“You have met the Emeri?”
“No. I have heard of them. lestak and the Shumai defeated them over two summers ago. But now they trade with the Shumai.”
“They are a cruel bunch. They live way to the north of the empty land. Once they came this far. But that was before I was bom.”
“Who are the Roti? Why don’t they talk like everyone else?”
“Who knows? They have always been there. We have never understood them. We have always hid our light-eyed children from them.” Again she cackled. “But they will have nothing to do with us now, nor our cloudy-eyed people. We are to them death. They wish to taste the blood of the young.”
Stel shivered. As they neared the building, seven more figures appeared in its doorway, looking much like McCarty and the others. Then another figure came to the entrance. Her robe was dark, and she had white hair, combed neatly and wound in a braid on top of her head. She appeared slightly younger. Her dark-brown skin contrasted starkly with the cloudy whiteness of the others. That must be Fitzhugh.
“Look. I have brought someone who can hoe. He says his name is Stel.”
“That name is not on the list. I remember . . said one of the figures, vaguely.
“No matter. He is not of Ozar. He has escaped the Roti by coming here. Now he wants to work. Look, Fitzhugh. Hair. Look at his dark hair.”
Fitzhugh came forward with a demure smile and took Stel’s hands, looking penetratingly at his face. “Welcome, Stel. Will you stay with us? We aren’t much, as you can see. We are near our end. You will stay, will you not? We are greatly in need. Now, are you hungry? Beans and fish is what we eat. Beans and fish. That is about all. There are melons, and sometimes nuts. But beans and fish is mostly it. Now, come inside.”
Stel was startled at the contrast between Fitzhugh’s warm humanity, the vacancy of the others, and McCarty’s zaniness. His desire for sleep seemed to increase. Everything here seemed safe, mundane, quiet.
“Thank you,” he said. “I am very grateful. Of course I will help if I can.”
The beans and fish turned out to be gluey, but they were served with a boiled green that Stel found refreshing. He ate everything, his drowsiness growing. McCarty watched him eat, remarking, “Eats like ten people. Look at that. We shall never make it through the winter with that to feed. Let’s hope he can work enough to make up for at least some of it.”
Fitzhugh repeatedly tried to shut her up. She meanwhile continually questioned Stel, and his answers, guarded though they were, still lengthened the time it took to eat until he was unutterably weary, and feeling the bruises of his fall. He noticed less and less, finally dozing off staring at the small bit of metal Fitzhugh wore around her neck. It seemed to be another bit of flotsam from the ancients, and Stel had made out on it: 1992 rabies vaccination COLO. DEPT. OF AGRIC. FREMONT CO. 2389. Well, that meant nothing.
Fitzhugh shook his arm gently, and when he opened his eyes, she led him to a small storage room with a stone shelf on which grass had been spread. He unrolled his sleepsack and spread it over himself, dropping almost immediately into slumber. Once, when the light from the small window showed it was near nightfall, he awakened. Fitzhugh was still there, sitting on an overturned basket. She was staring out the window. Her mouth was drawn in thoughtfulness and her eyes were still and narrowed. She didn’t see Stel notice her. He soon drifted off again into a deep sleep that lasted until near dawn.
8
Just at dawn, McCarty burst into the storage room. Stel was still lying in a near-doze. She shook his shoulder and beat his back lightly with her staff. “Stel. Wake up now, hairy one. Come on, now. You’ve eaten our beans. Now it is time to grow some. Up now. We’ll feed you now, but not forever. Up.”
Stel rolled over and sat up. With one sweep of his arm he snatched McCarty’s staff and flipped it out the open window. She stopped and looked stunned.
“My leg. My extra leg. Now see what you have done.” “Well, go get it. But don’t ever hit me with it.” Stel felt stiff, filthy, and again hungry.
McCarty left, calling back over her shoulder, “I hope you are that good with a hoe handle, big belly.”
Stel bathed down at the stream, with several old robed people nearby. He didn’t care. Most of them couldn’t see anyhow. The others seemed shells of people, mumbling and saying inconsequential things. Again he ate beans and fish. Again it tasted gluey.
Then Fitzhugh brought him a hoe. “Well, Stel,” she said. “There is no help for it. McCarty and the others will have you hoe if you are to stay. There will be time to talk. I am glad that you seem recovered. Anything you do will be a help. As you see, it is a bad time for us. When I was a child we were hundreds. Then the earth shook, and our stream stopped. Clouds of dust rolled over us and all our crops died.
“One person, Kannaday, convinced everyone that we would have to traverse the empty land to the north to seek help from the Emeri. I and Jaeger were left behind to care for Ozar. It was a hard time. The Emeri would not help—would not go near those who crossed the empty land and sent them back at swordspoint.
“While they were gone, Jaeger and I awoke one night to a great roar of water and found our stream nearly up to the level here. But it soon subsided and ran as it does now.
“We found later, when some of us went westward, that the earth had slid, forming a dam, and the water finally filled up enough to spill over it and then push it aside. It was a great catastrophe for us. We lost all our buildings down by the water, too, and our own dam.
“Nothing was the same when the people returned. Some sickened right away. Others lost their hair, and eventually all did. No children were born. People seemed to lose their purpose. Writing, art, music, even sports, slowed down and ceased as those who survived grew older.
“Jaeger and I had a child, but some of them stole her and killed her because they could have none. We had another. It was dark-eyed, so Jaeger took it to the Roti and gave it to them. Who knows. Maybe my own grandson chased you here yesterday. Life is a bitter thing. Now Jaeger has died, and I have to take care of this remnant until they die or I die. Why am I telling you this? I don’t know. It would be good to have someone understand me before I die.”
Stel said nothing. She had said that life is a bitter thing. He was beginning to agree. He put his arm around her, and her return embrace was almost fierce in its intensity.
McCarty came around the corner of the building, staff in hand, though, and Fitzhugh let Stel go. “There you go again, Fitz. Lover girl. What? Isn’t he at work yet? Look, Stel the eater. I have my staff again. I think I need to use it on you. Wait You owe me something. I saved you yesterday, when you ran. You have a beard, but no man’s heart.”
Stel hoed beans the rest of the day. He didn’t mind, though his shoulder pained him dully. This was the first time since he left Pelbarigan that he was a functioning member of a society, and though this was a strange group, he felt much more at home than he had in all his winter of wandering.
Fitzhugh’s brief commentary gave him much to think about. What terrible catastrophe had befallen the ancients that great areas of the land were so poisoned for so long that they could destroy a society that merely crossed the area? Would the land ever rebuild? From what he had seen of violence and misery, though, perhaps they would do it all over again. But then there were noble people. Stel knew them in Pelbarigan and among the Shumai. He had met Sentani during the last two years whose warmth and gentleness rivaled any he had known. And there were noble ideas and ideals, and the worship of Aven, with its whole code of ethics, that seemed so just and perceptive— would these not save the people this time? Could they not' rebuild and rejoin? Stel finally began to grasp the vastness of the problem now being unfolded to the Pelbar.
He felt his own personal problem suddenly dwarfed. And yet wasn’t that in miniature the same kind of thing that so deeply troubled whole societies, that may finally have erupted in the great time of fire that had destroyed nearly everything?
; Suddenly the hoeing of beans seemed, though paltry and insignificant, the sort of social action that Stel admired. It was cooperation. He had missed it. He enjoyed the tinkle of his hoe on the stones, the bird song from the field edges, the rhythmic thud of the hoe. He felt a gust of peace pass over him. Yet there was Ahroe. What was she doing? Was she standing guard on Rive Tower? Did she ever look westward and think of him? Had she begun to think of other men? Stel hoped so. There would be a scar, perhaps a deep one, but the wound could heal. Worse ones did. If only she were here. They could care for the old together.
Stel’s thought of Ahroe destroyed his slight sense of peace. Again he felt himself an exile. Well, here was something he could do. His musings were interrupted by the arrival of a thin, robed figure with water, which he dipped out of a wooden bucket with a gourd. Stel drank and watched the person, who stared off at the sky. Was this a man or a woman? Stel couldn’t tell.
“Thank you,” he said, handing back the gourd. “What is your name?”
“Taglio. I am the last Taglio. Once there were four.”
“A family?”
“A family? No. Taglio was on the list.”
“The list?”
“Yes. The names Ozar left for her children.”
“Are you a man or a woman?”
“A man? What do you mean? It has been so long. I went across the empty lands, you know. I don’t remember.”
“Yes. What was it like—the empty land?”
“I don’t remember.”
“What kinds of things did the ancients leave behind there?”
“Everything. All ruins.”
“Do you remember nothing?”
“There was a wedge, a roof, all of metal. Or its ribs. But they had melted on one side, and run down. There was much glass. There were many streets, and foundations of something like stone. All in lines. I don’t remember. There was a tower lying down, twisted. All metal.”
“A tower?”
“Yes. We could see that it was very tall and had been held up by ropes of metal. But it was not for people to climb. It was too small. There was glass on top. We thought it was for a light. And there was an enormous lake, like a giant hole, to the north of the ruins. We had to go around the lake, so we all talked about it. But that was a long time ago. I was barely an adult. I was another person then. I was like you. Soon the Ozar will be no more.”
“How wide is the empty land?”
“I don’t know. It is a long distance. Many kiloms. Hundreds of seasons ago, some of the Ozar, it is said, went all around it. But none had crossed it. We were told that it used to glow at night. Many hundreds of seasons ago. Soon after Ozar brought us here. But I don’t know. That may not be true.”
“Where did Ozar bring you from?”
“From the sky. I don’t know. That is what is said. It doesn’t seem to make sense. Unless we came to destroy the ancients. But we are like them. Nothing makes sense of any of it. I can’t hold a thought anymore. Ask McCarty.”
Taglio shuffled off down the row with the water then, without another word. Stel watched the thin, robed figure, and a feeling of unutterable sadness came over him. He still didn’t know if Taglio was a man or a woman. He turned to his hoeing with new vigor, counting as he stroked the weeds, driving thought out of his mind, piling the dirt around each stem with care, wondering if it would be possible to be true to anything. Didn’t one have to know why he was motivated? Taglio, Stel thought, has ceased to care. He—or she—was operating like one of the wind machines that were used to draw water for the Pelbar since Jestak had learned of them in the east.
As spring turned into summer, Stel remained with the Ozar, hoeing their large field, cutting grass to go between the rows to hold the sparse rainfall, bringing water to them, renewing the fence of brush that kept out wild cattle, bringing withes for baskets, repairing the old dam, and working at a myriad of odd jobs that needed skilled attention.
The Ozar had a large series of ponds, upstream in a widened part of the steep valley, where it made a bend. Here they practiced fish culture, much as the Pelbar did in their own ponds near the Heart. Stel cared for the fish, caught them, helped clean and dry them. He also repaired the roof of the communal hall, the terminal, as the Ozar called it, though no one knew why.
Twice while working at the stream, Stel saw the Roti on the far hill, five of them, silent now, watching him from the height. He had made up his mind now that they were as McCarty and Fitz had described them. He wanted to make a longbow, if he could find the time. Whenever he had a moment of leisure, though, someone asked him to do something. McCarty, especially, seemed determined to work him every moment. He could have refused, but it wasn’t worth it. The Ozar were to be pitied, not resisted. By the seventh moon cycle, or Pelbar Heatmonth, Harlow died, and Stel dug a grave on the hill among the rows of graves, all old, few marked anymore. When Stel inquired, he was told that they had lately been throwing the dead down into the great offal pit below the settlement. Stel knew it well. It had been a storage silo, a square-cut stone tower, beautifully made, and built against the hill downstream from the terminal. But at some time they had ceased to store beans or grain in it, and had begun dumping all sorts of refuse into it, as well as sewage. It was the foulest of collections, even oozing odorously from the cracks in the lowest stones.
They all referred to it as the “stew,” and Stel soon surmised that this was McCarty’s term for it. She herself had a horror of it and spent some time nearly every day digging at her own gravesite on the hill, so that when she died, they would not dump her into the stew. While she seemed sturdy, digging in the stony hill was far from easy for her, and she wasn’t half done. Stel could see that she had been at it for some time. She tried to get him to dig for her, but he simply told her he was sure she would live forever.
But he soon regretted saying this. She would look at him knowingly, and remark, “I shall be the last to go. Even you, fat Stel, hairy one, will go before me, bearing a light for me to lead me into the country of darkness. The Roti will come behind us, pursuing you, and we will have to hurry. Then I shall frighten them back. But I shall be the last.”
Stel bore McCarty as he had borne the Dahmens, with patience and determination. But she also made him feel vaguely uneasy. Fitzhugh, on the other hand, was his one delight—the only person he had met since leaving Pelbarigan whom he instinctively loved. It was Fitz who kept the whole society functioning. She had retained a human radiance despite all difficulties. She was also a consummate politician, smoothing away all domestic crises. In the evening Stel would seek her out and talk while she beat and spun the inner bark of a kind of tree they called the cordage into thread for cloth for the long gray robes they all wore.
It was tedious work. Stel saw he could fix a thread spinner for her, and a loom, if he were to spend the winter there. Clearly he would soon be their chief woodcutter, since the old ones had gleaned all the small wood for a considerable distance around Ozar.
Stel wondered about winter. Did he want to stay? Could he stand McCarty that long, in such close quarters? What would the old ones do without him? What would he himself do if he left? The winter might be severe in the mountains, and the Roti might still be waiting for him. Increasingly, Stel felt an odd sense of drift, perhaps, at base, because he had left Pelbarigan with no other motive but to live, and he had no clear purpose.
One evening he asked Fitzhugh if he would be welcome for the winter.
“Welcome?” She looked surprised. “We have grown to depend on you. To be frank, I was wondering how we would survive the winter. Five died last winter, and we grow rapidly more enfeebled. Look at them.” She extended an arm toward the small group sitting by the large window opening overlooking the stream. “They don’t play games anymore in the evening, or sing, or talk. They appear to be waiting. They don’t pray to Ozar, either.”
“Pray to Ozar? I didn’t know Ozar was divine. I thought she was someone who brought you here.”
Fitzhugh si
ghed. “That is just the trouble. Ozar was divine and wasn’t divine. Now Ozar isn’t for worship at all. We lack a real divine thing. I don’t know, Stel, but I suspect that when Ozar arrived, almost everyone in her died. Only a few survived, and they must have been children. They didn’t understand. They called Ozar a mother, as they grew, and they created a religion out of her. Perhaps the older ones taught it to the younger, either to fool them or to give them some explanation of things, inadequate as it might have been. And yet there must have been older ones because our language is well developed. It is hard to say. Ozar, as I see it, is nothing but some sort of conveyance, like a boat, but built to go in the sky, like a bird.”
Stel felt a shiver down his back. “In the sky?”
“Ozar is supposed to be hidden forever in her building.
But when Jaeger and I cared for her, and all the others were gone, we grew so lonely and frightened, we dug into the house of Ozar, which has no door, as you may have noticcd. We took lamps and went all through it. It is made of metal, and it is broken. On the side, now very faint, is written ozar. Perhaps more. That is where it is broken.
“I don’t know when or how Ozar became a religion. I don’t think it was at first, because some things we still have were made out of it. I think, anyhow.
“Near the front of Ozar, inside, was a door. It had a sign on it that read no admittance. Jaeger and I pried it open and went in. It smelled horribly, but in it were two human skeletons in fragments of cloth. We couldn’t understand the rest. They sat in chairs and faced a wall with disks on it, with glass fronts, and windows above it in a curve. Only one of the windows was broken, on the north side, where the hill had come over it. Don’t tell the others anything about this, especially McCarty.”
“Don’t worry about that. McCarty and I are not the warmest of friends.”
Fitzhugh grinned wryly. “I have noticed. You must watch her, you know. Just as she is watching us now.”
Paul O Williams - [Pelbar Cycle 02] Page 7