Forty Thousand in Gehenna (43 page)

It seems clear that there is a massing of calibans for defense or attack at the Cloud River settlement. These have come from the two seaside settlements and their numbers are being augmented hourly.

…Observers in field are at hazard…

Message, Base Director to E. McGee in Field

Genley and team are missing on Styxside. Do you know anything?

Memo, Security to Base Director

Agents in field are proceeding with utmost caution. War seems imminent. Field agents are reporting unusual aggressiveness on the part of calibans.

Memo, Base Director to Security

I don’t think there’s any question Genley, Kim, and Mannin are with that movement toward the Cloud. McGee is also out of touch. Don’t take unwarranted risks in observation. Start pulling the teams back.

205 CR, day 60
Cloudside

The corridors were unnaturally still, empty of calibans, of Weirds, unnaturally dusty, because no one was sweeping them, and that, thought McGee, was because of that gathering out on the riverside, that milling about of calibans. Fisher-nets got tangled; someone hauled in a gray by accident, but it survived. Something large surfaced in the river, just a great gray back, and no one saw it again—
curiosity
, someone said.
They’ve noticed
, but McGee had no notion who that
they
was, unless seafolk.

Great calibans moved in that no one owned, just arrived—presumably from upriver, from the forest. There were giants among these newcomers, but Weirds kept them to the Pattern across the river, and they tried none of the local calibans.

Wild, McGee thought, or tame. There was no distinction. And they remained, harbingers of trouble up the Cloud, while Elai delayed to move. The riders fretted; the calibans seemed indecisive. It all seemed wrong. And the halls grew dusty with neglect, under the wear of feet both shod and clawed; the sun shafted through clouds within the inmost halls, dustmotes dancing.

So she came on Din, in a little-used way, a shadow in the dustmotes. She had not looked to meet him.

“Din,” she said by way of greeting. “Haven’t seen you.” He had not come for stories. She missed that. He remained a shadow to her, mostly, with Twostone close against the wall, a caliban silhouette out of which the light picked tiny details, the color of a nose, a lambent eye too shadowed for color, staring at her.

Din said nothing, but bowed his head and stood aside for her to pass.

“Din—are you all right?” she asked.

Notes, coded journal Dr. E. McGee

I talked with Din today. I don’t think he understood. He’s seven. He’s wiry, all elbows; you want to give his face a washing and comb his hair; and then you look into his eyes and you wouldn’t dare. He’s a boy that’s thinking hard right now, how to stay alive. That’s the way it is. He’s not mature, not in all ways. He’s growing and awkward and he took a stone when I was trying to talk with him and threw it. Like a child. He cried, trying not to let me see.

I don’t want to die
. That’s what that meant. He just threw the stone and it bounced off the wall and hit me. I never let on it did. I just stared at him the way you have to do with that boy to let him know he doesn’t impress you; and he just broke into tears then and turned his face out of the light.

“Jin scare you?” I asked.

“No,” he said, and sniffed and wiped his eyes and tried to pretend he hadn’t ever cried, all sullen and arrogant. “Not scared.”

“Look at the sea,” I said. That puzzled him, us being inside, in the dark. “Look at the sea next time you’re out.”

“Why?” He’s a little boy, always ready to suspect someone’s playing tricks on him.

“You just do that.” I started to talk about boats, which we had talked about before. He just made that stone-dropping move.
I don’t want to talk
.

“You be smart,” I said. “You want to live to be a man?”

That got his attention. So that was what he was thinking about.

“Just be smart,” I said, not knowing how to advise him, because it’s not my world; it’s his. “Your mother wants you alive, you know that? That’s why she’s got that Taem around; because what’s coming up that river is mean and it’s coming here, you know that?”

He squatted there thinking about that, and then I figured out that scene on the roof, where he defied his mother; where his little caliban took on Scar, who makes ten of him. Scared. Just scared and full of fight, this boy. Elai’s son. I tousled his hair; no one touches him much: it’s not Cloudsider way. He set his jaw and ducked, but he looked pleased as that sullen little face of his does these days. Poor boy. Your mother loves you. I do.

“I like you,” I said then. He looked pleased. If he were a caliban his crest would have settled. That kind of look. His caliban moved up and nearly knocked him off his haunches, putting its head in our way. They know where the sunlight is. The attention. I don’t know how they know, or how much they understand. “Fight,” I said, “but be smart.”

“Elai say that?” he asked.

I lied about that, but I thought she would if she were not busy; but she said I should take care of her sons for her, so I guess it was in a way the truth.

I talked to Cloud too, but that’s nothing. Cloud’s too young to know much. And Taem knows—who knows what a Weird knows, but too much for any five year old, and too different to hear anything I could say. Scar talks to him. All the grays and ariels do. Presumably that’s enough.

We’re running out of time. We have to move. I won’t take this book when we do. I’m burying it. In case.

They’ll lend me a spear to use. Dain showed me how to hold it. I’m supposed to ride—one of the free Calibans the Weirds have come up with on this side of the river, the kind that don’t let themselves belong to anyone. I’ve seen it; we’ve looked each other in the eye. It’s not particularly big. I patterned to it and it nosed my pattern but it wouldn’t give me anything back. This is not a friendly one. But it’s born to the Cloud River pattern, Dain says; and so I trust it doesn’t hate me in particular, just the idea of being beast of burden.

That’s a human thought. And then I remember that I’m sitting in a house they made, in a land they own. I’m sitting in a word of the Statement they’ve made about Cloud River, one of the folk who write in squares and angles, no less; and it’s going to go where it pleases while I’m on its back, because I can’t stop it; I can’t defend it either, not with that spear. And it knows.

205 CR, day 97
Upper Cloud

They rested, the sun lost among the trees, and cooked what they had of supper at the hunters’ fires, mealcakes and boiled dried meat, and a bit of starchy root that grew wild. “I’m going off that stuff,” Mannin said. He sat bent over, had gotten thin—some bowel complaint. “Maybe it’s allergy.”

“Come on,” Genley said, “you’ve got to eat, man.”

“It’s the water,” Kim said. “Told you. Man’s been here long enough, letting sewage in the rivers, on the land. Mannin drinks the water—”

“Shut up,” Mannin said. He stayed bent over. His lips were clamped.

“Weak,” a hunter said, and nudged him with his elbow. This was Hes, who had had Mannin to carry, behind him on his caliban. “The Cloudsiders, they feed you to the calibans, starman.”

Mannin got up and went beyond the firelight, riverward.

“Huh,” Genley said. That was nothing unusual, not the last two days. He ate his meal, watched the hunters about the fire. It was a man’s community, this. All hunters. Jin’s own, scattered wide in many camps along the streamside.

How many
? he had asked of Jin. Jin had shrugged, but he had added it himself, from the number that he could see, that it was a great number: thousands upon thousands. The station would have seen them move; the station would spot the fires tonight and count them; the station could sense their presence virtually everywhere. But it would do nothing. This barbarian lord, this Caesar on the Styx, had gambled—no, not gambled: had calculated what he could do. Would take the world while the Base and the station watched. Would deal with Base and station then, himself, literal master of the world.

Poor McGee
, Genley thought.
Poor bastards
. He made a dry grimace, swallowed down the brew. It had gone sour in the skins, taken on flavors somewhere between old leather and corruption, but it was safe. Kim was right. Boil the water. Drink from skins. Man had loosed his plagues in Gehenna. Now it went the rest of the way.

Now the weak went under, that was all.

“Mannin,” someone said. Men went off into the brush. “Hey,” Kim said, anxious, and got to his feet, “hey, let him alone.”

“He’s all right,” Genley said, and stood up. Suspicion. They were still the strangers. He pointed, waved at Kim. “Get him—get him before there’s trouble.”

“Stop them,” Kim said, hesitating this way and that, pushed aside by the hunters. His eyes were wild. “
You
, you do something—”

There was laughter from the brush. A crashing of branches. Laughter and quiet then, but for breaking branches. So they brought Mannin back and set him down by the fireside.

“You,” Kim said, “you talk to them, you’ve got the means—”

“Shut up.” Genley squatted down, gave a scowling stare at the hunters, put a hand on Mannin’s shoulder. Mannin was white. Sweat glistened on his face in the firelight. He shook at Mannin. “All right?”

Mannin’s teeth were chattering. He sat hunched over, shook his head.

“Get the skin,” Genley said.

“I’m not your bloody servant,” Kim hissed. “You don’t give me orders.”

“
Get the skin
. You take care of him, you bloody take care of him, hear me?” Jin had come; Genley saw it, gathered himself up in haste, drew a deep breath.

Jin stared at the hunter-leader; at him, at one and the other, hands on his hips. It was not a moment for arguing. Not an audience that would appreciate it. After a moment Jin gave a nod of his, head toward the second, the smaller circle of hunters. “Genley,” he said.

Genley came aside, hands in his belt, walked easily beside Jin, silent as Jin walked, on soft hide soles, crouched down by the fireside as Jin sat, one of them, a leader with his own band, however poor it was. He had his beads, had his braids, had his knife at his side. Like the rest. Moved like them, silent as they. He had learned these things.

“This Mannin,” Jin said with displeasure.

“Sick,” Genley said. “Bad gut.”

Jin thrust out his jaw, reached out and clapped a hand on his knee. “Too much patience. All starmen have this patience?”

“Mannin’s got his uses.”

“What? What, my father?” Jin reached to the fire’s edge and broke off a bit of a cake baking on a stone. “For this bad gut, no cure. It’s his mind, Gen-ley. It’s his mind wants to be sick. It’s fear.”

“So he’s not a hunter. He’s other things. Like Weirds.”

Jin looked up from under his brow. “So. A Weird.”

“We’re a lot of things.”

“Yes,” Jin said in that curious flat way of his, while the eyes were alive with thoughts. “So I give him to you. This Kim; this Mannin. You take care of them… Lord Gen-ley.”

He drew in a breath, a long, slow one. Perhaps it was Jin’s humor at work. Perhaps it meant something else.

“You know weapons, Gen-ley?”

Genley shrugged. “Starman weapons. Don’t have any. They don’t let them outside the Wire.”

Jin’s eyes lightened with interest.

Mistake. Genley looked into that gaze and knew it. “All right,” he said, “yes, they’ve got them. But the secret to it is up there.
Up.”
He made a motion of his eyes skyward and down again; it was not only Jin listening, it was Blue and others. It was the Tower-lords. “First steps first, lord Jin. None before its time.”

“MaGee.”

“She’s got none.”

Jin’s lips compacted into a narrow grimace something like a smile.

“You put McGee in my keeping,” Genley said. He had worked for this, worked hard. It was close to getting, close to it, to get this concession. Save what he could. Do what he could, all rivalries aside. “You want Cloudside in your hand, hear, that woman knows what there is to know. You give her to me.”

“No.” There was no light of reason there, none at all in the look Jin turned on him. “Not that one.”

He felt a tightening of the gut.
So, McGee, I tried
. There was nothing more to do. No interference. Just ride out the storm. Gather pieces if there were pieces left.
No place for a woman
. She might get common sense at the last, run for it, get back to the Wire. It was the best to hope for now.

If Elai let her run.

205 CR, day 98
Cloud Towers

They gathered in the dawn, in the first pale light along the Cloud, and McGee clutched her spear and hurried along the shore. The leathers felt strange, like a second, unfamiliar skin at once binding and easy; she felt embarrassed by the spear, kept the head canted up out of likelihood of sticking anyone with it as calibans brushed by her carrying riders on their backs, tall, disdainful men and women who knew their business and were going to it in this dusty murk.
God help me
, she kept thinking over and over,
God help me. What am I doing here
?—as a scaly body shouldered her and its tail rasped against her leg in its passing, weight of muscle and bone enough to break a back in a halfhearted swing.

A Weird found her, among the thousands on the move, waved her arm at her. She followed through the press of moving bodies, of calibans hissing like venting steam, of claw-footed giants and insistent grays that could as easily knock a human down, of ariels skittering in haste. She lost her guide, but the Weird waited on the shore where she had known to go, where her caliban waited, indistinct in the dusty dawn. Hers, the only one unridden, the only one which would be waiting on the shore.