The Days of Peleg

by Jon Saboe

  “Who is this?” asked an older boy standing next to her.

  “Just a lost orphan,” she said. “He understands. Ur-Nammu said to take him in.”

  “What’s his name?” he asked.

  “He’s an orphanage ward,” she answered. “Hasn’t been given a name yet.”

  The older boy turned up his nose.

  “We should at least give him a name,” he said. “Since it looks like we’re all starting over.”

  The orphan reacted. “Starting over?”

  “Yes,” said the older boy. “Once we get enough people that we can talk to, we’re going to start our own city, far from here.”

  He stared at the orphan for a moment, then looked up at the lady decisively.

  “Since it looks like everything is breaking up, I’ve decided to call him ‘Cracked’ or ‘Peleg’, since everything is falling apart today.”

  “Reu!” chided the lady.

  An explosion shook the ground as another building sagged into rubble.

  The orphan boy hadn’t expected a proper name until he turned six, so he was actually pleased with this strange turn of events.

  “That’s all right,” he nodded earnestly. “I can be Peleg.”

  He looked up at the lady.

  “What are your names?” he asked.

  “I am Gin-Muqayyar, the wife of Satrap Ryn-Thanon.” She looked down at the older boy. “And this is our son, Reu-Nathor.”

  The newly named Peleg smiled awkwardly. He had never been this close to such important people.

  “Where is your husband?” he asked innocuously.

  Muqayyar frowned sadly.

  “We haven’t seen him, yet.”

  “Let’s go!” shouted the man whom Peleg had first met. “We now have more than sixty people and it is time to evacuate. Collect your belongings and follow me!”

  The group began to move amid some protests—most notably Muqayyar who called out that her husband was still nowhere to be found.

  “Don’t worry,” answered Ur-Nammu. “Once we’ve established a camp, we can send word back. Your loved ones can join us later.”

  Reu-Nathor made a comment about the Gutians which included some naughty words. His mother quickly admonished him and he was quiet for a moment.

  As they moved out, he looked down at Peleg.

  “If I were in charge, I would simply execute crazies who spread myths, lies, and superstitions. It just makes for weak minds.”

  The young Peleg nodded with little comprehension. It was a simple thing to believe.

  The group made it out of the city just as more buildings and dust came swirling down behind them. Peleg had never been beyond the city walls and was astonished at how empty and vast the outside world was.

  He was not particularly scared or even worried. Already these strangers had treated him better than anyone in the orphanage. He suddenly became aware of the fact that he was hungry.

  A strange coldness came over him and he somehow felt chilly, although he was walking across the hot open landscape. A flute began to play and he looked around for the performer, but could see no one. The music grew louder and louder while his inexplicable cold chills began to make him shiver. He whirled around in the crowd trying to identify the source of the music which sounded as if it were playing directly into his ear. Louder and louder, piercing his mind, he hunched over, slapping his hands over his ears (which did nothing to diminish the volume), twisting in a frenzy trying to make it stop and …

  … Peleg awoke on the same stone slab, in the same dark damp room where he had been held prisoner for unknown weeks ever since his recapture in this strange, unknown, underground community.

  The flute player outside of his door continued his haunting melody, as Peleg shook off the residue of this latest dream/flashback. They were coming more frequently now—and stronger all the time. With no mental stimulation in this cell, his dreams were becoming more vivid and dramatic—and also (in this case) more realistic and accurate in immersing him into his own personal history.

  He shivered with borderline hypothermia in the cold clammy room, and he reached for the bearskin which had slid off of him while he slept.

  Peleg tried again to determine the composition of the flute which constantly played outside his door. It didn’t sound like either wood or metal, (he could easily identify the tone differences of tin, silver and gold flutes) but the sound was too heavy to be any type of reed. He decided (as always) that it was closer to wood than anything else, but that it must be a very heavy, yet porous wood to create such a thick, grainy sound.

  His room had not changed since he had first been placed in here. The dim, green light panel, which was replaced periodically, and the shimmering sheet of water that trickled down his right wall were ever-present; and the only breaks in the monotony were the sporadic meals which were placed through the grate at the bottom of the stone door. There was nothing to indicate the passage of days, and his only other activity, besides eating, was the usage of the small toilet hole he had discovered in the floor at the far end of his ‘water’ wall.

  When he had first arrived here, he was so exhausted and despairing that his fatigue and apathy bordered on catatonia. His shipmates were gone, his mission was over, and he was hopelessly captured while all of his original reasons for living were gone. He had forced them to carry him as a dead man, and he had watched with disinterest as they took him into a hidden cave opening and brought him down deep into his first cell.

  There he had clutched his charts and few possessions in his chest-pack (hidden under his overshirt) next to his chest, and, as he lay in quiet despondency, he had slowly discovered a new emotion.

  Rage.

  Anger at those who had stolen his purpose. Deep fury and bitterness overtook him as he contemplated their contribution to his emptiness and futility. They had murdered his friends! They had destroyed the Urbat—and obliterated his contribution to the Great Discovery.

  In a mad frenzy he had lashed out at the guard who brought food to him and ran insanely into the lightless corridors where he had charged blindly in whatever direction he thought might bring him back to the surface.

  But they had eventually caught him again and brought him to this place where no door was ever opened for him, and he was forced to lie on the hard mat and allow the stone stockade to secure his ankles before anyone pushed food under the door.

  The flute stopped playing, and Peleg listened again to the silence. The opening at the bottom of the door also allowed the music (and occasional footsteps) to filter into his room. Other than the person who brought his food and replaced his light panel, there were no voices; and when he spoke, it was the same rehearsed (and probably rote) statement:

  Fasten your feet.

  He had spent his first hours (days?) calling out to anyone who might answer, but he soon exhausted all of his languages—and eventually his energy—as it became apparent that no one would respond.

  He began to feel a quiet panic creep up on him as it always did when the flute player stopped. There was a deep anxiety that everyone had quietly left, and that he would slowly starve to death and then rot in the damp hole. He had almost starved once before, and would surely find some alternative if that fate ever presented itself again.

  The flute playing resumed, and Peleg realized that he had been holding his breath. He exhaled forcibly, and listened.

  The flute holes were placed with precise diatonic tuning, and he noticed that it overblew a twelfth when the musician began playing louder.

  His mind began to fester as it rehearsed, for the six-thousandth time, the destruction of the Urbat. His home for twelve years. The screams of men burning. All for nothing. His fury was fanned as faces from their travels flickered through his thoughts—now rendered meaningless by the atrocities of his captors.

  Kupé. The boy with his team of dogs. Manco Chavin. Kreivan, with his large spider tattoo. The mysterious rancher, Dōgon.

  Serug.

  Pele
g’s first son, Reu, (named after the older boy who befriended him, Reu-Nathor) had not been accepted into the Citadel, and therefore Peleg had managed to maintain sparse contact with him after he left to study finance in Uruk. When Peleg was celebrating his own sixty-second birthday, he had received a message that his first grandchild had been born to Reu and his first wife. The baby’s name was also Serug.

  Peleg had never told his young friend that he had a grandchild with the same name. The image of his friend’s body floating into the frigid south polar sea suddenly churned in his brain.

  Meaninglessness. His anger threatened to turn the black room red, as clenched eyelids began to create sparks in his eyes.

  “Fasten your feet!”

  Peleg jumped as the speaker interrupted his mental tirade. It was a different voice! He hadn’t heard anyone approach.

  Peleg cleared his head, and resignedly lay back on the mat and waited for the stone cuffs to clamp over his ankles.

  Once in place, the door opened, surprising Peleg. The light panel didn’t need to be replaced. A young man entered, pulled a heavy leather cord from his belt, and approached Peleg.

  “Raise hands.”

  Peleg stretched his hands upward, above his chest, as he lay fastened to the mat. The man wrapped the cord tightly around his wrists and fastened it with a bowline. He yelled something incomprehensible to someone standing outside the door, and the stone cuffs slid open.

  “Up!” he ordered, giving Peleg’s wrists a firm, but not overly cruel tug.

  Peleg started to say something, but the man silenced him.

  He pulled Peleg up into a sitting position, and then began walking through the doorway, forcing Peleg to follow.

  Once outside, Peleg was flanked by two other men, and they started walking down the pitch-black corridor.

  After walking for several minutes, Peleg saw wedges of pale blue-green light as they passed by other doorways where curious people peered out at him. He heard the hushed jabbering of children who were not being as silent as they were instructed. Peleg soon realized that others—perhaps entire families—lived in rooms much like his. Except they weren’t prisoners.

  The swatches of light did reveal that the rough walls were formed out of some kind of white, crystalline substance—probably quartz. It certainly helped in distributing the meager luminescence, but of course, Peleg reasoned, when there is no light, a white wall is just as dark as a black wall.

  He almost fell as they started down a short flight of steps, but soon he was ushered into a room. Hands pressed down on his head, forcing him to clear the low entrance, and he soon discovered the hard way (when he straightened up) that the ceiling in this low room was the same height as the doorway.

  His two escorts pressed him down onto a wide stone bench, and when a third person brought in a light-panel, he saw that he was sitting in front of a large stone table. The man holding his wrist-ropes went to the far side of the table and stood in the corner, keeping a firm grip on his line.

  They remained in this silent impasse until finally a man entered, dressed not in the skins and furs of his captors, but rather in a short robe, much like Peleg would have expected back home.

  He sat on a bench across from Peleg and, without looking up, began speaking.

  “I am called Alapar. I have been summoned to speak with you. The residents here are a very closed community, and they have no one here who speaks your language. Supposedly, you have tried to speak in a variety of tongues, but once they determined your homeland from your dress, they sent for me.”

  He paused and began to unroll some parchments he had brought with him. Then he looked up for the first time and fastened his eyes directly on Peleg’s.

  “I assume you can understand me,” he stated with full assurance of an affirmative response.

  Peleg gave the expected nod, but added a glare of pure hate and rage.

  Alapar was taken aback by the look, but dutifully continued.

  “I have been asked to express this community’s sorrow in the destruction of your vessel. It was assumed to be a stealth attack from some of Sargon’s mercenaries, and they dealt with it accordingly. They regret…”

  Peleg interrupted with an explosion of violent fury.

  “You murdered my companions, you cave-dwelling butchers!” Peleg erupted with angry despair. His voice cracked with pent-up rage and weeks of disuse. He tried to rise, but strong hands clapped down on his shoulders, forcing him back to the bench. He looked at the other men in the room one by one, trying to force eye contact so that his accusations would hit home, but they were oblivious to his words.

  Alapar drew back, and began speaking to the guard with the wrist-rope in the guttural brogue that Peleg had heard ever since his arrival here. When he finished, he looked back at Peleg.

  “When they realized their error, they rescued as many as they could. Forty-seven survivors were brought to shore where they were given food and medical attention.”

  Alapar locked his gaze into Peleg’s eyes, and Peleg was shocked to discover a compassion and deep sorrow in them. Peleg unwillingly began to soften. This meant that only six or nine people had died—depending upon the fate of Thaxad and the Captain and his wife.

  “Many were badly burned,” Alapar continued, “but we treated them as best we could.”

  Peleg noticed the switch from ‘they’ to ‘we’.

  “How could we have known that an exploration vessel would appear from that direction?” Alapar’s distress appeared genuine.

  Peleg spoke, more quietly this time.

  “Was there a woman among the survivors?” he asked.

  Alapar chatted briefly with the rope-holder, then answered.

  “I’m sorry, but only men were found. Once we had provided for them, the rescuers left the area. Since this location is a heavily guarded secret, none of the survivors knew who had cared for them, nor which direction they went. Your companions never knew who rescued them. There are enough materials in the area for them to put together a small boat and travel to wherever they need to go.”

  Peleg was only half listening as he began to picture Thaxad, Phaxâd, and Utebbibassu heading off into their own adventures, not knowing that the lives of most of their shipmates had been spared.

  His reverie was interrupted by a sudden silence from Alapar, who was staring directly into Peleg’s face with a look of cautious disbelief—mixed with what appeared to be the recognition of an old friend.

  “Eber?” he began slowly, then spoke more quickly before Peleg could protest.

  “Eber, is that you? The last I heard you had traveled with your son’s family into the Far East.” He continued with growing confidence. “How did you manage to arrive here? Do you remember me?”

  Peleg managed to raise his bound hands to quiet Alapar, and shook his head.

  “I have never heard of a man by that name, and I am certainly not he.” He watched as Alapar’s excitement dwindled.

  He continued to stare into Peleg’s face.

  “I swear that once you are cleaned up, and your beard removed, you will look just like him.” He looked over at the dim light-panel as if it were responsible for his mistake.

  “I was born approximately four years before the Great Awakening…” Peleg said, and then stopped suddenly at Alapar’s look of bewilderment.

  It passed quickly, replaced by comprehension. Alapar mumbled, “So that is what you call it.” He nodded for Peleg to continue.

  “I was reared in an orphanage in Babel, then traveled with Ur-Nammu to be raised and trained in his settlement. I began studies at the Citadel…”

  Alapar interrupted with renewed interest. “An orphanage?”

  “Yes, there were dozens of us in my ward. Why?”

  “Because most in the orphanages were not orphans,” he said as a look of disgust and sadness passed over his face.

  “What do you mean by that?” asked Peleg. A strange shudder coursed through him, as if his entire personal history would
soon be under revision.

  Alapar sat still for a moment, then looked down.

  “It’s not possible,” he muttered, shaking his head.

  He took a deep breath and looked up at Peleg.

  “The Founder will want to speak with you when he arrives.”

  Chapter 32

  Confusion

  “History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.”

  He had been ushered back to his room (cell?) without another word of explanation. A storm of confusing questions swirled in his mind.

  What was his status here? His ‘interview’ had not been of an interrogative nature, and the conversation had not implied he was a prisoner of war.

  Why was this place so secretive? The stone door had slid closed behind him, but they had not fastened his ankles. Perhaps he was still treated like a prisoner because they didn’t know what to do with him. They seemed to fear knowledge of this place getting out.

  Who was this Founder? What significance was attached to being raised in an orphanage? Why would this cause him to be worth speaking to?

  Who were these people?

  The ultimate question. It was expected that, after the Great Awakening, small, unknown settlements would be found almost anywhere. That had been the point of the Great Discovery. But what had caused this group to hide in caves? It was hard to imagine a small group carving out such a community. New settlements spent their time building cities, observatories, and places of learning, not digging caves—or moving into ones that already existed.

  He sat on his mat, watching the thin film of water course down the wall. He was slightly comforted by the realization that (apparently) his quarters were no worse than those of the other inhabitants here. Also, he had learned two important things.

  First: Most of the men on the Urbat had survived. They would probably never know the truth about their rescuers—or even about the attack; but they had not been left to die. This gave Peleg a slightly better opinion of his ‘hosts’.

  And the second was this: He now knew the true nature of the mysterious flute outside of his door.