Walk to the End of the World (6 page)

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Authors: Suzy McKee Charnas

BOOK: Walk to the End of the World
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A man was supposed to be an individual. He was supposed to go apart and strengthen his soul with a dream from among those taught in the Boyhouse, which were all on the same heroic themes: dreams of victorious battles against monsters, dreams of power and wealth bent to the good of lesser men, dreams of manly love and lifelong loyalties, dreams of endurance and achievement - an endless selection of patterns keynoted to the manly virtues. In this way the soul could be schooled independently of the drowning flesh. Each man, in command of his own dreaming, chose the proper dream for his own needs and weaknesses.
D Layo told them to forget all that and give him control. He would show them how to free their souls for the delight of knowing what they were, not what they ought to be. It was seditious nonsense that undermined manly self-discipline and integrity, but he made it attractive.
‘Let me teach you,’ d Layo murmured, ‘to relax your mind and soul, to open the dark core of yourself and free what lives there. Every soul is equal before a DarkDreamer, and every soul is unique; what is your soul?’
The insidious lure of DarkDreaming lay partly in this deliberate abolition of hierarchy. D Layo led them into the void of their hidden selves, where any mad chaos was possible. He was skillful, nothing like the fumbling fools Kelmz had encountered before. Gently, the DarkDreamer touched Sullen-face, drawing out the hesitant movements of his limbs and his slowcurling fingers. The man’s mouth simpered open, his hands began to stroke downward on his own chest and thighs. He cringed, he melted, he was a fem.
Revolted, Kelmz looked away. For himself, he realized, he had
hoped to see beasts – real beasts, hot-hided, pungently scented alien beings – not the pathetic perversions of other men.
Now d Layo was working on Hak. One-eyed Hak, chief of the crew on the coastal run, tumbled over and rolled on the floor, shielding himself from invisible kicks and blows, yammering. The DarkDreamer seemed to dance over and around him, perfecting the ferryman’s performance with a touch, a whisper, a tug at the sleeve.
Kelmz began to shake.
He couldn’t understand the meaning of the upright-walking being that came toward him, sniffed at him, put its hot, smooth touch on him. Panicky, he reared back to escape, but there were barriers. He struck out. The tall-walker evaded him and withdrew. Alone, penned in, he squeezed his eyes half shut and swung his head away from the bright, flaring heat and burning smell. Deep tremors of fear shuddered through him. He swayed from side to side, nosing the air for a familiar scent. There was none.
A sound found its way out of his throat, a whimper. He rocked his weight from shoulder to shoulder and moaned out his despair and isolation; but there came no answering voice.
 
It was day. Close by, a man slept all asprawl, snoring. Another had burrowed his way under a pile of woven mats so that only his haunches stuck out, collapsed sideways over his bent legs.
‘Stand up, Captain,’ the Endtendant commanded.
He was right to give that order, though he was only a Junior. Kelmz stood, blinking.
‘Sun’s fire!’ he croaked; ‘I was a beast!’
D Layo was laughing. ‘Look at him, he’s upset because his secret is out. What a secret! He should know as many men as I do who dream themselves a coat of fur or feathers when they get the chance!’
Servan was high as a flag. Each go-round with manna was a gamble for him; his tolerance for it was undependable. When it left him exalted he was the victor. He shook the empty bracelet along his arm as he walked. He would have to see about getting hold of some more good stuff, now that he’d used up his supply on that pack of ferry-punks.
The ferrymen had let them off at midday. The three men made their way through the marshes in the still, warm afternoon. The hike gave them time to emerge from the after-effects of the dreaming. Kelmz, in particular, needed that. He was in a black, bewildered mood and walked apart from the others.
As for Servan, he held onto his euphoria; he was practiced in keeping alert enough to function well in spite of his intoxication. That their destination was the fem-center of the entire Holdfast increased his good humor. He had always intended to visit Bayo, in order to fill a gap in his professional background — as he explained several times to his companions, between snatches of song. Inside his head an on-running paean of praise to his own good luck rippled along, woven of scraps of songs he had wrung from various fems who had passed through his hands. Completely unable to produce a true note of his own, he had spent a period of his life pursuing others’ music. That craze was over now, but he had learned a lot and still liked to sing, however tonelessly. Besides, one thing he still had a craze for was needling Eykar, and he knew perfectly well that his singing needled Eykar.
There was no one to hear him but themselves. The grass of the marshes was allowed to grow undisturbed to head height, curing in the salty mud. The Bayo fems were sent to harvest it as needed for weaving, and you could always hear them coming a mile off, singing their work-chants. The scattered stands and thickets were deserted now.
The footing was soggy, but Servan liked the hiss and rustle of their passage through the tall, yellow stems. Stripes of gold and shadow glided over their skins and clothing, giving a fantastic, underwater motion effect. The sunlight struck obliquely toward them between the ribbons of grass; they must have been slogging along like this for some time. He’d hardly noticed.
Soon there came the piping of the flutes of Bayo, which were said to skirl as ceaselessly as the horns blew in Lammintown. There was a song that said the flutists’ indrawn breath sucked up the spirits of dead fems and that it was these ghost-voices which sang so sadly from the instruments. An interesting conceit. Servan was eager to see fems on what must be considered their homeground.
Bayo had begun as nothing more than a crude outpost of the City, which lay forty miles inland. The flats between the City and the southern mouth of the river were perfectly suited to the growing of lavers. These freshwater weeds, both tasty and nutritious, grew best in nutrient-rich, shallow waters. So the south channel of the river had been dammed into ponds, into which the City’s sewage was fed. Then stone causeways had been built bestriding the ponds and linking Bayo with the City. Lastly, the structures of Bayo itself had gone up, to house a permanent fem labor force and whatever company of men was assigned to supervise them.
Surrounded on the seaward side by the golden grass, the thick crescent of Bayo buildings crouched, compact and unadorned, between the southern margins of the ponds and the river’s mouth where the ferry docked. Bayo’s walls were of mud-brick, fired to withstand the summer rains. All the structures had been erected on a ramp of similar brick that sloped noticeably upward from the dockside warehouses to the farther horn of the crescent, where the pyramidal men’s compound reared up overlooking everything. The quarters of the fems comprised the curved centre.
This evening, from the bright-windowed men’s compound came cheerful rills of flute notes and a drum beat reinforced by the stamp
of dancing feet. The Penneltons’ greeting-feast for the ferrymen was in full swing. Hopefully, the Chesters would maintain the secret of their complicity with the fugitives outside for some hours yet.
The three of them squatted in the high grass, weary and coated to the knees in marsh mud. An unpleasant odor hung in the air, penetrating even the dank salt-smell of the marshes. Probably the odor was connected with the cloudy emissions from the chimneys clustered on the rooftops of buildings adjoining the warehouses. Those would be the workrooms, a good place to enter, if they could get past the guards.
Three pairs of Rovers patrolled the lighted gallery which ran along the inside curve of the crescent. Servan considered Rovers to be highly overrated as fighting men. Once you figured out that they worked on the principle of the pre-emptive strike, it was easy to deal with them. Acting out of fear themselves, they interpreted others’ fear of them as a presage of aggression and responded by attacking first. Seen in this way, theirs was a reasonable sort of behavior. Servan had a theory that the famous ‘mature’ composure of Senior men was primarily protective, to prevent the unintended triggering of Rovers against the Seniors themselves. Servan had adopted the show of serenity in his own contact with Rovers quite successfully.
A man like Kelmz, however, was not to be wasted in a situation like this. Servan waited while Kelmz sized up their position independently and came, naturally, to the same conclusion. The captain made a stay-put sign and moved off silently toward the warehouses. For a big man, he could travel very neatly when he chose to.
Servan sat back to wait, turning his mind firmly from considerations of food. They had eaten nothing since morning, and now that the manna-high had worn off, he was hungry. He hummed part of a song concerning ‘Rovers, red-handed, mad-eyed warders, dreadful and deadly to fems.’
The two Rovers guarding the workroom and warehouse end of the crescent came swinging down the gallery in step, bald-headed and thick-bodied like two rough clay men made from the same mold. That their features could not be discerned in the shadows of the thatch overhead seemed only fitting; their anonymous madness was their most formidable aspect. Servan knew from experience that they were so nearly soulless, like the mechanical men of Ancient legend, that they were a disappointment to kill unless fully aroused
– something that at present was to be avoided.
He thought he knew what Kelmz had in mind. If successful, it would save Servan trouble. If not, he would do what was called for. He never liked to plan too tightly for the future.
The Rovers wheeled and marched back the way they had come. A shadow rose from the darkness behind them, and Kelmz fell silently into step at their backs. They stiffened visibly, but didn’t turn or break stride. Kelmz would be matching their tread so exactly that each of them would hear only his own steps amplified by his companion’s in a manner that he had been taught not to fear, so that he could work as a member of a brace or squad.
Servan would have to tell Kelmz later what an artist he was. His praise would certainly irritate the captain – art was a famishing untrustworthy attribute – and at the same time it would have the virtue of being true. Kelmz had an artist’s luck, too: the Chesters were doing their part well, for no one stepped outside the men’s compound to piss or settle a bet. There was no break in the pounding rhythm of the Penneltons’ dancing.
Smoothly, the captain moved up and put his hands on the Rovers’ shoulders. He wheeled with them and they came back down the gallery, secured by his authoritative touch. If he had hesitated, they would have turned and cut him down. By the time Servan and Eykar gained the gallery themselves. Kelmz and the Rovers were again at the far end of their patrol, backs turned.
The doors to the work-buildings were not locked, for no fem would try to get past a Rover-watch. The two men simply walked in, entering a huge room full of hot, sour air.
The cement floor was cluttered with machines, bins, tables, and chutes. At the far end, layers of stuffed hempen sacks mounted toward the ceiling, presumably containing some of the finished product. Most of the equipment seemed to be idle. A few fems were present, wearing sweat-rags bound around their heads and stained aprons that reached from armpit to knee. Three of them stood nearby, fixing a piece of wire mesh over the opening of a pipe that stuck out of the wall. The pipe and the trough under it seemed to be the prime source of the pervasive sour stink. From this group and others came the murmur of voices; that was surprising. Though normally fems sang at work, the majority of them were held to be incapable of any but the most limited fem-to-master type of speech.
There were no men about at all. This was the first time Servan had ever seen any number of fems together without at least one pair of Juniors overseeing their activities. It made his hair prickle.
Some signal must have been given; suddenly every fem in the place acquired a slight stoop or cringe. The faces of the nearest ones went slack and foolish before his eyes. Witchery? He almost laughed. He had seen a dormful of boys change in just such a way when a Teacher walked in on them unexpectedly in the Boyhouse.
One of the fems tending to the pipe came toward the intruders, her calloused feet rasping on the concrete floor. She knelt to kiss the ground in front of them. There were scars on her lean back. Nobody bothered about pretty appearances in the workrooms of Bayo, it seemed. She had wide shoulders for a fem and a strong neck, and she was almost the size of a fair-grown boy.
Servan addressed her close-cropped head. ‘Where are your masters?’
‘This fem feels that they are all in the men’s compound, please-you-master,’ she whined, slurring her words in the manner of fems. She sat back on her heels, so that now that he had acknowledged her presence, he might see her face if he wished to. ‘Is there something this fem might offer these masters?’
A trickle of white fluid ran off the lip of the pipe into the trough, setting off a to-do of shouting and wall-rapping from the fems working with the mesh.
‘She can offer her full attention,’ Servan snapped to the one before him. She kissed the ground again in apology. ‘Is there some fem here who’s been in Bayo for the past three five-years?’
‘This fem can try to take the masters to one such,’ she said, using the proper formula that avoided any suggestion of actual competence on her part. She arose at his gesture to guide them.
Then the outer door opened and Kelmz walked in. The two Rovers strode ahead of him, heads up and nostrils flaring.
Every fem in the room froze.
‘Christ,’ Servan groaned, ‘and his unfortunate father!’
Close up, the Rovers were impressive. Their heavy torsos gleamed, and the short capes they wore strained across their shoulders. They stood with their legs bent in an aggressive crouch. Each Rover had a knife in his right hand, and his defensively gloved left hand tensed before his belly, ready to lash out with a metal-studded
blow or to turn the slash of an enemy’s weapon.
‘Kelmz, you’re moon-mad to bring them in here!’ Servan said.
‘I can hold them,’ said the captain.
Eykar said sharply, ‘Will they be missed?’
Kelmz shook his head. ‘They’re fresh, probably just on duty an hour or so. Nobody will check them for a while. I think they’re worth the risk to us. You want to keep these bitches shivering when you have to go among them.’
His hands rested lightly on the Rovers’ shoulders; he stroked them a little, calming them. But he had an odd, abstracted air, as if he touched them from a great distance.

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