by Maurice Gee
‘They’re going to catch us.’
‘Then some of them will die.’
‘So will we.’
No, Xantee thought, not till Hari lives. She still had him in her mind from her encounter with Keech. He seemed to whisper but she could not make out the words. Maybe they were no more than: Run. Hide.
‘Run,’ she said. ‘Hide.’
They climbed the beam and went through a series of rooms, crawling on rubble that mounted to gaps barely wide enough to squeeze through. Their hunters followed. Always they were closer, using their eyes like cats and their noses like dogs.
Tarl seized Her and leapt from a broken floor into the dark. He called Him and it leapt. Xantee heard it yelp.
‘Girl, come.’
Xantee leapt blindly, bracing herself for impact with a floor she could not see. It jarred her but she stayed on her feet and heard Duro land beside her. They ran again, in deeper shadow, then slowed to feel their way. Xantee heard their pursuers yelling as they leaped into the dark.
‘Tarl, where are we going?’
‘We’re in Keg. I don’t know.’
‘Quiet,’ Duro said. Repeated it to Xantee: Quiet. A voice.
She heard it calling, hard but silent, in her head. Xantee, it said, Duro. Follow me.
Who?
I don’t know. But it knows our names, Duro said.
Xantee, follow. Duro, follow. Bring Tarl and the dogs.
Behind them the slapping feet drew near.
‘I’ll fight them here,’ Tarl said.
‘No, Tarl, follow us. There’s someone calling.’
‘What, boy?’
‘Follow.’
Duro took Xantee’s arm and ran. She did not know where to, but the voice was constant, guiding them: Turn, jump, follow. There was no light in the ruins except starlight shining through broken roofs. They turned, then almost doubled back, and seemed for a time to move parallel to the chasing men.
At the next turn crawl through the hole in the wall, said the voice.
They saw it, an opening scarcely larger than an oven door.
Xantee, you, Duro said, pushing her. She crawled on sharp stones, scraping her knees, and came upright in a narrow room. A man stood beside her, holding a torch of wood that burned with a sooty flame. He pulled her out of the way as Duro appeared. The dogs came out, then turned and tried to go back. On the other side of the hole, Xantee heard a man cry out in pain and heard Tarl yell his fighting yell.
Stay, the man commanded the dogs. They fell still. Tarl, come, he said. It was a command stronger than any Xantee had ever heard, almost as strong as Blossom and Hubert might make. Tarl crawled out of the hole and stood up blindly. The man thrust his torch into Duro’s hand. He sprang forward and swung on a giant slab of stone. It moved down slowly, grinding as it came. Then it sped and slipped into place with a jarring thud, closing the hole they had crawled through. They heard thin cries on the other side, then the sound of knives chipping stone.
It’ll take them all night to break that down, the man said. The dogs were sniffing him. He touched their heads.
Who are you? Xantee said.
No one you know.
She saw his eyes shine green in the torchlight.
A Dweller, she said.
Yes, a Dweller. Now follow me again. We’ll talk when we’ve put these men behind us.
He led them into the ruins, in buildings and streets and basements, and deep into the night, until Xantee thought the burrows had no end. Then she smelled the sea.
We’re in Port, she said.
Yes, Port, the Dweller said. He led them on a crumbling road beside the harbour, then into a hidden place beneath a wharf. A dinghy was tied up and he ushered them in.
Xantee and Duro sat in the bow, Tarl and the dogs in the stern. Tarl had recovered.
‘Where are you taking us, Dweller?’
‘To a safe place,’ the Dweller said. He pushed the boat out, took oars and started to row.
‘There?’ Tarl said, pointing at a dark shape against the starlit sky.
‘Yes, there.’
It was a shed raised on piles, standing in the harbour. Once it had been part of a wharf but the decking had fallen, turning the shed into an island. The Dweller rowed towards it with easy strokes. Duro had taken the torch again, and suddenly Tarl leaned past the Dweller and seized it, making the boat tip and the dogs whine nervously. He held it close to the Dweller, forcing him to lean back.
‘I know you,’ he said.
‘Yes, we met long ago,’ the Dweller said. His three-fingered hands rested easy on the oars. He let Tarl study his face.
‘You’re the boy who came with Hari to Deep Salt.’
‘Long ago,’ the Dweller said, smiling.
‘So,’ Tarl said, narrow-eyed, gritting out his words as though they hurt, ‘you came in that place with Hari and called me out.’
‘Hari called you,’ the Dweller said.
Tarl shook his head. ‘You were the guide. Danatok is your name.’
‘I’m Danatok,’ the Dweller said.
‘Then I thank you,’ Tarl gritted. Xantee saw how difficult gratitude was for him.
She spoke to Danatok: Hari is my father.
I know. Now, let me row. I’ve got food and shelter for you.
They reached the shed on piles. Duro climbed an iron ladder to the deck running round its sides. Tarl handed up the dogs then Xantee climbed, followed by Tarl. Danatok tied the dinghy. He tossed another rope to Duro, telling him to pull. Duro hauled up a dripping cage with a dozen fish flapping inside.
‘Tarl,’ Danatok said, ‘help me get these ready. Your dogs can eat too. Xantee and Duro, go inside. Your friends are waiting.’
Friends? Xantee said, but he made no explanation.
She found a door on the seaward side of the shed and entered a large room with bunks against the walls, a table and chairs in the centre, and a fire burning in the open grate of an iron stove. Two people were sitting in front of it, holding hands. They looked at Xantee, unsmiling.
He said he would bring you, one of them said.
Sal, Mond, Xantee said. You’re alive.
TEN
They had walked through jungles and climbed over mountains and crossed plains, taking the straightest route they could find. The people with no name helped in the jungles, but in the mountains they froze and nearly died and on the plains their double strength had been barely enough to keep fangcats away. They arrived in the city four days before Xantee and Duro. Danatok found them hiding at the edge of the burrows and took them to his home on the harbour.
We’ve come to kill the gool, Sal and Mond said.
They had no idea where the gool mother might be. They had met no gool on their way.
But, they said to Xantee, when you find her, tell us and we’ll come to fight.
Danatok’s story took longer. He told it as the travellers ate fish baked in the oven and drank tea brewed from the bitter leaves of weeds that grew in the wasted streets of Port. He had lain in the Dweller sickhouse for many weeks after saving Tarl and it was a year before his strength returned. But he would never have to go back to Deep Salt and that knowledge helped him recover. His body grew strong. His mind was changed. Lying in the sickhouse, he had learned to love solitude. After working in the gardens all spring and sailing out with the fishermen in summer, he left Stone Creek. For many years he lived alone in the forests that stretched as far as the Inland Sea. He learned the languages of birds and animals. He learned the language of the earth, of trees, of streams, of flowers. Sometimes he thought he might change flesh with the earth and become part of it. The voice that spoke his name became a familiar sound, like a bird calling: Danatok. He asked it no questions. He swallowed it like water and it lay silent in him until it spoke again. He knew it had nothing more to say and that he had no more to learn.
‘Xantee, you’ve heard the voice? Duro, you’ve heard?’ He spoke aloud so Tarl would hear.
‘Yes,’ th
ey said.
‘Tarl, you could hear if you weren’t so busy,’ Danatok said.
‘I talk with dogs. That’s enough for me,’ Tarl growled.
Danatok smiled. He went on with his story. Told how, at the jungle edge, he had met, but not seen, the people with no name. They had become his familiars. They taught him jungle skills – medicines, tracking, survival. After many years, they taught him how to sing so that dangerous animals could be pushed away.
‘But I could push them already, with my mind,’ Danatok said.
They showed him how to draw down light from the sky and store it in himself and make it live again in the night.
‘I can do that, but it’s hard, so I don’t try very often. I have to sleep for days afterwards.’
Danatok perfected his own skills. He learned to speak more clearly and at a greater distance than any Dweller had ever managed before. And he could know, if he chose, whatever was in a Dweller’s or a human’s mind.
‘You know I’d like more fish, then,’ Tarl said.
‘Help yourself,’ Danatok said.
‘When did you find out about the gool?’ Xantee said.
‘Yes. The gool. I went back to live in the village, but soon I knew I could never stay. I needed the forest and needed to be alone. So I left again and the people with no name called me to the jungle’s edge. They showed me a gool that had slid from a crack at the bottom of a cliff beside a swamp. It was like a blob of spit a sick cow coughs up. They had tied it in threads of thought stronger than iron. I looked into it and couldn’t find anything there. No life I could recognise. But it was alive, with tiny organs turning over under its skin, and a tiny eye like a fish scale.’
He flicked a scale off the table edge.
‘It looked out from its world and struggled to get into ours.’
‘What is it? The gool?’ Duro said.
‘I don’t know,’ Danatok said. ‘It stank like a dead whale on a beach. Then the people took me to one they’d found too late. It had grown. It was as big as – as a whale. And it was eating everything it found. They told me of others. They told me these creatures were eating the world.’
‘Sal and Mond found one,’ Xantee said.
The cousins nodded but did not speak.
‘Hari saved them. But it wrapped one of its arms around his neck and it won’t let go.’
‘I’ve talked with Blossom and Hubert,’ Danatok said. ‘Hari grows weaker every day. But he breathes. His heart beats. His blood flows. And Pearl sits by his side. There’s still hope.’
‘How do you talk with the twins?’ Duro said.
‘They’re far away. Their voices are as thin as a tree-bat’s cry and I have to lie as still as a bear in his winter sleep. But the twins have the voice inside helping them and when they speak, “Blossom” and “Hubert” mingle with “Danatok”, so we hear.’
‘And Hari lives,’ Xantee said. ‘I knew. I would have felt it if he’d died.’ She wiped tears from her eyes. ‘Did they say anything about Lo?’
‘He stays with the people with no name, that’s all they know.’
Tarl sucked the last flesh from the head of a fish and laid it down. He wiped his fingers in his beard. ‘So my son sleeps on a bed, where he’s no good to anyone. How do we get this thing off his neck and turn him back into a man?’
‘By finding the red star and the white and killing them,’ Xantee said. ‘When they died the gool in Barni’s story died too.’
‘And all the other gools in the world?’ Tarl said.
‘I don’t know. But if there’s a mother gool and we find her . . .’
‘I don’t know this story of Barni,’ Danatok said.
Xantee told it, while Tarl yawned and sucked fish meat out of his teeth. Danatok’s cat eyes narrowed with concentration. When it was done, he nodded. ‘I think this Barni heard the voice.’
‘And I think this voice of yours talks too much,’ Tarl said.
Danatok ignored him. ‘How does the story lead you here?’
‘Tealeaf – Tealeaf who was Xantee – says the people of Belong wrote books. They told the history of all the people in their world, before Company came and destroyed Belong. We travelled here . . .’ She stopped, realising suddenly how hopeless their search was: a lost library in a ruined city, a book that told the history of a tribe of fisherpeople on a distant coast a thousand years ago. And even if they found it . . .
‘You’re searching for a book that will say what the red star and the white really are?’
Yes, she whispered silently.
Xantee, Danatok said, don’t give up. We’ll start tomorrow. If Hari can be saved we’ll save him. If this thing that eats the world . . . He stopped and thought a while, then spoke aloud, to include Tarl: ‘Like you I came here searching for the gool. Dwellers watched Belong after Ottmar died. They watched while Keech and the Clerk set up their little kingdoms, then they left, believing things would stay the same for many years – a new Keech when Keech was dead, a new Clerk after the Clerk, and others of the same kind after them. So the watchers left. A cloud had sunk down on the city, and the burrows too, and Dwellers couldn’t live under it. Do you feel the cloud pressing on your skin? Do you feel how it seeps into your pores and your blood?’
‘We saw it from the mountains,’ Duro said. ‘But I can’t see it now.’
‘It’s here. It squats on everything. I can scarcely breathe for it sometimes.’
‘Is it the gool?’
‘The people with no name believe it is. They can’t live away from their jungle but they sense this thing.’
‘There’s no smell of it,’ Xantee said.
‘Then she’s found a way to hide her smell.’
‘And that’s why you came, searching for the gool?’
‘Yes. Keech and the Clerk are not important.’
‘But Keech hears a voice,’ Xantee said. ‘He can “speak”.’
‘He hears the voice from the other side. Hari heard it once. He blocked his ears. Keech listens. So does the Clerk. I’ve questioned men from Ceebeedee. They say he can make people scream with pain. He can make them burn as though their bones are on fire. That means the voice. But he’ll die when his time comes, as we die. The gool . . .’ His face contorted with the fear he had concealed until then. ‘The gool will live forever.’
‘How long have you been here? Have you found her?’ Duro said.
‘Not long enough. I’ve searched the burrows. I know every hole. That’s how I know where to hide from Keech’s men. I’ve only scouted the city, so I don’t know it like the burrows. But these books – we have to find them.’
‘If they exist,’ Duro said.
‘If they exist.’
‘Tarl says there’s a park Hari found, full of broken statues,’ Xantee said. ‘There’s a building called Art Hall and one called Music Hall.’
‘I know it,’ Danatok said. ‘Tomorrow we’ll go there. But now . . .’
He showed them where to unroll their sleeping mats. With Him and Her snoring in front of the stove, Sal and Mond side by side in a corner, and Tarl lying dog-like under a bunk instead of on top, there was plenty of room, but soon the shed was too hot and smelly for Xantee. She felt as if the walls were leaning in and the cloud that enveloped the city had seeped through the roof. She rose quietly from her bunk and carried her sleeping mat out to the deck, leaving the door ajar. The dogs looked up but made no sound. Danatok, awake on his bunk, said, Sleep well.
She made no reply. She did not want anyone in her mind. She laid her mat on the west-facing deck so nothing stood between her and the sea. The water was black, with glints of gold that made it seem like velvet, but it was the sky that took her breath away. It was littered with stars, flung out as though by a sower scattering seed – stars white and red and yellow and blue, and constellations, all the familiar swords and trees and necklaces and cooking pots Pearl had taught her to recognise. Oh yes, she thought, feeling the vastness swallow her, and taking, in turn, the vastness
into herself. She waited for her name to be spoken and smiled when it was not, understanding that it was no longer necessary.
After a while Duro came out and leaned on the rail at her side. He said nothing, but stared at the stars, and she heard him catch his breath as he too was invaded by them, and by the sea. She felt his arm warm against her own and after a moment stood on her toes and kissed his cheek. Then she lay on her mat and closed her eyes. Duro went inside for his own mat and lay down with his head almost touching hers and his feet pointing away. They slept till dawn.
ELEVEN
Dried fish and more of the bitter tea for breakfast. Then they rowed ashore, leaving Sal and Mond in the shed. The smaller their group the better chance they had of moving in the burrows unseen. Tarl, walking behind them through the streets of Port, soon grew impatient. Danatok knew this part of old Belong better than he – besides, Tarl did not believe in a library and books. He called the dogs from their scouting.
‘I’m going this way,’ he said, indicating a street that turned towards the burrows. ‘I’m going to have a look at the Clerk.’
‘Tarl, they’ll catch you,’ Xantee said.
‘I know some hiding places.’
‘Not in the city. You’ve never been there.’
‘Then I’ll learn,’ he said. ‘Goodbye, girl.’
He turned, with Him and Her at his side, and was gone. Xantee felt she would never see him again. He had not felt like kin, yet he was Hari’s father and she was sorry to see him go. She wished she had left him safe in the forest – the Dog King with his dogs.
Danatok led, keeping close to the water. Although many of the buildings were less damaged in this part of Belong, they met no people and Xantee began to understand how the population of the burrows had thinned since Hari’s time. Many people had fled into the country. Many had died from starvation, disease, war, murder. She wondered if the gool’s hunger was really much worse than the hunger of humans that led them into so many disasters.
By mid-morning they reached the park with the broken statues. Trees had grown out of the shattered marble. Their roots twined round heads, arms, torsos, making another sort of sculpture – roots like arms themselves, roots like grabfish.
