Walk to the End of the World (10 page)

Read Walk to the End of the World Online

Authors: Suzy McKee Charnas

BOOK: Walk to the End of the World
6.36Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
‘Varner and others of that time have come to me since at Endpath,’ Eykar observed, drily. ‘The Rovers are probably long-since killed in Hemaway skirmishes. But here you still are, Servan, to tell the tale.’
Servan laughed. ‘Eykar, you have a hard heart! Even you would have been moved, though, if you’d seen me lumping around in the dust and the thorns, swearing and roaring and bleeding, until the Scrappers came and got me. You know, it’s not true that Scrappers make their living salvaging stray bits of metal and such. Their best source of income is the trade in bondboys. Somebody at the Boyhouse gets paid to tell them when a promising lad – like me – is due to be dumped in the Wild. The Scrappers go and fetch him in, giving rise to all those tales of demons eating up the bodies.
‘What the Scrappers do with the lucky fellow they’ve rescued is soften him for sale. It’s a manly virtue, after all, not to waste anything useful that comes to hand.’
Eykar stopped. ‘We’d better turn back, if we don’t want to waste an hour of darkness. Go on; there’s more, surely? Or are you going to tell me that you were sold to Senior Bajerman, who is waiting for us at the shelter with a troop of Rovers at this moment?’
‘Christ,’ Servan laughed, ‘that would be hard on me, friend! The bondboy business trades on the fact that a lot of rich old Seniors are cunters at heart. That isn’t surprising, considering how unappetizing old men can be and the access they have to all the decent-looking ferns. They develop an appetite for ferns’ company, but at the same time they worry about the state of their souls. So a lot of them prefer to turn to some poor young fellow who’s been trimmed to the fem-pattern, so to speak - castrated. That’s your bond; your cut boy
is ashamed to run away, for fear of being found out to be no man by others. The whitehead who keeps a bondboy gets the security of male companionship with a touch of famishing softness thrown in. A neat solution to the problem, don’t you think?’
Eykar said, ‘I was wrong to joke with you about this just now. Bondboys have come to me on the Rock. Do you think you’re making up for a gap in my education with this kind of talk? Do you seriously believe that being shut up at Endpath is some sort of shelter from the darker side of Holdfast life? The things you speak of so lightly I’ve seen stamped in the faces of the pilgrims to the Rock. They talked to me, despite the rule of silence.’
In bursts of intensity like this one, Eykar would sometimes speak more of his feelings than he meant to.
‘Whatever they say about men choosing to come to Endpath, more are broken and desperate than are “ripe for release”, whatever that may mean. Cancer drives them, madness drives them, passion drives them; a meager handful are drawn by some feeling of readiness. I’m better informed about the pain of Holdfast life than most men are; so you don’t need to enlighten me.
‘And it was only in my weakest moments that I’ve ever thought you might not make your way easily through the worst of it.’
‘Well,’ Servan said, ‘purely as a matter of boring personal history, I slipped away from the Scrappers but kept my eye on them afterwards. Three of them are dead now; one still carries some magnificent scars that he owes to me, and two more are in permanent hiding – unless they’ve gone to Endpath in their eagerness to avoid meeting me again.’ He considered elaborating, but decided against it. He slapped the stopper back into the neck of the jug. ‘I had good luck.’
‘A fem’s notion,’ Eykar said. ‘Luck.’
‘Weren’t you lucky to find me when you needed me? Though I always felt that we’d come together again sometime, in the natural course of events. We’re as close as smoke and flame. The two of us could put our hearts together and make a blaze that would light the Holdfast from ’Troi to the sea.
‘What do you think? Nothing? Or do you think but not speak, being such a true individual, such a very private person?’
‘Look!’ Eykar said, fiercely, and his hand pointed, dark against the stars. ‘You can see the glow of the City from here. Do we travel
tonight, or do we hang about talking the trifling talk of soft-headed boys, old men and fems?’
There had always been ways of striking sparks from Eykar’s flint. Servan was pleased that he hadn’t lost the knack; he only wished he could see Eykar’s face just now.
Servan rested, crouching loose-limbed against the causeway wall. When he caught his breath and lost the cramps in his gut from running so long, he would slip into the City to bring back blanks for them to wear. Their present disguises were useless on the home ground of the Hemaways.
He could hear Eykar shifting restlessly close by in the darkness. The more you wore Eykar down, the tighter he wound himself, resisting his own exhaustion. He had run well. Now that they had reached their goal – the edge of the City – he couldn’t let go and rest, though Servan could hear the trembling in his breathing. There was never any point in worrying about Eykar; he looked frail, yet he generally proved a better stayer than other men.
Eykar whispered, ‘Strange, to hear the City and smell the City, without being able to see it. That happened sometimes at Endpath in my sleeping-dreams.’
Kelmz, who should have known better than to waste rest time in conversation, made some answer or other, and the two of them began talking quietly together. There was no jeering, no point-jockeying, just Kelmz’ slow, deep voice and Eykar’s edged one.
Head down on his folded arms, Servan listened. Kelmz made some remark about the influence on the City of a large fem population. He got back more than he had expected – Servan smiled to himself – one of Eykar’s learned lectures, the sort of thing that had made the Boyhouse Teachers so nervous. Of all things, Eykar was outlining an esoteric theory that the Holy Book of the Ancients had
actually been written by clever fems using men’s names. Only Eykar would speak of such things in the open at night, and with a fem squatting two feet away!
He laid it out with his usual precision and clarity; the drift of the teachings of that Book could be interpreted as a porridge of unmanly soft-headedness, mushy morals and anti-hierarchical sedition, cloaked in a manly-seeming tale of a Son justly punished for trying to supercede his Father, ‘God,’ as lord of men. There was also supposed to have been an older book of much sterner import, which this newer one imitated.
Surprisingly, Kelmz not only did not object to the topic, he showed himself capable of pursuing it.
‘But the meaning of the story,’ he said, after a long moment of thought, ‘is a manly one: that by challenging his Father’s authority – and by the false, famishing mush he taught, as you say – the Son drew down on himself the rightful anger of his Father. Doesn’t he accept his punishment, at the end of the story?’
They were off. You couldn’t give Eykar an opening like that without a debate. He sounded suddenly wide awake and relaxed in the way Eykar relaxed – by running his brains to exhaustion. Six years virtually alone at Endpath must have sharpened his hunger for theoretical argument. He pointed out that by the time of the Wasting, most of the worshippers of ‘God’ and his son had been fems and that one of the signs of Freakishness in the sons of the Ancients had been a bent in that direction. Moreover, male functionaries of that religion had been imprisoned for flouting the authority of Ancient leaders.
Kelmz could almost be heard thinking. The standard rejoinder was that the refugees had in fact taken some comfort from that Holy Book. On the other hand, in the end they had rejected the Book and its teachings upon discovery that many of the fems were stricter adherents to its tenets than any of the men.
What the captain came up with was another argument entirely, drawn from his training in military history rather than from any close knowledge of the Book itself. The Book’s religion, he said, had once been a fine and manly one, complete with armed battles against unbelievers and the burning of heretics under the auspices of a powerful and strictly organized hierarchy. The entire structure of early Ancient society, with its codes of honor, rigid class divisions,
and the subjugation of whole races of the Dirties, had been based on that religion. The problem, he maintained, was that ferns had infiltrated and perverted a fine, manly creed – this being ever the stealthy danger that they presented.
‘What could be more stealthy,’ Eykar said, ‘than to lure men into a net of ostensibly manly doctrine in order to corrupt them with rottenness that only becomes apparent far in the future?’
Kelmz shifted his ground. It seemed unreasonable, he said, to attribute such enormous influence to creatures related to the fem who carried their pack-basket, let alone to suggest that a skill like writing (a matter of organization and efficient presentation of ideas) was something that her low kind could handle effectively.
The old wolf was more clever than Servan had guessed. He must have chosen to engage in this discussion in a fem’s presence precisely in order to show up her unimportance in the light of these ancient, weighty matters and at the same time to warn Eykar to beware of her – without insulting him by coming right out and saying that he needed to be warned. Suddenly the conversation was no longer amusing to Servan.
While he had half-dozed, imagining himself back in the Boyhouse snoozing in the courtyard where boys and Teachers walked and talked under the arcades, Kelmz had been showing a concerned interest in Eykar. Kelmz offered the attraction of an elder willing to meet Eykar on his own ground without pulling age-rank or a pretense of intellectual condescension, and yet able to hold his own.
Well, what of it? If Eykar allowed himself to be lured into an affair across the age-line, Servan could always use guilt against him later. Kelmz was hardly any sort of long-term competition. Yet Eykar was so tense these days, so self-contained, that it was hard to be totally sure of him. Servan shifted uncomfortably and tried to shut out the companionable murmuring of their voices.
When the City’s chimes rang, faintly in the fading night, he got up sooner than he had intended.
They fell quiet, hearing him move.
‘These disguises are no use to us now,’ Servan said. He groped for Kelmz’ shoulder, rapped it sharply with his fingers. ‘Give me my manna-bracelet.’ The weight of the metal, still warm from Kelmz’ skin, was placed in his palm. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’
Even before he was out of earshot, they were talking again.
Servan broke into a trot.
No watch was kept over the City’s kiln-yards at night. Nothing could be taken from the sealed, roasting domes, even with the heat damped down to a waver of air over the vents.
Servan strode carelessly over the rubble of old potsherds that surrounded the chambers. He paused to pick up some of the trial bits that had been drawn out through openings in the kilns and laid on a tray so that the supervisors could monitor the progress of the firing. There wasn’t enough light for him to make out the colors, but the chips had a lustrous feel, suggesting that they would give to the touch at any instant, like skin. He dropped them, rattling, back into the tray and crossed the yard to let himself into one of the low buildings at the rear. Like the storage-sheds in Lammintown, the City potteries were full of caches of his private gear.
He stood with his back against the door, enveloped in the wet-clay smell, and he inhaled, tasting clay. First light would show him his way. There would be clay figures wrapped in wet rags on the tables, and he didn’t want to knock anything down. He waited, not minding. The fine grit underfoot and the powder settling on his lips were welcome to him. Like the City’s rippling carillon, this told him he was home.
As a boy he had done a stint in the kiln-yards as part of his skills-training; he had never combed the clay-crumbs out of his hair since. Something about the ability to draw form from a lump of moist earth and to fix it permanently had captured him.
He had begun scheming how to get the company then at work in the potteries to bid on him when he graduated from the Boyhouse; how to stay behind when their five-year was up and they were moved on to another work-turf; how to wangle the privilege of doing free-form work instead of turning out standard figures, utensils, and furniture-blocks. All of which had become irrelevant, of course, upon his expulsion.
Odd that none of this had come up in his talk with Eykar on the causeways. As boys they had often spoken together of the future, though Eykar had always avoided committing himself to any specific direction, saying that he couldn’t tell yet. By this he meant that his direction, though still obscure, was fixed by the fact of his identity.
Servan shifted his shoulders against the door. This gnawing on
the past was so stupid. He never fell prey to sieges of memory and reflection except when he thought about Eykar. How was it that he couldn’t be alone with Eykar for five minutes without giving way to the urge to torment him a bit, to prod and poke him into anger?
The fact was, nothing had changed with time. Eykar still stood in his mind like a rock in deep water, offering nothing, yielding nothing, dividing the current nevertheless. There was no question: Eykar had some power over him. This was a new concept. Servan had never seriously held the thought ‘Eykar’ and the thought ‘power’ in his mind at once. All along Servan had thought of himself as the stronger when it came to matters of any importance. Now he sensed a pattern that he had missed before – a pattern of influence that Eykar exercised over him.
Why had Servan put himself constantly in jeopardy in the Boyhouse, culminating in the DarkDream that had cost him so much, if not to show off for Eykar? The only positive result had been Eykar’s seclusion in a quiet place where he could gather his strength and his will, and to whose advantage was that? Now Eykar wanted to locate Raff Maggomas; sure enough, Servan set about arranging it.
A shiver roughened Servan’s skin. Eykar seemed so vulnerable in his tension, his slenderness, that you forgot the impact of his unwavering, translucent gaze.
Lumpish shapes were beginning to emerge in the dusty half-light. With the light came, as sometimes happened (though Servan never allowed himself to hope), a revelation. He recognized, among the draped shapes, the conventional heroic pose of one figure even beneath its swathings of damp cloth; it could only be one Zoror or Zero (depending on the chant), the first of the survivors’ descendants to step out of the Refuge into the world again, who had found the surface fit for the establishment of a new civilization.
That was the aura surrounding Eykar’s wiry figure in Servan’s mind: the potentiality for mythical action.
Eykar’s soul still hid its deepest and darkest dream, and the potential of that dream made him powerful. The man who knew his father’s name might do anything, might even make himself immortal with some immense, transfixing gesture.
That was better; Servan didn’t like mysteries. His pleasure was to bring them to light where they could be properly appraised and dealt with. Eykar as a compelling enigma was disturbing, but a man
could play with the idea of Eykar as a legend in the making. Humming, Servan made his way carefully across the workroom to rummage in one of the supply boxes against the back wall under the long wedging-counter.
When he emerged from the kiln-yard, whistling a rude parody of a very serious chant about setting manly examples, his mock-Hemaway clothing had been exchanged for a suit of blanks, and he carried a bundle under his arm. He slipped into the maze of narrow alleys that wound within and between larger blocks of buildings bounded by broad streets and boulevards. The alleys were Servan’s true territory; he knew his way through them even dream-blinded. Many Citymen did. There were old-time residents who referred to the alleys as the last stronghold of real freedom. Even the patrolmen hesitated to follow a man into this maze where law and its enforcers were given little respect.
Few other men were abroad at this pale hour. Whichever man saw another first would fade back and detour through another alley, for few men willingly encountered others in the alleys at any hour. Unhindered, Servan navigated the mazeway of crooked strips of paving and hard-tamped earth. He kept automatically alert for surfaces slippery with streams of stinking leakage from the high-windowed buildings on either side and for scattered shards of crockery that could lay open the feet of the unwary.
He would have to arrange a quiet hour or two here in the City with Eykar. Eykar’s fastidiousness was a bitch sometimes. He took things so seriously, and his genuine modesty made him a most trying lover. He had been tense and moody during their nights in the crowded confines of the ferry. The City would be the place for the leisurely loving he needed to steady him down; not entirely, of course — part of his charm was the necessity of seducing him all over again, to some degree, each time, defeating him into pleasure.
Thinking along these lines, Servan nearly strode right out into the Street of Honor. He caught the sounds of whips snapping just in time and checked himself in an alley-mouth.
The entire street on which the alley opened was cordoned off with two red ropes. A meager crowd loafed along the sidelines; two bored-looking patrolmen leaned on the corner-posts, and the weapon-lenders were packing up their wares. Inside the ropes, a bout between two overstuffed Seniors was dragging to a close.
Sweating and shuffling, the duelists were merely lacing each other’s paunches with delicate lines of welts. Servan had seen a man skin and strangle an opponent with one of those thin whips.
These men were apparently settling some minor matter in public to enhance their standings. Each had come with a group of friends – ‘witnesses’ would have been a more accurate term – who looked on with various degrees of embarrassment.

Other books

Bound to Be a Bride by Megan Mulry
Dead Air by Ash, C.B.
Going Down Swinging by Billie Livingston
World’s End by Joan D. Vinge
Beware This Boy by Maureen Jennings
HEAR by Robin Epstein
Avenger by Su Halfwerk
Trapped by Jonas Saul
Deviation by Scott M. Williams