Paul O Williams - [Pelbar Cycle 02]
Page 9
He could hear the Roti coming to the door. Hanging the coat on the back of one chair, he quickly propped the right-hand skull on top, and crouched down to the right, where the room bulked out. He held his lamp up inside the skull just as the Roti pulled the door open. In the dim light he saw three faces, then for an instant the reflection of the lit eyes and nose of the skull in six eyes. The compartment filled with a mutual shriek, and the door slammed.
The next moments combined a confusion of shouting, stumbling, and running. Stel heard, “Nekko, nekko, y da. Nu ga, nu ga vatay.” Then the sounds scattered, and si-Icnce resumed inside Ozar. Stel slumped down on the lloor, put the skull on his knee, sheathed his short-sword, and wiped the sweat from his hand. He felt limp. Then he began to laugh, at first silently, then quietly but fully. He sat and laughed off and on for some time.
Moving out through Ozar, carefully and silently, after placing the skull back in its corner and patting it a couple of times, Stel came to McCarty’s log entrance. It was barricaded shut. No matter. Perhaps the Roti were watching it anyhow. He moved around to the other side of the log structure and made a new hole beneath a rotted log at the end of Ozar’s other flat extension. Then he walked slowly back through the beans, climbed down to the stream, and in the chill bathed himself thoroughly. As dawn broke, he still sat by the stream, fingering the needle device that he had taken from the room of the skeletons. Now he could see clearly that it was a representation of two wings, all black, with a pin to fasten it on clothing.
Stel slowly climbed the hill and entered the terminal for breakfast, fish and beans as usual, dished out by Finkel-stein, a small person with a perpetually solemn look.
“Back in time to eat, I see,” McCarty yelled. “Ready to gather a little winter wood? The stack isn’t building up very fast.”
“It would build a lot faster if you didn’t cart it off. You have half a moon cycle’s worth in the house of Ozar already,” said Stel.
The click of spoons and bowls stopped. “In the house of Ozar?” said Taglio. He was echoed by murmurs from a dozen others.
“That is a serious thing to say, Stel,” said Fitzhugh, quietly.
“Nonetheless, it is so. I saw her last night. You can all go out there now and prove it if you would like to.”
“You know we don’t go to the house of Ozar.”
“McCarty does. She has stacked wood all around the great log pillars inside.”
“Then you have been inside the house of Ozar?”
“I was on the hill and saw a light. I thought I would check. I saw McCarty with some wood. She pulled aside a rotted log. I simply followed her in.”
“But at least she is of the children of Ozar.”
“Perhaps so. But even so, as you said, ‘We don’t go to the house of Ozar.’ That is, none of us but McCarty does. And there were five Roti inside last night, too.”
Above the general mutterings of consternation, McCarty shrieked out, “Now we know you lie. To the stew with him, the liar! Give him to the Roti!” She ended with a long, quavering laugh.
Stel simply said, “You need to grease your voice, McCarty. Go and look. Go inside and look at the tracks. I am sure you will see what I said you would.”
“Go inside! Do you hear him? He would have us go inside the house of Ozar.”
“It is time you went inside anyhow. The whole structure is in terrible condition. It will not last many more seasons. I am afraid I don’t see why you refuse to go in. Clearly the children of Ozar built the structure. Your ancestors must have climbed all over Ozar to do it. Ozar must have stood there in the open some time before that was done. It has surely been repaired from time to time in the past. You don’t worship Ozar. Besides, all it is, is a metal structure. I was in it last night, after McCarty shut the log behind her. She is always shutting me into something.”
Taglio stood now, trembling, with much more resolve than Stel had yet seen in him—or her. Pointing at Stel, Taglio said firmly, “This person is lying to us. We have never gone to Ozar. Even McCarty would not. He has confessed he has been inside. We must be done with him. He has violated our most sacred trust. He has—”
“Your most sacred trust is not to go into a rotting old building?” Stel returned. “I find that a marvelous thing. That is birds flying upside down. The care you give each other is your most sacred trust. You have no real religion. You do have an ethics of a sort. What is an old building but an old building, even if it is Ozar’s? What is it to McCarty? Nothing. She has been there repeatedly. Go and see.”
Taglio raised a pair of skeletal hands, crying out, “I will hear no more. This person must go.”
Fitzhugh then stood. “No,” she shouted, banging her wooden bowl on the table. “We will all go now to the house of Ozar. It is time we did. We should have done it long ago. No one has cared for Ozar, and if there is neglect, then it must be remedied. Of course, if we find the wood inside, we will have no way of knowing if McCarty put it there or if Stel did.” She gave Stel a level and severe look. “We will all go but Stel. He is not of Ozar, so he will have to remain behind.”
Taglio sat down with an audible plump. The others looked shocked and frightened.
“We will go,” McCarty shrieked. “I will be the first. I have not been there ever. As Fitzhugh said, it is time we looked into Ozar’s condition.”
Almost mechanically, the rest rose, took torches, lit one, and walked slowly through the beans to the house of Ozar. Stel watched them go from the terminal, then he took down the stave he had found for a longbow and sat by the smoking hearth working it. The Ozar were gone a long time, but finally they came back. Stel could hear them stacking wood back on the great pile under the overhang.
Fitzhugh came in ahead of the others and stood regarding Stel. “McCarty is my sister, Stel. I will protect her lies against your truth if I must. This is the only place she has, and she must not lose it. You must see that.”
Stel said nothing, but continued to shave the stave. Others began to come in. Fitzhugh continued, “It has been observed and decided that we have no proof that McCarty was ever in the house of Ozar. She entered first, through the opening you described, and so the tracks we saw were perhaps hers just made. We saw your tracks in Ozar, and we saw the bare tracks of the Roti. You were correct about that.”
“You made one mistake, Fitz,” said Stel, quietly. “Mistake?”
“I never told you where McCarty entered the house of Ozar. It is no matter. I see it is time for me to leave.
It must be a matter of some wonder, too, that I would straggle to bring winter wood here, only to carry it off to the house of Ozar, giving myself more work. Never mind.
I will be gone before the sun sets.”
“Gone? We have only to thank you. You were right. We had neglected Ozar. If we do not take steps to preserve and repair the house, it will truly fall down. For that we will badly need your help, Stel.”
The Pelbar stood frowning quizzically. Here Fitzhugh had shifted blame to him, only to praise him and ask his help. Well, maybe that shrill old catbird was worth it to her. On the other hand, she knew she needed his help. She would manage to put the matter of Ozar off while the more important business of survival took their attention. Perhaps it was just a game, a slow, ritualistic drama. The others, who had all been to the house of Ozar for the first time, seemed to be calm about the whole thing. Stel suddenly wondered if it were all a fiction and if they each had sneaked out there at one time or another to satisfy a curiosity about what was in the odd-shaped building.
Perhaps societies are bound together by such fictions. The Shumai certainly had trouble giving up the ridiculous notion of their natural superiority. What this collection of trembling bald heads had was Ozar. Fitzhugh had done what she had to. With them all staring at him, Stel had already begun to wander off mentally, wondering what fictions the Pelbar used to fuse their society together. The words of Pell?
But then he came to himself and said, “Well, then, I am very s
orry that I entered Ozar’s house when I should not have. I am glad that you will forgive me for it. I will stay here awhile yet if you permit it. See? I am making a longbow to kill a wild cow or two for you. If you dry its meat, it will help you in the winter. One cow is worth a lot of fish.”
A general murmur showed that they had eaten beef in the past, but not for some time. Stel didn’t tell them that his primary reason for making the longbow was the Roti. The Ozar now turned to their morning tasks. There seemed a gratification among them. They had been to the house of Ozar together for the first time in anyone’s memory. They had stood together and seen the tall letters on the side of Ozar, spelling out the name of the great craft that had brought their ancestors all together from the sky.
Stel caught McCarty looking strangely at him, but with obvious triumph. “Well, old buzzard,” he said, “you can thank Aven for how that turned out.”
“It has not turned out yet, hairy one,” said McCarty, adding one of her strange laughs.
10
The aspens by the stream were yellowing when Stel finally killed a wild cow with his longbow—flicking one long arrow into the back of the shoulder from behind a tree. The black animal had bellowed, begun to run, as if slow in discovering that it was dead, then collapsed after a few steps, lying motionless.
Stel gutted the animal, skinned it, and cut off one hind-quarter to take back immediately, wrapped in the skin. The rest he cut up and put up in a tree.
When he arrived back at the terminal, the jubilation at having meat was greater than he had anticipated, given the passivity of the Ozar. They immediately set about cutting steaks off the quarter and roasting them in the fire. Stel wondered if he ought not to kill a whole herd. But he left them and went back for more. No one would come with him, so eager were they for meat. It had been a long season of harvest, with smoky fires drying fish, beans endlessly hand-shelled into baskets, all woven by the solemn Finkelstein and a close companion, McPhee.
By midafternoon, Stel had brought in all the meat. He was alarmed at how the Ozar were eating it. “Fitz,” he said, “after not having meat for so long, they ought not to be gulping-it down like this. Will they be able to take it?”
Fitz herself looked greasy around the mouth. “They don’t get much pleasure, you know,” she replied, looking away. McCarty was urging further pieces of hindquar-ter on several of the old ones. Stel felt vaguely uneasy at her look. But he couldn’t focus his feelings. So he went outside to begin work on the black hide. He had left his heavy winter coat out on the prairie when the weather warmed, and soon he would need a new one.
Before sunset there was no one working on the meat anymore. Stel had directed the old ones about setting up a drying rack and cutting the meat into long, thin strips for drying, lighting a smoky fire underneath. Going into the terminal, he found the place nearly deserted. Only Berry and Finkelstein sat at the bench near the unlit hearth. “Your meat has made everyone sick, Stel,” said Finkelstein, staring at the wall.
“I was afraid of that. They all ate too much. A change of diet is not easy. Why are you not sick?”
“I didn’t eat much. I was gathering withes for the baskets.”
Stel felt uneasy. Nonetheless, he went outside and finished the drying of the meat, spending most of the night on it, cutting the strips, feeding the fire, turning the meat.
He was nearly done when McCarty appeared in the open doorway. “Poisoned them, did you? Never content to let us alone. Now you are fixing more poison.” Then she turned and was gone.
Tired out, Stel slept in his room in the terminal. He had devised a locking system he was sure that none of the Ozar could master—not even McCarty. In the morning, a few drooping old ones appeared in the terminal hall. The place was a foul mess. Fitzhugh was nowhere to be seen. Stel set to cleaning up after the old ones, using a fiber mop and a wooden pail. His own stomach turned at the smell. Suddenly, Taglio appeared in the main doorway. “Stel, Fitzhugh has fallen in the stew,” he quavered.
Stel dropped the mop and ran out by Taglio, heading for the stone structure on the bank. Something was odd —was wrong—but he never realized what until he ran into the entrance and found himself entangled in a net. A group of the old ones surrounded him, and no matter how he struggled, grappling at them through the holes, they wound him up.
McCarty was there, as Stel now saw, directing everything. “Now,” she shrilled, “into the stew with the poisoner. He has disrupted our life enough. Sink him.” She flung up her arms, laughing, took a misstep, and herself disappeared over the edge of the pit with a yell. There was a general rush to the hole, and cries.
“Quick, get a rope,” said Taglio. He turned. The only one around was holding Stel in the net. “We will have to let him go,” he said. The old ones rushed to unbind Stel. He fought his way out of the net, tempted for a moment to throw them all in after McCarty. Taglio dropped the end of the rope to her as she flailed and struggled in the soup of filth. She took hold of it, but in her weakness could not hold hard enough to be lifted out.
“Loop it around you,” said Stel. She was too frightened to hear, crying and moaning. The stench was almost unbearable. Stel turned to McPhee, shook her by the shoulders, and said, “Go get Finkelstein. He’s in the hall. Bring the roof ladder. And get Fitzhugh.” McPhee flung herself awkwardly out of the doorway. McCarty was sinking farther in. With revulsion, Stel took the far end of the rope, tied it to a small tree beyond the entrance, took off his clothes, and went down the rope to McCarty, slinging it around her armpits in the slop of filth, tying it in front of her, and calling for the old ones to draw them out. They couldn’t.
“Let go, Stel,” said Taglio. “We will pull McCarty out and then throw the rope down for you.”
“I will when you jump in, Taglio,” said Stel.
The ladder was finally brought, and Stel directed how it was to be tied fast at the top. Then he took the whimpering McCarty on his back and climbed slowly, with slippery hands, back up out of the stew and dumped her on the stone slabs. Fitzhugh came in, rubbing her wrists. “I was tied up by someone last night,” was all she offered. “Finkelstein just freed me.”
Well, that’s nice,” Stel replied, dripping with the stinking muck of the stew. “Taglio, bring my things—all of them—down to the stream. I am going to wash.”
Taglio started to resist. Stel hit him open-handed, with a filthy palm, across the cheek. The old one fell. “Finkel-stein, you do it,” said Stel. The short figure looked, opened his mouth, shut it, then went to Stel’s clothing and picked it up.
Stel said nothing more but went down to the stream and sat in the cool water, scrubbing himself with sand, clumps of grass from the bank, and finally with some wood lye soap he had directed Finkelstein to fetch for him. Several times he retched into the water. So that was it with the Ozar.
Finally he felt fairly clean. He climbed out and dressed. High above, in a line, a number of the old ones watched him. He slowly climbed back to the terminal to assemble his gear. As he came up, McCarty, still dripping with the stew, went down to the stream, though she had found water to rinse herself. She had stripped off her robe and was the same human ruin Stel had first seen in the spring.
“May the vultures of the mountains drink from your eyes,” she said to him as they passed on the hill. Stel said nothing.
He took his time preparing to go, taking an ample supply of dry meat from the racks. No one said anything until he was ready. Then Fitzhugh, by the door with a small crowd of the old ones, said, “Of course you will feel you have to go now. I wish you well. Don’t stay in the mountains long. Winter will come early there. We regret what has happened. We are grateful for all your help. You have gotten us through this winter anyway. We—”
“It was McCarty who killed your child, wasn’t it,” said Stel.
Fitzhugh stopped, stunned. “That was never proved,” she said, quietly.
“It was proved to me this morning. You may keep what you have harbored.”
“What of Jaeger? Did he end up in the stew? Was he already d—”
Stel was interrupted by a shriek from Fitzhugh, who covered her face and turned to go into the terminal. Stel quickly went to her and turned her again. “I am sorry. There is no use in our parting like this. There is that which is not McCarty. Good-bye, Fitzhugh. I fear for you now with her loose, but I have no say in the matter. Now—”
“No, you have no say.”
“Thank you for helping me with my things, Finkel-stein.” Stel took both their hands, then the hands of each of the others, for they all held them out mechanically.
Taglio said, “I am sorry. I have remembered now. I am a woman.”
“Oh. I should have known. Well, Tag the wag, keep yourself far from the stew, lest McCarty’s next conquest be you.”
“Me? What have I done? I never—”
“No, you never. I am sorry. Forget it.”
Fitzhugh came forward and embraced Stel, saying, “May your Aven go with you and lead you to a better place than this.”
“May Aven stay with you and lift you above the skies of Ozar,” he returned. Then he walked westward without looking back until he was high above, and the house of Ozar looked like the print of a gigantic, broken-winged bird, plowed into the hillside. Only one figure, like a speck, still stood by the terminal. Then another came. That must be McCarty, Stel thought, then looked ahead again, through the yellow-leaved aspens and the dark-green pine.
11
As Stel left the cluster of old ones, Ahroe, far to the north and east, lay in a log house of the western Shumai. She was in pain. Bending over her, a heavy blond woman, with a downturned mouth and crow’s feet by her eyes, said, “All right now, everything is fine. Now, push. When the tightening comes, push against it.”