He was the only passenger. The talk of the megrim had been enough to empty the coach. He’d taken no notice of the rumors of plague when he bought his seat for North Hill, since he wasn’t affected. But he was grateful. He didn’t relate easily to other people, even Ship people. He had no idea what to say to a Colonist, people who died, people who killed.
It gave him the chance to study the Colligations, since that was what Zebulon killed and died for. If the subject came up, he wanted to be ready.
As they rattled through the rutted streets, Tansman looked through the coach window. There was little traffic—none to speak of. There was less noise—stony quiet. Nobody to be seen. It was a strange queer place, this North Hill. Most of the adobe houses they passed were shut and shuttered.
Arriving, Tansman felt more tense than he had since that first moment when he had been set down here on Zebulon and put on his own. It was only the third time he had been on a planet, the third time in his life that he had left Daudelin, though he could million his light years. Once in practice for Trial when he was thirteen. Once for thirty nervous days on Trial when he turned fourteen. And now.
Here he was, a chromoplastician in a world ignorant of chromoplasts, an incognito prince amongst sharp-toothed paupers, an uneasy rider in a coach that was now, at last, coming to a stop in a dusty street under a lowering sky. And he was afraid. He wouldn’t have admitted it, but he was afraid.
It was his own fault for letting himself be overridden by Nancy Poate. She was his cousin, one of the few people he knew, one of the few people he let himself know. She was older than he, determined and formidable.
“Phil,” she had said, “did you or did you not tell me last week that you were finished with that silly set of experiments you’ve been locking yourself in with?”
He had told her about the experiments to make her go away. She didn’t like to hear about them so he always started talking about chromoplasts when he wanted to be left alone.
“Yes,” he said. “But they aren’t silly. You shouldn’t talk about my work that way.”
“Then you need a vacation. This will be a vacation.”
“Nancy, I’ll grant that after Earth was destroyed we owed the Colonies more than we gave them, but this sneaking around doing paternal good works to people who just want to be left alone doesn’t appeal to me.”
Tansman didn’t really care about the Colonies. They weren’t real to him. They were distant and vaguely frightening and he didn’t want to think about them. He would grant the premises that Nancy insisted upon—because Nancy was immediate and, in her way, even more frightening. But he would seize on any argument he could find and throw it back at her.
And none of it—the points he granted or the arguments he countered with—was real, none of it was thought through. It was all talk designed to keep the fearsome where it belonged, as far away as possible.
Since this argument seemed to be doing the job, he continued with it:
“You don’t dare come out in the open, because you’re afraid that they’ll wring your necks, but you aren’t willing to leave them alone. So what do you do? You prod and you poke, you try to establish trade routes and other silly business, and you hand out propaganda and how-to-do-it books, and that makes you feel good. Well, it wouldn’t make me feel good, and I don’t want any part of it.”
Nancy, bluff and unstoppable, just nodded. Tansman would have had himself remodeled if he looked the way she did. He was convinced that she didn’t, because her appearance helped her to overwhelm people and get her own way.
She said, “I knew I was right to pick on you, Phil. You won’t be tempted to meddle. All you’ll have to do is be there for two months keeping an eye on things.”
“No,” he said.
“Phil,” she said. “Don’t be stuffy.”
So now he was on Zebulon, not quite sure how he had been persuaded to come. He was a reluctant fire-bringer, muttering to himself about a man he had yet to meet named Hans Rilke who was a do-gooder with an undurable liver. They might call themselves “The Group,” but Nancy Poate’s people were low-visibility Sons of Prometheus.
It seemed appropriate that Rilke should have a liver complaint. That had been Prometheus’ problem, too. He wondered if it were an occupational disease of meddlers, and he wished Nancy Poate had found a better way to occupy herself than coordinating the activities of do-gooders—including the replacement of their innards.
He took a deep breath and descended from the coach, satchel in hand. He was a tall, youngish man. Not young—he disowned his youth along with all other potential folly. He was a thin man, narrow of face and large of nose. If it had ever mattered, he might have had it altered, but the chromoplasts didn’t care and if anyone else did, they had never bothered to tell him.
He was wearing a slouch hat, jacket, breeches and leggings that he had been assured were seasonable and stylish here. He felt like the sort of ass who dresses up for costume parties. He’d never worn a hat before in his life, and he kept reaching up to adjust the clumsy, uncomfortable thing.
The wind under the flat, cold, gray sky was chill and biting. It tugged at his silly hat as he stepped down from the coach, and slapped Tansman in the face with the most overwhelming, pungent, unpleasant odor he had ever smelled. It was an eye-burning, stomach-churning reek that drowned him in singed hair and charring flesh.
The driver of the coach could smell it, too. He didn’t wait for Tansman. He gave a sharp whistle and his horses lurched forward. Raising dust, open coach door banging back and forth, the stage rattled to the right and around the corner and was gone between the mud-walled buildings, leaving only a dust-whorl memory.
And Tansman stood alone at the edge of the square of North Hill. Fifty yards distant across the square was built a great bonfire. There may have been a base of wood beneath, but the primary fuel was human bodies. Some of the bodies were clothed, the fire licking at the cloth, lines of flame running down arms and legs. Most of the bodies were naked, marked by great purple bruises like port-wine scars.
Three determined men in gloves and white cloth masks worked by the fire. One did his best to hold a maddened horse still. The other two worked as a team to unload the cart. They grabbed arms and feet and heaved bodies like logs onto the fire. They were fast, silent and clumsy, impersonal and afraid.
One body, a female, was thrown so carelessly that it rolled down the pile and slapped at the feet of a fourth man, a white-suited, white-cowled, black-belted friar. He took no notice but continued his benediction, adding his single note of dignity to the crude and ugly disposal of the dead.
Tansman turned away. It was more than he could stand to watch. It was the closest he had ever been to death, that rarity on the Ship, and it was too close for his mind and stomach. He was not afraid. Before he left he had been given proofs against the accidents of Zebulon, including this hemorrhagic fever. He could have afforded a scientific curiosity. But one look at the burning pile of ephemeral human animals on the cobbles, one sickening whiff of their mortality, was too much.
He gagged and smothered his face in his hand. He gagged again, and ran. He ran down the street the coach had traveled into town, and he did not look back at a heavy rattle that pursued him like a nightmare of death. His bag banged heavily against his legs as he ran, and his breath came shortly.
Then he tripped and fell and lay panting in the dust. The rattle grew louder. A horse whickered. The thought flashed in his mind that he had been discovered. They knew him here on Zebulon. He had been brought to the place of death where they disposed of the true men they detected, and this was the death cart come for him.
He wanted to cry, Not me! Not me! He had never wanted to come. When would the nightmare end? Would he wake, safe in his own bed? He wanted to leap up and lock the door.
And then a wheel stopped by his head. He looked up at a gnarled little old man sitting on the seat of a flatbed wagon. The old man was dressed in brown leather, worn and soft, that might be sea
sonable but could never have been stylish. There was a gold-spot earring set in his right ear and a broad-bladed knife with a curved point at his belt. He had curly muttonchop whiskers and dirty brown hair, both shot with gray, and his last shave must have been half a week past. He was a monkey man.
“Mr. Tansman?” he said, grinning down as though he enjoyed the sight of Tansman lying on his face in the street.
Tansman said, “You aren’t…” and then stopped, because it was clear that he wasn’t. The pictures of Rilke that Nancy had shown him were nothing like this man. He had to be a Zebulonite, one of them, part of the nightmare.
“I’m from your uncle, come to fetch you to Delera. Hop in, boy, and let’s be off. I’ve no mind to catch the megrim.”
Tansman pushed himself to his knees and snatched up his fallen hat and bag. He stood and dropped them in the bed of the wagon and then began to brush the dust away.
“Ah, you are a dandy, aren’t you? City people! Climb aboard, damn you. I’m not waiting.”
Tansman stepped on the wheel hub and then up to the seat. The quick little man shouted to his horses and off they jounced through the dry, rutted streets. The old man didn’t slow the pace until the last flat-topped roof of North Hill had been left behind. Then he brought the team down to a walk, resettling himself on the hard wooden seat and taking a great sigh of air, as though it were only now that he really dared to breathe.
“You’re lucky I stayed for you, boy. I wouldn’t have spent another ten minutes in that charnel house. I haven’t lived all these many years to end me days being sizzled in the town square, and I don’t fancy walking around with half me mind leached should I survive the megrim, neither.”
He shuddered and cast an eye at the blank and leaden sky. “I should have known. I should have stayed at home tucked in me bed. The megrim is no more than you’d expect with five moons full and the shippeens walking.”
The dirt lane they followed ran parallel to a series of small hills rising away at the left. Down the slope at the right was flatland that stretched away level as a table as far as the eye could follow until it was lost in the grayness of the sky, cracked mud merging with muddy sky at the horizon. The road angled down from the town to meet the closer grayness.
With surprise at himself for venturing to speak, but because he had to know, shippeen that he was, Tansman asked with the haughtiest air he could assume, “How do you know the Ship people are about?”
“How do I know? Heh! Ain’t it obvious to anyone with his wits?” The monkey man held up his hand and ticked off his evidence on his fingers. “There are five moons full, right? And then there’s the plague. Do you expect a shippeen to tap ye on the shoulder and announce hisself?”
The dust roiling up from the horses was too much for Tansman. He reached into the back and found his slouch hat and began to fan the dust away with it.
The old mortal man snickered. He pointed ahead. “The dust will ease when we reach the flats,” he said.
Tansman resented the snicker and the contempt he thought he detected in it. “You work for my uncle, do you?” he asked in a tone designed to settle their relationship.
“Yea. Garth Buie is me name. Old Garth, they call me. And you’re Mr. Tansman.”
“That’s right. Mr. Tansman.”
With that established, Tansman sat back, stiff and upright, determined to say no more than he had to. This strange, quick, ignorant, and superstitious old man made him nervous. He continued to fan away the dust, but only when he had to and then in quick surreptitious little flicks of the hat.
After ten minutes they reached the flatland, and here the road continued, still parallel to the line of hills, almost straight, almost level, and as Old Garth had promised, almost dustless. Tansman brushed the dust from himself and from his hat, wiped his face, grimacing at the grime on his handkerchief, and set the hat in place on his head.
In another mile they came to a crossroad. There was a sign that read Delera and pointed toward a break in the hills. Old Garth slowed the wagon and guided the horses through the turn.
“Do ye see the brothers? Bound for the monastery at Delera, I’ll warrant.”
Trudging up the first rise beyond the turn were two men in white-cowled suits, the match of the man who had stood without flinching by the fire in the town square in North Hill. One, short and broad, carried a pack on his back. The other, a tall man, carried a bag like Tansman’s, switching hands as he walked. A small wolfish dog with a bushy tail curled high over its back frisked at their heels. The friars took no notice of the wagon clattering up the slope behind them, but the dog held the center of the road and yapped threats until the wagon was closer than the walkers. Then it turned, a rear guard whose moment to retreat had come, and hurried to catch up.
It occurred to Tansman that Old Garth intended to offer them a ride, and he wanted to forbid it, but didn’t dare. What could he say to them? He was suddenly angry at Rilke for not having come himself, for putting him in this uncertain position. He didn’t say anything. He bit his lip and sat the straighter, thinking of the Colligations.
They overtook the friars at the top of the rise, the dog circling away to the far side and pressing close to the friar carrying the bag. The short friar looked up as Garth brought the wagon alongside and reined the horses.
Garth saluted and said, “Good afternoon, Brothers. Will ye honor us by riding along?”
“Well, bless you, son,” the friar said, throwing back his cowl. He had a red face and a bald head with just a fringe of hair, a plebian snapping turtle. “A ride is just the thing for weary feet.”
He had his pack off in no time and the tailgate of the wagon lowered. And that quickly, after two short sentences, Tansman knew he found him dislikable. The friar radiated an abrasive self-confident pushiness, as though he expected things his own way and expected you to realize that it was his right. He took the tailgate down and hopped aboard as though he owned the wagon.
The other friar, whose suit was cinched with a black belt to the short one’s belt of red, had yet to look up. He turned and knelt, setting his bag down, and while the short one was making a backrest for himself out of his pack and Tansman’s satchel, he called the little dog close with a waggle of his finger and a pat on the ground, and caught it up.
And then he turned and looked up at Tansman just as the red friar was saying, “I am Brother Boris Zin. And this is Senior Brother Alva Abarbanel.”
Tansman was caught by the penetrating glance. The Senior Brother’s face was long and lean and intelligent, a face that Tansman might want to wear when he was old. His brows were bushy and white and his eyes beneath were deepset and clear. It was a face that Tansman liked as instantly as he disliked the other, but the gaze was so sharp that he could not bear to meet it lest he lose all his secrets and stand revealed. So Tansman looked away.
Garth said, “Brother Asmodeus!” And there was such fear in his voice that Tansman could not help but look back at him. And indeed, Old Garth was frightened, edging away on the seat toward Tansman.
Brother Boris held up a hand. “Aye, Brother Asmodeus. But have no fear if your hearts be pure. He is in my charge and he stands under an interdict of silence. Until the Questry completes its accounting and calls him forth from Delera, he is bound neither to teach, nor to write, nor even to speak. You are safe.”
“Must I give him a ride?” asked Garth.
“You forget yourself, my son,” said Brother Boris. “Whatever Brother Alva’s errors may prove to be, he is still a Senior Brother of the Confraternity, and as such, he is entitled to your respect. Errors in faith are not for such as you to judge. They are the business of the Questry.”
“Yes, Questryman,” said Garth, and he saluted him.
Tansman sat silent. The less said, the better.
“Besides,” Brother Boris said, plumping Tansman’s bag as though it were an out-of-shape pillow, “Brother Alva and I travel together, and you would not have me walk.”
“Ye
s, Questryman. I mean, no, Questryman.”
“Please. Call me Brother Boris. Simple Brother Boris.”
Simple Brother Boris gestured to his companion, who still stood beside the wagon. After an unrevealing glance at Garth, Brother Asmodeus the Fearsome set his bag and his white dog within the wagon, bade the dog stay with a silent finger, then walked to the rear, climbed up, and raised the tailgate after. Then he sat cross-legged, one hand on his bag, the other on his dog, smiled and nodded to Garth to proceed.
After they had traveled the road for some minutes Brother Boris said, “What are your names, please?”
There was no real politeness to the interrogative, no hint of personal interest. It was a pure expression of the right to know everything. It was just what Tansman had anticipated and feared when Old Garth, the ignorant monkey man, had first shown his intention to stop. Tansman could only wish that Garth felt as uncomfortable with his gesture as he did.
“Old Garth Buie. Mayhap you’ve heard of me. They know me up at the monastery. I went up in a balloon once.”
Garth fell silent, and Brother Boris did not seize the opportunity to pursue the details of that adventure, so after a moment Tansman said, without turning, “Philip Tansman.”
“Effects are a certain sign of their cause, as I’m sure Brother Alva would tell you were he free to speak. The Men of the Ship are about, for heresy, evil, and disease are to be seen around us. Infection of the body, infection of the mind, and infection of the spirit. Why is it that you travel at such a dangerous season?”
Garth said, “It’s as I told the lad. I should have known enough to stay at home in me bed. When all moons stand full, the shippeens are abroad.”
“No, my son,” Brother Boris said. “You must not believe that. What you have said is rank superstition. The Confraternity has kept careful records—as I may say, having spent a year assigned to the task when first I aspired to the Questry—and the phases of the moons have nothing to do with the comings and goings of the Men of the Ships. During the year I labored at the records, a nest of Shipmen, openly proclaiming themselves in all their rottenness and calling themselves the Sons of Prometho, were blotted by the Confraternity. At that time Aleph and Veth were full, Gimel was in the last quarter, and Daleth and Beth were new. Only once in fifteen turns of Aleph are all moons full together. Heresy, evil, and disease, and the men that spread them, are to be found in any month. Is that not true, Brother Alva?”
Farewell to Yesterday's Tomorrow Page 2
