Paul O Williams - [Pelbar Cycle 04]

by The Fall of the Shell (v0. 9) (epub)

  Gamwyn was led around the palisade wall to one guard tower, where a ladder led over the wall. He was made to climb the ladder, then thrown down into the mud inside. He hit with a sickening jolt. Inside, another Nicfad took the noose from his neck and tossed it back to the tall man, who waited above.

  They shouted a brief conversation, then the new guard looked at the boy, pointed to a long, low building in the center of the group, turned him, and kicked him toward it, saying, “Go there.” Gamwyn fell again, but got up and hurried ahead of the guard. The door was low, and Gamwyn had to stoop to open it. As he did, the guard shoved him into the room with his foot and slammed the door again.

  The room had no windows and was too low to stand up in. No one was inside, but Gamwyn could see, in the very dim light from one chimney at the end, that many people used the building. The floor was lined with straw and the room divided by logs laid parallel to each other on the floor. It smelled very heavily of smoke. Gamwyn suddenly felt tired. At least it was dry in the building. He knew he should try to get out as soon as he could, but instead he sat down, took off his wet boots, and tried to dry out his feet Gradually he grew drowsy and faded off to sleep.

  A quarter sun later, near evening, he was awakened by the sound of men entering the building, mildly stumbling and cursing. They paid little attention to him, but lay down on the straw in parallel rows as one old man lit a fire on the hearth that lay at the far end of the building from the chimney. Soon the building began to fill with acrid smoke. The men lay in it singing a slow, dreamy song. Gamwyn lay as still as he could, keeping his face near the straw where the air was clearest. Slowly he began to feel lightheaded. A strange sense of well-being sifted through him. He felt like laughing. It was a summer evening on the terraces of Threerivers. He was cultivating com and beans with Brudoer, and joking with the old beekeeper, Sepp. No. That was wrong. He was at the U Bend Tusco settlement in a smoke-filled building with the other slaves. Well, that wasn’t so bad. He would talk to them. They would let him go in the morning.

  Eventually most of the smoke drifted out, and the men slowly roused themselves and went outside. “You new?” one man near Gamwyn asked. “Come now. Time for supper.” Gamwyn went out with them and stood in a line *in front of another building. The line inched forward, and at last he was handed a large wooden bowl filled with steaming liquid. Gamwyn tasted it. Fish stew had never seemed so good before, even though he knew it was poor.

  “Come,” said the man behind him, the same one who had spoken earlier. “Come with me. Room in our hut.” His words seemed a slow, dreamy chant. He led Gamwyn to one of the rows of smaller buildings and stooped inside. Straw lay on the floor of this building, too. By the light of a small fire, Gamwyn could see it was marked off into small living areas. His new companion gestured to one. “There,” he said. “Was Ount’s. He’s dead. Yours.” He sat in the adjoining area, separated by a barrier two logs high. All the men silently ate their stew. Again Gamwyn felt sleepy. The stew had a faintly rank odor. He didn’t care. It tasted too good.

  “We’ve been cuttin’ wood. You’ll come with us. But first they’ll ask you a horde of things up in the circles. Don’t worry. lust tell ’em everything. Won’t matter. You’re in it now. We never get out. You’re in it for life now.”

  Gamwyn’s hope dropped again, despite the uplift he felt from the smoke and food. He was drowsy, but he knew he had to think the situation out before going to sleep. Though he, seemed to fade into and out of sleep, he had long periods of mental clarity in which he set his direction, Ms design for action, he thought, -borrowing Craydor’s terminology. First he would never resign himself to being a slave. He would take every opportunity to thwart the Tusco, but never at the cost of undue personal danger. He would never betray Ms fellow prisoners. He would try somehow to slip away unnoticed, but if this was not possible, he was willing to undermine the entire false design.

  He remembered back to his talk with Sagan, Protector of Pelbarigan. She told Mm that the oppressed had the right to lie to the oppressor. Didn’t she? As he recalled it, he wasn’t so sure. Did he have that right, or did he owe them the truth? Even desiring to escape was to them a lie, though. Then he did have the right, though he would use it judiciously. He would not bring danger onto himself with it.

  He recalled a bitter old servant in Threerivers, a tall, spare man who had. once confided . in Gamwyn as they worked on a bank stabilization detail together. Grasping the boy’s forearm fiercely and fixing his eye, the old man hissed at him, “Listen and never forget this. We live in the worst kind of oppressive society. Don’t forget it. Remember this. Don’t thwart them openly. They run things, these stupid old women. Circumvent them. Do what they ask, but do it slowly and stupidly and live your own life ’ to yourself. Nod and accept their insults. There isn’t any other way. You have a family. I- don’t. You have some help. You are young and have freedom from the hostility of the outside tribes. That will help, too. But it will not cure. Remember this. Live like a spy among them. You don’t have to respect them even if you do comply. There are ways to attain your own fulfillment.” The fellow had spat forcefully on the snow, then turned back and said again, “Remember that.”

  Gamwyn didn’t think the fellow was right about Threerivers. Things weren’t so bad there. Perhaps the old man had created his own aura of tension and bitterness. But, now that Udge was in power, things really had changed. Perhaps the old servant had seen it coming all along. He was a secret ornithologist, too. He knew an immense amount about the birds of the Threerivers region, both the migrants and the natives. He showed Gamwyn his volumes of notes with sketches once—endless observations, noted in a tiny, neat hand. He had sworn the boy to secrecy about them. The woman for whom he worked, when not sent on outside details, knew nothing of his hobby but thought him merely a stupid old man.

  Gamwyn knew his own most immediate problems were two. First, he had to become anonymous, acquiring the shapeless clothing of the slaves. Next, he had somehow to avoid the smoke. He saw the debilitating effect it had on the others, dulling them to the facts of their situation. Gamwyn had the typical Pelbar admiration for clarity of mind, an attitude that made them avoid all stimulants to jollity, even at times of feast and celebration, if intoxication would result. Avoidance of excess was a part of Cray-dor’s code. “Do not think of it as balance,” she had written, “even though it is in a sense a balance to live moderately, eating neither too much nor too little. Think of it as the harmony of the Pelbar choir, in which each note contributes to the whole impression, sounding out and combining in a perfection of individual clarity, agreeing with the whole. A muddiness of the individual note or a hesitancy or an excess mars the brillance of the whole.”

  Gamwyn eventually fell wholly to sleep. It seemed to him he was aroused only a moment later, but it was dawn. A heavy Nicfad opened the door to the hut and shouted them all into wakefulness. In his hand he had a collar made of leather, with metal loops sticking out of it. As the dull group filed out, heading for the smokehouse, the man took Gamwyn by the hood of his winter coat and threw him aside, then buckled the collar on him, snugly. Only then did the boy notice that all the slaves wore such collars, though their shapeless coats hid them.

  “Now, go get your smoke,” the man said, throwing the boy forward and chasing him, kicking him as he went.

  Gamwyn dove into the room, tripping over a man near the door, and in the dimness found a place to lie down. Already the room was filling with the acrid smoke. Everyone there lay on his back, placidly drinking it in. Gamwyn turned on his side, parted the straw, and thrust his face down into the pocket there, hoping to minimize its effect. Eventually he thought, Well, maybe this life would not be so bad after all. It could become a routine. My trip downriver was a silly thing, after all. I could settle into this society just as I did into Threerivers. No. I’ve got to resist. It’s the smoke talking. But then again ...

  After breakfast stew, the slaves were led out toward the downriver side of the
circular Tusco community. But as they neared the hill below the outer wall, the same Nicfad who had brought the collar took a long staff with a small hook on one end and stuck it through one of the loops in Gamwyn’s collar, yanking him from the line then leading him up the hill. They passed through a gate into an outer ring of houses where Gamwyn saw a number of Nicfad with women and children. The boys all dressed in the black leather of the elder men. They stared at him with contempt. One threw a glob of mud. Gamwyn tried to dodge, but the staff holding his neck made it impossible.

  Almost immediately, Gamwyn was led through another gate in a wall partly composed of another ring of houses. No Nicfad loitered in this area, but a number of people in brown, shapeless garments, all carrying things, hurried busily along the circular corridor. Gamwyn raised his eyes to the white tower in the center of the ring ahead. He could see its whiteness came from a surface of bones fastened to it. He stopped with a slight outcry as he recognized a number of human skulls, but the Nicfad jerked his collar, leading him to a long, nondescript building and thrusting him inside, unhooking the staff.

  Gamwyn found himself facing a table at which a middle-aged man sat. Before him lay shallow wooden racks with pebbles in some of the squares into which they were divided.

  “New slave. Put in uniform,” the Nicfad said.

  The man peered up at him nearsightedly, then rose and walked around the table to look again. He regarded Gamwyn intently from close up, then felt his coat and parted it to look at his tunic.

  “Not Siveri. Who?”

  “Peshtak spy,” the Nicfad said.

  The man drew in his breath sharply and stepped back. “Another Peshtak,” he whispered.

  “No worry. They stand no chance with us. Remember dogs. This one half-starved. Only boy. Other one already good slave.”

  The two made Gamwyn strip off his coat, and then the warehouseman fitted him into a quilted slave suit. It was shapeless but surprisingly comfortable. The warehouseman turned him to the light and surveyed him. “Strange hair. This fits all right. Fine weaving in his clothes. Lovely work.” Reaching out, the warehouseman took up Gam-wyn’s folding knife, which hung on a lace around his neck. “What this?” he asked.

  “The sign of Grogan, the beast-god,” Gamwyn said impressively, “Go ahead. Take it and die.”

  The man dropped it. “No matter,” he said. “Only decoration. Take him for questioning.”

  “Not need you to tell me that.” The Nicfad hooked his staff in Gamwyn’s collar and jerked him toward the door. “Good-bye,” the warehouseman said.

  “Good-bye,” Gamwyn replied. The Nicfad jerked him along roughly. They walked through another gate into the innermost ring before the tower.. Here, too, Gamwyn saw people busily walking around, carrying sticks with marks and notches in them, as well as the racks of pebbles. Again the Nicfad thrust Gamwyn through a door into a dim interior. Again a long table faced the door. But this time, seated at it were seven people, surrounded with marked sticks and racks of pebbles.

  One man, tall and severely dressed in a high-collared robe, gray with black piping, stood and walked around the table with his hands behind him. He snapped his fingers. “Release him,” he said. “Wait outside.”

  In removing his staff, the Nicfad threw Gamwyn to the floor, stood for a moment dusting his leggings, then slowly sauntered off, as the tall man looked at him from under raised eyebrows.

  “Stand,” he said. Gamwyn stood up, rubbing his neck. “New Peshtak. You will tell us, then, of intentions of Peshtak. They move this way, then? They plan attack?”

  “I know nothing of any Peshtak.”

  .The man thrust his face up to Gamwyn’s frowning, and hissed out, “You will find it will go very badly with you to hide anything from me. Knou, bring the stick.” A short, fat man came from behind the table and put a willow switch in the tall man’s hand.

  “Now, then, you will tell me everything.” He cut Gamwyn in the side with the switch. The boy barely felt it through the quilted coat, but he plainly saw the man’s anger.

  “You will not believe, then, that I am not Peshtak?” “No. Now no delays.”

  Gamwyn paused. “All right. I see there is no help for it. I am from the farthest Peshtak city in the eastern mountains. It is called Kitat. We are moving west. It is difficult to live there, and with the eastern cities and the mountains, as well as the rat famine.”

  “Rat famine?”

  “Yes. We live largely on rats.” The tall man groaned and sniffed. “Something has killed most of them out—perhaps the groffhawks, which seem to get bigger every year. They are even beginning to carry off children.”

  “Children?”

  “Yes. Not any big ones. Nothing over six months old.” “Months?”

  “That’s about thirty days.”

  “Ah. You mean just over six moon cycles.”

  “Yes. We have to move west, you see. We are looking for a place. I was sent to see if you were a strong society which would threaten us. If you let me go, I will assure them that you are.”

  “Make him slow down,” said one man behind a table. “We having trouble notching sticks. He talks very strange.” The tall man turned impatiently, then sighed and said, “Well, hurry.”

  “What are they doing?” Gamwyn asked.

  “You primitive society. They recording your statements.” “Why don’t they just write it down?”

  “They do. What you mean?”

  Gamwyn was astonished. They didn’t know how to write conventionally, as all the Heart River peoples to the north did. Instead they notched the long, flat sticks in some pattern. “Nothing,” he said. “We write in a different way.” “A lie. You know well you have no way to write. That why you cannot hold your own in your own land. Hawks indeed.”

  “Then there are the giant beasts.”

  “Giant beasts?”

  “Yes. They have come down from the north country, beyond the Bitter Sea. They are white like snow, and they eat everything that has flesh—birds, fish, mice, people.” “Many of them?”

  “They travel in herds, like the wild cattle of the west here, and leave the countryside decimated. In the summer they even eat insects. No, there are not many, but when they come, they tear down our strongest log walls, and if we. shoot the first ones, the ones behind devour them, then keep coming, entering our towns. We have to flee or be eaten. There is no help for it.”

  “This truth?”

  “Truth? That word again.”

  The tall man turned his back on Gamwyn. “You see,” he said to the others. “He not even really know truth. That how benighted they, Peshtak.” He turned again. “Many of you? Nearby?”

  “No. Not many. Only about three thousand, and they are up near the Oh River. They are trying to decide whether to go upriver and attack the Pelbar, go west, or come downriver and attack you.”

  “Three thousand? How much that?”

  “Don’t you know how to count?”

  “Count? To sum?”

  “Yes. To sum.” Gamwyn explained at great length how many three thousand was, using his hands, as one of the men moved pebbles rapidly in the boxes. When he was through the tall man looked at the pebbles and turned back with a grave face.

  “That many. That too many. Three ten hundreds.”

  “I think they will go west, up the Isso.”

  “What of Shumai?”

  “Yes. But the Shumai are settling with the Pelbar along the river. The Pelbar cities are impregnable, and the people all together are too many. We Peshtak will seek empty land to the west and not attack. I assume you have other Tusco cities you can draw on for reinforcements.”

  “We not tell you anything. Do not seek information from me.” The tall man cut him across the legs with the stick. This Gamwyn felt, though he gave no sign. “Now. You say they not attack? We have heard from Sentani what you Peshtak have done.”

  “We are a peaceful people, but we have been driven to fight. We will seek to avoid it. You are too well
defended here for us. I imagine the slaves will fight for you, too.” “You will never return to tell them anything.”

  “There have been others.”

  “Others? How many?”

  Gamwyn held up the fingers of both hands, shutting them and opening them twice. “At least that many. Last summer.”

  “Then why they send you?”

  “They were all from the Oh Peshtak. River people. They came in the water, swimming at night. They can stay in the water for days on end. We didn’t wholly trust them. They might want the best places for themselves. I was sent to check on them.”

  “And they right, these river Peshtak?”

  “Oh, yes. Completely. You don’t have to worry. We will not attack you. The dogs are too frightening, and those black-leather men.”

  The tall man paced up and down for several sunwidths. “I inclined to believe much of Miat you say. You could not make most of that up. Remember what will happen if we find you lied.”

  “What will happen?”

  “You will lose foot, just as if you escaped.”

  “Well, I have no worry, then, because I have told you all the facts.”

  The tall man rapped on the door frame for the Nicfad. “Take him,” he said. “We have no further need of him. He incompetent boy sent by weak primitives.”

  As Gamwyn was led from the building, he looked up again at the tower and saw a plump girl of his own age, with light blond hair, gazing out a window. As he was jerked along by the neck, he smiled a little and waved. She banged the window shut as the Nicfad threw Gamwyn to the ground and stood over him. “You like to live? You never do that again. Never,” he snarled at the boy.

  “No. Sorry. I didn’t know.” Gamwyn was terrified. “Never,” said the Nicfad, jerking him back to his feet. “Now. To cut wood,” he added.

  Far to the north, at Pelbarigan, the three Peshtak captives were brought before Ahroe in the guardroom. Sun through the south window cast a harsh light across their thin faces. But their wounds were healed. Each one stood in front of a male guardsman, and two more flanked them. Their hands were bound behind them and their feet loosely shackled.