught the glint as he raised a bottle to his lips. I looked from him to the lorin and was struck by the resemblance, remembering a somewhat unlikely story I’d heard recently, that Silverjack’s mother had lain with a lorin out near Finger Point, years ago.

  At last we reached the top of the hill and the lights of the cannery lay below us, looking a long way off. The four carts drew alongside one another and Strongarm stood, holding a blazing torch.

  “We’ll start from here,” he shouted. “We spread out and beat downhill towards the river, keeping in a straight line as far as possible.” Although his voice was steady enough, the strain showed in his gaunt face. “Be careful when you reach the swamp. There are ice-devils in there. Now, I want a small team in either cart to form advance parties with a roving commission. Listen out for cries or anything which might strike you as strange. In a short while the vehicles from the new cannery will be here, then we’ll really be able to get moving.”

  The messenger had returned, having ridden on loxback up the hill from the new cannery. He said something to Strongarm.

  “What!” the man roared. “What?” He turned to the rest of us, his face haggard in the glow. “They say we can’t have vehicles,” he rasped. “The guards say they don’t have the freezing authority! What sort of a freezing country is this, anyway?”

  “Let’s ride down there and smash the place up!” yelled the cyclopean man, and there was a chorus of agreement.

  “No!” shouted Strongarm. “For pity’s sake don’t forget what we’re here for. First we find my son. Then…” His voice dropped and he spoke so quietly that I barely heard the words. “Then we deal with the cannery…”

  I remember it occurred to me at the time that Squint was lucky in his father; there couldn’t have been a better man to organize a search. It was not merely because he was personally involved; he seemed naturally to have a way of getting things done, of bending people to his will by sheer force of personality and maybe a little physical intimidation. Later Browneyes told me that, although Strongarm held no office in the town, he was, nevertheless, highly respected and looked on as a leader in local affairs.

  Browneyes, Ribbon, Wolff and I were placed in the middle of the straggling line and told to make for the place where we had last seen Squint. As I looked left I could see torches in the distance almost as far as Finger Point; to the right, the line stretched far inland. While the searchers were getting themselves organized, further volunteers had ridden up from the town and by now we must have been well over a hundred strong. Down in the river valley below, more lights moved as loxcarts and their crews conducted a random search.

  We made our way slowly downhill, torches held above our heads until our arms ached. From time to time Browneyes and I would see a huddled form in the bush, but when we got closer it always turned out to be a sleeping lorin, or a lox, or even a spinethicket. I found myself wondering about the lorin. If anyone could find Squint they could, with their uncanny ability to detect the emotions of people in trouble.

  Later progress slowed as the line began to pick its way through the swampy area towards the riverbank. We passed the place where Browneyes and I had first confessed our feelings, then moved on to the point where Ribbon had been trapped, all the while treading with the utmost caution as the dancing light of the torches glittered over dark water. We saw nothing and heard nothing more than the occasional shouted query and reply further along the line. At last we reached the river; I joined Browneyes and together we gazed across the slow-moving ripples of the dark estuary to the lights of the cannery opposite. Further along the bank I could see Wolff and Ribbon standing together.

  Suddenly I heard an exclamation from Wolff. He was bending down, showing something to Ribbon.

  “What is it? “I called.

  He turned. “It’s a yellowball skin. It’s…” He turned back to Ribbon and they muttered together, pointing. “Come over here!” he shouted.

  We joined them and Wolff indicated the mud before us. The gradual falling of the tide had revealed a wide margin of black ooze between the bank and the water and at this point I could make out marks, imprints in the mud. I moved closer, stepping down from the bank and sinking into the slime, holding the torch high. I saw a long single furrow running out into the dark water and, parallel to the furrow, a line of small deep imprints.

  Quite obviously someone had pushed a boat into the estuary at this point, climbed in and rowed…where? The destination could only be the cannery.

  “They could be Squint’s footprints,” said Ribbon, “they’re small enough. And it would be just like him to go prowling around the cannery because he knows he wasn’t supposed to.”

  “What have you found?” The shout came from along the bank. A column of jiggling lights marched in our direction. The searchers were reassembling for a further briefing. Soon there was a large crowd gathered around us. Strongarm arrived, thrusting his way through and staring belligerently at the marks as though willing them to yield up their secret.

  “He must be in the cannery,” he said at last. “He found a boat here, got inquisitive, and rowed across. Right.” He stamped away upstream. “Make for the freezing cannery, men!” he shouted, and the column of burning torches trailed him along the riverbank.

  The bridge which carries the Pallahaxi road over the river was some distance away but Strongarm set a furious pace and before long we had crossed to the other bank and were marching in a body towards the new cannery. There was hope in the air now, and I think we all believed that in due course we would find Squint asleep on a heap of sacks in the boiler-house.

  At last the high wire fence and glaring notice boards delineating the restricted area glittered in the light of our torches. We halted and Strongarm beat on the tall gates with a cudgel. “In there! In there!”

  A guard stepped out of the tiny hutch beyond the wire. He stared at us, eyes screwed up against the light. “What do you want?”

  “Don’t act so surprised, man!” shouted Strongarm. “You must have heard us coming. Now open up and let us in, will you? My boy’s in there.”

  “There’s no boy in here,” replied the guard flatly.

  “You’re not a Pallahaxi man, are you? I don’t know you—but if you knew me, you’d know I have a habit of getting what I want. Now open up the gate and I’ll say no more about the vehicles you wouldn’t let us have.”

  “This is a restricted area. I have orders to admit nobody.”

  “Now look here, you!” yelled Strongarm. “Open up that gate and let us in before I smash the freezing thing down! Do you hear me?”

  There was a pause and I found Wolff plucking at my elbow. “I don’t like this,” he muttered. “My father works for the Government. I don’t want
to get involved. You ought to have more sense yourself. I’ll see you tomorrow, maybe…” He crept away and I looked after him in disgust. Ribbon hardly noticed him go; she was watching her father apprehensively.

  “Are you deaf?” shouted Strongarm, then, receiving no reply: “Right. You asked for this, my lad. Where are the lox? We’ll tie them to this gate and pull the freezing thing down.” There was a movement at the back of the crowd; it parted to allow men through, leading the animals.

  “What’s happened to the lorin?” I asked Browneyes, conscious of a foreboding. If Squint were in there, I would have expected the lorin to sense it. Yet they were nowhere in sight. The lox were uneasy, peering this way and that with questing eyes as they stood at the gate.

  “All right, that’s enough!” shouted the guard. A row of uniformed men had appeared inside the compound. They held springrifles, cocked and levelled at the crowd.

  “The next man to make any move towards the gate gets it,” said the guard coldly, “you’ve had your fun; now go home, all of you.”

  I thought Strongarm was going to rush the gate and attempt to tear it down with his bare hands as I saw the veins bulge on his neck and his fists clench. His wife caught his arm; and Ribbon ran to them, pushing herself between him and the gate.

  He stood motionless for long seconds, staring over their heads at the guard. Then he relaxed, shrugged, and turned away. I saw his face in the torchlight as he walked past me; his mouth hung open and there was a dreadful emptiness in his eyes.

  CHAPTER 11

  In the days that followed I was conscious of a growing feeling of unity among the people of Pallahaxi. It is possible that this had always existed and only now that I had become acquainted with a few townspeople had I noticed it. In previous summers my parents had always been with me and we had driven about in the motorcart, visiting beaches, going on organized boat trips, hardly ever speaking to anyone other than the occupants of the other cottages in the field—all of them, like ourselves, were on vacation.

  Nevertheless I was quite certain that people were drawing together in some way that was almost instinctive; as though they had been hurt, and they knew they were going to be hurt some more, and they needed the company of one another. Attendances at the Phu temple increased greatly—not because people had suddenly got religious; but because they wanted to be together. The local newspaper, instead of merely printing the incoming news from the message post, began to report local gatherings and publish letters and opinions concerning Parliament’s conduct of local affairs. People gripped one another’s arms when they met, they stopped berating the storekeepers for the rationing and sympathized with them instead. In the evenings they sat outside their houses and chatted to neighbours, burying the feuds of decades.

  I’d heard that in time of adversity people came together like this, so to a certain extent it was understandable. The only thing which perturbed me was: whom were we uniting against? The logical answer would have been the enemy, Asta—yet I scarcely heard the war mentioned. Asta was not blamed for the rationing; the Government was. The shortage of distil fuel, the proliferation of restricted areas, the occasional loss of a vessel at sea, any disaster, any hardship, was laid at the door of the Government.

  During the state of armed neutrality which existed between my parents and me, I mentioned this to my father.

  He looked thoughtful. “I’m aware of the sentiments of your friends in the town, Drove,” he said at last with remarkable restraint. “Of course it worries us. The cannery is an important project and, right now, there are many inland towns which would not survive if it wasn’t for the supplies which we ship out of here. There are Astan saboteurs in the area whose prime target is the cannery, so we have to take stringent security measures. But as far as the general public are concerned, they have had to suffer hardships so naturally they look for a scapegoat. Asta is a long way over the horizon, but the Government is close at hand, so the Government is blamed. It’s regrettable, but it’s the way people think.”

  I’d been watching him in some surprise; for the first time ever, he’d spoken to me as though I was an adult. It felt good. “Maybe if the cannery had been more helpful over Squint, then the people might be more friendly,” I said mildly.

  “A very unfortunate incident. The guards involved were most sternly reprimanded. We carried out a thorough search and the young lad was nowhere to be found on the cannery premises.” He seemed almost to be apologizing. “It illustrates my point however, Drove. With all of the region to choose from, with the ocean to the west and the Yellow Mountains inland, why should the general public choose to assume that the boy had disappeared into the maw of the cannery?”

  This made a certain amount of sense, but left me with horrifying images of Squint, overbalancing as he investigated some giant machine, falling into the whirling blades and eventually emerging in the guise of a stack of cans…

  Since the confrontation at the cannery gates Wolff had been lying low. From time to time I saw him with his mother, walking about the town and buying supplies in such quantity that I had no desire to admit our acquaintance in public. I couldn’t understand why the Government didn’t make it clear to its employees that flashing cards around and ignoring rationing made for bad public relations.

  Meanwhile the trucks continued to thunder through the town and away up the inland road, carting produce to towns less fortunate than ourselves. I spent much of my time with Browneyes and frequently we visited Ribbon’s house—at first to express sympathy and find out the latest news on Squint; then, as the days went by and hope dwindled, to console and try to divert them from their sorrow. They were a close family and had taken it very badly. Ribbon blamed herself and hardly spoke, and Strongarm blamed himself for his remarks to us on the evening of Squint’s disappearance which had contributed to Ribbon’s decline.

  In the evenings when we sat in Ribbon’s room trying to cheer her up while she sat on the bed and looked unseeingly through us, the house received a number of visitors. The bedroom was at the front of the house and I could watch people arriving. Some of them carried parcels which would contain food or liquor as a gift for the bereaved family—but others, and these were usually men, came empty-handed. They approached with purposeful tread, sometimes in twos and threes, and Strongarm would receive them into the living room and shut the door firmly—re-opening it only to call to his wife for more drink. Often he would have twelve or more people in that room, and one night I counted more than twenty. Browneyes’ parents were there that night and later she asked them what it was all about, but she couldn’t get a satisfactory reply. We asked Ribbon, but she didn’t know and didn’t care.

  It seemed that an action group had been formed, but we couldn’t guess the nature of the action to be taken.

  Meanwhile the grume arrived.

  We took Ribbon down to the quay one day; we had difficulty in getting her out of the house but once we reached the harbour the activity all around us seemed to brighten her up. All the deep-hulled boats were laid up by now, and the basin was filled with brightly painted little skimmers. The water level was very low; the surface had a heavy, undulating appearance like molten lead.

  I untied the rope of my skimmer from the bollard and pulled; the rope dripped slow viscous drops like treacle as the little craft slid towards us. We climbed in and I hoisted the sail. Tired ripples spread around us with the movement of the boat, but died almost immediately. The wind caught us and we glided gently towards the harbour mouth. All the snowdivers were gone, now; with their buoyant lightness they were not suited to the dense water of the grume. They would not have been able to descend beneath the surface—besides, the grume brought new enemies.

  The grummets had arrived, winging in from the south, following the grume. A large number of the great white birds perched on the roof of the fishmarket, eyeing the offloaded catches avidly. As we sailed through the gap into the outer harbour a grummet came in low, skimming the surface with downslun
g feet, wing tips raising little ripples. It landed heavily on the slow water, settled, shrugging great wings across the broad back and watching us coldly as we passed. I gazed at it, fascinated. These birds symbolized Pallahaxi to me, and the whole meaning of our annual vacation.

  As though reading my thoughts, Browneyes asked, “When are you going back home, Drove?” Her eyes were sad.

  “Rax. Don’t talk about that now. It’s a long time yet—besides, father’s all tied up with the new cannery.”

  I didn’t dare say it, but at the back of my mind was the feeling that we might never go home, that we were in Pallahaxi for always. The thought was almost too wonderful to contemplate. Certainly my parents never spoke of Alika; and usually about this time my mother would start talking about how nice it would be to get home again. I found myself hoping that my father ran into all manner of difficulties with the cannery, which necessitated him staying here on a permanent basis.

  Ribbon was looking at me gravely. She said, “Perhaps you’ll stay here, Drove.” I wished she hadn’t said it. It was tempting fate. But it was good to hear her speak and I made some noncommittal reply while Browneyes smiled hopefully.

  The sullen water was suddenly flecked with sparkling silver as a shoal of tiny fish, unable to maintain depth, broke surface and skittered among the boats, pursued by snapping, twisting glubb. A flight of grummets swooped, a huge bird picked off a stranded glubb as it lay writhing on the surface, unable to regain safety underwater.