Salt (2 page)

‘No,’ Tarl said, ‘no son.’ But he spoke too quickly, for the clerk said, ‘Ah. I must make a note,’ and turned to pick up his quill.

Under the cart, Hari waited another moment. Whips stood too close to his father. But he must act, there might not be another chance. He sent a questing thread out from his mind to the horses, found them, and whispered silently: Brother horse, sister horse, the black fly stings your rump.

The two beasts lurched forward, rearing and whinnying. The cart bucked and leaned, and the clerk’s desk skidded sideways, carrying him with it. It balanced on the edge of the tray, then tipped off. He thrust out his arm to save himself and one of the iron cart-wheels crushed his elbow on the stones. His shriek rose like a sharp spear into the sky.

Hari slid back as the cart advanced. The canvas flap at the rear brushed over him and he sprang to his feet in the open. The acid bucket stood close, and he seized it and flung it one-handed at the two underlings. They danced, screaming, as the acid burned. Hari sprang sideways, quick as a cat. He stabbed with his knife into a helmet joint of the nearest Whip as the man fumbled with his glove, but the joint shut as the Whip fell, holding the blade as though in a vise and ripping the knife from Hari’s hand.

‘My knife, Hari,’ Tarl screamed.

Hari saw it lying by the wheel of the cart and scooped it up, but his advantage of surprise was gone. The Whips who had run to help the clerk abandoned him and rushed back to surround Tarl, while others who had been posted at the gates of People’s Square came running around the side of the swamp. Hari sprang sideways. He felt the heat of a Whip hand strike in the space he had left; heard the deputy clerk, standing on the cart, cry, ‘Take him alive.’ He dived low, skidding on his belly across the stones, passed between Whips’ feet and came upright beside his father. He slashed with the black-bladed knife, and the rope linking Tarl to the man in front parted like a cotton thread. There was no time to cut Tarl’s hands free, for the Whips were closing in, with yellow bolts jumping from their fingertips.

Again Hari flung his thought-spear at the horses: The black fly stings. The black fly bites. The animals whinnied with pain and plunged against their traces, jumping the cart forward. The linked water cart tumbled on its side, pinning three Whips on the stones. Hari and his father sprang through the gap, but the Whip sergeant, sprawling on the ground, lunged as they went by and clamped Tarl’s heel in his burning hand. Tarl fell, screaming, and Hari, two steps ahead, felt the pain too, so close was their bond. He fell on his knees, crying out, and would have turned to help his father, but Tarl, in the grip of the iron hand, mouthed: ‘Go.’

Whips were only a body length away. Hari felt their heat. He turned and plunged into the crowd of women.

‘A purse for whoever takes the boy,’ cried the deputy clerk.

Some of the women clawed at him; others parted, making way, then closed again. But the Whips, close behind, with burning hands, knocked them aside like stalks of corn. Hari had no time to pause at the edge of the swamp. He plunged through the rushes, mud sucking at his feet, then flung himself into the brown water where it deepened, and clawed his way down with his father’s knife clutched in his fist. Deep, deeper, he went, blind in the murk, out of reach of the iron men. Swimming was unknown in the burrows, where no water flowed except in drains, and the scummy ponds and yellow swamps that lay in deep basements and abandoned squares and parks were believed to be poisonous; but Hari, taught by the old Survivor, Lo, had learned how to worm his way into the minds of the giant rats that lived deeper in the ruins than men could go, and had found the place where their swimming instinct had its home, and had learned the skill. The ponds, the swamps, were part of his highway through the burrows. He swam with his belly sliding on mud, probing with his father’s knife, until he felt it strike the sunken pedestal of Cowl the Liberator’s statue. With his breath almost gone, he circled to the back, then climbed the Liberator as if he were a tree and broke the surface of the pond beside Cowl’s giant head. He put one foot in his wide mouth, hauled himself up on a shaggy eyebrow and lay on the slope of Cowl’s forehead, catching his breath.

Most of the Whips had given him up for dead, but the sergeant still watched. ‘There, the boy,’ he cried. ‘He swims like a rat.’

The clerk was on his feet, with his crushed arm dripping blood. ‘Kill him,’ he shrieked. ‘Use your bolt guns. I authorise it.’

The Whips drew their weapons from their belts and flicked them on. Hari, watching from his perch, knew he had a moment while the charge built up. He saw his father climb painfully to his feet, his leg half-dead still from the sergeant’s glove.

‘Tarl,’ Hari cried, ‘I’ll come for you.’

‘Stay here. Your job’s here,’ Tarl answered. The nearest Whip felled him with a sideways blow.

‘Kill the boy,’ whimpered the clerk. Then he fainted on the stones.

The bolt guns were charged. They were clumsy weapons that could not be aimed accurately, but the bolt of energy they threw would blast a hole in a stone wall. Hari waited until the sergeant levelled his weapon. Then he scrambled across the top of Cowl’s head and slid onto his submerged shoulder.

‘Company dies,’ he shouted, and flung himself into the water as the sergeant’s bolt fell in its arc towards him.

This time he stayed shallow, for it was a longer swim. He held his father’s knife in his teeth and went like a mud-frog, arms and legs stroking in unison. The pool was deepest where it met the wall of a ruined building on the north side of the square between two gates. He meant to come up there, and would have time for only a single breath before the bolt guns were fired again.

Then I must make them think I’m drowned, he thought, but Tarl will know.

His hands touched the wall. He fixed his feet on jutting stones and propelled himself up. Beyond Cowl’s broken head the sergeant was watching, and other Whips, their bolt guns raised, were waiting by the gates at the edge of the pond. Tarl struggled to his feet again. He made an agonised shout: ‘Never let them take you.’

Hari had no breath to reply. He took the knife, his father’s knife, from his teeth and raised it above his head, knowing Tarl would understand. Bolts hissed towards him. He sank again, and was punched by detonations, burned by water that boiled as they struck, but he had marked his place and knew his way. Down again, and sideways, counting the handholds in the wall, until, four body lengths under the surface, he found the hole he was seeking, blown in the base of the wall by cannon bolts in Company’s Freedom War. The masonry was thick and the hole narrowed to his shoulders’ width on the inner side. He wriggled through, fighting slimy weed that hung like curtains, bent his body upwards, inside the wall, and slithered along tunnels in the drowned masonry, praying that no new fall of stone had closed the passage, and that he would not meet a king rat here.

At last he broke into the air and freed his knife from his teeth and lay across a shattered door, gasping for breath. Then he hauled himself up through tangles of broken beam and plank until he reached the light. It pierced in rays through the building’s roof. He was in a vast room, for banquets and dancing in the old days, he supposed – although he had no idea what banquets and dancing were. Everything had been scavenged generations ago. Rubble and rotting timbers lay on the inlaid floor. Hari did not pause, although in the past he had spent hours in the room, shifting rubble and scraping the floor clean so that he might wonder at the coloured scenes of trees and animals and people inlaid in green and red and yellow tiles.

There were no windows, no openings to People’s Square. Hari ran through halls and passages, crawled in tunnels of broken stone, climbed through floors and ceilings, and slid through walls where charred timber stood like blackened teeth. He crept on his knees around a hole opening in the floor of the watchtower over East Gate. Below him, a Whip kept guard, with his bolt gun holstered and his gloves humming at low power. Hari went by, as soundless as a cat. Then he ran again and came at last to a building on the south side of the square. A window opened in the wall above the clerk’s cart. It was blocked with timber except for a small hole at the bottom where the frame had been forced out like a fractured bone. Hari inched forward and the square came into view.

The rain had stopped and the sun was shining. Half a dozen haltered men with their hands set free were tipping the water cart back on its wheels. Tarl was not among them. He was chained to an iron ring on the clerk’s cart, and the Whip sergeant was guarding him.

Hari sent his thought thread to the horses: Brother horse, sister horse, I’m sorry I caused you pain. I ask you, travel slowly so my father doesn’t fall.

He did not know in what form the silent messages Lo had taught him to send reached animals, but the horses pricked their ears up as though they heard.

I thank you, Hari said, and turned his eyes back to his father. They would take him across the desert to the mines, and down the shafts into Deep Salt, where no worker ever came out. Hari held the black-bladed knife in front of his eyes. ‘Don’t die,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll save you.’ It was a foolhardy promise and one there was no way to keep, but it hardened in him, swelled in him, beat like his heart in his chest, and he knew he would try.

Below him the women and children drifted away. The acid-burned underlings bound the clerk’s broken elbow to his side. He had woken from his faint and groaned with pain. The deputy clerk strutted importantly, ordering Whips to singe the men raising the water cart. The Whips pinned under it were carried away. One was dead.

The underlings lifted the clerk onto his cart and laid him down. Hari, seeing how close Tarl stood, thought: My father could kill him now with a single bite. He could tear his throat out like a hunting cat. But Tarl only smiled and said to the clerk, ‘You hurt now but soon you’ll hurt more. You’re a broken part. Company will throw you away.’

‘It’s not true,’ screeched the clerk. ‘Company cares.’

‘Your quota was two hundred men and you bring ninety. And you bring a dead Whip. Company doesn’t like mistakes. Perhaps you’ll join me in Deep Salt.’

‘Kill this man. Kill him,’ cried the clerk.

But the sergeant made no move and the deputy clerk said, ‘We must not waste an able-bodied man. He belongs to Company.’

‘You see,’ Tarl said. ‘Already someone stands in your place.’

‘You will die in Deep Salt,’ hissed the clerk. ‘Salt worms will eat you. Your soul will be sucked down into the dark.’

‘So be it,’ Tarl said, shrugging.

‘And your son is dead. He drowned like a rat. Think of that.’

‘He did not die a slave, he died free,’ Tarl said. ‘He has conquered Company today.’

He knows I’m not dead, Hari thought. He knows I’m close and can hear. He tried to send a message to his father: I’ll come to Deep Salt and set you free. Tarl had never been able to hear in that way. But he feels me, Hari thought. He knows I’m here.

He watched as the carts rolled round the sloping stones by the swamp, until the Whips and clerks and underlings were at the gate. Tarl turned his head at the last moment and looked past Cowl’s sunken head. His eyes found the hole in the broken window frame.

He knows, Hari thought, and he risked pushing out his fist that clenched the black knife.

His father nodded once, and was gone.

I’ll save you, Hari thought.

He drew back his hand, and made his way down corridors and runways into the burrows.

TWO

It was true that Tarl had no woman. She had died in the sickness of 77, leaving Hari without a mother. He was three years old. The sickness had nearly taken him too. He wore the scars on his face.

His father raised him, carrying him on his back or on his shoulders until the boy was able to run at his side. Hari learned every slide and hole and tunnel in Blood Burrow, perched on Tarl’s shoulders or climbing after him on broken walls or deep in the ruins towards Port. They scavenged in the streets around the closed citadel, Ceebeedee, where Company conducted its business, and along the fortified wall enclosing the corridor to the sea. Above the bay, on a green hill called Compound, the owners and shareholding families had their mansions. When he was older, Hari came to know every inch of the wall, even though, to learn the far side, he had to circle round through the empty lands at the back of the suburbs beyond Ceebeedee. He was afraid of that journey, for there were few places to hide from the young men from the Families who rode out from the walls to hunt burrows scavengers for sport, or from feral dogs roaming in 17 packs. Yet he took the risk, for the sight of the mansions in Compound and the flowering trees and the carriages rolling in the streets, and creatures he scarcely recognised as human, their bodies were so tall and fat and white. Their skirts and cloaks were made of cloth that shimmered in colours only seen in the burrows in bits of broken glass and scraps of tile.

He climbed against the downflow of drains into Compound. He slid under grilles in the night, submerged, and came up on the hill behind the crescent of mansions facing the sea. Roads as broad as city blocks ran through the parks surrounding them. Hari sped across like a hunting cat into the gardens and slid, like a rat now, into the lily ponds. Sometimes, in the warm months, he would lie in a pond all night, moving only to drink the water trickling from fountains or creep to the mansion windows and hide in the flowering trees, wrapped close to the trunk. He watched the people inside – he knew they were people, like him; Lo had told him – watched them sipping drinks from tiny glasses and eating food from huge plates laid before them by serving men who must have had their tongues cut out for they never spoke. Before dawn broke he crept around to the back of the mansions and hunted in the rubbish bins for scraps of food (no feral dogs here, no dogs at all, and no cats, for Compound families had no fondness for animals). Carrying bones to gnaw on, he scouted along the cliffs, working out ways of escape, places where he might climb or jump, if guards ever saw him. He circled the giant marble hand raised on the cliff edge as a memorial to Families slain in Cowl’s revolution. Then he followed the drains down to the sea, where he slept in caves in the cliffs while day lasted, before the dangerous journey back to Blood Burrow in the night.

Tarl knew about these expeditions and encouraged them, trusting Hari not to be caught. He questioned the boy closely about everything he had seen – numbers of guards, location of barracks, weak places in the wall, drains that surfaced in unpatrolled places – preparing for the rebellion Hari knew would never come. There was no way the starved population of the burrows could ever be organised to fight, and nothing to fight with; and, for most of them, nothing to fight for except food. There had to be some new thing – a new idea, a new ally, a new source of strength. Lo, the old Survivor, had taught the boy this. Hari was the only person in the burrows who knew that Lo still had a voice and could speak.

Hari ran and scrambled for an hour after leaving the window above People’s Square, going deeper all the time, past the dangerous edges of Keech Burrow and Keg Burrow, cutting through Bawdhouse Burrow, where women screeched invitations to him, heading for the forbidden district of Port, where Whips patrolled the streets and Company vessels lined the wharves two deep. (Hari had seen the ships on nights when he crept and swam through the piles under the wharves.) Lo’s cell was in an abandoned tongue of Bawdhouse poking into Port. On stormy nights the old Survivor could hear the sound of the sea. He came from a family of ocean-farers and had sailed as a mess boy before a cannon flash blinded him in the war Company called Liberation War in the year it called Year One. He was ninety-nine years old, the last survivor of the war left in the burrows.

Hari stopped by the curtain blocking the narrow entry to Lo’s tiny room. He waited, panting softly from his run, and soon Lo’s voice, creaking like an old door, said, ‘I hear you, boy. Come in. There’s no need to wait.’

Hari pulled the curtain aside, stepped in and let it fall. The room was dark but he knew where Lo lay on his bed of rags in the corner.

‘I bring no food or water. I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘I have enough. And I need little. You’ve been running, boy.’

‘Company has taken my father.’

Lo was silent. Hari heard him shifting, heard him groan as he struggled to sit up. He stepped forward, using the sounds as a guide, and took the old man’s shoulders – bones as thin as rat bones – and helped him find a comfortable place against the wall.

‘Thank you, boy. You can let in light if it will help.’

Hari found the wedge of stone blocking a hole in the wall and pulled it out. The light made scarcely any difference, but after a moment he was able to see Lo dimly – a man shrunken with age and with years of near-starvation, sitting on his bed-rags in the dust, with only a scrap of cloth about his loins. Hari wondered what kept him alive.

‘I don’t know,’ Lo answered, hearing the thought. ‘I will not see Company’s end. Or even the beginnings of its end. But the beginning of beginnings, perhaps.’

‘My father is gone.’

‘And you grieve. That is right. None come back. You must live by your own wits now.’

‘You haven’t asked where they’ve taken him.’

‘There’s no need. Tarl was a free man. He was unbroken. They will take him to Deep Salt.’

Again Hari felt his innards churn at the name. His throat tightened so he could scarcely speak.

‘What’s in Deep Salt? Tell me,’ he managed to say.

‘I’ve heard all sorts of tales, and none of them true. Don’t be afraid, boy. Salt worms, salt tigers – they’re creatures that live only in men’s minds. Salt rats? Perhaps. Rats are everywhere. But know this, Hari: something is there. I’ve heard of men sucked away in the night, sucked from the places where they sleep, and they are never seen again. Those are tales too – but I have heard a whisper among the rats that such things happen. And what a rat knows . . .’ He left it unfinished, but after a moment said, ‘Tarl will be one who is sucked away. Others die at their labour and their fellow workers leave their bodies in the empty tunnels, where they lie forever. But the thing, whatever it is, will take Tarl.’

‘How do you know?’ Hari cried.

‘I’ve told you, boy, between what happens now and what will happen a curtain hangs, as black as my world has been since the cannon flash, but now and then a hand takes mine and leads me to the edge of tomorrow, and lifts the curtain aside, and I see . . .’

‘What do you see? Do you see my father? Do you see him now?’

‘Only shadows, Hari. But he seems to stand up from where he has fallen, and there’s a voice that whispers: “Follow me.” I can’t tell if it’s a friendly thing or something evil – but he stands . . .’

‘And follows? He follows the voice?’

‘So it seems to me. But the curtain closes, Hari, and the night that I live in comes back.’

‘I came to tell you . . .’

‘Yes, what?’

‘That I’ve promised to save him.’

‘Ah,’ Lo said. He was silent for a long time. Then Hari saw his mouth widen in a grimace. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that is what you must do.’

‘Do you see something? Is the curtain lifting?’

‘No, boy. Nothing comes. But I think you must do what you must do. Follow your voice when it calls.’ He grimaced again. ‘I’ll be sorry to lose you. I’ll die when you’re gone . . .’

‘No.’

‘You’ve kept me alive. Teaching you has been a reason to put my face to the hole in the wall and feel the breeze and hear the sea breaking. Hari, you alone know the things I’ve known. The men who told me the tales and the history, and the men, the women too, who learned how to reach into the minds of the animals, and taught me the skill, are dead long ago, and you are left. I found no others.’

‘My father. I’ve told him.’

‘And did he know? Did he learn?’

‘He learned enough to fight Company. And teach me how to fight.’

‘And that is all?’

‘He could not . . . it was too hard for him, reaching inside the rat or cat. And the stories you told me and I told him, they made him angry and he would sharpen his knife on a stone and hunt in the burrows for a king rat, and cry as he killed: “Company dies!”’ Hari felt tears on his cheeks. ‘That is all.’

‘But you know there must be other ways.’

‘Yes.’

‘And I’ve told you how things came to be.’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell me, before you go.’

Hari swallowed. He did not want to go over the story again: the invasion, the defeats, the years of slavery. He wanted Lo to tell him how to find Deep Salt and free his father. But he knew the old man never asked for anything without a reason, so he wet his lips and began: ‘There were centuries, long centuries, before Company came. Life was good. Our city was Belong and our name The Belongers. Our ships went out from Freeport, far into the west and north, to harvest the seas. Our lands stretched south and west, grain fields and farms, as far as men had ever travelled – to the jungles and the deserts that lie beyond. Men came from distant countries, came with their caravans and ships, to trade with us, bringing goods we needed and taking goods away. And we, the Belongers, were happy. And then one day a black ship came. We had not known there were lands beyond the lands we knew. A black ship with white sails and a red open hand marked on the flag. Its name was
Open Hand
and it came from a place called Company.’

Hari felt his tongue grow thick and refuse to talk. That day when the black ship – bigger than any that had ever been seen before – sailed into Freeport was the day slavery began, although all was calm at first, and friendly at first, open handed, and years went by and trade went on and many ships came from Company. But somehow those who had been young when the first ship,
Open Hand
, arrived found that as old men and women they were citizens of Belong no longer but had become servants of Company.

‘They took small steps and we were greedy. They brought so many good things. Our city grew. Company set up warehouses and granaries and factories and our rulers said it was good, it brought more wealth. And then Company must have barracks too, for its soldiers, who were needed to protect its property – and we allowed it. They became our army and police. And soon our ships were not allowed to sail, they must be Company ships. Our farms were Company farms. And managers and clerks from Company ran everything. Our whole city. Our government. Everything. Their families settled our lands, and the ones who grew rich built mansions on the cliffs and put up walls and called it Compound, and we, the Belongers, were the servants there, and workers in their factories and on their ships and farms. So it went on, until we must sell ourselves to them and be slaves. Ourselves were all we had to sell. So we belonged to Company.’

‘Yes, boy,’ Lo said, ‘you know the tale. Don’t wipe your eyes. It’s no shame to cry.’

Hari’s tears had been silent. Had the old man known he wept because he too was weeping quietly from his blind eyes? He sat down beside Lo and went on with the story:

‘Then one day in the city a Company dray with goods from the port ran over a woman selling trinkets and crushed her beneath its wheels, and the driver would not stop. He cried that he was late with his delivery and would be whipped if he delayed, and anyway the woman had not moved quickly enough, people must make way for Company, and the guard who rode with him uncurled his whip and struck the woman’s children out of the way – and that was the moment the great rebellion started. Cowl the Liberator killed the guard with his knife.’

‘Yes, boy, I saw it. Cowl was an honest sailor, a friend of my father, and I was riding on my father’s back. Cowl jumped on the dray and killed the guard, and the driver fled. Then Cowl discovered he had a voice and he called on the people to rise against Company and take back our land, and our sea, for ourselves. Tell the tale . . .’

‘It was like a tide. A great tide rising everywhere, and everyone heard the voice, in the city, on the ships, and soon in the countryside. Every man and woman found a weapon, a knife, a sickle. Every child. By nightfall Belong was free again and all the Company guards, and the managers and clerks, were dead. We stormed the ships in the port and hung the captains from the masts. We hunted Company families in Compound, in their mansions, and dragged those we captured to the cliffs and threw them off. We were fierce and cruel. Not one was left . . .’

Hari swelled with fierceness himself, and stabbed and slashed the air with his knife – his father’s knife. But, as always when he told the tale, or remembered it, his savagery leaked away and he shrank small.

Lo’s voice, sad and creaking, asked, ‘What happened after that?’

‘Looting, destruction, chaos, death. Ten leaders in the city, each with his army. Brigands in the countryside, murdering and burning. Men who were kings for a week or a day. Until Cowl the sailor burst from Port and cleaned out the city with his men and drove all the little kings away. Then he made a government and tried to put Belong back together, and slowly it began to be as it had been before Company came. The farms began to raise their cattle and plant their crops. It began, we began . . .’

‘And then?’

Hari swallowed. ‘Cowl made himself king.’

Lo uttered a groan of despair. His head sank on his breast as though he could not hold it upright any more.

‘I don’t need to go on,’ Hari said.

‘Tell it. All parts must be told.’

Hari wet his lips. ‘He made himself king. He declared that he must rule alone, that parliament would weaken the state. He put up statues of himself. Cowl the Liberator became Cowl the King. He made a court, with courtiers who lived in the mansions. He built an army and planned the conquest of other lands. And soon we found that we were slaves again. And all the while, in their home beyond the lands we knew, Company was getting ready to come back. Company was stronger, far stronger than we knew.’