The Dream Compass [Book 1 of The Merquan Chronicle]

by Jeff Bredenberg

  The burly man thrust his belly forward and slapped it with a grimy palm.

  But the giant’s patience and good nature were dwindling. Londi did not seem sufficiently staggered by his revelations. Even before his bizarre countenance, she seemed to be devoting more of her attention to the village below and the majesty of the surrounding gorge walls.

  “Nora,” he said, “I know that you are not Government because I am Government. Not just of this gorge—of all the Sectors, and eventually beyond. I am the Government. I run the Government.”

  “Then you’re the Monitor,” Londi murmured, resigned. “Mmm. Wrong, wrong place, Nora—wrong stream to fall into, wrong waterfall, wrong canyon.” She paused. “Ain’t you supposed to have three heads?”

  The beast scratched at his belly, squinted at the sun, then glanced at his quickly reddening forearm. “Humph. Now, won’t you come inside?”

  The monster ducked and disappeared into the triangular blackness. Loo stood still on the ledge, clearly assigned to bring up the rear.

  Londi approached the mouth of the cave and cupped her hands around her mouth: “I do play chess,” she shouted, “and have you taken into account the knights coming into play?” There was no response—just the flat blackness—and Londi had no assurance that the lie had landed home.

  Loo then slapped Londi’s rear, more forcefully than necessary, and Londi reluctantly crept into the black void.

  Alone with Loo, Diego bore a puzzled look. “You … play chest?” Then he followed his companion into the rock wall.

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  20

  Music Not Thrown

  “Music is the nearest expression of man’s actual soul and being. Do not taint it with impure thought.”

  —From the writings of Rutherford Cross—Book III, Chapter IV.—Excerpted by permission of Ligkh Priest Lit Mannah,—34UH5.

  Tha’Enton nearly fainted trying to purify his music this night. He could not allow himself to think of these unknown wanderers in the village and what they might mean. The advocations chosen for him—Sound Maker and Defender—had defined a spartan livelihood that promised many spiritual benefits were he to remain faithful to his task until death. Now, more than ever, he must concentrate.

  Out of all musical positions, being a bonesman required the most dexterity. Some instruments were considered totally rhythmic, and others were much more melodic, but being a bonesman required an intuitive facility at both. His instrument was the Pa—a wood, leather, and cotton-fiber assemblage measuring 5 1/2 feet wide, surrounding him in the shape of a concave quarter sphere. There were actually 718 instruments included in the Pa, 718 pairs of “bones” arranged in this rack surrounding Tha’Enton. Each set of bones consisted of two slightly curved pieces of ebony made to be rattled between the fingers. At precisely the right time, the bonesman was to pluck the proper set of bones from the rack, let them twitter or rumble in his hands (the size determined the tonal range), and then toss them back into their proper place with a carefully aimed flick.

  The confident and showy bonesmen lately had taken up a sport that enraptured the more knowledgeable among the spectators: During the course of an evening’s play, such musicians would toss a set of bones aside when they had thocked out their final tones for the evening, instead of returning them to the rack, where they could be safely retrieved. The trick lay in having the foreknowledge of when during the night’s repertoire each of the 718 sets of bones had become obsolete. To toss the ebony sounders aside prematurely, into a growing pile of the polished sticks, would mean musical disaster and months of shame for the musician. Not coincidentally, the musicians who reveled in the game of chess also tended to immerse themselves in the risky throwaway of bones.

  Bone tossing was by no means a required activity, but still there were those in the milling audience who loudly expressed their disappointment that Tha’Enton was not attempting the feat this evening. (There was a small band of purists in the community, on the other hand, that argued that such throwing actually chipped the little ebonies occasionally and was therefore detrimental to the musical art. But a Sounder as brash as Tha’Enton could not suddenly claim to be among them.)

  There would be no stick tossing tonight. Let them fibber, Tha’Enton told himself. I have a throb of foreknowing, and I mustn’t be distracted.

  So it was that the crowd pressing and shifting through the village Center for the evening’s Sundown carried an edge of dissatisfaction. There was a dusty tussle or two, ending with the loser’s limp body being dragged off to the pyres. The children swooped in to rub the blood into the dirt until it disappeared, thus hurrying the ghastly gorings into history.

  And so it became a bad night musically, with Tha’Enton presiding over the uninspired soundings and the audience acutely aware of the shortcoming. The Pa’s leathery aroma warmed his nostrils, but there was none of the soul lift a musician might come to rely on. Instrument and inner being never met. As he played, the excruciating minutes wore on, and he grew all the more resentful of the outsiders who hovered on the edge of the Center’s torchlight, consulting with the Wise.

  Just moments in the village! The outsiders were already souring the Sundown proceedings and had presumed to approach the Wise without a booger of ceremony. The old stranger, the gray-head, moved about assuredly, and seemed to have enough education to make himself understood to the Wise. He was speaking in a makeshift communication bolstered by silly hand signs. The young one followed him closely, like a singed kitten.

  Both of the outsiders wore those clingy machine-skins, the kind that had never wrapped an animal. Their faces and hands were milky white and showed not one colored honor marking, no mumble scars, not even an appreciable sun scorch. As he saw them now, he knew them to be exactly what the Wise had historically called these wayfarers from the cities, stragglers from the clusters of human decay: the Fungus People. Yes. Soft and deathly white scavengers.

  When the music stopped, every set of Pa bones was in place in the rack as if they had never been played. Tension hung in the air thicker than pyre smoke. The crowd was quiet with anticipation, a collective breath held. Tha’Enton pushed away from the quarter sphere and strode into the crowd, the only sound being the clatter-clack of his shin guards.

  Laddo the barterer stopped him on the Center’s causeway and threw a long laugh into Tha’Enton’s face—a mild insult, an uninventive one. But the barterer grew sober when he felt the stinging splash of Tha’Enton’s urine against his thigh—a serious insult, a deadly one. Laddo about-faced and, elbowing a path through the bemused and raggedy gawkers, scurried back to his display table mounded with refuse of questionable value. There, he consoled himself by smacking and lashing his naked little helpers.

  When Tha’Enton reached the Wise he saw that he was expected. The Wise, after all, anticipated everything. To the outsiders, Tha’Enton knew, the Wise was perceived as three bodies, three men. But it was not so. The Wise thought and reasoned as one in impeccable logic. Mentally, they were one and inseparable. Oh, there were awkward times that they had to be considered as individuals for day-to-day living, and only then could they be called by bodily designations.

  “Tha’Enton, Sounder and Defender, you will go with these Fungus People and collude in their endeavor. They come to us at the will of the son of Rutherford Cross himself. While you will protect them and give them aid, you also will see that these matters of the Fungus People—this festering—will be confined to the cities and never spread to civilization.”

  Tha’Enton saw that the unschooled gray-head had turned to one of the Wise, the Father, thinking the words had come from his lips alone.

  The musician’s chest grew several inches and his braids of brown hair fell away from it. “Wise, perhaps the festering is with us now and should be cast into the pyres,” he said.

  “No!” scolded the Wise. “If there is any good among the Fungus People, it lies with this man, the old one, and those who follow. He lives not in the dung-hea
p cities, but under a mountain far east. Go and help.”

  “And when I have destroyed this festering that the outsiders speak of?”

  There was a quiet moment in which it was decided that the gray-head had not understood the last exchange. The Wise reasoned, “When the festering is scorched away, you may commemorate the day with a new musical composition biddled from the bok of these two men’s skulls.”

  The younger of the two outsiders was feeling braver now, even smiling, and he extended his right hand in the friendship gesture of the Fungus People. Tha’Enton smiled too, baring his sharpened yellow teeth and urinating on the young man’s palm.

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  21

  A Wet Book

  “…Well, ya can say I bugger everything I touch, ya. How many years would ya say Moberly had been building her inn? Fifteen ‘er twenty, I gully—house and barn, brewing setup, all the additions.” He wiped his nose on his forearm, scratched at his beard, and stared back at the campfire. “So now there’s Security men pawing through her place. If they don’ find me, they’ll be pig-pissed. And then they’ll find something.

  “They’re lookin’ for me now. You ‘er right, Pec-Pec. No … there’s no goin’ back. I’ll be buggered, probably, any city I go to. Ya shoulda let me take my truck, least. Their truck. Now I got nothing. I’m in the wastelands alone with a crazy pokin’ magician, and I got nothing. Just some maps and a few centimes. No travel papers, boogie. No equipment. That’s all in the truck. But no, says the crazy poker. I canna go back to the truck. Go back to the truck, he says, and I die. Huh.”

  Anton Takk saw there would be no response, and he continued the monologue to fill the condemning quiet. “No. None of that Supply housing for me anymore. Not in Camp Blade, thank-you. Had my fill of that….

  “Hoo, I’ve a blabbery mouth—trouble for everyone. They took Nora, and I’ve told her about Ben Tiggle—his press and everything, that Cred Faiging Collapsible Press….

  “Do they keep ‘em in the ground all the time? Nora Londi, I mean, at Blue Hole. They don’t work down there all the time, do they?”

  The fire sputtered on a sappy log.

  “Ben Tiggle. Now there’s one man, one good man I’d never hurt. He’s my father, just about. Except for my real father, who’s … Mmm.”

  Takk stared at his fingernails, and then at the dark-skinned man crouched near the fire, head bowed over an empty fish bowl. Beyond Pec-Pec, parked among the scrubby trees at the edge of firelight, was the magic man’s truck, and Takk was struck by its appearance. Weeks ago in New Chicago, he seemed to remember, the truck had resembled a carnival wagon, some sort of gaudy gypsie ramshack. At the Moberly Inn, though, it had appeared at home among the Supply trucks. And now, maybe it was just the flickering of yellow light, the vehicle seemed … rural. Perhaps a milk wagon or a cattle cart.

  Takk’s mind turned to a tale Pec-Pec had told that day as they jostled across the prairie (a shocking badlands, by Norther standards). The story had concerned a magical animal—a fairy tale, really. A lizard the size of a man’s finger, so it went, could crawl onto a leaf and turn just that shade of green. On a tree trunk, it would muddle to brown. It had the talent of disguising itself in just about any surroundings.

  “Thrown into the air, then,” Takk had asked, skeptical, “would the lizard turn clear like water and disappear?”

  Hah. A fine question—it had rolled off the tongue so adroitly, spontaneously. The question, the absurd perplexity, hung there in the air unanswered like the hypothetical lizard itself. It was a prize question that Takk wanted to catch in his cupped hands and preserve—take it out whenever he desired, to look at it, think it over again. Catch it in a bowl, in a blanket stretched out, on a sheet of paper.

  Paper. Of course. Treasured, unanswerable questions could only be captured one way—on paper, written, and he forced himself up onto stiff knees and walked haltingly to the passenger door of the truck.

  His canvas satchel, the last of his personal possessions, was on the seat. It contained an extra shirt, a pair of heavy socks, three bottles of ale. He pushed them all aside and found at the bottom the little pine case, six inches long, that he had crafted during idle hours in the Camp Blade warehouse. He flipped it open and drew out one of seven slender strips of soft metal—lead. He had traded on the black market for wheel weights salvaged from ancient trucks, and melted them down in a saucepan and then poured the glistening metal into a crevasse between floorboards in the warehouse, the straightest crack he could find. Once cooled, the fragile sticks of metal made suitable markers. He pulled writing paper from Pec-Pec’s glove box—five-by-seven-inch sheets pressed between two thin boards and wrapped around by twine.

  Takk returned to the light of the fire and bent his tired legs again to lower himself onto a stone perch. He unbound the paper and slapped a sheet onto the wood cover, knowing its hard surface would make the dull markings most legible.

  Now, how did he remember it? “Thrown into the air,” he had asked, “would the lizard turn clear like the air and disappear?” Yes. He began scribbling. Pec-Pec had been driving and he had snorted his admonishment as they bumped across the prairie—”You crazy”—but his eyebrows had risen and the magic man had grown silent for hours as he seemed to take the proposition seriously—shaking his head, whispering to himself.

  Crazy. Takk knew crazy. Outposts like Camp Blade were famous as homes of the befuddled and the berserk.

  Pec-Pec was crazy: a braided wild man who had coddled a peculiar fish in his hands this evening, swallowed it, and had passed out perilously close to the campfire. Takk looked up from his writing. Pec-Pec had not moved for twenty minutes. Could the magic man, as he called himself, have choked on his slithery pet?

  Takk decided to try to wake him.

  When Pec-Pec saw the moving headlights from afar, he grew intensely attracted to them, a mothlike instinct. Disembodied, he flew through the blackness to the yellow discs and fluttered about them distractedly as rocks and rutted earth passed underneath.

  The automobile was a new, government-issue jeep—fabric top, doors removed and stored in back. A man was at the wheel, a fellow with a hard-looking, angular face. Pec-Pec drifted to the man’s left eye and slowly, in a liquid motion, enveloped the orb. When the man’s eyelid blinked closed, and the eyeball rolled upward, Pec-Pec tumbled into the man’s head.

  There he found a book, a sopping wet volume which Pec-Pec opened. The pages were thin and flimsy, turning fluidly at the slightest touch. The first pages were white, and carried childhood images—a rotund mother, a sour-looking aunt, apple juice, a willow tree from which switches had to be cut by the little boy himself as he faced punishment. The center pages of the book grew pink, then bright red with vivid accounts of sexual encounters.

  Doubt was an unfamiliar emotion to Pec-Pec, but here, perusing this private, scarlet parade of women, men, and animals, the magic man questioned his own methods. He paused. Never before had the dragon fish led him into such a sordid encounter. He thought of the ancient words Curiouser and curiouser.

  His hands began flipping pages again.

  The final several pages of the book were black, and Pec-Pec turned impatiently to the last few.

  The first page among them showed a large man strapped to a table with heavy tape over his eyes. His jowly face rolled from side to side, and in astounding bursts of energy he lunged upward at his leather restraints, only to fall back again, tears gurgling in his throat.

  Three Badgers, bearded and uniformed, chortled at the effort. The Inspector, Mick Kerbaugh, was laughing too. He was unseen, of course, for these were his thoughts and memories.

  At Kerbaugh’s orders, a Badger quietly unbuckled Ben Tiggle’s chest restraint. When Tiggle again bolted upward he flew from the table and crashed over the side, his feet still strapped in place and his head cracking against the plank flooring. More chuckles.

  In that awkward position, Tiggle clawed at the tape over his eyes, groaning
as it pulled away his eyelashes and eyebrows. In painful succession, hundreds of tiny volcanoes erupted on his face as each hair follicle burst. Finally the tape crackled down into a ring around his neck, and Tiggle squinted in the lamplight.

  A Badger unstrapped his feet, and Tiggle’s knees banged to the floor. Shakily, the large warehouseman stood and staggered toward a washbasin mirror. He rubbed his eyes and desperately examined his face in the glass. His brow and eyelids were inflamed, bloody, and virtually hairless, but there were none of cruel cuts and abnormal healing that Kerbaugh had promised. His eyelids had not been grafted together.

  Tiggle felt no relief. He began to sob and felt excruciatingly weary. The information he had given…

  The room rang with hearty guffaws.

  The next black memory page reeked of foul smoke. The Moberly Inn was a roiling mountain of heat and flame, and the shutter on a ground-level basement window exploded into a shower of splinters as an ancient typewriter hurled through it.

  In the basement, two sets of flailing arms clawed for a hold on the shattered window frame. One of the panicked men, Kerbaugh, howled into the blackness a vile harangue of expletives and orders. The meeker, yellow-haired bureaucrat acceded and frantically boosted the Inspector out of the window. Kerbaugh rolled onto the dirt, surrendering to a crippling coughing fit.

  A steady tubular cloud of smoke now gushed from the basement window, occasionally obscuring the face of Gould Papier, wide-eyed with terror. His bloody hands scrabbled over the frame of splinters and glass, looking for a grip.

  Kerbaugh’s hacking subsided. He sat up and glared down at his lap, soggy and black with soot and urine, and he pondered shamefully the paralysis that had crippled him in the basement—how Papier had desperately searched the machine room for an escape and finally coaxed him into helping toss the typewriter through the shutter.

  Kerbaugh stood and spat. He staggered to the typewriter and lifted it by its front bar, slipping his hand under the mangled keys. He let the machine pendulum at the end of his right arm as he tested the weight, and then he heaved it back into the basement window from which it had come. When Gould Papier’s face collapsed under the blow, the machine’s carriage return bell rang a tiny ping.