The thousand earths, p.20
The Thousand Earths, page 20
When Mela had last come out this way, this trail, created by people walking north around the town, hadn’t even existed. Now it was crowded by a slow-shuffling queue, flanked by Town Guards. Most of them were on foot, a few pulled carts. Some people were carrying heavy loads, stuff in packs or wrapped up in sheets or blankets. Mela even saw one young woman with an older woman on her back, carried like a child in some game.
Every stumble out of the line caused the Guards to swarm like flies around a wound, Mela observed. Sometimes they helped with repacking, or to get some old person back on their feet. More often they just shoved people back into line, dragging them upright if they had to. Mela saw no sign of any town officials here. And no sign of doctors or nurses.
The Guards were Fence Watch, with their padded armour under their blue-and-red uniforms, but some were regular Guards – and they all wore face masks, as if their fellow citizens were diseased as well as exiled. If one of them was Tabor, she didn’t recognise him. And if her brother recognised her, he didn’t show it, or reveal himself.
A slow anger brewed in Mela. She felt adrenaline surge; she wanted to stride out, to get this part of her strange new journey over with. But the line progressed at the speed of the slowest.
After a time she took turns with Gine and Rafo to carry one of the children.
It took more than an hour before they even reached the Immigration assembly camp.
From the outside, Mela could see how hastily the camp had been constructed. It was just a rough circle of stakes and smartwood panels which looked as if they had been cannibalised from the fence of the city itself – and why not? Soon the city would be gone, and would have no need of its fence.
As they approached, Mela made out more Fence Watch looking down on the shuffling crowd from a crude parapet at the top of the fence.
Gine murmured, ‘All these Guards. I didn’t know we had so many.’
Rafo shrugged. ‘I did hear they were recruiting, a while back.’
A phalanx of Guards blocked the gate itself, all of them calling for Permits to be shown. It was a last check, Mela saw, to make sure nobody with better credentials was swept up here. But if you had no Permit, it was this camp for you, and an unknown, evidently scarcely planned future.
Mela’s own invalidated Permit was still tucked inside her jacket. She felt as though it was red hot, burning her flesh, glowing through her jacket as if everybody could see. I shouldn’t be here.
But she walked into the camp with the family. She had little Hael in her arms just now, the child grimy, exhausted, probably hungry, briefly asleep.
This was her destiny now.
Mela and the family stumbled through the gate.
As she passed through, Mela saw there was a small hut to the right of the entrance. Locked up, some kind of plaque on its side. Rafo pointed this out to Gine.
Otherwise, inside the fence, the camp seemed open. Empty, aside from the people already there. No buildings, no facilities that she could see. Just this swathe of countryside, just earth which had recently been parkland or cropland maybe, now enclosed by the circle of fence.
She looked back. The fence itself had evidently been hastily erected, but had a complex construction, she saw, with an inward tilt and those walkways around the top. And she could see how difficult those inward-sloping faces would be to climb from the inside. Even if you made it up there, maybe by a dangling rope, you would still have to challenge the Guards on the walkways above, glaring down at the camp’s milling inhabitants.
It was clear far more work had gone into the fence than into preparing the camp itself.
And as they walked deeper into the camp, the first thing that struck Mela was the noise. A babble of voices, a clamour that echoed off the wooden panels of the fence: adults shouting, the thin sound of wailing babies, voices raised in anger and pleading, the bellows of the Guards.
And then there was the stink, surprisingly dense and pungent considering the whole area was open to the air. A smell of vomit and sewage and damp mud …
Open to the air. Mela was thinking slowly, so slowly. Open to the air. What happened when it rained? She saw now that the Guard track on the upper fence had canvas sheeting above. Nothing for the people on the ground, save what they had brought for themselves.
Nobody cared.
It hit her all at once. That was what all this signified. Nobody cared what happened to the people still flowing in here, hundreds already at least, young and old, ill or healthy. They were being disposed of, expelled, exiled. And if they died here, they would simply be spared the labour of struggling on to find somewhere else to die, equally unmarked and equally unwanted.
Rafo and Gine didn’t seem to have grasped that fact, not yet.
Once they were through the gate, Gine collected Hael from Mela with a murmured, ‘Thank you’. Rafo put down little Aphe, and the family gathered by the door to the small, closed-up hut to the right. Stood there waiting.
Rafo said, ‘We’ll be fine now. Thanks for all your help.’
Mela stared at them, unsure. Again, instincts to dump them warred with an uneasy feeling that the little family were out of their depth. She sighed. ‘I don’t get it. How are you … fine?’
Rafo pointed at the plaque fixed to the door of the hut. It turned out to be a well-made sign:
OFFICE
OF THE
IMPERIAL REMOVAL AGENT
‘You see?’ Gine said. ‘This is who’s in charge. I’m sure that when this person hears about our lost Permits it will all get sorted out, and we can join the proper caravans.’
A subtle cough. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have a long wait.’ A voice Mela knew.
She turned, startled. ‘Vitae. You’re here!’
The Perseid preacher shrugged. She saw that his green garb was smeared with mud, and the trailing hem stained with something thicker, more pungent. Sewage, perhaps. She tried not to recoil – but if it was sewage she couldn’t smell it over the general stench in the camp.
He said, ‘Of course I’m here. Where else would I be?’
‘But I’m sure you have a Sirius Permit? My father brought it to you at the shelter! You told me so!’
He shrugged. ‘I gave it to somebody more needy. While I am needed here. As you can probably see. Your father, Mela – he’s safely joined an official convoy. I checked it all myself, saw him join. Saw him on the cart!’
‘But why didn’t you go with him? How did you get here?’
‘Oh, I got a ride with a platoon of Guards. All the way here, to where I knew I would be needed.’ He held out his hands. ‘Oh, Mela! It’s good to see you safe too. Well, relatively safe.’
‘And you. And my father – thank you.’ She took his hands – and noticed colourful stripes on the palms, red, orange, green.
When she asked, he just said, ‘Food ration marks. You’ll see. You’ll get one. Now, your friends here, I don’t believe I’ve met—’
Mela introduced them. His smile was like a sunburst, and the family clearly couldn’t help but respond.
Rafo said earnestly, ‘I’m thinking we will get things sorted out in a few days, at worst. As soon as we can speak to this Removal Agent.’
But Vitae said gently, ‘Well, if there is anybody assigned to this office, I’ve seen nothing of them. Not yet.’
Rafo frowned. ‘The Guards, then. Maybe one of their officers, if we can find one we can explain to. Find one who will listen. We shouldn’t be here. It’s just a mix-up in the paperwork.’ He looked up at the lines of Guards on the parapet. He waved, tentatively. None of the Guards reacted, ‘Maybe if I got up there to speak to them – there must be a ladder or a stair—’
‘I wouldn’t try that,’ Vitae said quickly.
Rafo, brittle, said helplessly, ‘Then what are we to do? … look. I’ll wait here. Sort things out. Maybe this Removal Agent will show up. Or somebody else. Somebody must be in charge here. To sort things out.’
Vitae stayed calm, admirably so, Mela thought again, but he said nothing.
Aphe was still grizzling, so Vitae leaned forward, smiled, and stuck out his tongue. He got a smile back in return. ‘Come on. I bet I know what those little ones want, and in what order. Toilet first, then food – or better yet a drink.’
‘Pee-pee,’ said Aphe, still smiling.
‘That’s right. Pee-pee first. Come on, I’ll show Mother and Father where the pee-pee place is.’
‘You go,’ Rafo said. ‘I’ll wait until I get things sorted out here. Come back and find me.’
Gine gave Mela a look of despair. ‘Would you mind helping? We’ve asked an awful lot of you—’
‘No problem. I could do with finding the pee-pee place myself.’ She bent down, held out her hand for Hael to take.
But he stood back. ‘Big boy now.’
Vitae smiled a brilliant smile.
Vitae walked them into the interior, away from the fence. Mela saw that he was leading them roughly eastward.
As they moved further into the camp’s big circular space, the crush by the gate lessened a bit.
But still there were crowds everywhere – and, not much more than a few paces in, they saw places where people had already camped out, more or less. Mela found herself stepping over blankets and sleeping bags and heaps of belongings. People stared as the strangers passed, helplessly, protectively, aggressively. There were many, many children. Most of them looked bewildered and scared, even when tired adults tried to distract them.
And as they walked deeper into the camp the air turned sourer, Mela realised. There were smells of shit and piss and vomit; of old food and damp; of dirty wet clothing. The smells of people penned in like overcrowded animals. She longed to cover her mouth. Soon, she told herself, she would smell just as bad.
And this was Procyon, her home city just a short walk away.
She murmured, ‘I wonder who all these people are. Or who they were, yesterday, the day before. What they owned, who they knew, what their plans were. Now—’
‘Now we are all the same,’ Vitae said. ‘Everything stripped away, leaving us equal, as when we will stand before eternity.’
Gine snorted. ‘Tell it to my husband.’ She glanced back.
Mela murmured to Vitae, ‘I wonder if having a Permit makes it easier. Even if something has gone wrong with it. Like Rafo. As long as he has that document, or at least he thinks he’s owed one, he has hope of everything working out in the end. With a Permit you aren’t an Immie, at least.’
‘I suppose some people think like that,’ Vitae replied. ‘But, look – you have a Permit. Even if it was valid, would it make you feel any better now?’
‘No,’ she said, thinking it over. ‘No. Because even if I got out of here, even if I got all the way to Sirius – there’s just a few more years – twenty, isn’t it now? That’s all. And that’s what we will all have to come to terms with. That’s what I’ve been feeling today. As if it’s suddenly become real.’
‘As if you woke up for the first time,’ Gine said. ‘While the rest of the world is still asleep.’
Vitae nodded grimly, kindly.
As they walked, out of the melange of stenches around Mela, a sharper sewage smell became more dominant. And cleansing smells, of some kind of bleach perhaps.
They were approaching the fence at the eastern side of the camp. It had the same set-up as near the south gate, with the Guards in face masks on their protected parapet. They made elaborate hand-waving gestures as if clearing the air, and looked down into the camp and pointed, sometimes laughing uproariously.
As she approached Mela saw why. The area below this part of the fence was the latrine.
She had to look past the crowded rows of people, squatting or standing over trenches, to see the pattern. Ditches had been crudely cut in the earth, each running east – all the way to the fence there and then under it, she saw. Planks had been laid over the trenches, planks with holes gouged into them. She thought she saw running water in the ditches under the planks, sluggish, rank.
An open-air lavatory. In use by adults young and old, by children. The little ones had to be held over the holes in the planks.
Gine looked down on this in utter dismay. ‘By Andromeda’s mercy. Sorry, Perseid. It’s just – is this all there is?’
Vitae seemed unperturbed. ‘It was worse a few days back. When I first came out here, to see what they were arranging here, there was nothing. Oh, the wall and the Guard positions had been set up, very efficiently, no doubt. Effective at keeping people in. But there was nothing otherwise. Not even a latrine. So we had to sort it out for ourselves.’
Mela looked around. ‘I’m starting to see it. The latrine has to be on this side of the camp, because the River is over to the east, beyond this wall, and that’s where the latrine drains to. But what about the running water? Fresh water?’
‘From a header tank that used to serve the city itself, out to the west. They provided that, at least. We wanted the western wall area to stay hygienic.’ Vitae pointed over the heads of squatting people. ‘So we asked for the food drops to be over on that side. We have a rough sanatorium set up over there too. Very rough. Don’t get your hopes up. We have whatever medicines we walked in with and are sharing, improvised gear like blankets and bandages, even splints that we clean for reuse. We have some doctors, nurses, though most of them have Permits, along with other useful folk. Some volunteered to come in here even so, when they could have got away. People have good hearts.’
And Mela wondered how much of this was down to the good heart of the preacher himself. He must have been sorting this out, even as he was running his Immie sanctuary in the south. She reached out, squeezed his hand.
He actually blushed, and looked away.
Gine smiled. ‘Come on,’ she said to her children. ‘Let’s get you to the toilet with all these nice people, and then we’ll get something to eat and drink, and then we’ll go find Daddy again, shall we?’ She put Aphe down on the ground, took both her children’s hands, and they walked down towards the latrine ditches.
Vitae eyed Mela. ‘Need to follow them in?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Which means yes. Come on, I’ll walk you in. One tip.’
‘Yes?’
‘Don’t make eye contact.’
That made her laugh, a laugh that kept her going until it was over.
Evening settled softly over the camp. The Thousand Earths began to show, aloof, uncaring.
And as the dark deepened, the camp seemed to calm, subtly. A thousand people – Vitae said – jammed in together, with here and there a lantern of some kind showing. No fires, though: fires were prohibited by the Guards for safety reasons; they would come and stamp out any nascent blaze. That policy wasn’t going to help when cold weather came, Mela thought – if the Perimeter advance allowed them to get that far.
The murmur of a thousand voices, with here and there an individual standing out: a cry, a laugh, even a scream. And, Mela noticed, as the last light faded, there was a slow drift of people to the western walls.
It was not quite fully dark when the food deliveries began, over by the south-west wall – nearly the full diameter of the camp away from the latrines, as Vitae had said. By lamplight, one group of Guards hauled food packs up from outside the wall, then lowered them down inside to be accepted by more Guards.
Mela had seen queues building up there earlier; now she understood. With the distribution controlled by the Guards at the base of the wall, it was first come first served – and more often than not, Vitae told her now, the food and other goods ran out before the queues were done.
As the distribution began, Vitae himself led the family over, Rafo and Gine and the kids, leaving Mela to look after their few possessions. Vitae said that without any kind of documentation system working inside the camp, the Guards would only hand out packets of food – if they saw palms free of the day’s ‘food mark’, a different colour for every day. You got your packet, your palm was marked. So when they all came back with food packets, the kids proudly showed the blue stripes on their palms to Mela, like the one in Vitae’s growing collection.
Mela went over and took her turn in the line. By now, she saw, the heap of ration packs at the base of the fence was growing visibly smaller. People had become anxious, on the edge of aggression. Perhaps the obvious brute strength of the Guards was all that kept a riot at bay here, she thought.
But now, as she neared the front, she saw a handful of the Guards, down from the fence, working through the crowds, each carrying away a sack of what looked like ration packs and other provisions – medicines, perhaps, bandages.
And she saw furtive transactions. Immigrant and Guard approaching each other, each glancing around, an exchange. A ration pack for glittery stuff, jewellery perhaps, what looked like precious ornaments, once even a fine pair of shoes. Or just cash. And a few times she saw Guard and Immigrant disappear into the shadows of the wall. These couples were opposite sexes, same sex. One Guard seemed to try to lead away a child, but adults around him pushed back. Other Guards close by didn’t intervene.
But at least they hadn’t helped the child-taker.
Watching these subtle horrors, Mela found herself thinking of her brother. Wondering where Tabor was. What he was doing right now.
Mela got her pack and a stripe on her hand. Then, with some difficulty in the gathering dark, she found her way back to the little area Vitae had come to call his home, where Gine, Rafo and the children, with Mela, had been invited to stay. The man was like a lamp attracting harmless moths, she thought. But as the light faded further, Mela thought she probably felt as safe here as she would anywhere, surrounded by friends and acquaintances of Vitae. She hoped.
The day was over at last. She tried to sleep.
In the pitch dark, she was woken by rain splashing on her face.
There was no cover for anyone save the Guards on the fence. All around the camp, people were moving, grumbling, digging out water-resistant gear. Vitae, Mela and the parents pushed together, holding their coats over their heads to make a little shelter for the children, who seemed to think it was all great fun.
