“I’m sorry,” Zachariah stammered. “I thought...”
“Of course you did.” Ezekiel smiled. “They don’t teach you history. The Dananns came before. But it doesn’t matter. Does anyone else know about Underworld? All the Elders and the government ministers know, and all the engineers and the scientists knew before they were purged, the poor devils. Where do you think the water pipes go and the sewage? It’s us they don’t know about.”
Zachariah looked sceptical. “So what do you do when they come down here? Hide?”
“From who? Nobody ever comes to Underworld anymore. It was intended as a second city beneath the ground, but they abandoned the idea decades ago.”
“Why was that?” Zachariah was intrigued, his interest in how things worked aroused.
Ezekiel shrugged. “They said the Wise God didn’t like human activity so close to his own dwelling. If you ask me, it’s because the energy is difficult to control, sometimes accidents happened. Now none of the High Caste people come below ground at all, except for a few overseers in the protein production plant and the mines. The place where they get the energy, the reactor they call it, is completely enclosed. They get access from Overworld. The rest of it, what we call Underworld, they’ve forgotten ever existed. We found our way down here, we Ignorants,” Ezekiel pronounced the name with bitter irony, “burrowing like animals. But at least here we can breathe and laugh and remember we’re human beings. Up there it’s easy to forget.” His soft brown eyes grew hard and piercing. “If ever the Elders discovered we’d found our way down here, that we’d made this place our own—”
Zachariah’s eyes widened with horror. “I would never betray you,” he insisted. “Never!”
Ezekiel searched his dark eyes, then nodded, satisfied. Zachariah peered across the dark landscape, one grotto succeeding another until the flickering lights were swallowed by the echoing darkness, and he shivered.
“You get used to it,” Ezekiel said softly. “We’ve made it our home. Come on, I’ll show you.”
He led the way through a tunnel in a wall of rock, red striped with yellow, that plunged across their path. They were standing on the edge of a huge natural amphitheatre at the top of a flight of steps cut into the rock. The sides of the amphitheatre were studded with holes, and in the black depths within, Zachariah could make out the flickering light of candles. They were caves, and from the caves came the sounds of music, laughter, and singing. He stared incredulously at Ezekiel who, by way of an answer, took Zachariah’s arm, led him down the steps, and stood before an open cave.
“My humble abode,” he said proudly and motioned to Zachariah to enter. “Grania,” he called. “Company!”
Chapter 21
The cave was like nothing Zachariah had ever seen before, furnished using discarded construction materials from the great underground pipelines. Shelves, tables and chairs were made from struts and panels. Niches carved into the rock were filled with an assortment of coloured glass dishes and jars where lighted wicks floated in steamy, pungent oil. Scattered across the floor lay a variety of objects Zachariah recognized as toys: balls, rag dolls, pipes, and drums. With an apology for the disorder, Ezekiel pulled out a box and started throwing the objects into it.
“Children,” he grumbled good-humouredly. “Never put anything away after themselves.”
Zachariah’s eyes opened wide with astonishment. “I’ve never seen so many toys.”
A woman appeared in the cave entrance, her arms full of black lumps that she placed in an iron basket on the hearth. Her head was bare, and black hair, tied back in a loose plait, fell gracefully over her shoulder. Zachariah, embarrassed at the impropriety, tried not to stare. She laughed, ignoring his red face.
“Up above they don’t like children to play, it’s true. They don’t much like children, come to that. But we Dananns have never heeded their rules, have we, Zeke?”
“Not if we can help it, no.” He laughed. “Where are they, by the way?”
“With Fionnuala, listening to stories.” The woman turned to Zachariah and held out her hand. “I’m Grania. Fionnuala’s my sister.”
“Your sister?” Zachariah asked in a small voice and pressed the hand briefly and awkwardly. “You have a sister?” It was all getting a bit too much to take, so many infractions of the rules, announced so casually. These people were condemned to death several times over.
“Like Grania said, we don’t much care for the Elders’ rules. Now then,” Ezekiel rubbed his hands together, “I expect you’d like something to put you on till suppertime.”
From a shelf by the hearth, Grania took a round loaf of bread and cut several thick slices from it. She then set a bowl of salt and a small jug of oil on the table and passed a water crock to Ezekiel, who went outside to fill it at a tap fitted into the main water pipeline. Zachariah watched, astonished a man would take an order, even an unspoken one, from his wife. Ezekiel put the jug and three cups on the table and pushed the soya bread towards Zachariah.
“Now,” he said, leaning his huge forearms on the table, “let’s hear your story.”
Zachariah blushed and stammered into his bread. Surely the woman wasn’t going to sit there next to him, was she? He glanced sideways and caught Grania’s eyes laughing at his discomfort. It wasn’t that she was young and attractive or anything. She was probably old enough to be his mother. Her hands were coarse and red from work, and there were dark hairs on her arms.
He blushed again. The point was that he shouldn’t be able to see her arms or her hair. She should cover herself in front of strangers. He wriggled and broke his bread into small pieces, hoping she would go away, but she didn’t, she just sat there, laughing at him.
Ezekiel placed a hand on his arm. “We already told you, we don’t have the same rules as your Elders. If we did, you wouldn’t be here. Ezra and Diarmuid would have turned you in. We don’t like the way the Elders treat people. All people. And that includes women and children as well as men. You understand? We are all children of the Mother, all due the same respect. Grania has as much right to listen to your story as I have.”
Zachariah lowered his eyes to the little pile of crumbs his agitated fingers had made, and swallowed hard. “It all started when Father was killed.”
Ezekiel and Grania looked at one another and smiled.
Chapter 22
The cloakroom was buzzing with an excited whispering. The women and girls wrapped themselves tightly in their shawls and passed on the news with shining eyes and excited voices. There had been a breakout. Not one but two prisoners had escaped, a boy and a young girl. Both extremely dangerous subversives.
Deborah mingled with the crowd as her father had suggested, but it was only now as the lockers opened and closed, as the white and blue gowns were taken off and the grey or black shawls were put on, that Deborah remembered her own outer clothes had been taken from her. How could she have been so stupid? With no headscarf, no shawl, she would be arrested for immodesty on the threshold of the prison.
The doors had opened, but there seemed to be some kind of a hold up. Standing on her toes to peer over the heads of the women in front of her, Deborah was horrified to see four Black Boys checking the papers of every worker before she left. The atmosphere was tense. Women and girls looked uneasily at one another and huddled closer together. They were used to being afraid; they were Ignorants. Any excuse was good enough for tormenting them.
The friendly banter, the calling out to friends and neighbours over the sea of heads had stopped, and the crowd was quiet except for a persistent, fearful murmuring. Deborah looked wildly from one face to another, not knowing how to approach people she did not know, hoping someone would guess from her distress, from her unshawled appearance, from the way she slid backwards as the crowd moved towards the doors, that she needed help.
The crowd shuffled forward, closer to the guards, and Deborah prepared to turn and run. She felt a hand take hers and hold her still, a hard, firm hand, but warm and comfo
rting. She turned sharply, hoping to see his face at last. She knew it was him, the one who sang and laughed out loud in her dreams, who comforted her when she was miserable, but she saw only women, their eyes fixed anxiously on the Black Boys. In confusion and disappointment, she stumbled backwards and trod on somebody’s foot. She turned round, stammering apologies.
The girl took her arm and whispered, “What’s up? Where are your things? Are you in trouble?”
The phantom hand slipped away, and Deborah clutched at the girl, gratitude lighting up her face. Suddenly she felt brave again, in charge of the situation. “I’m a prisoner. Help me get out. Please!”
The girl stared hard at her, weighing her up. It took her less than a minute to decide Deborah didn’t look like a spy. Leaning forward into the mass of shawls and scarves, she tapped a tall woman on the shoulder. “Aysha, pass us Juno’s shawl, will you? Is her security pass still inside it?”
The tall woman asked no questions, she simply pulled a long grey garment from her bag and felt the deep pockets. She nodded and handed it wordlessly back to Deborah and her friend.
“Put it on, quickly,” the girl urged. “Juno’s her cousin. She had an accident this morning and was sent home. Aysha picked up her things.”
Deborah pulled the long shawl down over her forehead and across the lower half of her face so only her eyes were visible. She tucked her hands into the deep pockets and clutched the identity card gratefully. The guards weren’t looking at the photo on the passes anyway, just checking each woman had a card. From the look of disgust on their faces, Deborah could guess what they were thinking. Holy Mother! She’d heard the insults thrown at Ignorant girls often enough. The Black Boys’ thoughts were easy enough to imagine—they were just so many dozens of filthy sluts. Watching them filing past under their noses was bad enough without having to make them uncover their faces and look at their ugly snouts.
Infected by the tension and suppressed violence in the air, Deborah stuck close to the girl as the crowd moved towards the doors and the checkpoint. The girl, sensing her anxiety, took her arm and tucked it tightly under her own.
“My name’s Persephone,” she whispered. “What’s yours?”
The guard took their cards and shoved them back having scarcely glanced at them. Deborah caught the expression of utter contempt in his eyes—it told her she was less than human, and her guts squirmed in fear and anger. So this was how it felt to be an Ignorant, she thought.
* * * *
Guard Isaiah Deodato hated Ignorants. They were base and vile and brutalizing them was allowed, so he did. He despised the men he beat up, and scorn led easily to hatred. He hated them, too, because they seemed to do as they pleased, broke the laws, idled their time away drinking and singing. But he hated them most of all because, in spite of everything, they seemed to have a good time. He was pleased at what was going to happen to them. It was only right they should be punished for it in the end.
He called after the two girls. “You’ll be laughing on the other side of your faces before long. Providence’ll be well shot of you, little trollops!” His voice was bitter and angry and he shouted louder than he intended. The guard opposite looked at him sharply, but Guard Isaiah would not keep quiet. “Well, what? It’s no secret. They know they’ve got it coming—thieving degenerates. All they produce now are mutant abortions. They’re vermin—it’s high time they were exterminated.”
All the women in earshot started, shocked. They wrapped their shawls tighter about them and hurried towards home. Other guards had joined in the taunting. The Ignorants had been threatened before, but this was different. They could sense a new danger hovering over them. Persephone pulled Deborah along, through the crowd of women and the whispering that was gradually rising to angry muttering and shouts of defiance.
They hurried along the dark, uneven streets fringed with badly deteriorated buildings, down a pot-holed track into the heart of the Ignorant quarter. Persephone darted into a dark doorway, pulling Deborah after her, and up an evil-smelling staircase to the fourth floor. Bursting into the apartment, she threw herself sobbing into the arms of her astonished mother.
“Lugh was right, Ma. It’s started, the final ordeal. Gehenna is close. And this time they’ll leave none of us alive!”
Chapter 23
“And so the only thing I could do was to climb into a laundry bag and hope somebody came to take it away before the guards thought to search the depot.”
“So, where will you go now?” Ezekiel asked. Zachariah looked blank. “Where were you heading?”
Zachariah tried to look stern and decisive, but his heart sank. How could he admit he hadn’t got even the faintest idea? Grania gave his hand a gentle squeeze.
“Who’s talking about leaving? The boy’s only just arrived. Come on, we’ll go pick up the children, and you can meet Fionnuala.”
* * * *
Fionnuala lived on the far side of the amphitheatre in a cave that was longer and narrower than Ezekiel and Grania’s. At the back of the cave the roof rose, revealing the entrances to two small, round inner caves reached by neat metal ladders Zachariah guessed had been wrenched from the side of one of the main pipelines.
Grania stood at the foot of a ladder and called. Martha, her eldest niece, appeared in the entrance above, her face framed by a mop of straw-coloured hair.
“Maeve’s telling us a story,” Martha called back. “Do they have to go right away?”
“When you’ve finished your story. But first come and say hello to Zachariah. He’s going to stay with us tonight.”
More curious faces crowded around Martha. “Hello,” they chorused, then backed shyly into the darkness of the cave.
One face with round blue eyes lingered a little longer. “Hello, Zachariah.”
Despite the impropriety, Zachariah returned the young girl’s stare. “Hello. I’m sorry, I don’t know your name,” he replied rather stiffly.
“Come on, Maeve,” Grania pleaded, “Come down and say hello properly.”
But Maeve shook her head. “In a minute, I’ve nearly finished.” After a final, long look at Zachariah, she disappeared after the others.
“They don’t often meet strangers,” Grania apologized. “You’ll see quite enough of them at suppertime, I suppose.”
“Are they really all yours?”
Fionnuala threw up her hands. “Oh, they’re just the runts. The rest of the pack’s out scavenging round the mine shafts.” She and Grania burst out laughing at the expression of astonishment on Zachariah’s face. “Of course they’re ours!” She went on in a more serious tone, “That’s one of the reasons we have to keep our heads down, not make too much of a fuss, and accept the injustices. If the Elders decided to investigate how we really live, they’d crush us like cockroaches.”
Zachariah tried to look as if he understood, though he was growing more and more confused. The Ignorants were despised and shunned. They lived in the worst housing, did the most menial jobs, and were given the least nutrition. But they seemed to lead a parallel existence where none of that mattered. They were the Dananns; they defied the laws, and lived more or less as they pleased.
It was what they chose to do with their relative freedom that Zachariah did not understand. They lived in an underground shantytown, they had barely enough to eat, but they surrounded themselves with children. At any moment they could be rounded up and destroyed like rats. Zachariah frowned. And yet they seemed happy. Happier than anyone else in Providence, anyway. The more he thought about it, the more complicated freedom appeared.
Grania clapped her hands. “Come on, kids. Supper time!”
Children dropped out of the little cave one after the other. Grania silenced the vague mutterings of discontent with a look, and she ushered her brood home. Zachariah followed, deep in thought.
Cooking smells greeted them as they stooped to pass the low entrance. Once again, Zachariah was astonished; this time to discover Ezekiel had been preparing the meal. A fire
of the black lumps Grania had brought in burned in the hearth, and the thick smoke was drawn up through the roof of the cave in a metal pipe. Grania lifted the lid of the cooking pot suspended over the fire and added a plateful of yellow dumplings made from soya meal. The smell was so intense Zachariah felt his head swimming, not only because he could not remember when he had last eaten a hot meal, but because he could simply not remember when he had ever sat down to a meal that smelled so appetizing.
“Ten minutes,” Grania called. “Get your hands washed and set the table, please.”
Those were probably the longest ten minutes of Zachariah’s life.
The children drew up an assortment of chairs to the table, swapping them about and changing places until Ezekiel shouted, “That’s enough!” The bewildering darting about settled down, and Zachariah was at last able to look at each member of the swarm in turn. On his left, a boy who might have been twelve or thirteen watched him intently with the same light brown eyes as his father. He had the same curly brown hair too.
“This is David,” Ezekiel said, “named after a king in one of the old stories who started off as a shepherd boy, a little Danann probably. The cheeky little one hiding under the edge of the table is Demeter, named after one of the old corn goddesses, and the baby of the family is Daniel. Daniel might have been a Danann, too. He was certainly at home in a cave, and the great wild beasts refused to harm him.”
“And this is Maeve, our eldest,” said Grania proudly, indicating a lithe, wiry-looking girl with dark hair pulled back in a loose plait like her mother’s. “Maeve was a great queen who did more or less as she pleased and never took no for an answer, not even from the High King, her husband.”
Maeve fixed her startling blue eyes on Zachariah until he had to look away.
“I never really took much notice of names before,” he stammered. “Names are given at the House of Registration. They have a list. It depends on the day and the hour of birth. For us, anyway.”
The Dark Citadel (The Green Woman) Page 9
