The Vistor Page 13

  Taking a last look around and being careful not to leave either footprints or a trail of ash, he found his way back to the monster-head door, and from that to the pivoting stone, the stairs, and eventually his rooms, where he pocketed several items from a hidden closet before going down to ground level and out into the streets.

  He was followed, as he often was, by one of the bishop's henchmen as he wandered aimlessly, having tea in this place and a sandwich in that, looking at shoes in that shop and then another, which finally convinced, the henchman, who was tired of blinking against the wind driven dust, that the doctor was up to nothing in particular. When the henchman departed, the doctor purposefully made his way along to a ragged bit of wasteland beside the railroad where a few hardy trees were bent almost double by the wind and a good many tufts of dried grass whipped the air. A drift of white wildflower bloomed under the eaves of one of the blind-walled sheds that hid the place from view on all sides. This was the closest bit of "natural" land the doctor knew of, and "natural" land was necessary to his purpose.

  From one capacious pocket he took a trowel and used it to dig first a piece of tufty sod and then a narrow but deep hole into which he put the linen-wrapped packet, replacing soil and sod above it and treading it firmly into place. In another pocket, he found a tiny book with almost minuscule print, and from that he read a prayer for the repose of the soul of the child whom he had last seen at play upon the roof garden in company with other children.

  Finally, the doctor took a vial of water from his other trouser pocket, uncorked it, and poured the contents onto the tiny grave. The water came from a spring that flowed beyond the ramparts of Bastion near the cavern home of a certain seeress. It was said, not by the seeress, that the water was blessed by someone called Wogalkish, and was therefore a specific against evil. As the water sank into the ground, a faint mist rose from the tiny grave, along with a smell of flowers.

  At this sign, which somewhat surprised him, he returned to the book, flipped a few pages and read, "By Shadua of the Shroud, Rankivian of the Spirits, and Yun of the Shadow, to whose care I commit her, may she whose remains lie here, whether living or dead, come to peace; may her fetters be loosed; may her spirit be freed."

  He waited. The mist rose before him, to the level of his eyes, then whirled into a tiny, virtually invisible vortex and vanished. Taking a deep breath, he put the odds and ends back into his pockets and returned to the Fortress, where he saw the man who had followed him among a group of stand-abouts at the door. The doctor hailed him by name and engaged him in an unnecessary conversation about shoes.

  "So you didn't buy any?" said the henchman.

  "No," said the doctor in a petulant tone. "I'm going to have a pair made to order. I'm tired of these bunions springing up!"

  The follower subsequently reported to the Over Colonel Bishop that the doctor had looked for new shoes because he had bunions, and that was the end of the event so far as the doctor and the bishop were concerned.

  It was not the end of the consequences in another quarter, however. The city of Hold, like most of Bastion, lay atop a limestone deposit riddled with caverns, tunnels, caves, crevasses, pools, and rivers. Most of these holes were black and empty; some were tenanted only by blind fish and the skeletons of small creatures who had gone too far from the light. Others, however, were occupied, as was true of a very large cavern that lay deeply and vertically below Hold. This cavern was full of a nameless slime, an abhorrent ropiness, a stench of the pit and a darkness unutterable.

  The moment that Doctor Jens Ladislav, standing by the railroad, called upon Shadua, Rankivian, and Yun, the inhabitant of that cavern started awake with a horrid yowling as though stung by some creature even more venomous than itself.

  "Gnang?" the being roared, raising its jointless and terrible arms in a gesture of fury.

  A servitor writhed to the door of the chamber, his usual method of locomotion when not dressed to confuse the Spared.

  "The girl child," screamed the vast inhabitant. "Go look at her."

  The servitor turned wordlessly and went up, once out of earshot engaging in a litany of annoyances.

  "Gnash'm. Gnash and smash'm. Gnang go here. Gnang go there. Check this. See that. Serve that one the good wine, serve that one the shit from the pit. Keep this one waiting, let that one in. Cut her here. Penetrate her there. Let the Fell out of the book and step aside. Lick her blood, but don't get in the way of the Fell! All the time, do this, do that. And when's time for Gnang to have any? Ah?"

  The servitor went almost to the surface, to an area of cut stone and straight corridors, down one of which it slithered until it came to a locked room in which a trio of candles gave a pallid light. There on a narrow bed lay the body of a child, one arm ending in a bandaged stump. The servitor stayed at the barred door for some moments, listening for breath, then opened the door and went to the bed, where it set its teeth into the little body and shook it, as a terrier might shake a rat. When there was no response, the creature turned back the way it had come.

  When it arrived in the dark chamber, the ropiness seethed. "So?"

  "Dead," said the servitor in its natural voice, which held neither concern nor pity.

  "How?" came the scream, as though from a thousand throats.

  The servitor had its tentacles over its sound receptors, and stayed so crouched until the echoes faded.

  The servitor cringed. "There's a dreadful wind on the surface today. Maybe it blew away the ashes."

  "No wind should have blown the ashes! No one should have touched the brazier in which the spell was set! The parchments have always instructed him to put it in a protected place and leave it where it was! You were there? Was it in the wind?"

  "Not then," said the servitor. "Maybe now."

  "He was told not to disturb it! So long as it sat there, untouched, we would have owned the child! Amused ourselves with the child! Turned the child into bait to catch others!"

  Gnang shrugged, bending swiftly sideways to avoid a blow that came from a remote part of the inhabitant. "Maybe someone came upon it and decided to neaten up," Gnang offered.

  "I'll neaten someone," said the being, rearing long extrusions of foul flesh up from the ooze in which it delighted. "Oh, I'll neaten someone."

  16

  faience: the whipping boy

  It was a rule of the Division of Education, that every citizen must be taught the essentials of Sparedness by a licensed teacher, assisted by a classroom monitor. A classroom had been set up in the Faience for the children of the workers, and a span before class was to begin, Rashel told Dismé that since she was not doing anything useful, she would take the job of monitor.

  "Of course," said Dismé, as though it didn't matter. She was not displeased by the idea. The morning and evening journeys to and from the classroom would prove enjoyable: the smell of the kitchen herb garden; the hustle and jostle of squirrels in the firs; the banter of magpies; the sarcastic converse of crows; the slithery crunch of wheels on the gravel drive; the jingle of harness in the porte cochère of the Faience...

  And at the end, the sound of Michael Pigeon's voice raised in song as he led the horses to the paddock for the day, a sound that Dismé savored. He had a high, tenor voice that soared and dipped, like the flight of a hawk, or an eagle. Looking at him, listening to him sing, and thinking about him—rather as she might think about the squirrels—was one of her daily enjoyments, so well savored that she often returned to the house smiling.

  "Are you happy here?" lonely Gayla asked in wonderment.

  "As happy as one can be..." said Dismé.

  "...who has to live with Rashel," laughed Gayla.

  "There is that," Dismé acknowledged, flushing.

  "Don't you long for a sweetheart?"

  "I try not to think about things like that, Aunt Gayla."

  "I can't understand why you stayed once you were grown!"

  Dismé shook her head. "You were here, Gayla. And I had met Arnole, and having Arn
ole's friendship was like having Father back again. With him in the house, I felt safe. I thought of him and you as my only real family."

  "Well then, the three of us should have left. Ayward and Rashel should have been a family on their own."

  Should have been, perhaps, but family was not what Rashel had in mind when she had wanted Ayward for herself. She had enjoyed getting him, but even that was only preliminary to uglier pleasures that followed.

  "Take Ayward his tea, won't you Dismé? He's all alone in the study." This in Apocanew, the year of the marriage.

  "Of course, Rashel."

  The voice without emotion. The tea carried into the study, the door pushed widely open. The cup and pot placed on the desk without comment, followed by an immediate departure, the door closed as she left. Dismé had not forgotten what had happened to her childhood treasures. From the moment of her return from Aunt Genna's, she gave no sign that she treasured Ayward. Gradually, the intention-not-to-show became an inclination-not-to-feel, until one morning, some months after the wedding, she wakened to the fact that the behavior was the reality. The real Ayward she had come to know in the household was not the dream Ayward she had lost and grieved over, and the dissonance between the two had become too obvious for her to ignore.

  That morning she hummed as she brushed her hair. The next days she sang to herself. One night at the dinner table, however, Dismé noticed Rashel's eyes fixed speculatively first on Ayward, then on herself, back and forth, like a spider weaving a web, and on Rashel's face an unconscious expression of frustration.

  "Arnole," she whispered to him later. "Did you notice Rashel watching me at dinner tonight?"

  "Of course I noticed," he said mockingly. "What can you be thinking of? You've recently shown signs of happiness. Whipping boys are not supposed to be joyous, or even tranquil. They're supposed to cringe."

  "Ah," she murmured, after a moment's thought. "Of course."

  For a while, she had forgotten to behave in accordance with Rashel's script. Indifference toward Ayward was a strategic error. If Rashel could no longer gloat over the spoils of her victory, why keep the spoils lying about?

  Thereafter, Dismé fashioned a fraudulent affection and rebuilt its façade, making sure that Rashel both heard and saw each act of sham solicitude. Arnole took note that Ayward had not detected either the alienation or the falsely affectionate return. The fakery was good enough. Rashel went back to gloating, and Dismé comforted herself with the hope that Rashel might somehow find some other whipping boy. When that happened, Dismé would think about having a life of her own.

  17

  the advent of tamlar

  On a particularly sunny day, four students took their lunches onto the lawn near the Faience where, as classroom monitor, Dismé accompanied them, enjoying the warmth of the autumn sun and the feel of the grass as much as did the four: Jem and Sanly, one pretty but rather dim, the other plainer but brighter; Horcus and Gustaf, one stout, pubescent, and jeering, the other curly-haired and gentle, Dismé's favorite.

  As they finished their food, Gustaf looked at the shadows of the nearest trees, judged it to be still very noonish, and, hoping to forestall immediate return to the classroom, said, "Tell us a story, Monitor Dismé."

  "What story would you like?"

  "About the Trek! That's exciting," said Horcus. "When the men had to ride, and fight, and kill monsters..."

  "And sit quiet for long years here and there growing corn," said Sanly. "Besides, we know the Trek story backwards and forwards."

  Dismé offered, "I can tell you about how Hal P'Jardas discovered the woman of fire, how's that?" It was a story Arnole had been fond of, and one the children were not likely to have heard.

  "When the darkness ended and the Spared had been a century in the Trek, they had become far too many to live off the country they traveled through. So, the many little tribes and families split up into three main bands named after commands in the old hymn: the Turnaways, the Come Adores, and the Praisers, but even when they had to stay in one place, to grow and harvest food, whether for a season or for years, the leaders and the scouts went on looking for a better place.

  "They wanted a land that was impregnable, a place where they could rediscover The Art without the world knowing it, for the un-Spared laughed at the Spared for trying to recover what had been lost.

  "One day, a scout named Hal P'Jardas was traveling deep among the canyons outside our mountains, and he came over a narrow, hidden pass and saw three wide valleys spread out like leaves of clover. He came down from the pass and went from valley to valley, fishing the streams and testing the soil, and where the three valleys ran into one another, where Hold is now, he camped near a mound covered with strangely twisted lava pillars, like glass, he said, with lights inside them. He found a fumarole nearby that served him for a campfire, and a warm pond where he could wash himself. He roasted a snared rabbit over the fumarole, and finally settled himself to sleep.

  "Deep in the night, he wakened to a cracking sound and a change in the smell of the air. His eyes slitted open in time to see a line of fire come out of the fumarole, a fiery candle that stood taller than a tall man, wavering in the light wind, then broadening to take the form of a woman. She was cloaked in black so that only her shape could be seen against the predawn sky, her body visible only when the cinereous robes parted momentarily to show a blazing hand, the fiery curve of a cheek or thigh, a set of burning lips and a tongue of white flame.

  " 'Why are you here,' she asked him in a voice like hissing lava, and he trembled, for in all his years on the Trek, he had seen nothing like this.

  " 'Looking for a place for my people,' he said. 'A place for them to settle.'

  " 'And does this place suit you?' the fiery woman asked.

  "He thought he should say no, it didn't, he was leaving in the morning, but what came from his mouth was the truth. 'Yes. It is a good place. My people will like it.'

  " 'And your people are called?' she asked.

  " 'We are the Praise Trek-band of the Spared Ones.'

  "She laughed, then, the kind of laughter a volcano might utter while it was resting."

  Horcus interrupted her. "Miss Dismé, how do you know this?"

  "P'Jardas wrote it all down!"

  "Including the bit about the cinereous robes and the volcanic laughter?" asked Gustaf, his eyes wide.

  "I'm making it vivid for you."

  "So it's not all true?"

  "It is all true," she said, annoyed. "I'm merely giving you the feel of it. One can tell from what Hal P'Jardas wrote how the woman of fire behaved, and what Hal P'Jardas wrote is in the archives in the Fortress of Hold and the person who told me the story memorized it directly from that document."

  When Arnole had told her this story, Dismé had had similar doubts. "You've read them, Arnole? How did you get to read them?"

  He had shaken his head at her. "Dismé, I was sixteen when the Spared took me for a slave, fifty years ago. After they spent a year re-educating me, they put me to working a night shift in the Fortress. Nobody notices a man with a mop, and I spent more time reading the old files than cleaning the floors."

  Dismé went on, "Then the fiery woman said: 'If they are the Spared Ones, then I will spare them yet a while, explorer. Tell them, however, that if they come here, in time they will be charged a fee for the use of these lands, for this is a place dedicated to Elnith who was, Lady of the Silences who is yet to come.'"

  "That's one of the Council of Guardians!" cried Jem.

  Dismé nodded. "She said, 'I am her friend, her forerunner, her prophetess, if you like. Have you heard of Tamlar of the Flames?'

  "Hal shook his head, too full of fear to speak, and she said, 'Elnith sleeps in this land, and it is hers, not mine, though we cohabit it in part. In time to come, Elnith will wake and set her sign on your people. Be sure to tell your masters, so they will know all about it.'

  "And she moved her hand in the air, leaving a glowing line that looped upon
itself, and this sign hung there even while the ashen robes closed around the radiant body and dropped back into the fumarole. That was the last he saw of Tamlar."

  "Tamlar is one of the Guardians," said Sanly. "There's Tamlar of the Flames and Bertral of the Book and Camwar of the Cask..."

  "What do we need guardians for when we got angels?" demanded Horcus, a bit truculently.

  Dismé gave a careful reply. "The Dicta tell us to believe in the Rebel Angels, Horcus, but they don't name them or describe them. For all we know, the Rebel Angels and the Guardians are the same creatures under different names."

  "Go on with the story, Miss Dismé," Gustaf said.

  "When Hal returned to the Trekkers and announced his find, the Spared gathered together from all over the land and spent the last year of their great trek clambering their way over the mountains into this land of Bastion. When the Spared reached the center of Bastion, they found a mound topped by a number of curiously shaped lava pillars. Nearby was a dead fumarole and a recently dried-up pond, but no one connected this place with the place P'Jardas had spoken of..." Perhaps, thought Dismé, because they had not believed the story to begin with. "...and when P'Jardas next saw the place, the curving stones had been removed, and the foundations of the Fortress were already encircling the mound..."

  Dismé reached for her shoes.

  "...so the mound where Hal P'Jardas camped is still there, in the cellars of the Fortress itself and that's how the story ends," Dismé glanced at the sky. "Look. The sun's moved past lunchtime. We need to get back to the classroom."

  In the Time of Desperation, there had been darkness for a very long time and what remained of humanity had lost track of time. When the darkness lifted, someone had figured out when midsummer was and had counted days until the next midsummer to establish the solar year as lasting four hundred days. This neatly divisible annum was divided into four seasons—though there was much less difference among them than formerly—each season made up of ten spans of ten days each, yielding such calendar nomenclature as "Spring-span ten, fourday," or "Winter-span three, nineday."