by Maurice Gee
Here, Danatok said, speaking silently now that Tarl was gone.
He led them into the arched doorway of a building standing almost undamaged at the eastern side of the park. Carved above the door, worn by rain and windblown grit, but legible still, were the words: ART HALL. The walls were standing but the roof had collapsed. Rooms opened off a large hall where broken masonry lay everywhere. The bare walls were red with lichen and black with water stains. Xantee tried to imagine what the place had been like when Belong was a great city – paintings and tapestries on the walls (she had never seen either but thought she knew what they were), pots and jugs of baked clay and vases of blown glass (there were clay shards and glass chips in the rubble), statues carved from marble or cast in bronze so shiny your face looked back at you from some hero’s shield. Pearl had told her of these things hanging or standing in her home when she was a child, and that most were looted from Belong. Soldiers had scoured the ruins for everything of value after Company’s Liberation War.
Xantee turned away.
We don’t need to go in there.
They crossed a corner of the park, around ponds of dead water and patches of stinging weed, and stopped on the south side. The building that had stood there looked as if it had been lifted up and dropped. It lay almost flat, with spikes of masonry rising like fractured bones. The portico had toppled forward. Its columns lay criss-crossed like the limbs of the statues in the park. Duro climbed into it, looking for something that might tell what the building had been.
Here, he called.
He had come across a flat stone, part of a cross-piece that had run between two columns. Carved into it were three letters: MUS. The word broke off.
Music, Xantee said. Pearl’s wooden flute made the only music she had heard – that and voices singing in the fields, and the singing of the people with no name. She could not imagine music that needed a great hall.
If there was a book hall it must have been over there, Duro said, pointing through trees obscuring the west side of the park. They made their way across another corner and found a building almost intact. It too had marble columns and a portico but if a name had been carved on it a cannon bolt had blown it away. Jagged stones littered the ground. They picked their way into the porch, alert for people who might be living in this building that still had its roof.
Silence inside, absolute stillness, until a lizard scuttled away and a rat ran up a stair-rail like an acrobat and vanished into darkness at the top. The staircase led nowhere – collapsed walls and deep hollows opened beyond. Water dripped through the ceiling from rain puddles made days ago.
There are no books here, Xantee said. And if there were . . .
Rats would have shredded them and water rotted them.
They explored every room and hollow and found a pile of parchment rolls in a basement. When they tried to unroll them the leather fell in pieces and only marks like spider legs – parts of letters, parts of words – showed on the slimy surface.
Books about weapons, Duro said. How to forge swords and spears.
But it proves this was a book hall, Xantee said.
Where are the books gone?
Looted, Danatok said. Company took everything it could sell.
So we’ll never find them, Xantee said. They’d send them in ships over the sea.
They’d send the precious things. Gold and jewels. Paintings perhaps. Decorated pots. Tapestries and costumes and cloth. Those were the things Company liked – whatever made them rich. But books – they wouldn’t see much value in books.
They still took them.
My father, Duro began. He was silent a moment. My father told my mother . . .
Yes, what?
He worked in Ottmar’s salt warehouse. There was a room at the back where the men sat to eat their cheese and bread. Ten minutes, enough for a crust and a mouthful of water and a piss, then the foreman was shouting at them . . .
Duro, what? Xantee said.
They sat on rolls of – he didn’t know what they were – thin leather, he said, rolled on sticks. With marks on the leather. My father smuggled one home in his trouser leg. He and Tilly used it for firewood, in the stove.
Books, Xantee said. But why didn’t you tell us before?
We were looking for a library.
And these were stored in the backroom of a warehouse, Danatok said.
Duro, can you take us there?
I wasn’t born. Anyway, what chance of them still being there? And, if they are, what chance of them being the ones we want – if the ones we want were ever written?
Xantee held a piece of damp parchment in her hand. There was one word on it, written in a script with curling ends making it almost impossible to read. Arrow, it said. Should she take it as a message: go where the arrow flies, follow Duro’s memory of his mother’s story? Why not? They had nothing else.
Danatok, she said, can you take us into the city?
Yes. It’s time I had a better look at it. I’ve seen Keech. Now it’s time to see the Clerk.
It’s the gool we want, not the Clerk, Duro said sourly.
Well, perhaps she’s in the city. We can go the way Tarl went.
How?
It’s another thing the people taught me, how to follow animals by their scent. We’ll follow the dogs.
They left the Book Hall, with its empty rooms and dripping ceiling and went back along the waterfront. Danatok untied the dinghy from its mooring under the wharf and they rowed to the shed for more supplies – water, dried fish, flat bread he had baked from root flour. Sal and Mond made ready to come with them.
We want to hunt for the gool. We can feel her.
Where? Xantee said.
Everywhere.
They would say no more than that and, once ashore, they refused to travel with Danatok into Port but made off without a word into the burrows. Xantee wasn’t sorry to see them go. She found their locked hands disturbing and their silence unnatural. She knew she should be responsible for them (it was what Hari would expect), but she had no mind for anything except her hunt for books – for the red star and the white.
Danatok followed the scent of the dogs, and Xantee and Duro picked it up faintly too. It led them all afternoon, through Port and into the winding streets of Bawdhouse Burrow. They met no people and saw only a single rat scuttling into a drain. When night came they slept in a sheltered yard below the city wall. The dog scent was fainter in the morning. Xantee and Duro lost it but Danatok kept heading westwards, back towards the sea.
Here, he said, stopping at the mouth of a drain in the base of the wall. The opening was head high and the ceiling had fallen but the dog scent led nowhere else. Tarl must have found a way through.
Duro, this is where Pearl and Hari came to steal the salt, Xantee said.
Memory of her parents was keeping her strong. She would be terrified without them – and again the thought of Hari dying turned her muscles to water.
Come on, Xantee, Duro said.
He was a help too. And memory of the starry sky and the velvet waves was a help. She followed Danatok into the drain. He found a way round and over mounds of fallen stone. Xantee felt his pain as he made light, drew it from inside himself as the people had taught him. Tarl must have made a torch or trusted to the noses of the dogs. But soon light flooded from a hole in the ceiling. Fallen earth made a hill for them to climb. The dog scent led them, paw-marks too, and Tarl’s footprints, in the loose earth. They emerged in a street so wide it made them feel like beetles on a table-top. It seemed impossible that with so many undamaged buildings no one was about. They ran for the nearest doorway. Tarl had done the same. The dog smell was there.
We don’t need to follow him any more, Xantee said. He’s looking for the Clerk. We’re looking for Ottmar’s salt warehouse.
I’m looking for the Clerk too, Danatok said.
Later, Xantee said.
He smiled at her, amused at the way she had taken charge.
The warehouses a
re that way, he said, pointing. We’ll have to go around Ceebeedee.
Then let’s go.
Send your minds well in advance. The Clerk’s men have crossbows.
I thought they’d have bolt guns, Duro said.
The technology’s lost. The cannons are tipped over in the squares. The gas lamps are broken. The steam engines rust in the yards. Nothing’s made any more. Men live in the buildings as though they’re caves. The Clerk is king of a thousand ragged men.
Where does he have his headquarters? Duro said.
In Ceebeedee, where Ottmar had his. We can go along the edge.
It took them the rest of the day. The buildings of Ceebeedee, many pocked with cannon holes from the wars – Ottmar against the clerks, the clerks against the workers, the burrows against everyone – stood white in the midday sun, then turned pink as it went down. Danatok took them through railway yards with rusting rails and engines marked on their sides with the faded emblem of Company, the Open Hand. They camped for the night in an empty shed, and in the morning followed the rails into a district of warehouses. All had been looted years ago. They stood dark and empty and echoing. People had lived in some. Ashes lay caked on the floors, hardened into stone. Bones were scattered about – always bones. The skeleton of a Whip was propped in a doorway, rusty bolt gun in his hand. It was someone’s joke but Xantee felt sick. A fog of cruelty seemed to lie over the city; and with it the invisible weight of the gool.
Ottmar, Duro said.
She looked where he pointed, half expecting to see the man, but it was a name in flaking paint over wide double doors with rails leading into them. OTTMAR SALT: she shivered as she read. Ottmar was the man her mother Pearl had fled from. He had thrown Pearl’s family – and all the Families – from the cliffs. He had made himself king. He had planned to use the green salt to poison his enemies. He had killed and tortured. And then Tarl’s dogs had killed him. The dreadful story made her harden her lips to keep from shrieking.
Duro put his arm around her shoulders. She shook it off. There was no comfort for such pain and cruelty.
They went through the double doors to the place where the rails ended. Wagons had loaded salt from a wooden floor five steps high. There were no wagons now, just emptiness and shadows. They climbed the steps. Grains of salt, brown with age, gritted under their feet. At the far end of the huge shed a row of windows high in the wall let in enough light for them to advance.
‘My father,’ Duro said, aloud. He was almost crying. ‘My father worked here. All his life.’ Xantee tried to take his hand, but he too wanted no comfort. ‘You only get one life and he spent all his here so Ottmar could get fat.’
They went deep into the shed, to a stone floor where salt-cake had been broken with hammers. A heavy wooden door stood in the end wall. The bolt was twisted off but the door was latched with a length of iron pipe. Duro wrenched it out. The door scraped on the stone floor as he pushed it open. The room beyond was airless, windowless, and empty except for rubbish piled against the back wall.
Nothing, he said.
Books, Xantee said, approaching the rubbish.
They were as round as rolling pins and stacked like firewood. Pieces of leather poked out like tongues. They bent and cracked as she eased out a roll and laid it on the floor. But when she tried to open the parchment it broke into pieces in her hand.
It’s no good, Xantee. They must have been here a hundred years, Duro said.
How did Ottmar get them?
Maybe they were stored in this shed before he used it as a warehouse. He must have thought they weren’t worth anything, so he left them.
And we can’t read them, she said. She tried to unroll the parchment again but it broke like the hard bread Danatok had baked, and broke again with each renewed pressure of her hand.
Books were never going to help us, Duro said.
Danatok walked along the stacked rolls.
The workmen sat here, he said, stopping at a place where the stack had been lowered to form a knee-high bench. See how they’re flattened. They make a good seat.
My father sat here, Duro said wonderingly.
Carefully he lowered himself on to the books. Xantee expected them to break in pieces, but instead they gave a groan as his weight forced them down.
These ones are softer, he said, feeling the leather. He brushed his hands. Salt, he said. My father came home covered in salt. It was in his clothes and hair. Tilly said she used to make him shake it on the table and she’d sweep it up and use it for the stew. So here . . .
It fell out of the men’s clothes when they sat down, Xantee said. And it’s kept these books from rotting away.
She pulled out the book Duro had rested his hand on. The outer part was softer than the layers inside. It unrolled two turns before the leather cracked. She took it out to the stone floor and put it in the light from the windows.
Can you read it? Duro said.
Just. This bit’s about how to roast an ox. What herbs to use. It’s a cookbook.
No wonder Ottmar thought they weren’t worth anything. Xantee, the chances of finding a book about the two stars – they’re nil.
We didn’t come here just to walk away. Bring out some more.
Danatok kept watch. Duro carried out books one by one. Xantee unrolled them far enough to find what they were about. Some had titles painted on the outside. She did not need to unroll those. Others were less well-preserved than the book about roasting oxen, but she was able to read enough to discover the subjects. There was a book about waterwheels, a book about sowing crops, a book about the seasons, a book about the punishments allowed by law. One seemed to be about travel in foreign lands, another about the mapping of the eastern coast. Those two made her heart race. She felt she was getting close. But nothing was said about the Fish People and nothing about Barni and the stars.
The bench that had made the workers’ resting place shrank to ankle height as she worked. The books close to the bottom were less well-preserved than those on top. Some unrolled only an inch before the leather snapped. Others would not unroll at all. Duro sliced them open with his knife. Deep inside, some of the words were legible. There seemed to be no order in the subjects: trade, weights and measures, cooperage, etiquette, husbandry. One seemed to be a history of Belong. One was a tale of ancient gods. Xantee kept on. If they had all been on one subject she would have grown discouraged, but in this mix of books there was a chance . . .
Eat, Xantee, Duro said as darkness invaded the shed. He made a fire of leather scraps on the stone floor.
Sleep, he said at midnight.
She lay on her mat, staring into the dark. When she slept her dreams were of words floating by, their spiky script like crows’ feet, the leather they were written on flapping like bat wings.
Danatok scouted in the morning. He brought back a report of men – the Clerk’s fighting men – drifting in from their homes to the centre of Ceebeedee. There seemed to be nothing in their minds except the promise of entertainment.
Did you smell the dogs? Did you find Tarl? Duro said.
He shook his head.
Duro, bring out more books, Xantee said.
What do we do when we’ve finished, start a school?
She made no reply. Her last dream was vivid in her mind. It was of a black man, with a traveller’s cape flung back from his shoulders, sitting on stone steps leading down to the sea. He dipped a goose-quill pen in a pot of ink and wrote words on a roll of parchment held on his knee. Below him, in a moored fishing boat, a grizzled old man – a brown man, this one – was mending nets. He spoke in a language Xantee could not understand. The traveller wrote. She saw words form at the point of his pen, written in a language she knew. Barni led us, the traveller wrote. Duro’s hand on her shoulder woke her then.
Get more books, she repeated.
He sighed and touched her head.
Your eyes are red, your face is dirty, your hair’s like the backside of a sheep. When we get back to the s
ea I’m going to wash you.
Please, Duro, just bring them, she said.
He carried them out two by two. Half the morning went by. Books on the early history of Belong, when it had been a fishing village. A book that went even further back, telling how the village had been founded by a poor herdsman and his wife, who found a dolphin stranded on the beach and returned it to the sea. Leave your goats and farm the sea, the dolphin said, and I will drive cod into your nets.
Duro, these are stories like Barni and the stars, she said.
We want true stories not made up ones, he replied. And there’s only one row of books left. They’re covered in salt.
Bring them.
He shook them free of the grains and laid them beside her. They opened more easily, but one, two, three, four – they were about ship-building, the rules of an elaborate card game, the preparation of marble for sculpture, and the practice of midwifery. Then, late in the morning, Duro came running out with a book lying across his hands like an offering.
Xantee, look here, look at the title.
She strained her eyes to see the name painted on the dark outer stick.
The history, she read slowly.
The History and Legends of the Fish People. Careful, it’s brittle, don’t break it.
Her hands were trembling with tiredness, her fingertips stinging with salt.
You do it, she told him.
It took him the rest of the day to break the parchment open and lay it on the floor. It was like fitting a shattered plate together. Some pieces were the size of his hand, others no larger than his fingernail. The words were tiny. Many had faded to shadows, others stayed black. They swarmed like ants in front of Xantee’s eyes. She rubbed the lids and was stung so painfully by salt she cried out. Danatok came from keeping watch and made more light to help her.
Slowly she ran her eyes along the lines of words. Parchment must have been in short supply. The scribe had cramped his words together. Sometimes they collided and ran over the top of each other. She realised they were notes put down to make a later story. There was a bit about the wondrous herring catches of the settlement’s early years. Then an account of a war fought with pirates. Then the building of a sea wall. These events seemed hundreds of years apart. Then – it made her cry out with delight – the story of Barni. The name splashed out of the text like a fish from water. She hooked it with her mind, dragged it free, then ran her eyes along the lines surrounding it. Barni was more than a simple fisherman. He was chief of the village council. He had led the village in its resistance to the rule of rival kings, one in the north, the other inland, who claimed the coastal lands as their own. The Fish People fought the invaders off. The kings arranged a meeting (they were the rulers of a tribe of red-skinned people in the north and a white-skinned tribe from the mountains). Each was proud, ambitious, and eager to crush the other, and each was full of malice and deceit and cruelty. They met and spoke honeyed words, while each seethed with hatred underneath. They agreed to join their armies and attack the Fish People in the next fighting season, then went their ways, each scheming to murder the other and take all the spoils for himself. Barni was aware of it. All winter long he thought and planned, distracted only by a sea monster that had arrived to live in a cave along the coast from the village. Men went out to slay it and were slain themselves. But Barni, playing on their fears, taught that the monster was a magical beast spawned from the hatred of the two opposing kings, and feeding on their cruelty and deceit, and so growing stronger every day, and that when the kings were slain, the red king and the white, then the monster would starve and die.
