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CHAPTER 18

"I am always with them," he had explained to Akiva. But the images were transparent, easy to ignore, and their sound for the most part a hum like the drone of insects.

He enjoyed the feeling of being always at the doors of elsewhere. With a little concentration, he could leave this dying camp, the ragged youngsters slowly fishing, the hopeless labor at communal traps, the hills where men and women dragged themselves along the trails gleaning roots and worms and berries, and he could follow the tens and scores sent out in boats. He felt himself among them, that the eye-in-hand fixed to the spirit doll he gave each departing group was he, sitting in the bottom of the boat and singing, rowing on short rations, poring over the brave undetailed maps and drifting in ignorant optimism toward calamity.

Because many of them died. Crews rowed strong and singing over waterfalls they heard too late, and twice he leapt to his feet when he saw the rocks heave up and heard the screams. The first time three Itscriyite boys restrained him at their own peril. The second time Akiva held him and he shuddered like a hungry baby. While Akiva sang the funeral chant, Tiyar heard himself weeping, "My children, my children."

This time he was alone. He looked into his cup and saw the makeshift tent. Attracted by its order, he listened. It was the peace of despair, he knew, but in the early sunlight, with the straw doll gently swinging, tapping on the rushes they had bound and propped around the boat against whose other side the gentle waves were slapping, the sleepers mumbling in their rest, he savored their tranquility.

This group had landed near a town of occasional temple-goers, vaguely loyal to Pahid, who would not trade openly with them. Too sick and hungry to go farther, they remained, and every now and then a furtive act of charity kindled false hope like a grass fire that died fast, leaving them weaker than before. Once an Itscriyite left alone in the tent had turned to the spirit doll and cursed him from the back of her throat, wishing his entrails pulled out and trodden for having sent them to this place, or for seeing their misery, or for having made her live again and die. He kept listening, however, and one morning while he half-led, half-forced a pack of ravenous teenagers through their fighting drill he heard beneath the threats and yells and punches her whispered "Death, I forgive you." The whisper vanished, the last furl of a hem as the wearer shuts the door. He saw her often in memory as he saw everything these days, no image ever gone completely but all crammed into his view, jostling for attention like the hundred thousand incarnations of his constant thought that if things went on much longer they must starve. Already the raiding parties he pretended not to know about were their biggest source of sustenance.

The hunger itself was just another kind of training, helpful even, because he felt that he knew death now. Before when he spoke of killing people it was like sending them to another country, but now the hard emptiness of insides closing on nothing echoed in sympathy with the silent and still. The weakness in his stomach felt like remorse. Sometimes it caught him alone and made him cry to think of the people, now his, he could not save--then it deserted him and left him kneeling, wet-eyed, feeling nothing. He had been afraid his emotions were dead but it seemed he had only set them free. They wandered oblivious to his thoughts. While his mind chased round and round between banditry and starvation, emotions came and harried them and went as unpredictably as the great marsh cranes.

The spirit doll swung and tapped. Other, happier groups had begun to stir and a few ghostly voices to which he paid no attention were saying good morning. In this faraway tent the people were asleep. They lay on their backs, slightly swollen bellies in the air, all together in the middle of the tent away from the morning dew that ringed them.

He heard the footsteps and saw a man in the leather tunic of Pahid's army, slit across the back because it was too small for him, blackened over the chest with blood, probably taken from a corpse. The intruder grabbed the doll.

The creases in the man's face were full of dirt. Old sores showed where the dirt had worked beneath the skin. The whites of his eyes were yellow, the centers faded. He tossed the doll on the floor. Tiyar's followers woke. They rose slowly like stiffening autumn grasses and soon fell dead.

Another man entered. The two gathered all the cloth and pottery and the clever little carved utensils and played tug-of-war with the fishnet until it snapped. Tiyar smiled angrily. They would find no metal implements, at least, because this group had set off before Berthe's ore-smelting operation got underway. Perhaps they would kill themselves fooling with the pouch of poison barbs. He hoped so. One opened the pouch, but then a hand grabbed the spirit doll and he came face to face with a thirteen-year-old girl.

He knew her. She was one of the children who came from the Lir with Akiva after the first bombing left her orphaned, a clever girl who liked to tag along after Clark and ask questions. About a week before Pahid came, when they were eating well, she had run to Clark carrying a rag bright with her first menstrual blood and he congratulated her with a kiss after the manner of his planet. Clark ought to be home raising children, Tiyar thought with a sudden inexplicable sense of--what was it? quick now!--of envy. He shrugged. On the bridge at Ebur, threatening to kill Clark with his Puro, Tiyar had hated him as he had not thought he could hate anymore after Greyesar's training, hated him like a boy hating the men who have bought his mother, and then in the midst of that hatred, at the moment he fired the shot, patience spread across that empty hatred like a river. It turned his hand so that the shot went past Clark's ear and as he watched it flowing outward he looked down at the real water below them and felt that he could remain there as long as Clark held him, for age upon age. That was when his emotions first broke free.~*~

Now he envied the girl--Morgen, he thought her name was. He envied her name, her child's skeleton beneath the skin, the thick black hair that seemed to grow as she shriveled, the hard nails and freckles and the faithful companionship of hunger.

His muscles went tight when she turned the doll and he saw the men look at her. "Run, run!" he thought, but at the same time a wild laugh was forcing its way upward, the laugh that had taken root when Huey told them the Uchide's star was ascendant. He, Tiyar, would be a king. He need only live long enough to see the Viyatos toppled and the government of Paffir Haretz would pass, through Sevit, to himself. And he would live, he knew, even if all the Daybreakers starved. He would do anything he must to survive; he only wondered occasionally how much that would be.

Even now his kingdom was growing. Itscriyites crossed the Ebur bridge by the dozens every day and they or the peasants they displaced still arrived daily in the marsh camp known as the City of Wisdom, where there was nothing to eat and adolescents sat like old men around the fires chewing bitter leaves and belching philosophically while Akiva and Berthe discoursed.

The girl leaned the doll against something. She took a little bone knife from her bosom and rushed on the closer man. Blood came to the surface of his beard like autumn scarlet to the apical leaves, but he pulled her off, hit her square in the head and dropped her. Tiyar's laugh sank below the surface unuttered. He watched with all his might.

There is no difficulty in raping an unconscious, half-grown girl. The man in the leather tunic had more trouble getting out of his armor. By the time she revived enough to turn her head and look at the spirit doll, he was on top of her with one heavy arm across her shoulders, her legs forced apart. She screamed. The other man chuckled, slapped his friend on the back, walked away and returned, fingers laced over his stomach, belly-laughing while the first sucked the girl's face in parody of a kiss. When the first one rolled off the girl and lay face up, smiling like one who had gulped a long draught, the other took his place. The two men traded jests and encouragements while the girl's screams degenerated into sobs and finally she was silent, staring at Tiyar.

He stared back. Sorrow, the most dangerous of his harridans, now came docile to his side, under control though his thoughts were racing in their track from starvation to banditry and round again, ignoring the new course open to them. Itscriyite bandits were everywhere now, murdering with abandon. By the time he let go his moral finery and started raiding in earnest, the cities and towns would be gone, the countryside denuded. It had come about as Pahid threatened, "They will be tortured by pity."~*~

The child's gaze wavered, she passed out and revived. Still she lay quiet as though taking part in a ritual. It was the initiation into barbarity. As he watched the transparent image, many ghostlier images flickered before him, mental pictures of the thousand rapes that must happen to girls and boys, women and men on this world and elsewhere with or without the cruelty of an unconsentual wedding, before mercy could be born. All this was part of that conception going on in the many wildernesses where civilization had died, and those claw marks in the earth beside her where the fingers raked the dirt were part of the hard labor of its rebirth. "When all suffering was past, they wept ten thousand years for what had gone before," Akiva would say. Envy came again without warning and took him.

Akiva was safe. Most of the time he sat in a muddy cave on the hillside, preparing for death. Nothing could touch him, he wanted nothing and expected nothing. He stood with the women, and men as thin as women, singing in reedy voices to the sun and instead of dragging round and round the same closed track his thoughts lifted and flew the swifter as he body grew light. He reveled in the clear perception of every hair on every blade of grass, while Tiyar watched the signs that must lead to blindness. Tiyar would have liked to revel and sing, as he had done sometimes in Merced as a soldier in the Armies of Daybreak, intoxicated by hope. He would have liked to be in that cave, with the others seeking purity in that cold water, but when he heard the mothers sing their wavering lullabye about the wind loving the grain he shrank back into the tent to think over and over of how there was no way out. Then he would despise his cowardice, jump up and go exhort them, bully them, compel them to train.

The girl scraped the ground again. Her fingers trailed blood in their tracks. Looking at the spirit doll, she muttered, "Oh my brother, thus did his friends see them drag away Verloring." Sorrow and frustration came as they ought to, but the wild laugh was with them and he stopped them just in time. Yes, he was dragged away and held captive, and no child would come set him free. Beyond the girl he saw Pimel at the door of his tent. He beckoned her to enter.

That was a rare honor. She smiled the smile of one about to devour something good, came in crouched and did not straighten up but crept, staring and smiling, to him. Passion had destroyed her other appetites; Pimel never complained of hunger. She wanted sensation more than food or rest. The plague in Itscriye really made little difference in her life since she was born to trouble anyhow; perhaps it made things easier. The burnt crust of a stultifying village crumbled around her and she stepped out happily. He wondered to have found this hot core in the dull mud of peasant life. Even the Itscriyites, stripped of everything, for the most part just flickered briefly with madness, then lay down to rot. How many could burn hard and ceaseless as this woman named Primrose? Yet there could be many in villages not ruined, their bright lusts deliquescing under straw-filled clothes and toil.

Tiyar switched off all the other transparent images except the one and fitted the headset onto Pimel. She sat still while he did it, though he could see the impulse to movement jerk her shoulders now and then, like the fluttering of a tame bird.

"Do you see it?" he asked.

She spoke in short bursts, each one a desert flower. "I see it! Two men on her. And blood. She fought them. She cut them. The worm is inside her. She struggles. Fight! Fight! To one side. To the other side. Bang!" Pimel's fist struck the ground. "She's out."

"Dead?"

"Here. Look." She pulled off the headset and gave it to him. When his fingers curved around the tube he hesitated, as he was always hesitating to do small things these days, and a dawn wind carried a handful of whithered grass into the tent where it laid it at his feet. Hunger had sharpened all their senses; he smelled the Middle Plains, still warm and fertile, in this wind.

He put on the headset. Both men were off the girl. One spoke in a backwoods dialect of which Tiyar caught only the obscenities, and they started fighting casually, mostly slapping, but after a few minutes they just draped arms across each other's shoulders and stood as if hung there, exhausted. He found himself smiling on those two men who had become brothers having eaten and drunk and rutted together. Suffering rarely moved Tiyar, but he found it easy to forgive these two because they were happy.

The men staggered away. The girl was breathing again and she groaned but lay still. Beyond her reach, a baby cried.

Pimel stood up. All her nut and wooden bracelets and necklaces and her tufts of feathers clicked and clattered and rustled into place. She loved ornamentation, and had actually learned a part of the alphabet to get Berthe to give her the pretty cord tied up with twigs and berries. They were working on making her an ironmonger now. She delighted in mixing and pouring the molten stuff but she also liked to drop the ingots into water and see them crack. There was no way to punish her because she loved everything. Scolded, she would try to incite real anger. Deprived of the sorry evening meal she would eat mud or run in the woods until she collapsed. They tried boredom, the only thing she seemed to dislike, but shut in a tent alone she happily tortured herself. She was like he, without ideology, the pitiless, turmoil-seeking heart of revolution.

A bit of dust sparked in the little warmer where he made his tea. Her gaze flew to it. "It's hot! Let me." Already her hands came near it, fingers spread. She liked to play with the controls and the shiny cooking surface as though it were a kitten that burned instead of scratching.

"No," he said, but she paid no attention. Pretending not to notice, he adjusted his headset and switched on the ghost images he had turned off for Pimel. He saw Daybreakers eating breakfast, setting to work, saying morning prayers. One group was receiveing a local herbalist, a rather drunken-looking woman whose red bracelet bore only the single berry for the first letter, Aghata. He wanted to enter one of those pictures, any one except where the girl lay dying. He wanted to speak to them, but none of the eye-in-hands could carry sound--he had known better than to make himself such a god.

Pimel dropped the heater with a sharp laugh and began to lick a new welt on her palm. "What do you see?" she demanded. "Pahid?"

"Not Pahid."

"He's coming again. Isn't he?" She tested the heating surface with her other palm, set the control expertly, emptied a little bag on the cooker, breathed the fumes so deep that she turned purple, and lay back to predict, "Pahid will come and burn us all. None of these tents and houses will be left. There will just be a heap of bones. Then the girl will come back with a dozen babies and found a city here."

"Do you pity her?"

"No! She cut them!"

Tiyar looked straight at Pimel. Their eyes reflected one another, magnifying the intensity of their looks like mirrors. "Yes. How many are never able to cut their enemies," he said.

She giggled and he stopped himself at the verge of asking her to kill Pahid. It would have been foolish to rely on her, and perhaps unnecessary. Pahid was marching through the north country, report had it, burning seed potatoes and persecuting old men and women who spun on wheels. Maybe one of them would do him in. He might return to the Middle Plains for the winter and then come here, but by that time they might all be gone.

He could hear them gathering outside to go through their useless ceremonial marching drill and point-swing-block with the weapons that no one would take into combat but that he had made them whittle out and use to vary the tedious endless practice becasue there was so little to farm, build, spin or eat and he must keep them in condition. Sometimes when he led them kicking, blocking, dodging, rolling up and down the mountain trails he would feel like falling down among the brush and laughing, heady not from his empty stomach but from a sudden apprehension that all this was only meant to give an artificial sense of purpose, to create the illusion that these were his followers when in fact they were here because they had nowhere to go. Those strange emotions would prey on him and he felt giddy from an empty heart.

When he came out of the tent they gathered around him, as eager as if he brought something real. Nowhere to go, he thought with a smile, that's why we continue living. That was why he had watched the girl while they raped her. Nowhere to go.

Fuego was coming up the rocky trail from the swamp, moving slowly and contriving to raise a cloud of dust from the sodden earth. A pot swung from a cord on his shoulder and bumped him every other step. That was their meal. Tiyar might have been annoyed--Fuego ought to balance the weight with another pot and use one of the water yokes they had around, and for that matter all the grass was dead so he need not follow the narrow path--but he watched sympathetically as the cord and the jar, Fea's symbols, bumped Fuego's knee. He ought to have net, knife and fire like Hath, like himself, Tiyar, who was carrying the mesh bag of darts and bone dagger in his belt. He wanted a metal blade, but the iron was too clumsy and they had no copper for bronze.

"Is this Ayekar?" he asked.

"Is it? I'll say it is!" Fuego answered, dropping the pot. "This is the food of the gods." Tiyar's contingent crowded around him and he doled out the dark molasses into their bowls. It was rendered wood, treated according to some process Fuego had learned from his tapes. Everyone got two handfulls a day to eat as a soup or drink in hot water and no one fought over it, not even the toughs he had made into foraging squads to keep them from bullying the rest. They were harrangued so much between Tiyar and Fuego that they could shout the Virtues of the Law in Paffir and Eyimalian, but when someone came back to the camp with a lucky find or a catch, Tiyar could see a squad leader's eyes glitter and hands reach out as though unconscious until the training reasserted itself and the hungry kid would shrink away.

"Look what I've got," Fuego was rattling on, pulling a string of fishhooks from under his jacket. "Barbed. A guy from out on the coast, Myosardia province, showed us how to make these. Fishhooks, spear tips, harrow teeth. We're going to be the trading tinkers. Look, jewelry, too." A little iron aghata berry lay in his palm. "No more carrying around leaves and twigs for the alphabet. They rot, they crumble, they get burnt. These things last for ever. We press them into clay, see, the top and the bottom, and then we have a mold that opens so we can save it. You should see the carding combs Pimel made. She can go in the next boat."

Pimel, still feeling the narcotic she had inhaled in Tiyar's tent, stuck her finger in a cup of hot molasses and licked it down. "Uhm," she murmured. "I'm not going back."

"Not back--" Fuego said. She walked away. The Itscriyites were returning with their bowls. A squad leader, a big-faced lad named Erkomt, pushed to the front and was jostled from behind. He tripped forward and caught himself with his free hand. Tiyar pulled him up by a cord around his neck. "What's this?" Fuego asked.

"I see what it is," Tiyar said. It was a necklace made of human teeth. He cut the cord so they fell on the ground, turned his bone dagger and hit Erkomt on the jaw with the handle. "I wonder how he made holes in the teeth," he remarked to Fuego.

"Needle," Erkomt managed, holding his sore cheek. His eyes were submissive, gaze low.

Tiyar hit him again. "Squad leader. I will yoke you to a plow with oxen until you decide you are a human being."

Someone laughed. Tiyar slapped her, too, and she fell backward. Now Pimel was at his side again, scrabbling in the dirt for the teeth. He gave her a push with his foot. "I said you will behave as a human being."

"This is how we behave," she told him. Breathless, she fondled the teeth, then as he struck her hand to knock them away she caught and stroked his fingers. He pulled back. Fuego was leading the drill.

"What are we to do?" Tiyar shouted. It was that night, it was dark, another day gone and no answer, the dead season that much closer but somehow no nearer to spring.

"Do?" Fuego looked as if the idea of worry had just been born right there. "We're building a city. We're building a new world."

Tiyar grasped him by the shoulders. For a moment everything worked together, he knew the thing to do was to shout, "Man, you are asleep!" He genuinely wanted to do this, but then suddenly he felt calm. He asked quietly, "Can we live on wood molasses all winter?"

"I don't know," Fuego answered.

Tiyar sat down. At a transparent crossroad, transparent figures were riding toward the city. The Eyimalian horses walked slowly; the world was too big for them. They meant Pahid was returning to the Middle Plains before the onset of winter. Tiyar watched the five of them gather in the crossroads and roll their eyes at the three ways in an extremity of hopelessness, seeing no water, no grass, no stable or sign of rest, nor any of the beauties they recalled from Eyimalia, and then the men astride them kicked and they moved on.

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CONTINUE.....................

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