Pilgrimage v1 0, p.23
Pilgrimage v1.0, page 23
“Do you believe it?” Brann asked, pointing toward the chubby Branlee.
“Not anymore,” said Grandel after a moment “Then you know it’s all real. The city’s falling down is real and the outside is real and the Driver is real?”
“Yes,” Grandel said.
“And we can tell you what the city is actually about—that it served to keep us safe until the outside became livable again…
“I know,” Grandel responded. “I saw it too, and you told me.”
“So,” said Brann, “do you suppose that there is a person free of the pain of all this? We were turning into little monklers that just chittered and grinned in the trees and it’s a good thing that the city fell down. There are millions of scared folk out here and only a few of them are going to survive without the city. Ebar taught me that. She must have said much the same thing to you. But you’re no different from anyone of them and just because of the Driver you haven’t been hurt anymore.”
“The Driver,” Grandel repeated. “I ate…” He sat down on the sand and refused to look at Brann or Liza.
“Let’s go,” said Brann. His cheeks were wet with tears. He took Liza’s hand and they walked off in search of family folk, leaving Grandel to follow or not.
Hegman Branlee’s words stirred the folk more than Brann could have imagined. He discovered that most of the folk were even worse off than Grandel: like Grandel, they knew that the world was very different from what they had thought, but they would not, could not, do anything about it. Brann found his family. Little Thod found him first, coming toward him and Liza through the crowd of worshipers. Thod held to Liza’s coarse skirt and found it funny that Brann wore the same, wanting to know where he had obtained it and whether the little folk were truly shorter than he. He made faces at the idea of such tiny folk as the jailers.
“We all thought you died,” Thod said matter of factly. “And Gwenia said you were stupid to go off like that so I shoved her but you’re here now, Brann, so tell me what happened. How come your sides are all scratched like that?”
Brann’s mother held his face for a long time and looked about to cry. Brann saw tears in his father’s eyes. It seemed for a moment, here in the Frontend ruins with his family, that nothing had changed. The weeks, which had taken the final bit of child out of Brann, slipped away from him and he was a boy again. Liza had gone off. She had been peculiarly distant while he greeted his parents, and had walked away without any great show.
Little remained of the treasures from the Adelbran houseplat. His mother had salvaged the heirloom chest. His father had carried away a packet of photographs and a prayer book with a family history penned inside. They had only the clothing they had worn on Pilgrimage and at that were better clothed than many of the folk. No effort had been made to make the beach into a home. Refuse and garbage were strewn carelessly about. Folk accepted what the harvester dolls brought as food and cooked it slightly. Many wore nothing—and showed no shame in a society which had been strict in its modesty. Brann saw that even among those who had not joined the Driver, a sort of thoughtless brutality had taken hold. Not infrequently shrieks punctuated the worship service, and public intimacy which would have shocked the folk before was the mildest sort of display here. Folk copulated against walls and in the sand, fought, practiced mayhem, killed and through it the service went endlessly on.
Brann asked about Ebar.
“She came as far as Frontend,” Brann’s mother said. “We’ve not seen her since. Some said there were Gads here, and that she was with them.”
“You let her go!” Brann said, incredulous.
His mother looked at his father. She gestured with empty hands.
It was Brann who had changed, not they. Before, Brann would not have been upset. The folk rarely became excited. What came, came. Brann, now, couldn’t understand his parents’ lack. Still, in the midst of folk who took such a disaster without showing any care, Brann’s family showed anger and upset They were different They were Ebar’s descendants.
“The Hegman says it will be over soon,” Brann’s father said. “The shaking will stop. He says it is a test of our faith in the city. The Lord above is testing us and he says our faith should not be found wanting.” He sat in the sand, trying to be the same as the other folk, listening to Branlee, who seemed to have an endless supply of words and breath. “When the shaking stops,” Brann’s father said, “we’ll be ready.”
Ever since the message had spun its ruby way out into the stars the sky had held its clouds. Gradually the rains had come and in the ensuing days, as they sat idle on the beach, the rain fell steadily. Now and again a report and a flash of light would come from the city roof: a series of metallic clangs, a growl of thunder not cloud-born, a distant, reverberant blast. Brann supposed that the Hugen and the Post Guild fought, though for what purpose (since the message had been sent) Brann couldn’t imagine.
The folk on the beach wouldn’t speak of the message, though its sending had become common knowledge. “Halsam sent it,” Brann told bis sisters.
“Oh, yes, of course,” they said.
Of Halsam himself there had been no inquiries except for one brief question from Hals’s father, who listened patiently to the tale and said afterward, “Halsam is a capable young man. He’ll take care of himself.”
Brann was becoming furious. Liza came to visit rarely. Brann didn’t understand what had changed. She wouldn’t stay long and treated him as friend rather than lover. She stood in the drenching rain, water matting down her hair, rain running in rivulets where the little folk’s jacket hung open, and he longed to touch her. She made a wry helpless face, half reached a hand to him, and stepped away. Brann took to wandering among the folk. He was looking for some sign of Ebar and the advice he was sure she would offer. “Do this…” she would say and Brann would do it The course of the future would change. A million massed folk would stir up out of their lethargy, rise from their squatting and take action. But Brann in his imagination could never find what Ebar would say to do: “Do this ., she would say. But what?
Brann felt so alone. Halsam was gone and Leoht. He couldn’t imagine where. The image of Halsam among the clouds came to him often. Had Hals become the message and flown off with it to the stars? Was Leoht with him? He missed Grandel who hung at the outskirts of the amphitheater, never coming closer or talking to the family. He missed his family, who would not talk of substantial things. More and more he missed Liza.
“Do this…” he heard. It was Ebar’s voice. No one knew just where she had gone. She had a large circle of friends among the folk of the gallery. Every one of them seemed to recall having just seen her. But Brann went to those places—along the beach where surf broke in pewter foam and the folk waded finding no dry spot to rest, on the roofs of tumbled houseplats in the derelict trolleys off their rails and sunk in the sand. He would bellow “Do what?” over the babble of the folk but there was no answer.
The battle atop the city had intensified. It had become a continuous string of reports and the air was charged with smoke. It smelled singed to Brann.
“It’s the Hugen and the Post Guild fighting,” Brann would say.
“Yes,” the usual answer came. Nobody’s curiosity was piqued. At these times Brann eagerly expected something to happen, a battle of the giants to break out here on the beach, a sudden flight of starcraft away to the island watchposts in the sky. Nothing occurred.
Worse, the Driver had returned. Actually, the little Driver had taken the whip and the seat of power. When the Driver died, the dumb folk had awakened, many of them going back to* their own people and leaving the dead tyrant trampled on the road. But the little Driver had climbed the tower. He had snapped the lash experimentally and had tried out the chants. Some of the dumb folk returned. They were tens now instead of thousands, but a miniature cart rolled the old ruts and more rejoined him daily.
“We have to stop him,” Brann said once. But he hadn’t the will to do it again, not even to the miniature driver with his tiny, ludicrous voice.
“We have heard from Mikla,” Brann’s father said one day. They had a small fire between them, sheltering it from the rain beneath a tattered cover. “The Structors have all abandoned Tailend. They are coming here to fix things. In a few days we can go back to the city.”
“The city is ruined, Father,” protested Brann. There’s a thousand years’ work before it could be habitable again.”
“We’ll be starting as soon as the rain lets up,” his father said. “The Isocourt has plans to meet. They’ve spoken of meeting and they will find a suitable place to meet. We’ll make plans and leave soon.”
The rain scarred the beach like a shower of broken stars splashing white, hot sand about, leaving smoking craters.
Branlee’s fervor didn’t still his appetite. He spoke often now with his mouth full and abandoned the platform without reluctance at the least rumor of food.
“So, young Brann,” Branlee said, “we missed you. We had some fears for your faith when you did not attend upon the Pilgrimage with your parents. But though you strayed, you have returned. It was the hand of the Lord Above which brought you back to us, even as his hand has reached down to rattle the city and shake from us the dust of complacency, and send us on the Pilgrimage to renewal.” The rain streamed down Branlee’s pudgy face and his eyes stared eerily through Brann, seeming not the present adult but the boy of other times. The giant gatherer dolls brought a scant supply of food from the Farmy Fields and the folk went mostly hungry, although Branlee seemed to find enough to sustain himself. He ate the flat bread which Brann’s father baked in the fire’s coals and he drank hot tea from their meager store.
“Have you made ready, young Brann? You know the Lord Above tells me that he will stop the rain soon and quiet the city so that we may find our new Frontend homes,” Branlee said.
“The Lord Above tells you? You speak directly to the Lord Above?”
“He speaks to me,” said Branlee. “I do wish the rain would stop, it makes the bread so soggy, though the Lord Above tells me he has a reason for the rain. The Lord Above speaks to all of us. Don’t you hear the voices of the folk repeating his words? Sometimes I see a vision of trees outside the city and of clouds dropping rain. They are visions as clear to me as the true features of the city. They disturb me; sometimes I doubt my power to sustain faith. But I digress. The Lord Above has a reason. I have always liked your table more than any of the others, Friend Fral, Friend Eza. Don’t tell your neighbors, but it’s true. We will pack up soon and find our new homes as the prophecy teaches us. Illusion is always with us, young Brann. Haven’t I explained it to you before? The eye abhors an empty place and fills it with visions. Sometimes I see water and open sky.”
“The truth, Hegman Branlee, is that the city is obsolete,” Brann said. “I’ve seen the ruins from the inside. The Post Guild and the Hugen fight over the ruins. They’re fighting now. That’s what the noise is all about.”
Branlee shrugged away Brann’s hand. He picked up another loaf from the coals and juggled it between his hands until it cooled. He made liberal use of the Adelbrans’ last bit of butter and looked Brann in the eye as he ate. “Are you packed, young Brann? Do you have all those books of yours and that marvelous cake model of the city? Are you packed, Friends Fral and Eza? The Lord Above says the rain will break any time.”
“We are packed,” Brann’s father said. And Brann’s mother said the same, though she gave Branlee a sharp look as if to add something else.
“Mama, Papa!” Brann cried out, “What are you saying? We can’t go back. The city’s fallen.”
Eza Adelbran looked hard at his son, almost ready to agree, but a look came over him, a look of fear, Brann saw at once, one such as the ancient folk must have had when they took refuge from the outside. Ebar was right, some were bred to captivity, to thirty thousand years of it The older Adelbrans were like them.
“We are packed, Hegman,” Eza Adelbran confirmed.
Brann found Liza asleep beneath a blanket which her folks had brought on Pilgrimage. She sheltered in a conduit that opened blindly into an upturned gallery floor. She wasn’t a part of them either. The rain had slowed to a thick drizzle. The folk were a sea of supine black shapes on the gray sand. Few truly slept and the murmur of their voices diffused the words that Brann whispered to Liza. He slipped a hand beneath her blanket, resting it on her neck. Slowly he let the hand glide down her spine along the gentle bumps of vertebrae to the swell of her hip. She whimpered in her sleep, loving his hand or fearing it. He burrowed his face into her hair, which smelled of salt and damp.
“Who?” she said.
“Brann.” He stripped off the little folk’s rough skirt and, taking hold of the blanket, slipped beneath it, his belly against her side.
She woke and saw him and struggled, not knowing Brann at all—lost in the sea of folk, nameless like them, anonymous, distant from him. He put his mouth on hers so that she couldn’t speak. He held her until she quieted.
“Do you love me?” he asked.
“Let go, Brann,” she said.
“Do you love me, do you?”
“Yes,” she said. She searched him, too, feeling the still fresh welts along his sides. “I’m sorry I did that,” she said. She traced his ribs, his chest, learning him, shedding with that touch increment by increment the fear she shared with all the city’s folk. She took Brann’s weight, accepted him, moved with a swelling fury, saying in that motion: “We have to go. They’ll never listen. I’ve hated you since we’ve been here. It just happened. It’s the way all the folk behave. I saw my parents and it just overwhelmed me…We are different, aren’t we, Brann? They’re going back to the city. But we won’t go with them. Will we?”
“We’re no different, Liza,” he said. “I saw that when we came here. Ebar knew. Everything independent has been bred out of them. Even my mother and father. We have to leave before they decide to go back to the city or join the little Driver and start it all again. Hals has sent the message. The folk will come back from the stars and change everything, tear down the ruins of the city, drive us all out on the earth again. But it will be a long time and too late for us.”
“But we can go to the Gads,” Liza said.
“We can go to the Gads.”
Later, they explored each other as if it were the first time and what they felt was very new.
The droning voices became a roar, waking Brann and Liza to a gray, fogbound morning. The shapes of the folk were still colorless in the dawn and many carried lamps and torches.
“They’re going back,” said Brann. “They’re all going into the city.” People ran past. Liza crept to the conduit entrance, to be knocked back by a woman who rushed past, unheeding.
“Hey,” Brann shouted, but she was gone. Others followed. One shape was like another in the dawn. Brann searched for his family. Liza called for hers, but the faces were the same, intense, distracted, looking toward the city. The fear of the outside had overcome them. Hegman Branlee’s words had taken hold. They were returning to imagined safety and the roof which covered them from the awful yawning sky.
The pressure mounted, folk moving toward the city were packed so solidly that Brann and Liza had nowhere to go. If they left the shelter of the conduit they would be pulled along with the crowd.
“It will thin out soon,” said Liza. “It must.”
“Zolbek said they were millions,” Brann answered, shouting to be heard over the million voices. They didn’t hear words. They heard babble. No one understood anyone else; the gallery folk were strewn among the mass. They had abandoned even the little bit they had carried to Frontend, leaving all the trappings of humanity trampled in the sand. From their vantage Brann and Liza couldn’t see the faces. All they saw were legs striding past in a parade, which became a blur as the morning progressed until, mesmerized by the folk’s passage, Brann and Liza lost track of time.
Finally the crowd began to thin. Stragglers of the mob passed them, seeking to keep up, intent on the dty. The legs and the roar had moved eastward. It was a storm letting loose on the city’s flanks. Brann came out of the conduit. The beach, once an endless stretch of folk, held only the stragglers. Everywhere feet had churned the sand and mixed the embers of fires and the remnants of belongings. Folk lay where they had been trampled. Mercifully the babble of voices was gone.
Two sat in the sand facing their sanctuary. One was a young woman whose hair was red and seemed bound in tatters of light The other was a boy/man just Brann’s age with dark hair and a sharp face, turned around toward them, watching. A jewel hung by a chain around his neck and glowed dully.
“Halsam?” Brann called.
The young man stood.
Liza echoed, “Halsam, and Leoht, too!”
“We waited,” Halsam said. “I told Leoht you wouldn’t go with them.”
“But how did you find us?” Liza asked.
“Leoht did,” said Hals. He looked Brann over. “You’re filthy. Did someone beat you up?”
“Hals, in the name of the Lord Above, I thought you were gone. I saw you in the clouds, spread out and giant I saw you after…”
“Brann killed the Driver,” Liza broke in. There was some distance of churned sand between the couples. Liza took a few steps forward, closing the gap. Brann followed a pace behind.
“You killed the Driver?” Halsam asked.
