Read Walk to the End of the World Online
Authors: Suzy McKee Charnas
Walk to the End of the World (4 page)
‘Who says I don’t do my job right?’ he demanded suddenly.
‘What man in the Chesters? Or is it just you ’Wares that say it?’
The Senior’s bristling eyebrows rose. ‘I didn’t criticize the way you do your job – ’
‘Then what’s this talk about getting me off my boat? You trying to score me off, Senior? Taking advantage of a rough working lad that’s been at sea too long?’
Turning on his subordinate, the Senior curtly ordered him to get the Rovers out of earshot of the discussion. The older man plainly appreciated the difficulties of his position, and he was giving himself time to think. He could hardly send for a Chester Senior, for he would incur enormous humiliation for himself and his company by appealing for help in dealing with an uppity Junior.
The Senior leaned out over the piling and said balefully, ‘A man who helps a thief is worse than a thief, in these lean times. You might remember that you are no Pennelton, to walk off this boat in Bayo and sleep safe for the rest of the five-year with the whole coast between us. You’ll be coming back here on your return run, and when you do, I’ll have your standing stripped. You’re compounding an injury done my company on its own work-turf, and that’s injury to all. It will cost the Chesters a lot to make it good. It will certainly cost them you.
‘Think about that, Junior, and consider: who should pay the price of theft, you or the thieves?’
‘There’s a lot of things lying crooked between the ’Wares and the Chesters, Senior. Maybe it’s time it all got put straight. Then we’d
find out who owed whom.’
find out who owed whom.’
Without another word, the Senior turned and stalked off, with his entourage hurrying after him.
‘Go stick it up a fem,’ Hak muttered. Giving Kelmz a sour grin, he stumped off toward the winch deck, shouting at the men standing there. They leaped up onto the winch housing and laid hold of the handles with their gauntleted hands.
D Layo sighed. ‘Well, Captain,’ he said, ‘I suppose I must grant you some usefulness after all.’
No Seniors rode the ferries, except occasionally as passengers. Skilled administrators (some were even literate), they were in charge of record-keeping ashore. Aboard the ferries, the older Juniors were responsible for the crew, passengers and cargo between dockings. One-eyed Hak had been crew chief on the coastal run since the beginning of the five-year.
The ferry itself was a converted river craft which had replaced the legendary ocean-goer lost long ago. The story was that a Senior had insisted on taking Rovers on a sea trip with him and that one of them had gone rogue and cut the cable. The ferry had drifted out onto the empty immensity of water and had never been seen again. The largest of the river craft had been altered to take its place, for by that time the building of ships was an art that had vanished with the trees cleared from the Holdfast.
There were tales, of course, of ships of the Ancients which had been driven by fire and by secret and strange substances that could kill a man on contact. These legends ranked with stories of craft, carrying human cargo, that could hurl themselves through the air for great distances. That had been in the days when the world was so rich in metal that there was plenty for the fashioning of mighty machines.
In the Holdfast, requests for metal went through the company hierarchies to the Board, which might pass them on to the town of ‘Troi. Not many orders were filled; the furnaces of ’Troi could only turn out so much metal goods per five-year. Tools, weapons, and
replacement parts for the few machines still in use had priority. Extra work-time and material tended to go into luxury items like jewelry, which only Seniors could afford.
replacement parts for the few machines still in use had priority. Extra work-time and material tended to go into luxury items like jewelry, which only Seniors could afford.
The ferries were powered by machines. ’Troi engineers had designed a system of gears by means of which the strength of men on the winch was amplified and transferred to rotary blades at the rear of the craft. Certainty of staying within sight of land was assured by the long cable which fed down from the pylons through a wheel fixed to the midships decking. The whole arrangement was slow and clumsy, but free of the perils of fast-moving, free-ranging boats. The Holdfast could not afford to lose another ferry.
All that remained of shipyard skill was the ability to patch and trim existing vessels with wood won from the Wild. Each bit of the precious material was polished and shaped by the hand of every man in a given crew before being ceremonially installed. The names of the men who dared the empty lands beyond the borders of the Holdfast to obtain wood went into special Chants Celebratory concerning the ferries. Every step of the patching process was, like most of the things the ferrymen did, part of a fabric of custom intended to hold ferrycrews together in manly order, despite their isolation between empty sea and empty sky.
The huge hold of the coastal ferry was lit by hanging lamps and stray sunlight that entered the high-set ports. The air was hot, moist and permanently impregnated with the reek of sweat, lammins and beer. The noise never stopped.
At the center of the hold was the play-pen, a pit of sand that was the scene of the perpetual contests and games with which ferrymen filled their off-deck hours. Something was always going on in the pen and at the tile gameboards that made up the apron around it. Every match drew its mob of shouting spectators.
Forward, the sweating sloppers tended cook-tubs sunk into the tops of great clay fire-boxes in which fires roared day and night. Aft, past the cargo-space and the rows of crewmen’s hammocks, someone was always playing the part of story-box to whatever audience he could keep, bellowing out his tale in order to be heard above the general din. The entire ship reverberated ceaselessly to the growling of winch and propeller blades.
The gleaming skins of the ferrymen, who went about in shorts or nothing at all below decks, reminded Kelmz of insect armor. Even
the interminable activity and racket struck him as mimicry of the meaningless scurryings of those strange, tiny beasts of the Ancients’ times.
the interminable activity and racket struck him as mimicry of the meaningless scurryings of those strange, tiny beasts of the Ancients’ times.
He had never travelled by water before, except under awnings on the decks of river barges. His journeys had commonly been overland, with a brace or two of Rovers in his charge. There were no Rovers on the ferry; there was nothing familiar or easy. The heat made him dizzy; the stuffiness choked him; the constant rolling cost him several meals. It was impossible to sleep in all the noise, but he didn’t need much sleep, having nothing active to do; and he didn’t eat a lot.
The food – never enough of it here any more than elsewhere at Juniors’ tables – was invariably blue-stew with dollops of the hemp-root starch called taydo in it; thin slices of hempseed bread smeared with plankton jelly; and pale beer to wash it all down. The only relief was the occasional fresh salad made with the lammins that d Layo had turned over to the sloppers on first entering the hold. That gesture had won him friends from the start.
He had built on this beginning by becoming an enthusiastic participant in the games at the play-pen. As a DarkDreamer and an outlaw he lived outside the company system of work- and gamepoints, so he took his winnings in cash. This should have made trouble for him since Juniors were always short of cash, their only means of buying any sort of luxury beyond the subsistence distributed to them by the companies. Yet without apparent effort, d Layo shortly became so popular with the young Chesters that he influenced their private status structure.
Officially, work-points determined a company’s subsistence portion every five-year, and game-points converted into individual shares of spending cash for the Juniors. But among themselves young men vied for standing on the basis of scars. This system had begun as a defiant glorification of the marks of corporal punishment. By the time the Board had substituted more subtle forms of discipline, the Holdfast Juniors had established an underground hierarchy based not only on verbal contests but on scars gotten in fights. It was rare for a young man not to be marked up, even if he had to inflict wounds on himself.
To Kelmz’ surprise, the DarkDreamer had very little to show under his shirt other than the pallid discolorations of an acid-bleached
rank-tattoo on his shoulder and a few faded wound-weals that he did nothing to enlarge or freshen up. Smooth skin should have worked against d Layo; but something in his manner and his impressive showing in the ferrymen’s games converted it into an asset. Within a few days of leaving Lammintown, it became the fashion on the ferry to modestly cover one’s scars with a shirt. The theory was that a man who stood ready to prove his courage in action had no need to show off evidence of past bravery.
rank-tattoo on his shoulder and a few faded wound-weals that he did nothing to enlarge or freshen up. Smooth skin should have worked against d Layo; but something in his manner and his impressive showing in the ferrymen’s games converted it into an asset. Within a few days of leaving Lammintown, it became the fashion on the ferry to modestly cover one’s scars with a shirt. The theory was that a man who stood ready to prove his courage in action had no need to show off evidence of past bravery.
Similarly, because d Layo wore no jewelry but his manna-bracelet, the younger ferrymen soon put away their own highly prized ceramic earrings, pendants, anklets and studded belts. D Layo mockingly ascribed these changes to Kelmz’ influence, not his own.
By professional habit the captain sported no ornaments. He continued to wear his patched and threadbare suit of blanks, saving his uniform. It was not a Rover’s way to display his body like a boastful boy. Kelmz was hoping the anonymity of blanks would help him spend the voyage in quiet obscurity.
However, on the first morning out he woke from a fretful doze to find a ribby, freckle-skinned lad, ostentatiously scarred on chest and arms, waiting silently by his hammock. This Junior politely requested that Captain Kelmz come join a group at the story-box. Once Kelmz accepted out of courtesy, he found himself trapped into a pattern that repeated itself daily, to his intense embarrassment.
The young men would begin complimenting him. By reputation, it seemed, Kelmz was strong, skillful, efficient, loyal, brave, honest, and on and on until he couldn’t tell whether they were describing some mythical paragon of the manly virtues or trying to make a fool of him. He would sit among them with a flush in his seamed cheeks and his big hands clenched, until he could bear no more of their bright-faced praise. When he finally started to rise and leave them, someone would say, ‘Will the Captain tell about the time two Rovers went rogue on him on the river-road near Oldtown?’ Or about the skirmish with Birj Company at the City breweries, or a fight in a Lammintown Street of Honor, or even the time he had carried his friend Danzer, fatally injured, five miles on his own back?
These lads knew Kelmz’ life better than he did himself, and they pressed him unabashedly about events that he would have preferred
to forget. By convention, a man could not refuse to tell a story that he knew or to come back next time and finish one that had been interrupted. Kelmz’ stories were always interrupted.
to forget. By convention, a man could not refuse to tell a story that he knew or to come back next time and finish one that had been interrupted. Kelmz’ stories were always interrupted.
D Layo claimed that some of the regular Chester story-boxers were angry because Kelmz was stealing their audience. Kelmz said he didn’t understand how the young men knew so much about him.
The DarkDreamer laughed at that. ‘Kelmz, you are an innocent. Haven’t you ever looked past your Rover-brutes at anything? Man, you’re a walking legend, and for once there are no Seniors around to check the lads’ demonstration of their feelings. How would you expect youngsters to regard a famous fighting man who sticks by his Junior status and his dream-doped Rovers in spite of all customs and pressure?’
‘They don’t know anything about it,’ Kelmz muttered and refused to discuss the matter further. He felt as if he had won the young Chesters’ respect falsely.
The situation grew serious when the freckled lad turned up one morning with a gold-glazed earring which he pressed on the captain as a gift; then he asked for a story that was part of a courting-series. Kelmz didn’t care about the jealousy of the lad’s prior friend, an older Junior chiefly noticeable these days for his sullen looks; but he felt he had no right to divert the young Chester from companionship within his own company and age-group. Though Kelmz was not an officially mantled Senior, by any biological reckoning the freckled lad was on the Junior side of the age-line. The appropriate attitude of an older man toward a younger was wary concern, not lust. A man could hardly have a relationship of equals with one less mature than himself. Kelmz had no intention of descending to the vice of boy-stealing. Besides, after the years with Danzer, Kelmz had formed the habit of avoiding close bonds with other men.
He retreated; he went up on deck, where he found the Endtendant standing at the rail.
The Endtendant spent daylight hours alone there, with all that bleak sky overhead and fathoms of water below and nothing but the line of the land, gliding past, to look at. He even kept his back turned to the chanting ferrymen on the winch, as if he actually enjoyed solitude in the open. He was slightly tanned by sun and wind. His eyes were the same pale windows on the chilly place behind the mask.
Kelmz nodded a greeting, which was curtly returned, and leaned on the worn rail a little distance away. He watched the water slide by below. That was a mistake.
The sight of the shifting surface in whose depths nothing lived any more brought horribly to mind all sorts of stories that no decent man should even recall from his Boyhouse lessons, let alone picture in vivid detail: house-sized fish that ate ships, many-legged bladder-beasts skittering along the bottom of the sea to gobble the bodies of drowned men … Kelmz closed his eyes and turned his face up to the cleansing light of the sun.
Fortunately, that afternoon they sighted the tall marshgrass that grew between Bayo and the beach. That was also the day that the Endtendant was recognized.
Thanks to ceaseless prodding by the freckled lad’s friend, certain Chesters who were contemporaries of d Layo and the Endtendant had worked out who the DarkDreamer’s companion must be. When Kelmz and the Endtendant came belowdecks for the evening meal, they found a meeting in progress. Hak was addressing the assembled men with some heat, while those who had precipitated the crisis stood in a group at his right, headed by Sullen-face and the freckled lad.
Hak was saying that he had extended the freedom of the ferry to the strangers on the strength of Kelmz’ reputation and because of a natural sympathy for any young men in trouble with Seniors. He had not counted on one of the fugitives turning out to be an outlaw Endtendant.
D Layo got to his feet, brushing sand from his chest and arms. Though his skin was blotched with red marks from a play-pen match, he seemed unruffled and spoke in a tone of light incredulity. ‘Leaving aside for the moment the question of identities, is it seriously suggested that these young Chesters refuse to help other young men — or maybe even turn them over to the cloth-cocks for cash?’
The listeners guffawed; young men sometimes called Seniors that, meaning that the only thing an old man could still get up was his mantle.
Sullen-face retorted, ‘If there’s a reward, why not? It’s not every day that men have a chance to do their manly duty and get paid well for it besides.’
At that point someone noticed the two new arrivals, and a cry was raised: ‘There’s the man!’
Hak called, ‘Are you Eykar Bek, Endtendant of Endpath?’
And the Endtendant said, ‘Yes.’
‘Ah, Christ,’ Kelmz said, with deep disgust; to throw away their lives so simply was a crime. He set his hand on the hilt of his knife.
‘Then something has to be done,’ Hak declared. ‘I know who gets blamed by those here when this five-year ends and the work-points and game-points presented by this company are discounted by the Board because we’ve helped a renegade Endtendant. There won’t be plenty to go around to begin with. The Board will be looking for reasons to cut shares where they can.’
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