And The Devil Will Drag You Under (1979) (6 page)

"Just up ahead," he replied, gesturing but not breaking stride. "A small cantina that sells to the merchants and people in town from the farms. Just relax and keep quiet and let me do all the talking. You don't want to make any more mistakes, 'specially out in public," he
warned. She didn't mind this in the least. If she could help it,
she
wasn't going to hear that weird voice again.

A number of kids were gathering near the cantina-perhaps a dozen or so, all of whom seemed to be in boy-girl pairs. They ranged in age from about five or six to eleven, which, she guessed, was close to her own age. She found the numbers difficult to dredge up; when she thought,
Five
or
six,
her mind said,
About the age of her friend Cathy's daughter.
The concept of age was there, but not the figures.

The other children seemed to recognize them.

"Just don't say anything you don't have to," the boy cautioned her.

"These others-they are all orphan beggars, too?" she whispered.

He nodded. "It happens. There is no dishonor in it."

"I-I didn't mean that there was," she shot back, a bit startled by his reaction.

They joined the crowd of children, and she shut up as he made no further comments. She felt a little awkward and there was a creeping depression growing inside her. Nothing was going right; nothing she said or did was right. The objective looked more and more hopeless every passing moment.

The boy greeted several other boys by name; they were regulars and friendly. The girls, she saw, generally kept quiet and deferred to the males, which was cul-turally irritating but, considering her situation, provided a comfortable blanket in which she had no obligations to screw up.

One problem surfaced immediately, and it was almost comic. The Zolkarian language was most com-pact; a number of sounds went together to form different words depending on the mere arrangement of this syllable or that. As a result, names tended to be single long terms that, nonetheless, meant graphic things to the listener. It was awkward-the language went in for elaborate names, yet provided no simple way for nicknames or shortenings. It made for long-winded talks.

"Hey! Shadow of the City! I hear you did real good in the Street of the Nine Thousand Buffaloes yester-day!" a chubby eight-year old called.

"Not bad, Whisperer of the Long Marsh Grasses," Shadow of the City responded. He looked around. "Flower of the Long, Dark Hills is no longer with you, I see."

The pudgy Whisperer of the Long Marsh Grasses nodded. "You know how it is. Man came along a
cou-ple days ago and offered her Solace. Said she looked like his dead daughter or something. I dunno. Who can ever understand 'em?"

"Women?" Shadow of the City responded quizzically.

"Naw. Grown-ups," the pudgy one replied. "I may have something working with Flower of the Deep Orange Sunset, though. We'll see. Free Wind of the Black Earth is turnin' grown-up fast, and he may just decide to give up the life and turn shareholder."

And so it went, with the massively complex names coming quickly and the conversation, while very human, running on an alien cultural level. The words were there, but not the meanings.

The children were all there because of the cantina, run by an elderly man named Winged Dancer of the Buffalo Stampede. He dealt mostly in confections and bite-sized, open-faced sandwiches.

The culture had no refrigeration, and therefore storage of such things was impossible. Rather than just throw the stuff out, the next morning he gave it to the poor kids, showing kind-ness and charity at absolutely no cost. Sometimes he had nothing, of course, but the beggar children's sub-culture had a way of knowing just how much was available.

The sandwiches smelled really rancid, and Jill passed when they were offered to her. The trouble was, she didn't know whether they were truly rancid or if that was the way they were supposed to smell. It didn't matter; the other kids wolfed them down hap-pily, and she got a good share of the sweet pastries and rolls, which tasted excellent despite being hard and more than a little stale. When you're hungry that doesn't matter much, and if she were starving, even the sandwiches would look attractive, she knew.

The appetite of Bright Star of the Night Skies, whose body she now wore, was almost birdlike, and Jill was soon full. It took a bit longer to satisfy Shadow of the City, and there was little left by the time he, too, was filled. Finally he turned and said, "All right, now let's go see if we can find your jewel."

They got up, although it took about another fifteen minutes of saying goodbye to all those long-named types and wishing them good days and good fortunes before they were able to break loose. Finally on their way someplace, Jill felt free again to talk and question her young guide.

"I notice that everybody seemed to be in boy-girl pairs," she noted as they walked back to the main street. "Why is that?"

Shadow of the City looked a little bemused. "It's not seemly for a male to beg unless he is crippled," the boy explained. "That means a girl must do the begging. But girls can't touch or spend money, so the system always results in that kind of partnership."

Another bit of craziness,
she thought.

"And what if you can't find a partner, or you out-grow yours, like your friend back there?" she con-tinued with the same line of thought, suddenly realizing the meaning in some of the odd commentary. "Do you starve?"

The boy chuckled. "Did Whisperer of the Long Marsh Grasses look like be was starving?" he asked.

She had to admit that, if anything, the chubby boy could have stood a diet, and said as much.

"Sometimes the girls outnumber the boys, which is fine, since more than one can beg for a boy.

So if a boy gets without a partner, then an extra girl moves in with the boy who needs one. That's how I got you-that is, how I got Bright Star of the Night Skies-aw, you know what I mean."

She nodded, sympathizing with his confusion. Had the boy not already had experience with others from outside his world, he could never have handled this conversation at all, she realized.

"But you don't have that now, do you?" she asked him. "What happens when there are more boys than girls?"

He shrugged. "If things are going good, we all chip in to help him, and there are always places like the cantina. If times are real bad and he faces starvation, say, he might die or he might take The Risk."

They were walking along the wide central street now, and she realized that the town was truly a city with perhaps ten thousand or more people in it. They were heading toward the tallest building in town, that was for sure-she could see the odd pyramidal tower's top ahead.

"The Risk?" she prompted, glad to get whatever added insight into this new culture she could.

He nodded grimly. "Appealing and praying to the Holy Spirit for divine charity."

"You get it?" she asked, fascinated.

His smile turned sardonic. "Oh, you get it, all right. It just might not be what you think. You come to judgment right then and there, really, and if you're found completely worthy, then you'll get what you need. If not, well, I've known guys struck dead on the spot or turned into buffaloes or even girls!"

She didn't like the obvious distaste of that last, and said so. He just grinned and shrugged it off.

She sighed, reminding herself that she was, after all, talking to a small boy-hard as it was to remem-ber that sometimes, with his older-than-his-years man-ner-and changed the subject.

"What happens when you grow up?" she asked. "I understood you to say that you can't beg any more."

He nodded ruefully. "Manhood means you must act honorably always, and that means an honorable job. If you can't find one or somehow learn a trade-which is hard to do if you're an orphan-then you become a shareholder and go out and work on the land of a Lord for a share of the crop."

She recognized that part, anyway, from her history classes. Feudalism pure and simple. The poor sold themselves to the rich for food, clothing, shelter, and protection. This would be the fate of most of the boys, and it was sad to think of such bright and free spirits voluntarily chaining themselves for life. It was a depressing if certain future, one obviously not talked about much, as she could feel from his manner. Still, once aired, the subject remained in the mind and had to be discussed.

"You girls have it easy," he said irritably. "Some guy will come along and take you in and give you everything you want, and all you have to give him are babies. Even if you don't, there's always church service. Not boys. We're stuck with the responsibility."

To her that sounded like a no-win situation.

They had by then reached the temple square. It was enormous, a grassy park with four paths forming a plus shape and intersecting at the temple itself, a huge pyramid made out of massive stone blocks whose only entrances were atop hundreds of stairs.

They stopped across from it. "The main temple of the Holy Spirit," he told her in tones hushed and reverent.

"The strange-looking man with the jewel-he works there?" she asked him, a little awed herself.

She tried to imagine building such a massive structure by muscle power alone and couldn't.

The boy nodded. "Works there and lives there, as do the church leaders and Women of the Spirit."

She stared anew at the structure. "Hard to believe anybody actually could live inside there."

"It's not as bad as you think," he replied. "I've never been inside, but the whole park here, grass and all, forms a roof over a big castle that maybe goes down as far as the temple goes up.

Enormous number of rooms and lots of twisty passageways. I think it's part of a big cave or something. Leastwise all I heard is that it's cool down there but always breezy so the smoke doesn't bother you."

She sighed. On top of everything else, the man she sought lived inside a virtual fort of unknown dimen-sions and honeycombed with labyrinthine passageways. She began to think she would never even
find
the demon with the jewel. Suddenly a thought came to her.

"You said something about girls giving themselves to the church," she recalled. "And just now you said some people called Women of the Spirit lived there. Just what does that mean?"

He shrugged. "Beats me. All I know is that any girl who's passed blood but is unclaimed could show up at one of the four doors there and give herself to the church and get taken in. What happens after that nobody knows, since I don't think anybody ever sees them again."

That was not cheering news for several reasons. For a brief moment she had an idea to volunteer her-self-at least that would get her inside and perhaps give her some familiarity with who and what was where -but puberty was required, and this body was still months, perhaps even a year, away from that. How long had Mogart said? One day here equaled more than an hour back home. Certainly not enough time. It didn't matter, though; she was certain she couldn't stand a year in this society. Of course, if she didn't solve this problem she'd spend more than that here, she realized suddenly, and new urgency came over her. Her mind raced.

"Look, you know the one I'm looking for?" she asked almost desperately.

He nodded. "The Holy Elder himself, the ruler of the temple. Of course. No one else has hair on his face of any amount, and he has lots of it, plus a lot more. He is not human; that is how we know he is the Holy Elder. He is only half man, and half something else."

That description fit Mogart pretty well, and Mogart had said that to humans his kind would all look basi-cally alike. This line of questioning was becoming in-teresting now.

"And how do you know this about the Holy Elder? Have you seen him?" she pressed almost desperately.

The boy nodded. "Oh, yes. He comes out for services and prayers, of course, at midday." The boy suddenly saw where she was heading with this line of questioning. "No services scheduled for a week," he told her. "Prayers, of course, every day at midday, but that won't do you any good."

"Why not?" she asked, not wishing further disap-pointment.

"Because you're praying, of course," he responded in that condescending tone that told her she had asked something dumb.

She let it pass, and considered ways of approaching the demon at the midday ceremony.

"He
does
have audiences, though," the boy said suddenly.

Hope soared. "Audiences? With common people?"

He nodded. "I've never been to one, 'cause the only reason you're supposed to go is if you have a problem too big to solve. Almost everybody does, so it's crowded, and he usually only gets to talk to a few."

Obstacles,
she thought.
Always obstacles.
But these were lesser obstacles, ones that could be surmounted. She just wished she had more time.

"I'd still like to be here for the midday prayer," she told him.

He shrugged. "All right, but it's only gonna mean trouble. We can set up here and beg until it's time. Might as well get
something
done."

Begging, it turned out, was a universal sort of thing for any culture. Jill was filthy and her hair was, too, but that didn't stop Shadow of the City from finding a remaining mud puddle and applying even more mess to her, almost getting her to wallow in it.

"It washes off," he assured her. "But the worse you look the better the pitch."

"I thought charity was a must," she responded, recoiling from the muck.

"It is," he agreed, "but not to the point of going broke. You give what you can afford, and then usually only once a day. Do you know how many begging teams there are in a city of this size?"

He paused and added special emphasis to his next sentence. "Espe-cially right around the Holy Temple?"

She got his meaning. If she wanted to be here at midday, she would be working in the most competitive of neighborhoods. It was hard to ignore a beggar child when you were within sight of the temple, so competi-tion would be fierce.

Surprisingly, even to her, with a little coaching she proved pretty good at it. Begging was particularly dif-ficult in this sort of society, where you couldn't tell a good lie without immediately getting tripped up. The boy told her that even a small lie would result in having to tell the absolute truth for a pretty long while, and no fudging.