Gibbon's Decline and Fall (62 page)

West and north of them the mountains rose abruptly—not high, a thousand feet perhaps—as they went south and still farther south, then westward around a curved toe of the mountains, crossing other dim rutty roads that wound away to water tanks and windmills, coming at last to a place where the land sloped gently down toward the west. The old man shifted gears smoothly, and they proceeded more slowly, winding among large stones. Though it was night, they moved in the bubble of amber light that brightened the farther they went.

Carolyn rose and went to the front of the bus, dropping her pack and herself into the empty seat nearest the driver. “What is your name?” she asked.

“I am Chendi Qowat. Also called Padre Josephus.”

“Both postmaster and priest?”

He shook his head, laughing. “No. A messenger and a father. I am father to pigs and goats and chickens and many girl children.”

“No boy children?”

“No boy children. We do not need boy children very often.”

“The girl children are yours?”

“Yes and no. Mostly, I am father to the chickens.”

“What does it mean, to be father to chickens?”

“When they hatch, someone must fetch food to cast before their feet. Who but their father would do this?”

“Are we going to see our friend, Sophy?”

“I have heard Sophy was your friend.”

“Were you the one who brought her food when she was in the desert?”

“She told you that?”

“She told her followers someone had brought her food, someone who lived in a school bus.”

“Perhaps it was I. I do things like that. Bring food. Bring help. Not long ago I brought help to someone you know. Helen, her name is.”

“Helen! Helen Jagger?”

“I found her alone on a hillside, hiding under a tree like a rabbit. I took her to a safe place.”

Carolyn merely stared. “How … how did you know she was there?”

He peered at her intently. “Didn't you ask someone to help her? I thought you did.”

She bit her tongue until she could hold it no longer. “Where are we going?”

“To a place of sun-warmed stone. To the Sisterhood. To the family place of Sovawanea.”

“Who is she, Father Josephus?”

“Don't you know?”

“She was just … Sophy. Our friend.”

“Her people may not agree with me, but I think she is still your friend. You are wise to have such a friend.”

“I'm not sure we're wise.”

“It is hard to be wise in the body. Hard to be wise when one is hungry, or tired, or lusting. I know. I was young once, too. How the blood simmers, making a steam around the brain, a mist that fools the senses. How the words of passion crowd up in the throat. How the muscles twitch and dance when one is young.”

“I'm afraid none of my friends and I are young.”

“Oh, some of you are very young.” He turned the bus slightly to the north, and she saw they were going downhill into a hidden valley. Now the light was pure gold. There were cottonwoods around them, which meant a stream, but she saw no stream. Then, in a moment, she did see a stream—bubbling water, fountains springing forth from the bare earth, filling rocky hollows from which they spilled to make a brook that flowed beside them, dancing silver skeins of water marking their way. The water was edged in grasses and soon passed into the shade of trees. All around them was bosque, riverine woodland, the green boughs hiding them from the sky. Carolyn fished in her pack for her map.

“This place is not on any map,” chided the old man. “This is a place one must know before one goes there. One cannot arrive, one can only return.”

“Then the ones following us can't find it?”

“That is true. They may find your car, but they will not find you.”

“We should have brought the car.”

“It would not go in. Only this vehicle goes in and out. It was created to go in and out.”

She set her instant apprehension aside, forced herself to be calm. She was living in a story Luce might have read and told her about. “Some fairy-tale place?” she asked hesitantly. “Some … what? Magical door between the worlds? Some fold in space?”

He chuckled. “This is not a fairy tale. It is, perhaps, technology of an unfamiliar kind, one that allows a place to exist with an invisible wall around it. People who come to the wall walk around the place, without knowing there is a wall.”

“Why here? Miles from anything?”

“It is easier to make the wall when few people approach it. In a city it would be very hard. The disjunction would be noted. Walls would bend inexplicably. Streets would not meet at corners. It could be done … has been done in old cities, I am told, where alleys wind and walls curve. There you could go through a door, turn a corner, turn another, wind here, wind there, and be suddenly elsewhere, all the disjunctions hidden by evasive corridors and delusive stairs. Here it is simpler. Who comes? A few cows. A man or two on horseback, hunting the cows. A pig hunting his dinner. A cougar hunting the pig. Who goes over? A few planes, very high. Once in a great while one like last night, a helicopter flying low and slow, looking for someone. What do they see? Mesquite and sand and yucca and more mesquite and more sand. Who will notice that mesquite does not make a straight line? Who would expect it to?”

“But there are detectors,” she said uncertainly. “Radar? Things like that?”

“The wall makes no trace on such devices.”

“And you still say this is not fantasy?”

“No. Real people here sent for you.”

“Sent for us?”

“Sent me for you. In my role as messenger, or as you say, postmaster. You are the post I am delivering.”

“This place where we're going … has it always been here?”

He shook his head. “It has been here for a very long time. Not always. Nothing is always.”

She went back toward her seat.

Faye raised her head as Carolyn sat down. “Learning things, schoolmate?”

“Many things,” she said. “All of them like eating wind pudding.”

“Yeah,” she said, laying her head back again. “Sophy was always hard to get hold of.”

The jouncing journey went on only briefly before the bus slowed and stopped at the edge of a glade, a streamside meadow, sheltered under giant cottonwoods with dark evergreens standing behind them. Carolyn had been over the map a dozen times. There was no stream upon it, only dotted blue lines to show where spring melt or summer cloudbursts cut knife-edged arroyos into the dry clay of the desert. There was no wooded place on the map. There was no town on the map, but here was a settlement beneath the trees, small houses, along with several larger structures.

“Lizard Rock,” said the old man, pointing toward a vast, ramified outcropping that reared itself into the golden light beyond the nearest trees. He went to the side door, opened it, fetched a barrow from a few feet away, unloaded the chicken and pig feed into it, and trudged off with it along the stream.

Carolyn descended the steps to stand at their foot. The extreme quiet made her uneasy. It was some time before her roving eye saw a figure clad all in green standing in the door of a nearby house, one so robed and veiled as to be completely hidden, though from the attitude she could see the person was facing them, no doubt looking at them.

There was nothing threatening in that quiet watching, but it made Carolyn shift uncomfortably nonetheless. Behind her, Bettiann came down the steps and put her hand on Carolyn's shoulder, gripping it firmly. As though cued by this appearance, the veiled one left the house and approached them.

“This is friend Carolyn,” the person said softly, in a warm and welcoming voice. “And with her are friends Bettiann and Agnes.”

Agnes, so mentioned, stopped halfway out of the bus, frozen totteringly in place. Carolyn turned and reached out to her, afraid she would fall.

“I have seen your pictures,” said the person. “I feel I have known you for many years. Come. Water has been made hot for the brewing of tea. Chairs have been placed upon the porch. We have been expecting you.”

Afar, men's feet thundered down the pavement of streets, traversing the cities, attracting considerable notice from those men who did not march, who were not moved to march, who regarded all this with a shudder of primitive fear, as men might once have done at the approach of a great cave bear or mammoth, or even a tribe other than their own, a tribe bent on evil business, busy with something monstrous and fell
.

“You know,” whispered one bystander to his neighbor, “it reminds me of those old newsreels, the Nazis, goose-stepping down the street.
”

“It reminds me of the nature programs on TV,” said the other. “Those ants, the ones in the jungle, the ones that eat everything!”

“Somebody ought to stop them.”

“Why?” He shrugged, not without some apprehension. “I guess they gotta right to march if they want to.”

Enough of them had that right to make the pavement tremble with an avalanche of purposeful feet, causing shivers of discomfort among the watchers. From windows and doors people looked out to see feet falling in unison, legs tramping, arms swinging, eyes straight ahead as the armies marched to the beat of the drum. Some had shaven heads and some had beards. Some had armbands and insignias, others had none. Some were tall and broad, their shirtsleeves rolled high to show tattoos and bulging arms. Others were slender ascetics with hollow cheeks and piercing, angry eyes. Of whatever type, they all marched to the same drums
.

In one of those cities, on one of those streets, in the lamplit kitchen of a white clapboard house, far from the man and the fate she had escaped, Helen Jagger sat with others who had also needed a place of refuge
.

Rebecca Rainford was telling them a story
.

“So then,” said Rebecca, raising her voice a little to be heard over the tramp of the feet on the pavement outside, “the men went where Elder Sister was sleeping, and several of them held her down, for she was very strong, while the one man found the medicine bag she had hidden their sex in …”

The sound of the marchers reached a crescendo, then passed, the pom, pom, pom of the drums diminishing into the night
.

“… and when each man's sex came out, a tiny piece of the medicine bag stuck to it, and so they are stuck today to the tip of each man's sex, shaming him for what he did to Elder Sister in
the long ago, and some men even cut them off, so as not to be reminded of their shame.…”

A questioning hush fell as Rebecca went on to the end of the story
.

“… and each time a woman is hurt, Elder Sister weaves a little on her medicine bag, and in time it will be all woven again.”

“Is that why the men are marching out there?” asked Helen, talking a deep swallow of hot tea. “Because Elder Sister is weaving a new mediane bag?”

“Has just about woven, I think,” said Rebecca, with a trembling laugh. “Has just about woven.”

Jessamine, Ophy, and Faye came out of the bus like sleepwalkers and were shepherded with the others across the short grasses to the nearest house: a brown wooden house with a wide-planked porch set about with chairs and small tables. Ophy perched like a bird, alert and interested. Bettiann sat demurely erect, ankles crossed, hands folded, as at a formal tea. Jessamine sprawled, her mind busy cataloging what she saw. The voice that had greeted them was as quiet as the surroundings, a charming female voice, much as she remembered Sophy's voice had been.

“You're female,” said Jessamine, ticking off a category.

“That is a truth,” said the person in a voice that smiled. “I am Tess, aTessuraea Pausiuane [ah-TAY-soo-rah-AY-ah pa-OO-see-oo-AH-nay], which means, in our language, Pausi's daughter, the balanced one. It is a beautiful name when spoken lovingly, but Tess will do admirably. My mother is Pausiliafe Flomuinsuane [pah-OO-sil-ee-AH-fay flow-MOO-in-sue-AH-nay], Flomuin's daughter, the long-sighted. She is called Pausi. She brings tea.”

Pausi came onto the porch, robed and veiled in blue, bowed her head to each of them, then seated herself. The person next out of the house, carrying a tray set with cups, was in purple.

“This is my grandmother: Flomuin. We are Tess, Pausi, and Flo.”

The robes they wore were like Japanese kimonos, with long, loose sleeves that covered their hands. The veils covered even their eyes, though with a fine net through which they could evidently see without trouble, for they did not fumble or peer. Cups were distributed and tea was poured without their hands coming into view. Carolyn fought a hysterical giggle
that welled at the back of her throat; Faye and Jessamine were relaxed but concentrated, one seeking appearance, the other substance. Ophy seemed watchfully at ease, while Bettiann was politely eager. Agnes, however, could as well have been dreaming. She could have been at home, at the abbey, in meditation for all the attention she paid the strangers. Though a visitor in their land, she had shut them out.