Pallahaxi

by Michael G. Coney

  Ribbon looked hard at her, then shrugged. “Squint, stuff seaweed in those holes and take their boat back. You people, follow me.” She hauled herself into the sewer and disappeared from sight.

  Wolff followed her, then myself, while Browneyes brought up the rear. I looked back to see Squint hoisting the sail in expert fashion, then extended a hand and helped Browneyes into the tunnel—although she could no doubt have managed better by herself. As we moved forward I let go of her hand slowly, prepared on the slightest pretext to keep hold of it. At the same time Browneyes loosened her grip and I wondered if she was thinking the same as I, or whether I had construed more into the happening of last summer than I should have. There had been a long winter in between, a lot of time for my imagination to work, and a lot of time for Browneyes to forget.

  We could not stand upright in the tunnel but progressed slowly with a crouching gait reminiscent of a lorin. In front of us Ribbon’s echoing voice uttered continual dire warnings as to the consequences of a wrong turning while around our feet I heard, or thought I heard, scuffling noises and shrill squeaks. Despite the fact that Ribbon constantly referred to the tunnel as a storm drain, the evidence of my nostrils caused me to agree silently with Wolff; it was a sewer and a pungent one. A trickle of liquid ran down the centre; in cross-section the tunnel was roughly circular so, walking with legs apart, I was able to keep my feet out of the filth.

  Apart from Ribbon nobody spoke; she had assumed the capacity of leader and presently halted at a point where daylight filtered from above. Here, the stench was particularly strong.

  “We’re right under the town’s main fishmonger,” Ribbon announced. “It’s lucky for you they’re not washing the place down right now, because when they do, all the fishy water comes gushing down here. We take this tunnel to the right, now. If you took the tunnel to the left you’d be in big trouble.”

  She refrained from explaining what nightmares lay down the left tunnel and we did not ask her, having by now learned the folly of such questions. We stumbled on in silence, bending lower as the rough tunnel roof sagged toward us.

  “Years ago, when I was just a kid, there was a cave-in,” came the relentless voice from ahead. “And then all the stuff backed up; it couldn’t get away. Rax, the stink.”

  I cannoned into Wolff who had stopped suddenly; he dug his elbow irritably into my stomach. “We’ve stopped,” he snapped. His nerves were ragged.

  “This is where I leave you,” announced Ribbon with no evidence of regret. “My place is further on and I’m not supposed to go to Browneyes’ place because of the drunks. I’d offer to take you to my place and get you cleaned up there, but my parents wouldn’t like it. they’re sort of particular, if you know what I mean.”

  Browneyes spoke quietly from behind. “If you’d like to come to my place and clean up, that would be fine.”

  “Thanks,” I said. Wolff was silent.

  She edged past us and climbed a series of iron spikes knocked into the wall of a vertical shaft. She fumbled about for a moment, then cracks of light from above suddenly broadened into a bright rectangle. Browneyes pulled herself through the hole and looked down on us. “Come on up,” she said.

  I found myself in one of the most exciting rooms I have ever seen. Low and long, the stone walls were lined with huge wooden barrels, vats and tubs, brown and aged, mysterious and forbidden like an illustration straight out of one of my mother’s books. A guttering lamp provided illumination. I was surrounded by evil and it was wonderful. In a corner I saw some cans which looked familiar; I examined them and, sure enough, they contained distil. Not for use as fuel, however; this stuff was for the sodden drunks who caroused their lives away in the bar of the Golden Grummet—to paraphrase my mother. The air was rich with the heady reek of liquor, and I was enchanted.

  “A beer cellar,” observed Wolff calmly, missing the romance of it all. “Why the outlet into the sewer?”

  “To wash out the barrels,” explained Browneyes.

  “Looks more like a smuggling set-up to me. I ought to tell you that my father is a Customs man, down here because of all this smuggling that’s been going on since the war started. How did you get that distil? It’s made in Asta.”

  I was not surprised to hear that Wolff’s father, like mine, was a Parl. What shocked me was that Wolff should be so interested in his father’s work that he could tackle Browneyes in this aggressive fashion.

  “Leave her alone,” I said heatedly. “Where are your freezing manners, Wolff? We’re guests here. This distil was stockpiled ages before the war started. Everyone was doing it. My father did it. He’s a Parl, too.”

  For once Wolff looked abashed. “Well, it just annoys me that people can trade with the enemy, that’s all,” he muttered. “It’s treason.”

  “Sorry, Wolff, but that makes no sense to me. War was declared on a particular day; are you saying that it was good business to import distil one day, and treason the next? And what about people whose boats were half-way across at the time?”

  I had already found that Wolff was a sucker for the academic argument, and he fell for this one too. Browneyes gave me a look of gratitude as Wolff began to expound his theories on the ethics of war and the historical background of the present conflict.

  CHAPTER 5

  Wolff and I sat in well-padded highbacked chairs, wrapped in blankets, while Pallahaxi-Annlee fed us soup laced, I suspected, with wine. We were in the back room of the Golden Grummet waiting for our parents to collect us; every time Annlee came bustling through the door from the bar we heard the sudden roar of conversation and laughter from beyond, and for a while afterwards the whiff of liquor and smoke lingered on the air.

  I was surprised by the decor of the room. Although a fire flickered before us, this constituted the only random element in surroundings of almost unbelievable neatness and order. Ornaments stood erect like guards, aloof and untouchable; mirrors shone and reflected infinities of bright tidiness in one another. Everything seemed to be carefully positioned at exact right angles to everything else. There was even a religious motif; against the far wall was a Renaissance shelf. A statue of Phu the sun-god, in the form of the Great Lox, dragged the world from the clutches of the dead giant Rax, symbolized by a many-tentacled ice-devil. I noticed that many of the ornaments around the place bore similar religious connotations and I was unable to reconcile this with the sounds of sinful revelry from the next room.

  Browneyes entered, followed by Wolff’s mother and a man whom I took to be his father since he wore the look of intense suspicion befitting a Customs official. “You’re a fool, Wolff,” he snapped without preamble. “You always have been a fool and you always will.”

  “To think that I should find a son of mine in a common inn,” wailed his mother softly, but not softly enough. Annlee, who had just entered, overheard. She looked as though she had been hit.

  “Here are his clothes,” she said quietly, handing them over. “I’ve washed them out. They’re nice and dry.”

  “You haven’t time to put them on now, Wolff,” said his mother, accepting the bundle gingerly and holding it with her fingertips. “You’ll have to wear that blanket, or whatever it is. There’s a loxcart outside.” She smiled with wide graciousness at Browneyes and her mother. “Thank you so much for looking after him.”

  “I can’t walk through the street in a blanket!”

  Ignoring his son’s protests, Wolff’s father seized him by the arm and propelled him through the door. Instantly, they were gone.

  Browneyes, Annlee and I regarded one another, uncertainly in what seemed to be a sudden vacuum. “Did you manage to get hold of Drove’s parents, dear?” asked Annlee at last.

  “They’ll be here later.”

  “Look, if my things are dry, I can put them on and go,” I said hastily.

  “Of course not,” said Annlee firmly. “You’d miss each other on the way. You’re welcome to stay here for a while; it’s only early e
vening, after all. I have work to do, but I’m sure Browneyes will stay and talk to you. Won’t you, dear?”

  Browneyes nodded, eyes downcast, and Annlee left, shutting the door behind her.

  Browneyes sat down in the chair recently vacated by Wolff and looked squarely at me with a hint of smile and dimples. I grinned back, but eventually had to look away in case the thing began to seem like some sort of childish staring contest. I watched her hands, which lay folded passively in her lap. They were nice hands, small and neat and white, and I remembered that I’d been holding one of them for a short time, earlier in the afternoon. I wished that I had the courage to hold it again, but Browneyes sat out of reach. I could hardly go plunging across the room and grab hold of her hand.

  She wore a clean white dress with some sort of pink and blue flowers on it, which made her look very angelic and sweet and unattainable; I almost preferred the grubby jeans and pullover she had been wearing earlier. Her knees were nice and she had pretty shoes on. We seemed to have been saying nothing for a long time, and if it went on much longer we would never say anything.

  “Do you like my dress?” she asked, giving me the chance to look at her more openly.

  “Yes. It’s nice.”

  “I had to take my other things off because they were dirty.”

  “I suppose so. Uh…I hope you Won’t get into trouble for bringing me here. For bringing us here, I mean. Wolff and I.” There was a huge pulse thumping in my lower chest which was making me breathless.

  “Is Wolff your friend?”

  “Yes,” I said eagerly, glad to seize on some concrete topic.

  “I mean no. I only met him today. I think my mother organized it; she always wants to find suitable companions for me.” I tried to smile in case there was a sting in the words; I didn’t want Browneyes to think I was a freezer who held his mother in contempt.

  She merely smiled back, however, and another silence followed.

  I don’t really like Wolff very much I said desperately. “It was his fault we were shipwrecked today, you know.”

  She smiled again, playing with something hanging from a thin chain around her neck. It flashed in the light and I recognized it. It was a crystal, possibly cultured from an ice-goblin like the one my mother had thrown away; but more likely real, hewn from a destroyed ice-devil and representing the death of evil. The sight of the thing dismayed me; there is something daunting about a religious symbol hanging around a girl’s neck.

  She followed my eyes downward and blushed faintly. “Mother likes me to wear it,” she explained. She smoothed the front of her dress with her hand and the thin cloth moulded itself over the warm curves of budding breasts. I looked away hastily, greatly embarrassed. “Mother’s very devout that way,” she continued. “I mean, look at all this stuff around the room. I hope…I hope you don’t think…”

  “My mother’s just the same,” I assured her, feeling sorry for her. “She believes everything. I sometimes think she goes about looking for things to believe—particularly recently, since the war got worse—as though she’s desperate to make her peace before the Astans get her. She has a Renaissance shelf like yours, and she has a war map that she sticks pins into, and I don’t know which she believes in most. I’m not sure I believe either one,” I added.

  She was watching my face seriously. When she was serious she looked just a little bit sad. “But your father’s a Parl,” she said quietly. “And you live inland, at Alika. Here in Pallahaxi we’re much closer to Asta—we used to know a lot of Astan sailors, in peacetime. We know there’s a war on. We can see it all around us. We can see flashes at night, out at sea, there’s no public transport any more so we have to use loxcarts or walk. And there’s not much food either, not for the general public.”

  “I saw plenty of fish today.”

  “You can get tired of fish, and even that’s rationed. Most of it goes to the new cannery now, and they send it all inland somewhere.”

  I didn’t want to talk about all this. It was a waste of time, a waste of being alone. Yet if we dropped this subject, we might find nothing to talk about again. I wondered what had gone wrong, and decided it was my own inexperience. We had started off with an intimate enough conversation but somehow we’d been sidetracked on the way. Maybe I ought to tell her, right now, that I thought she was beautiful. The pounding was in my chest again and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to say it.

  “I think…Uh. My father’s working for the new cannery. Maybe we’ll be staying here longer this year. I think Pallahaxi is a good place, don’t you?”

  “I thought your father worked in Alika.”

  “He said yesterday he would be having to do a lot of work here? Why were we talking about my freezing father?”

  “So you might be staying for quite a long time. You’ll like Pallahaxi when the mists come, and the warm rain. Even in winter it’s much warmer than inland.”

  Then, just when I thought the conversation was coming under control, the door opened and the crude din of the bar filled the room. A ruddy face appeared still wearing the remains of its professional innkeeper’s smile; I recognized the man as Pallahaxi-Girth, Browneyes’ father.

  “Hello, young Alika-Drove,” he greeted me. “I hope I’m not breaking anything up.” He winked extravagantly. “We’re short-handed here and I’m going to have to take Browneyes away from you. I’m sorry, but you know how it is.” He hesitated. Beyond him smoke swirled and voices brayed in animal mirth. “Maybe you’d like to get some clothes on and come into the bar; your parents won’t mind, I’m sure.”

  “I’ll get your things, Drove,” said Browneyes, hurrying out. I remembered the emerald bracelet. I would have to return it, now.

  Later I sat in the corner of the bar room and watched the proceedings. I found the whole thing quite different from what I’d expected. True, the smell was there and the smoke, the raucous laughter and noisy conversation, but somehow the air of evil, the air of menace was missing. Instead, all I saw was a roomful of people apparently enjoying themselves. It was puzzling. I sat sipping a glass of something Browneyes had given me, trying to work it out.

  “Hello there, lad!” roared a voice.

  I started, looking up. A large face was bent towards me, a grotesque hand was gripping my shoulder. Blackened teeth bared in a grin. I stared blankly and nervously at this apparition before sudden recognition came and I felt a little foolish. It was the trucker whom we’d left at Bexton Post; what was his name? Grope. Behind him, his lissom-necked companion craned his long face my way, smiling vacantly over a glass of something dark.

  “I thought you were at Bexton Post,” I blurted out stupidly, unable to think of anything sensible to say.

  Grope lurched around the table and seated himself on the bench beside me, squeezing uncomfortably close to allow room for his friend on the far side. They were both smoking long black weeds which stank abominably. I looked around for help, but Browneyes was on the other side of the room, carrying a handful of mugs from which foam slopped. She looked too clean and sweet to be pushing among all those uncouth bodies and suddenly I felt depressed.

  Grope was shouting in my ear. “Recalled us. Had to leave the freezing truck to rot. Parls, that’s what Lofty and me are now, just like your dad. The Government has taken over all the fisheries now—not just the new plant. They said it was a national emergency. No time to pick up lame trucks; leave it where it is and take another, they said. Must feed the population, stuff fish down their throats until they look like grummets, eh, Drove?” He bellowed with laughter and I suspected he was drunk.

  Across the room I caught sight of Horlox-Mestler, neatly dressed yet seemingly at ease in this rough crowd. He spotted me and raised a hand in grave salute and I wondered just what the position was between him and my father. I had a notion that Mestler had in some way persuaded my father to buy me the boat, I wished he would come across and rescue me from the gross Grope. Browneyes was at the bar counter, c
ollecting more full mugs from her father. There was no sign of her mother.

  “They didn’t ask,” Grope was saying incomprehensibly. “Rax, no, they didn’t freezing well ask—that’s not their way. They just said: you’re working for us, all of you truckers, that’s the way of Parliament for you. They don’t ask you, they freezing well tell you.”

  Lofty leaned around his companion to address me directly. “Slavery,” he said; then, having imparted this pearl, he resumed his place, staring into his mug.

  “And tell me this, my young friend. Tell me this. Where are the troops? Where are the troops to protect us when the Astan fleet comes sailing straight into Pallahaxi harbour—as it surely will, this being the nearest point by sea from their freezing country?” Grope’s eyes were wide with simulated alarm as he stared at an imaginary fleet which only he saw, indicating its position with a sweep of his forked hand. It seemed to have dropped anchor somewhere between us and the bar counter.

  “The grume is coming,” Lofty reminded him. “The grume is coming and they’ll be able to walk into Pallahaxi, near enough.”

  The roar of conversation and laughter was closing in on me and there seemed hardly enough air to breath. Grope was pressing in from one side and a large, fidgety woman who smelled of stewed meat from the other. I swallowed, feeling sick. Suddenly Browneyes was standing before me, looking worried. “Well, hello there,” murmured Grope, chuckling. “What have you brought for me, little girl?”

  “Drove, we’re terribly busy. Would you…” She hesitated, “would you mind very much helping?”

  Overwhelmingly relieved, I stood. “I’d like to,” I said sincerely. “What do you want me to do?”

  “We’re running out of things behind the bar. Perhaps you could bring some more bottles up from the cellar. You know where it is.”

  “Of course.”