“That may very well be true. But, Willum—look at me! No, do not look at six other things you want to find out about, look at me! Remember what Xulai told you about not needing farm boys. She meant it, I mean it. Keep your mouth shut about it.”
Willum swallowed. “I thought he maybe meant just the womenfolk . . .”
Abasio crouched to the boy’s level, one hand on each side of his head. “I don’t want to hear what you think! Maybe in Gravysuck you know enough to think; here you don’t. Your eyes are off everywhere, you still aren’t concentrating on listening.” He shook the boy hard. “The man said please don’t talk about it in the town.” Shake. “That means you do not open your mouth and say one word about it in the town.” Shake. “Not to men. Not to children. Not to the horses. Not to anyone.” Hard shake. “You don’t even stand out under the stars and talk to yourself about it! You don’t know enough about anyplace but Gravysuck to do any thinking! I want you to listen. Are you?” Shake. “Now hear me. You will not say the word ‘giant.’ You will not mention it to anyone. If someone asks you if you saw a giant, you are to look stupid and say, ‘What, what giant?’ If some group of people mention that there are giants out there somewhere, you are to keep your own mouth shut. You are not to ask any questions.” Shake. “You are not to say the word! You are not to hint the word! You are not to pretend to know something that you can’t talk about to make yourself seem important!” Very hard shake. “And if you do any of those things, or make anyone think you have done any of those things, or tell someone and make them promise not to tell, I will be told about it, and, Willum, you will go back home with Gum, no joke, no second chance! Do you understand me?”
Willum had a very strange look on his face.
“What?”
“I ’uz just thinkin’ you musta been as bad as me, ’Basio. You sure covered ever’thing I mighta thought of.”
Abasio, rejecting laughter, adopted ferocity. “Then I’m going to add something else. You are also not to do anything that I didn’t mention that you may think of later!”
He returned to help Kim unharness the horses while Gum rambled on about the evening’s menu at the Tavern—which was down near the mine workings, so taking the babies along would not be a problem.
“Shouldn’t think there’d be enough traffic to support a tavern,” called Abasio from the wagon, where he was rummaging for a clean shirt.
“Oh, Tavern’s for the mine folks, ’Basio. They need a little ’musemen’, too, y’know. Tavern serves stuff a little fancy, y’know, things the town families likely wudden cook for their selfs. Got ’em two furriner cooks, they do, him n’ her. Tasty’s what they do. I allus looks forward to eatin’ at the Tavern. Men n’ women here work four days, two days’ rest. Rest days, folks all drink a little, sing a lot! Children’s playgroun’ jus’ outside. Young’uns can’t do much runnin’ up inna town. Space is kinda tight up there, but up there’s mos’ly jus’ for livin’ safe an’ outta the way of people causin’ trouble. The town’s guarded and safe, y’know.”
Guarded and safe, Abasio repeated to himself silently. At least two giants just outside that slot down the valley, giants quite possibly tall enough, if they got in here, to reach those houses up on the wall, but the people considered themselves guarded and safe. He looked forward to his chat with Melkin. Yes, he certainly did.
“Is the town really built of salt blocks?” Xulai asked. “Doesn’t it dissolve in rain or snow?”
“All salt!” Gum said. “Whole thing! They paint it with stuff makes it waterproof. Tops’ve all gotta dome on, like a beehive, painted like the rest. Rain runs right off. Insides’re painted, too, so it don’t rub off on yer clothes ’r yer skin. Gotta be careful about that, salt’s awful irritatin’ when it gets rubbed in.”
Xulai suggested they put off visiting the town until morning, and they accepted Gum’s suggestion to have their supper in the Tavern where rest day and evening meals were provided quite inexpensively to those traveling and also provided to the Saltgoshians—along with their housing—as part of their pay from the mine. Men going on duty in the morning advised the Tavern if they and their families wanted supper in the evening or, on going off duty on day four, what meals they would like on the two following rest days. There, after a meal as tasty as Gum had promised, Gum loaded his pipe with some unfamiliar but fragrant combination of leaves and told them about the town perched above them on the ledge while the babies slept curled into their blankets on the settle beside them.
“I was thinking how dreadful winters must be,” said Xulai. “That narrow little path, slippery with ice . . .”
“Ah, no, lady,” said Gum, half mumbling around the stem of his pipe. “Saltgosh folks don’ live up in Summer Town in wintertime. Like you jus’ said, way too much snow n’ ice. It gets deep, taller’n me.”
When cold came, he told them, the Saltgoshians moved from their cave-swallow houses on the high ledge down into “Snow Town,” an old section of the salt mines that had been fitted up for subterranean living with ventilation pipes, tight doors, stoves, and chimneys. Down there, the inhabitants went through the cold season “snug as bears in a cave,” said Gum. Especially since among the more important barter items he and others brought were many sacks of the grains needed by the Tavern for the brewing of ale. There was a large cave below, big enough for the young ones to play ball games, and school went on all winter for the young ones, too, and he described the system of water pipes and sewers.
“Waste pipes all run down t’that marsh place, long the wall. Stinks consid’rable, but don’ seem to bother the critters none,” said Gum.
“We noticed the smell on the way here,” remarked Abasio. “Did I understand right when you mentioned kennels?”
“Sled dogs, ’Basio. Come snow, t’dogs pulls sleds. Y’go rescue somebody treed by a bear in winter, y’need sled dogs.”
The city on the ledge, he said, was occupied only from thaw until threat of first snow, for even early snows at this altitude soon covered the town completely, sticking tight to the wall behind it. At the end of the wall, near the river, where the stone tower went up—and it was, he said, a natural formation with a natural vertical fault into which stairs had been built—“Way up, on top, ’ere’s a warm li’l room ’at’s a watchtower!” It had a closed little stove that burned special fuel with almost no smoke. It had glass windows that looked in every direction, windows set deep so that they reflected no light. People entering the valley would not even know they were observed. Abasio’s wagon, said Gum, had been watched from the moment it entered the valley.
Xulai murmured sleepily, “So, nobody could take over the town in winter?”
Abasio said, “I think what Gum is saying is that after the move belowground, the dwellings are deeply buried in snow and there’s literally nothing there to take over. It must take a lot of effort to move everything, Gum.”
“Oh, it do, ’Basio, it do. Movin’ takes three, four days, spring an’ fall. Hoist goes up n’ down, up n’ down, dawn to night, an’ ever’thin’ gets moved—down ’r up, it gets moved, ever’body doin’ it, even the little ’uns! Then ’ey has a party. I was atta Springtime Move-up party wunst!”
“Salt!” exclaimed Xulai, shaking her head. “What do they paint on it to keep it from melting or rubbing off?”
“Dunno.” He shrugged, obviously not caring what it was so long as it worked. “Ever’ early summer a wagon fulla it comes over t’pass. Kinda like paint, only no color. Both places, up n’ down, gets painted outside n’ inside, ever’ year. Tavern, too. It’s built outta salt.”
“The Edges are still there,” Abasio reminded her. “Over the pass, near where the cities were. They’ve always made things for trade, and they need salt, too, just like everyone else.”
“How do you get into this Snow Town?” Xulai asked.
Gum’s eyebrows rose in astonishment. �
�Oh, missus! Outside folks don’t know! An’ the chil’ren don’t know. Even some person got saved from bears or t’ like, even one a’ them, they’d blindfol’ afore they’d take him down and afore he come up agin. Jus’ like they do little ones, too baby yet to keep their moufs shut.”
Xulai still wasn’t satisfied. “It sounds sensible enough, and I can understand their going underground, but what danger are they always watching for?”
Gum had to think about this. His furzy eyebrows drew together as he brooded for a long moment before saying slowly, “I ’ud say—nothin’ in par-ticaler lately! But one time? Oh, my, yes! Old Oaster tol’ me, he did. Right. Long time ago. He tol’ me in t’ Tavern. Women stealing.”
“Women were stealing from Saltgosh?” Abasio said disbelievingly, trying not to laugh.
“No, no, ’Basio. It ’uz Saltgosh women bein’ stole. Or wudda been, if those raider men’d got any. Not in my life, boy. In my pa’s time. When he wuz a lad. That’d be seventy years ago.”
At this evidence of real danger, Xulai cried, “Who was stealing women?”
“It wuz some little towns off inna woods, kinda strange people, had this notion stealin’ women wuz . . .” Gum made a two-handed gesture of puzzlement. “It wern’ so much t’ gettin’ of some women. It was more the kind of women they got! Raiders said a only way ’ey cud get a good fee-male wuz stealin’ one.”
Xulai pursued the question. “And they’re still watching for them to come back?”
“Oh, cata-pull-it, NO, lady! I SAID! Non’uv’m come t’Saltgosh fer seventy years! See, back ’en, the Goshians here got ridda big bunch uv’m, n’ they never come back.”
Though Xulai felt an actual physical pain at letting go of any possible danger that she might intervene to prevent, she did get the point. As Gum said, Goshians weren’t geese, but there was this one little thing that bothered her. “If the villagers don’t steal women anymore, why do the Goshians still keep the watch during wintertime?”
At this, Gum’s speech slowed into his important mode: the pipe withdrawn from his mouth, each syllable separately enunciated and containing all the consonants habitually ignored. “No, no, lady, they keeps the watch all times. Daytime. Nighttime. All year round! Maybe those women-stealin’ crazies don’t come no more, but it don’t matter! Now, y’see, keepin’ watch is tra-di-shun! When a boy outgrows singin’ t’high notes, gets his man-voice, t’sing, y’know, then he gets ee-ni-shee-ated to the Watch. Takes a oath an’ all.” Gum’s voice deepened, he intoned: “‘Will not rest, will not sleep, faithfully my watch I’ll keep.’ Then his daddy gives him a red hat with a badge on, gives him a drink a’ beer. Ever’body in t’ Watch cheers, an’ they have a feast! Makes a boy proud t’do his part: watchin’! That room up there, it’s so high up, they saw you afore you even came the wet way inta the valley.”
“Ah!” said Xulai, with satisfaction. “Rite of passage,” content to let it be so, now that she had properly categorized the matter. “Male solidarity system.”
Abasio, however, though he did not react outwardly, felt his body tense. If they had seen over that wall, then they had seen into the valley beyond. He smiled and nodded at Gum, resolving yet again to meet, very soon, with Melkin.
Next day they carried the babies up the path and walked through the village as they routinely did, showing the babies, explaining, letting the villagers follow them back to the pond in the meadow to see the babies at play. The Goshians had displayed the usual fascination, asked the usual questions—though with none of the hostility shown in many other places. Then, at lunchtime, they had gone into the Tavern, and it was there that they learned what occupied the Saltgoshians during their free time, for Gum announced to all assembled that these folks from Tingawa had never heard local music.
There was immediate enthusiasm. People went up the path to fetch people who were in the town. People came hastily down again. Chairs were arranged. All the instruments were kept in the Tavern back room, as the Tavern was the only place large enough to hold everyone who wanted to take part. Accordingly, though the music was mostly vocal, the back room was plundered of its astonishing variety of drums, gongs, bells, and chimes so that Saltgosh might offer its visitors an impromptu concert. Virtually everyone except the young children and some of the very old wore a red hat with a badge and had a vocal or instrumental part. The director was an elderly man, possibly retired from work in the mines or relegated to less physical work, but he had acquired extensive musical knowledge from somewhere, for he held the music in both mind and heart as he directed his musicians.
It seemed almost everyone in Saltgosh was part of the music. The singers covered the entire range of the human voice from a basso so deep that it made Xulai’s bones rumble, to one clear, elegantly crystal soprano that lilted and leapt, utterly unstrained. That singer was part of a cluster of soprano, contralto, and tenor voices that rang out like bells from a group of five dark-haired young people who stood together and looked much alike. Too close in age to be siblings; Xulai thought they were probably cousins.
Xulai had not heard such complex harmonies or memorable melodies since she’d left Tingawa. The words of the songs praising trees, wind, birdsong, and other natural things were simple, but their effect was not. Xulai heard the music with her whole body. “Deep mine” songs were dense, in men’s voices only, giving Abasio shivers about lost men who walked galleries far under the earth. Xulai’s favorite was one they called the “rain song,” which started with a patter of rain on a tom-tom, the sound of rain on a roof, built into a thunder of barrel drums, a lightning strike of gongs and cymbals, all the while the voices building in a rush of air, a torrent of wind, the storm rushing this way and that, on and on, finally fading into the patter of rain, once more, slowing, slowing, ending with a serious-faced five-year-old girl child’s solo on a treble drum the size of an apple: a delicate, two-fingered tap-tap-ping, tappity . . . ping . . . ping . . . ping . . . and silence except for a distant mutter of barrel-drum thunder, fading . . .
After the concert, they went to congratulate the director, Burn Atterbury, who flushed with pleasure to hear the singers praised. Xulai asked about the youngsters she had particularly noticed, and his smiling mouth turned down sadly for a moment, then smiled again.
“Ah, they are happy here, I think, for all their tragedy so early in their lives. They were just babies, not two years old yet, when they came here to our Home. They’re orphans, the children of three brothers, Pembly was the name. The youngest brother fathered the two girls and one of the boys, Brian. The older brothers each fathered one of the other two boys, and they had older children as well, but the older children were with the adults when the tragedy happened.”
“A tragedy?”
“It was some kind of family celebration, grandparents’ birthday or anniversary, something of the kind. The five littlest ones were left at home together with a couple hired to look after them, rather than subject them to a rather arduous journey, and all the rest of the three families went to the celebration. They were staying together in the little town there in the mountains where the grandparents lived, and there was an avalanche! That was a terrible year for snow. They had a string of them that year, and not one since!”
“How did they end up here?” Xulai asked, in wonder. “Someone related to them?”
“No. It was a very unexpected thing. Turned out the family had been very fond of music, and their business had taken them back and forth traveling through here many a time, so they had had occasion to hear Saltgosh music many times, even going out of their way sometimes just to hear it. We do sings for people, you know, when we have a bunch of ’em here. Don’t remember the Pemblys, myself, but we have visitors coming through from snowmelt to snowfall every year, and no way we’d remember ’em all. Anyhow, the Pembly brothers had left wills if anything ever happened that left family members needi
ng care due to age or health, if our Home would take them in and let them share in our music, the Home was to receive the family estates. They were very well-to-do, the Pemblys, so it was quite a fortune, altogether.”
“Your Home?” asked Xulai. “I don’t understand . . .”
“No reason you should, ma’am, we don’t make a big thing out of it. I’m sure you know that many jobs can be dangerous, and mining—even salt mining—is no different. Sometimes there’s accidents and people may get crippled up, or maybe some young ones are orphaned. Folks get elderly and can’t quite manage on their own, maybe it gets to be too much for them even to go up and down stairs to the Summer Town. They’re our people, and they don’t want to be sent away somewhere among strangers, none of them. So, it was over a hundred years ago the miners’ ’sociation—that’s who owns and runs the mines, ma’am, and all of us here, we’re members of it—we built a Home back up in the woods, real pretty south-facing clearing with a pond in it up there, little garden for folks as like to putter planting things, not far away, and o’ course, people that planned it put a nice warm underhome below it for winter. The ’sociation sees to it there’s good people hired to do the cooking and cleaning and caregiving. Tavern here does the food buying and storage for them.
“Well, that’s where the young Pemblys grew up. We already had a dozen grown-ups and seven or eight orphaned little ones up there, and figured with the Pemblys added on, we’d maybe need another good schoolteacher and music teacher. We’ve got our own school here at the mine. Have to! Can’t let the children grow up ignorant. The Home’s connected by a tunnel so the little ones from there can go to school with the little ones from here. We got us some edubots, too, and I got involved, oh my, yes! I got involved right off, because way before those Pembly babies could talk more’n a few words, they could sing!”
“Sing? Words to songs?” Xulai marveled.
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