The Book of Koli

by M. R. Carey

  I seen in her face she was telling the truth, for it didn’t make her happy to say it. I had an idea then that I’ll tell to you in a short while. It was an idea about what might of been happening upstairs with the Ramparts while I et my porridge and walked back and forth down in the Underhold.

  “Tell me about the music player,” Catrin said. “What did you call it again?”

  “It’s a DreamSleeve,” I said. “Made by Sony Copration.”

  “You know who made it?”

  That was me giving stuff away for nothing again, and tripping up my own heels into the bargain. I couldn’t say Monono told me, and Catrin knowed well enough I couldn’t read words of the old times. “Sony Copration is just a story,” I said. “Like Break-back Jack or the Dry Ladies. If you don’t know who did something, you say it was Sony.”

  “I never heard that,” Catrin said, but she let it go by because it didn’t matter to her right then. It was something else she was interested in. “There’s a lock on the player. Mardew’s tried everything he knows to make it work, but it doesn’t do a thing. That means you set a code. Something you got to say to wake it up. Tell me what it is.”

  I thought back to what Ursala told me that day in her tent after she killed the drone. She said some tech could taste your sweat and know it was you from the flavour of it. “There’s no code,” I told Catrin. “What there is, it’s like the DreamSleeve knows who I am as soon as I pick it up. It knows me, and it plays. I guess it doesn’t know Mardew, or if it does then it doesn’t like him too well.”

  Catrin give a laugh that was quick and sour. “Mardew gets better with age,” she says. “About the same way milk does. He’s got his heart set on that thing, though Fer already told him no. Well, it’s better if it goes back on its shelf, for some years at least. Long enough for people to forget.”

  That thought made me angry, and anger made me reckless in spite of the bad spot I was in. “It’s mine,” I said again. “It waked for me, so the law makes it mine.”

  “Okay,” Catrin said. “And what’s wrong with what you just said, Koli? What did you just miss out? I know you’re no fool to have managed to do what you done. So tell me now, for it’s important. Why ain’t the law going to help you?”

  I didn’t answer for a long time, but she kept on staring at me, waiting on me to say it. “Because Ramparts make the law,” I muttered.

  “Exactly. And they do it for the good of all, not the good of one. If I let you go from here, that’s fine for you and bad for everyone else. The things you figured out would have everyone shouting and accusing and laying into each other. All we got of order, right and calm would go straight over the fence and into the shitheap. How long do you think we’d last after that? How long would the gates stay shut and the forest stay out? I don’t mean to see Mythen Rood come apart on account of you.”

  “You don’t mean to give up your power, is what,” I said. And now I did start to cry, for I seen it was hopeless and I was going to die in a little room under the ground without nobody knowing where I was gone to. For whatever lie the Ramparts told about me was bound to of been a good one, that would keep anyone from looking for me or asking questions about me. Maybe they said a drone got me, and it got me so good there wasn’t nothing left. Maybe they showed my mother the pig’s innards from the Salt Feast and said rats et the rest of me.

  But I got a surprise then. When she seen me crying, Catrin looked somewhat dismayed. She put a hand on my shoulder again. Then when that didn’t do no good, she went down on one knee and took my head between her two hands, putting her face right up close to mine. “Shush,” she says. “Don’t be stupid now. Listen to me. Listen to me, Koli.”

  “I don’t want to die, Dam Catrin,” I says to her, between sobs.

  “Nor I don’t want to kill you,” she said. “I seen you grow up, alongside of my Jon. You always was fast friends, the two of you, for good or ill, and them memories is strong with me. I’ll kill you if I got to, Koli, don’t mistake me. But I’m trying to think of another way and I’m reckoning it out right now with my father and my sister. You don’t want to give up and lie down just yet.”

  She put a few more questions to me after that, but I don’t remember what they was. Hope had made me deaf and blind. And most likely dumb too, for Catrin give up soon after and left me to myself again.

  32

  I give a lot of thought, on a lot of occasions, to what Catrin said to me that night. It was hard for me to come to a solid understanding of it.

  She said she was for order. That she didn’t want discontent and enmities in the village, since our surviving depended on us all facing the one way. It was the same thing she said to Haijon after Ursala killed the drone. Anything that makes people slower in doing what Ramparts tell them to do is bad.

  I could see the sense in that, for all I didn’t want to. What I didn’t see was why Ramparts had got to be just Vennastins and nobody else. Catrin’s order was not the only kind of order there could be. It was just the kind that was best for her kin. Surely it would be better for the village if everyone could use the tech, and not just one family. Better if they took turns with it maybe, and likewise took turns to lead the Count and Seal on meet days, so power and choosing was things that everybody got an equal taste of.

  Or maybe it wouldn’t be no better at all. If there was fifty people that could use the firethrower, and only one at a time that got to hold it, how long would it be before the one that was holding it refused to give it up? Maybe we’d fight each other and hurt each other for a bigger share of what was rightly everyone’s at once or nobody’s ever.

  Maybe one voice telling everyone what to do is the best way to go about things when all the world is sharpening its knives for you and you got no chance at all but what you make.

  But like I told you, these thoughts didn’t come to me until later. What I thought then, that night, both when Catrin was with me and after she left, was about what was going on over my head, up in Rampart Hold. I thought that when the Ramparts took me, they never meant to keep me for three days, or even for one. Maybe they thought they had got to make me show them how the DreamSleeve worked, but that was a small thing next to making sure I didn’t tell nobody what I had figured out about them and how they did what they did with all the old tech.

  So if I was still alive, it was on account of there being some disagreement, way up there, on how to go with this. I did not doubt that Mardew was saying to kill me, but Mardew’s voice counted for little next to his older kin. I’m reckoning it out right now with my father and my sister. So that was where the disagreement lay, and it was the reason for me still being here, three days on.

  Catrin had told me true. She wanted to protect her family and keep them where they was all up on top of things. But she wasn’t dead set on taking the straightest way, which was to get a knife and cut my throat, or burn me up with the firethrower so nobody would even recognise me if they found me.

  I might live yet, and come out of this room, though I couldn’t see the shape of how that might be.

  33

  There was one more meal. By my count it was a breakfast. Then Fer Vennastin, Rampart Arrow, and Mardew, Rampart Knife, come to take me up into Rampart Hold.

  “You can run if you want to,” Mardew told me as he pushed me out of the room. He had the cutter on his hand and the bar was shining silver, ready to fire. If I run, he would cut me off at the knees before I took three steps. So I said nothing, but only climbed the stairs ahead of the two of them. My legs was weak from my nights of sleeping on stone and sitting through most of the day, but even if I was hale I still would of walked as slow as if I was climbing up a mountain. I wasn’t going to give Mardew no excuses.

  We come up at last in the main corridor, and I seen my count was wrong. There was dark outside the windows, except for the Milk Way splashed across the middle of the sky. It was full night.

  “Keep right on,” Mardew said. “Don’t get no ideas in your head, Koli.”
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br />   It felt to me like there wasn’t room for any. Them days down in the Underhold had left me weak in my will as well as in my legs. The light from the wall sconces was too bright for my eyes, and it was all I could do to walk a straight line.

  But I kept right on, as I was bid, down the corridor and through the big double doors into the Count and Seal. There was just the one light there, from a lantern down in the middle round. By the shine of it, I seen Catrin, Perliu and Vergil Vennastin, and alongside of them Gendel Stepjack that was wedded to Fer. They wasn’t in the middle round itself but in the lowest row of seats, sitting all in a line. The lantern was on the floor in front of them.

  Mardew give me a nudge in the back so I’d know where I was meant to go. I knowed already, but I wasn’t keen to go there. If it was just Catrin, I would of been a mite happier. But this was all the Ramparts there was, apart from only Haijon, and one more besides who wasn’t Rampart at all but was still Vennastin. My heart set up a banging against my ribs out of pure fear, and I thought for a second or two I might piss myself.

  But I didn’t, and by and by I went down the steps. There wasn’t no getting out of it, and I didn’t want Mardew pushing me no more. When I got to the bottom, Catrin pointed out a place right in front of the lantern. “Kneel down there, Koli,” she says. “Where I’m pointing.”

  Well, I was happy she give me my name for I took it as a sign she still had some warm feeling towards me. But as soon as I kneeled down my spirits sunk even further than they was. From down here, with the lantern at the back of me, the Ramparts was just shapes with no faces, all solid black – and no doubt I was the exact same to them. If you was going to kill someone, or order them killed, you might start by setting them off like that, more in dark than in light, so you didn’t need to look in their face as you was doing it.

  Shadow Fer joined one end of the line, and shadow Mardew sit down on the other. Now the Ramparts was all assembled, like as if this was a meet-day for the Count and Seal, except then they’d be in the middle round looking out at everyone. This was me looking out and them looking in. I felt like I was a rat in one of them traps where the wire closes on your leg and you can only go round in circles.

  Old Perliu looked to left and right along the line. “If anyone wants to change their vote,” he says to his gathered kindred, “now would be the time to say it.”

  There was some stirring here and there, but no one spoke up.

  I wondered why they brung Vergil into this. I seen why they kept Haijon out of it, for he was my friend and might not see eye to eye with what they was doing to me. But Vergil wasn’t even a Rampart. The nearest I could reckon was that it was a meeting of the Vennastins, not the Ramparts. It was about their family and their future, so it concerned them all. But it might be even simpler than that. Maybe Vergil was there because Perliu was his father and loved him something fierce.

  “Well, so be it, then,” the old man muttered. I seen his head turn in the dark, from them to me. Then he brung it down a little, like a bull does when it means to charge.

  “Koli Makewell,” he says. “You’ve stirred up a heap of trouble, with your thieving and lying, and now that trouble’s coming back to where it belongs.”

  “It’s Woodsmith,” says Mardew. “He’s a Woodsmith.”

  Perliu give his grandson a cold look, but no answer. Mardew shrunk a little under that look, and he seemed happy when it come back to me again. “Woodsmith I said and meant,” the old man snapped. He turned to me again. “There’s things about how this village is run, Koli Woodsmith, that we don’t share with nobody else. Secrets that Ramparts know but don’t give out, because they would be misunderstood and might give rise to contention.”

  He stopped there, like as if he was inviting me to come in with something. To disagree, maybe. I kept my peace.

  Fer didn’t, though. She come in quick to fill that gap. “Only now you’ve come into the knowing of those secrets,” she said, “and you can’t be trusted not to pass them further. The second we let you outside this house you’d be spilling to all and sundry. Telling them the few things you know and the many things you only think you know, and spreading all kinds of foolish grievance along with them. Don’t deny it, for there isn’t anyone here who’ll believe you if you do.”

  “I could swear to it,” I said. It come out in a rush, and my voice sounded awful shrill and shaky, but I couldn’t do nothing to control it. My heart had not stopped hammering all this time, and there was an ache on the inside of my chest where it was hitting. It was hard for me to stay knelt there and hear what was to be done to me without giving out so much as a word. “I’d swear by the dead god and Dandrake both, Rampart Remember, and on the blood of them that went before.”

  Mardew give a laugh like I’d said to look behind him and he wasn’t fool enough to do it. “Hah!” says Fer. “Of course you’d swear. Didn’t I just say we wouldn’t believe you? If I was where you are now, I’d say anything to get myself free, and I’d mean it for as long as I said it. But once you’re out of here, words is just words.”

  “So the best way,” Mardew said, “is to stop any words from coming out of him. And then the problem’s done with.”

  Perliu didn’t seem happy that the proceedings was passing out of his hands. He trod on the end of Mardew’s speaking, raising his voice to make it clear it was still his turn. “We took a vote, Koli. Koli Woodsmith. Right before we fetched you here. Rampart Arrow moved it, and Rampart Knife went second on it. The course they proposed was to kill you, as quick and clean as ever we could do it, and bury your body out in the forest a good ways away where it wouldn’t be found.”

  I went from kneeling to lying down almost when he said this, my body folding on itself until my head near touched the floor. It wasn’t no surprise to me, but still it made me sick in my stomach to hear it. I couldn’t speak for a little while, nor I couldn’t hear.

  “I’ll be the one to do it,” Perliu says. “And I can promise you there won’t be any pain. I done enough butchering of swine and sheep in my time to learn the gentleness of a proper kill.”

  “But that’s not what we decided, Father,” Catrin said. “The vote come in tied, three to three. We was deadlocked on it.”

  “Deadlocked,” Perliu repeated. “Yes, that we was.” He didn’t sound so sure of it though. It seemed more like it come as news to him, the same way it did to me.

  I unfolded myself again very slowly, the din of my breath and my heart loud in my ears. I looked from shadow to shadow in a kind of wonder. I knowed for sure Catrin voted to spare me, but who joined with her? Not Fer, or Mardew. And I didn’t see much mildness in Perliu either. That left Vergil, who probably would of had to be told ten times what he was voting on, and Gendel. If Gendel voted mercy, then I bet Fer would give him hard words and not much else the next time he come to her bed.

  I think that dizziness was still in me, for these was idle thoughts at such a time. Perliu still hadn’t said what a deadlock meant, or what they was going to do with me if they didn’t kill me after all. Cut my tongue out? Keep me in the Underhold for ever? Or send Vergil out maybe, and have the vote again with only Ramparts. There was no saying what would happen now, only that it would be something bad. But yet I couldn’t keep from hoping I would come out alive. That prospect shut everything else out of my head. I clenched my two fists and shoved them up against my mouth. Oh dead god, let me live, I whispered into them. Let me live a little longer, and I’ll speak your truth for ever.

  Perliu looked to Catrin now, as if he had forgot what was meant to come next. Catrin didn’t need no more invitation than that. She got to her feet right away, and that made me hope a little harder, for I knowed she didn’t favour killing me.

  “Cat,” Perliu said. “You tell him. Tell him what we decided.”

  “We’re deciding now, Father” Catrin said. “That’s why we brought him before us.”

  “A waste of all our time,” said Fer, but Catrin didn’t answer her sister nor so much
as look at her. She took some time instead to rearrange the room to her own liking. She went around behind me and picked up the lantern from the floor, then come in front of me again and set it down between us. I liked this better, on account of being able to see her face, but there was a hardness there that made me somewhat afraid. She kneeled down, facing me. It was like it was just the two of us now. The rest of the Ramparts wasn’t even shadows any more. There was just this little circle of light, and me and her in it, and nothing else but dark going on for ever, it felt like.

  “I’m going to ask you some questions, Koli,” Catrin says. “Not the ones I asked you down in the Underhold. These is new questions. And here’s something to keep in your mind when you’re answering. The first time you lie to me – and I’ll know when you do – I’m going to switch my vote. That means Rampart Remember will take you downstairs and kill you this very night. This very minute, even. You understand me?”

  “Yes, Dam Catrin,” I says. And I mostly meant it. Somewhere away in the back of my head, though, I was thinking that I lied to her before, about Ursala, and maybe I could do it again if I had to.

  Then she set something down on the floor between us, right next to the lantern, and when I seen what it was, that thought flew out of my head, and every other thought along with it.

  “You see that, Koli?”

  I nodded, for I couldn’t speak.

  “Tell me what it is.”

  “Key. It’s… it’s a… I’d reckon it’s a key,” I said, the words coming out crosswise and stumbling, with my tongue in the way of them.

  “And what’s it the key to?”

  I didn’t say nothing at first, for there was two answers to that and I didn’t want to give either of them.

  “The first lie will be the last one, Koli,” Catrin reminded me. “You won’t get another chance.”