by Mick Farren
The Texts of Festival
Mick Farren
I
The marshland had run for a day’s walk. A day had passed since he had come down from the hill country. Three days of slipping through his home hill land, skirting the inhabited valleys, avoiding the grim herders who clawed a living from the corroded hills and grew savage in their isolation. And then a cold, dirty day trudging through the lowland swamp, picking a way on the broken paved surface where swamp rats squalled and slid away as he approached.
Every now and then he would stumble as he missed the paved surface and his foot would sink into soft slime. Oily water would pour over the top of his father’s high boots. Cursing, he would drag his leg out of the slime and poke around with his toe to find where the paving started again. Sometimes it would prove to be a broad crack in the surface and then it would be necessary to wade waist-deep in the slime until he had regained the ancient stone pavement which, although befouled, was at least solid. Crossing them was also complicated by the unknown depth of these cracks and by the need to draw his knife and the family piece from his belt and hold them safe from the poisonous waters.
The sun set and a close blanket of mist, high as a man’s hip, lay on the surface of the swamp. Mosquitoes danced on the damp air, flitting their elaborate rituals in and out of the shadows cast by the mesa-like ruins.
The darkness was starting to close in and still he had gained no sight of the legendary raised highway that ran straight to Festival.
The rats grew bold and brambles caught at his legs. He gave thanks to the women of his village who had presented him with his leather trousers at the spring laying on. The token that had paid tribute to his separate, restless ego was now mud-spattered. A long way from their previous splendour. his trousers were at last proving useful.
A rising moon, bloated and orange, gave him a minimal light by which to find his footsteps, but at the same time distracted him with a multitude of black shadows and glinting highlights that hinted at an undefined menace.
A rat darted behind the rotting teeth of a corroded iron wagon frame. The man started, drew his gun and then froze with shame as the rat vanished, cleaving a short-lived V in black water. He had been entrusted with the piece of his house. The token of his father’s power in the tribe had been given to arm him on his absurd quest. Now he was waving it around like a spooked fool, about to waste one of the twenty man-killing shells on a rat. He was yielding to the dark and to’ paranoia. He put his hand on the pouch around his neck but then withdrew it. Although he was frightened, although he was lost in the black night of the swamps of ’Ndunn, it was not a crisis that would merit the use of either ammunition or the crystals. He must face his fear alone. He must weather a hard night in this western swamp; it was the path to Festival and its ancient skills. He shivered at the damp; holstered his gun; pulled his cloak closer round his shoulders but the coarse wool, with its mends and patches, held the water and afforded him little warmth as he felt for the next step on the pavement.
All night he trudged on. Repeatedly losing his footing; skirting the worst fissures until he could sidetrack no longer and was forced to ford the intervening water. As dawn began to cut through the mist on the swamp he paused to rest, sitting hunched on a moss-covered square of masonry.
The clearing of the mist gradually revealed a dark line almost at the horizon. It ran across the marsh, almost parallel to the direction the man imagined he had taken in the darkness. Its apparent straightness seemed to indicate that it was fashioned by men, some artifact of the old time city. It was by no means the broad pillared highway of legend. It was, as far as he could see, merely a straight, raised embankment. Even if it was not the true road, it would make easier going than the marsh wading of the previous day.
With renewed hope he made his way painfully to the distant ridge. By the time he reached the roadway—and a roadway it proved to be as he came nearer—the sun was high and the swamp water reflected it like a pitted, dirty mirror. The drying mud irritated his skin and ran in dirty rivulets as he sweated.
Sick and exhausted he clawed through the brambles that clung thickly to the side of the banking.
The top of the bank proved to be a broad paved road, straight and smooth, although heavily overgrown with moss and nettles. Its length was here and there dotted with the rusting hulks of oldtime iron wagons.
Having at last raised himself above the level of the poisonous swamp, the man finally felt safe to rest. He stripped off his cloak and jacket and bundled them into a pillow, then removed his belt with its gun and knife, laid it close to his right hand and settled down to sleep.
* * *
It was afternoon before Jo-Jo rested. The pursuit must have been called off long before dawn and it was not fear that had kept him walking; it was the shame of the loser tag that forced him to place distance between himself and Festival.
It had looked like an open and shut mugging when he had approached the fat crystal dealer on the outside of Shacktown, but as he had pulled his knife six retainers had appeared out of nowhere and started him running. He had kept going all night, fearing that they might have rented mounts. A lot of merchants were really heavy on the idea of bringing in muggers. Thieves these days were treated a whole lot different from the heroes of the texts.
It wasn’t as though he was even a full-time thief. He’d only laid for the fat dealer in order to get a stake. Everyone who went freewheeling got down on their luck. There were countless texts on that very situation. What really made him keep on walking, stuck on a nowhere road in the ’Ndunn marshes, was the inescapable fact that by blowing the mugging he had once again strengthened the image of Jo-Jo the loser.
Finally physical tiredness overcame his self-reproach and he sank down on a rusty, moss-covered wheel, a discarded leftover from the oldtime autos. He pulled out his pipe and reached inside his cotton shirt, itself a relic of the great times, for his battered weed pouch. He had no food but he could at least smoke, although even that would only last for two or three pipes.
When the pipe was finished, he tapped out the ash on the stones at his feet. He felt a good deal more relaxed although, he had to admit, he was in a pretty sound mess. He decided he might as well keep moving while the sun was high. It would be unwise to return to Festival, especially if he were broke, so his best bet was to press on and see where the marsh road led. Maybe he would find some village where he could put himself back together. In any case the marsh was beginning to trip his fears most bitterly and he would sooner be through it. Out of reach of its stench and the black ruins that squatted in the poisoned waters.
He stood up, stretched and started walking slowly down the raised highway. The sun was hot on the back of his neck, his stomach reminded him that he was hungry and he began to curse his luck again. The words of a text, half-remembered from childhood, came strongly to his mind.
‘If it wasn’t for bad luck
I wouldn’t have no luck at all.’
As a child in the village he had been quick and popular. He and the other children had sat round the ancient circuits and listened to the texts over and over until they could recite them.
‘Listen and learn,’ his father had said, ‘for the circuits will die and we will have to remember.’
Jo-Jo had been quick to learn, quicker than the other village kids. His father had been pleased. He had smoked his pipe and boasted how his son would some day be a mighty man.
Maybe it had’ been that same quickness that had caused him to break out of the village when the great hunger had come. He had studied the texts.
‘Run, run, run’ they urged him.
And he had run, leaving his neighbours to die by inches, fighting to cultivate their barren hillside.<
br />
By degrees he had run to Festival. Caught and intoxicated by its swarming humanity he had run with the crowd, hustling, gambling, stealing, until he was chased back to the road again, still running.
But running was a state of mind by mid-afternoon; the best he could manage physically was a steady trudge. Stones had ripped his canvas boots and it was beginning to seem as though he had walked forever when he first saw the man.
The man lay in the road. He wore, the coarse homespun shirt and leather trousers that were the standard dress of the young stud from the hills, and the greasy plaits and coloured headband marked him as fresh out of one of the villages that huddled in the valleys of the bare downs to the south.
At first Jo-Jo thought he was dead but, as he cautiously approached, the clothes bunched into a pillow and the gun belt within reach of an outstretched hand all left him in no doubt that the man was merely sleeping. When he saw the gun, his mind reeled. A piece. “With a piece of his own he could go back to Festival walking like a man.
Jo-Jo dropped into a crouch and drew his knife. Silently he stalked the sleeping man. A rube fresh out of the hills, probably carrying the family gun with hillbilly pride. This country boy could be exactly what he needed for his new start. Maybe his losing streak was over.
Suddenly, when Jo-Jo was not three paces from the man, a bird, alarmed at his approach, flapped croaking out of the brambles.
The man woke and reached for his gun at the sight of the gaunt figure with the long knife. Jo-Jo froze in horror as the big barrel swung up.
The hammer came back as he squeezed the trigger. Squeeze, don’t snatch at it, his father had told him.
The hammer snapped home with a click. The gun hadn’t fired.
Jo-Jo laughed. A rube with his treasured family pistol and hundred-year-old ammunition. His shells had probably been useless for thirty years.
Jo-Jo laughed again and slashed at the man’s throat.
Too shocked even to be afraid, the man fell back and died.
II
Old Johanna, wife of Aaron the gunmaker, sat and rocked in the doorway of her tent. A stylised pistol once painted on the ancient canvas had been almost bleached to nothing by the sun and obscured by generations of mismatched patching. She didn’t worry that the canvas would soon decay altogether. By then Aaron would have been able to extend the wooden-built forge to include their living quarters.
She was content and life treated her kindly in her old age. The slightly acrid smell of molten metal reached her as her eldest, Vernon, moulded bullets on the small furnace in the back of the tent, and flies buzzed lazily in the sunlight around the garbage heap to the side of the tent.
The great swirling texts had little meaning for her life now. It was almost like when she was a child. The small texts held their prime meaning for the very young and very old. The favourite had become the one she now hummed, drawing deeply on her pipe:
‘Throw my troubles out the door
I don’t need them anymore.’
It was like being a child again, only this time she did not have the years of fear to follow. It had taken years for her to dare even to recall the terror and even now she avoided it.
It was pleasant to recall her girlhood: seeking wild weed and herbs that her mother sold to travellers; listening to her mother telling the cards and reading stars for dealers and stagelords who came to their cottage with their fine clothes and tall horses; and the winter nights when laughing strangers would produce silver flasks of spirit from their fur cloaks and sport with her mother while she lay in a cot tucked up in skins and blankets. It was pleasant, too, to remember how, as a mature woman, she had taken Aaron as a husband and the pride with which she had taken charge of his trading. Didn’t all the neighbours say that although Aaron was a master gunmaker, it was old Johanna who took care of business?
It was the years in between that she tried never to let pass through her mind. After years of security, the pain was still to strong for her to be able to cope with the memory of the day when the Christies had broken into her mother’s tiny home.
She herself, at the time a young girl, had heard the rumours of how Peter the Blessed had raised his legion of Christ and roamed the country, destroying outlying homesteads and burning those who told the cards and made ceremony at the trees.
Of course, they had never thought it could happen to them. They had believed the Christie fanaticism would pass like the other fads. They had gone on believing it until the day that the Christies came.
She had been sitting in front of the cottage when they had stormed up the lane. The memory was so clear and vivid: the sunlight, the dusty earth in front of the cottage where the goat was tethered and the chickens scratched. Then suddenly they had flooded the lane, dozens of them in their dirty white robes, screaming their cursed text.
Howling ‘All you need is love’, they had kicked her aside and dragged her mother out of the cottage.
Johanna shuddered. It was too late now to stop the memory; she should never have started such thoughts. It flooded back, how they had held her and smashed down the cottage to make fuel for their awful bonfire. How they had kindled the heaped, broken timbers and bundles of thatch, bound. her and her mother, dragged her mother to the flames while she was forced to watch and then flogged her until her mother’s screams had completely ceased. Above all she remembered the staring eyes and sweating faces that had stood round her in the dust after it was over and the hoarse voice that told her that Christ loved her. She remembered their leaving and the night of weeping in the ashes.
Then had come the painful journey into Festival to beg and steal and later to become a listless whore on the Drag. A time when the only punctuation had been a fierce joy at the news that Joe Starkweather had led his men out of the western commune and massacred the Christies in the October battle.
She finally met Aaron though and loved him. They had brought up their children in the gunmaker’s trade; the giving had been good and the dark years had been put behind.
There were the times, however, when remembering could not be totally avoided.
Old Johanna’s painful reverie was stopped as she noticed the lengthening shadows and she rose to busy herself inside the tent. Aaron would soon return hungry from the metal dealers.
As she replaced her pipe in the pouch on her belt, a small furtive man hurried out of the shadows. He wore a dirty, mud-caked cloak many sizes too large and the bushy red hair that framed his rodent face was matted with dust. She backed towards the tent door, ready to call for Vernon.
Jo-Jo stared at the old woman. She looked spooked by him; maybe he looked more beat up than he imagined. He came quickly to the point.
“Ave any filled thirty-eights?’
Although when on his own, or talking with young women, he used the purer hill dialect of his own village, he now adopted the rough tongue of common Festival to bargain with this stout matron. The woman stopped edging towards the tent door and eyed him sharply.
‘Filled thirty-eights? You got trades?’
‘I got empties fo’ trades.’
The woman eyed him suspiciously. Ammunition was the high currency of Festival. By his appearance Johanna hardly expected him to have either bar room or dealer script, let alone real shells.
‘How many empties?’
‘Twenty.’
Johanna thought quickly. The man appeared to have no place holding even dead shells: his canvas leggings indicated that he didn’t have the price of a pair of boots. He was probably a mugger or heistman. She saw the chance of a quick profit.
‘Six filled fo’ twenty empty.’
‘You rip me off, ol’ woman, I could get twelve for twenty in tomorra’s market.’
‘Get to market then.’
Johanna made as if to go into the tent. Jo-Jo spoke quickly.
‘Wait, I need filled shells tonight. Maybe I take ten.’
Johanna stopped and looked him up and down.
‘Eight.’
&nb
sp; Jo-Jo hesitated; perhaps he could get nine. Johanna began to look impatient. Jo-Jo changed his mind; eight was better than nothing.
‘Done.’
Johanna leaned into the tent and shouted:
‘Vernon! Bring out eight filled thirty-eights.’ She turned to Jo-Jo. ‘You got the empties?’
Jo-Jo handed over the twenty dead shells. Almost immediately a boy—he judged him to be about fifteen—emerged from the tent and gave his mother a handful of bullets. Johanna counted them into Jo-Jo’s hand.
‘You sure these’re good?’
Jo-Jo shot the old woman a suspicious glance as he thumbed the shells into his belt. The woman glared at him.
‘My husband’s a master gunsmith, we don’t rip off honest folk.’
‘Okay, okay, I just asked.’
Jo-Jo hurried off. Johanna ducked inside the tent and rubbed her hands on her homespun smock. The evening meal would be late but she couldn’t have turned down that end-of-the-day profit.
* * *
Jo-Jo hurried towards the Drag. It was almost dark, and braziers and rubbish fires blazed every four or five paces. The avenues between the squat tents and single-storey wooden shacks were illuminated by their dull glow and the acrid smoke that drifted and billowed across his path.
He was some way from the Drag and he decided to take a chance on cutting through the Merchants’ Quarter.
In front of a lavish tent of matched hides, supported by stout carved and polished poles, a chained dog barked and snarled at him. Two armed retainers emerged from the tent and Jo-Jo slid into the shadows and crouched very still. Word of his flight might have spread and he could not afford to get careless. After peering into the smoky gloom for a while, one of the retainers cursed the dog and then went back inside. Jo-Jo scuttled away.
The torches that lined the Drag were almost welcoming. He began to walk straighter, conscious of the gun on his hip and secure in the familiar dim lights that shone out of the doorways and across the porches of the big, wooden pleasure houses that lined the dirty, crowded streets. The sound of music and raucous laughter reassured him as he avoided the drunks and beggars who thronged the steps to the gambling joints and whore houses. There in Festival’s red-light district he was safe, unless the lord’s men should mount a full-scale raid and that seldom if ever happened.
