Gool (12 page)

ELEVEN

Dried fish and more of the bitter tea for breakfast. Then they rowed ashore, leaving Sal and Mond in the shed. The smaller their group the better chance they had of moving in the burrows unseen. Tarl, walking behind them through the streets of Port, soon grew impatient. Danatok knew this part of old Belong better than he – besides, Tarl did not believe in a library and books. He called the dogs from their scouting.

‘I’m going this way,’ he said, indicating a street that turned towards the burrows. ‘I’m going to have a look at the Clerk.’

‘Tarl, they’ll catch you,’ Xantee said.

‘I know some hiding places.’

‘Not in the city. You’ve never been there.’

‘Then I’ll learn,’ he said. ‘Goodbye, girl.’

He turned, with Him and Her at his side, and was gone. Xantee felt she would never see him again. He had not felt like kin, yet he was Hari’s father and she was sorry to see him go. She wished she had left him safe in the forest – the Dog King with his dogs.

Danatok led, keeping close to the water. Although many of the buildings were less damaged in this part of Belong, they met no people and Xantee began to understand how the population of the burrows had thinned since Hari’s time. Many people had fled into the country. Many had died from starvation, disease, war, murder. She wondered if the gool’s hunger was really much worse than the hunger of humans that led them into so many disasters.

By mid-morning they reached the park with the broken statues. Trees had grown out of the shattered marble. Their roots twined round heads, arms, torsos, making another sort of sculpture – roots like arms themselves, roots like grabfish.

Here, Danatok said, speaking silently now that Tarl was gone.

He led them into the arched doorway of a building standing almost undamaged at the eastern side of the park. Carved above the door, worn by rain and windblown grit, but legible still, were the words: ART HALL. The walls were standing but the roof had collapsed. Rooms opened off a large hall where broken masonry lay everywhere. The bare walls were red with lichen and black with water stains. Xantee tried to imagine what the place had been like when Belong was a great city – paintings and tapestries on the walls (she had never seen either but thought she knew what they were), pots and jugs of baked clay and vases of blown glass (there were clay shards and glass chips in the rubble), statues carved from marble or cast in bronze so shiny your face looked back at you from some hero’s shield. Pearl had told her of these things hanging or standing in her home when she was a child, and that most were looted from Belong. Soldiers had scoured the ruins for everything of value after Company’s Liberation War.

Xantee turned away.

We don’t need to go in there.

They crossed a corner of the park, around ponds of dead water and patches of stinging weed, and stopped on the south side. The building that had stood there looked as if it had been lifted up and dropped. It lay almost flat, with spikes of masonry rising like fractured bones. The portico had toppled forward. Its columns lay criss-crossed like the limbs of the statues in the park. Duro climbed into it, looking for something that might tell what the building had been.

Here, he called.

He had come across a flat stone, part of a cross-piece that had run between two columns. Carved into it were three letters: MUS. The word broke off.

Music, Xantee said. Pearl’s wooden flute made the only music she had heard – that and voices singing in the fields, and the singing of the people with no name. She could not imagine music that needed a great hall.

If there was a book hall it must have been over there, Duro said, pointing through trees obscuring the west side of the park. They made their way across another corner and found a building almost intact. It too had marble columns and a portico but if a name had been carved on it a cannon bolt had blown it away. Jagged stones littered the ground. They picked their way into the porch, alert for people who might be living in this building that still had its roof.

Silence inside, absolute stillness, until a lizard scuttled away and a rat ran up a stair-rail like an acrobat and vanished into darkness at the top. The staircase led nowhere – collapsed walls and deep hollows opened beyond. Water dripped through the ceiling from rain puddles made days ago.

There are no books here, Xantee said. And if there were . . .

Rats would have shredded them and water rotted them.

They explored every room and hollow and found a pile of parchment rolls in a basement. When they tried to unroll them the leather fell in pieces and only marks like spider legs – parts of letters, parts of words – showed on the slimy surface.

Books about weapons, Duro said. How to forge swords and spears.

But it proves this was a book hall, Xantee said.

Where are the books gone?

Looted, Danatok said. Company took everything it could sell.

So we’ll never find them, Xantee said. They’d send them in ships over the sea.

They’d send the precious things. Gold and jewels. Paintings perhaps. Decorated pots. Tapestries and costumes and cloth. Those were the things Company liked – whatever made them rich. But books – they wouldn’t see much value in books.

They still took them.

My father, Duro began. He was silent a moment. My father told my mother . . .

Yes, what?

He worked in Ottmar’s salt warehouse. There was a room at the back where the men sat to eat their cheese and bread. Ten minutes, enough for a crust and a mouthful of water and a piss, then the foreman was shouting at them . . .

Duro, what? Xantee said.

They sat on rolls of – he didn’t know what they were – thin leather, he said, rolled on sticks. With marks on the leather. My father smuggled one home in his trouser leg. He and Tilly used it for firewood, in the stove.

Books, Xantee said. But why didn’t you tell us before?

We were looking for a library.

And these were stored in the backroom of a warehouse, Danatok said.

Duro, can you take us there?

I wasn’t born. Anyway, what chance of them still being there? And, if they are, what chance of them being the ones we want – if the ones we want were ever written?

Xantee held a piece of damp parchment in her hand. There was one word on it, written in a script with curling ends making it almost impossible to read.
Arrow
, it said. Should she take it as a message: go where the arrow flies, follow Duro’s memory of his mother’s story? Why not? They had nothing else.

Danatok, she said, can you take us into the city?

Yes. It’s time I had a better look at it. I’ve seen Keech. Now it’s time to see the Clerk.

It’s the gool we want, not the Clerk, Duro said sourly.

Well, perhaps she’s in the city. We can go the way Tarl went.

How?

It’s another thing the people taught me, how to follow animals by their scent. We’ll follow the dogs.

They left the Book Hall, with its empty rooms and dripping ceiling and went back along the waterfront. Danatok untied the dinghy from its mooring under the wharf and they rowed to the shed for more supplies – water, dried fish, flat bread he had baked from root flour. Sal and Mond made ready to come with them.

We want to hunt for the gool. We can feel her.

Where? Xantee said.

Everywhere.

They would say no more than that and, once ashore, they refused to travel with Danatok into Port but made off without a word into the burrows. Xantee wasn’t sorry to see them go. She found their locked hands disturbing and their silence unnatural. She knew she should be responsible for them (it was what Hari would expect), but she had no mind for anything except her hunt for books – for the red star and the white.

Danatok followed the scent of the dogs, and Xantee and Duro picked it up faintly too. It led them all afternoon, through Port and into the winding streets of Bawdhouse Burrow. They met no people and saw only a single rat scuttling into a drain. When night came they slept in a sheltered yard below the city wall. The dog scent was fainter in the morning. Xantee and Duro lost it but Danatok kept heading westwards, back towards the sea.

Here, he said, stopping at the mouth of a drain in the base of the wall. The opening was head high and the ceiling had fallen but the dog scent led nowhere else. Tarl must have found a way through.

Duro, this is where Pearl and Hari came to steal the salt, Xantee said.

Memory of her parents was keeping her strong. She would be terrified without them – and again the thought of Hari dying turned her muscles to water.

Come on, Xantee, Duro said.

He was a help too. And memory of the starry sky and the velvet waves was a help. She followed Danatok into the drain. He found a way round and over mounds of fallen stone. Xantee felt his pain as he made light, drew it from inside himself as the people had taught him. Tarl must have made a torch or trusted to the noses of the dogs. But soon light flooded from a hole in the ceiling. Fallen earth made a hill for them to climb. The dog scent led them, paw-marks too, and Tarl’s footprints, in the loose earth. They emerged in a street so wide it made them feel like beetles on a table-top. It seemed impossible that with so many undamaged buildings no one was about. They ran for the nearest doorway. Tarl had done the same. The dog smell was there.

We don’t need to follow him any more, Xantee said. He’s looking for the Clerk. We’re looking for Ottmar’s salt warehouse.

I’m looking for the Clerk too, Danatok said.

Later, Xantee said.

He smiled at her, amused at the way she had taken charge.

The warehouses are that way, he said, pointing. We’ll have to go around Ceebeedee.

Then let’s go.

Send your minds well in advance. The Clerk’s men have crossbows.

I thought they’d have bolt guns, Duro said.

The technology’s lost. The cannons are tipped over in the squares. The gas lamps are broken. The steam engines rust in the yards. Nothing’s made any more. Men live in the buildings as though they’re caves. The Clerk is king of a thousand ragged men.

Where does he have his headquarters? Duro said.

In Ceebeedee, where Ottmar had his. We can go along the edge.

It took them the rest of the day. The buildings of Ceebeedee, many pocked with cannon holes from the wars – Ottmar against the clerks, the clerks against the workers, the burrows against everyone – stood white in the midday sun, then turned pink as it went down. Danatok took them through railway yards with rusting rails and engines marked on their sides with the faded emblem of Company, the Open Hand. They camped for the night in an empty shed, and in the morning followed the rails into a district of warehouses. All had been looted years ago. They stood dark and empty and echoing. People had lived in some. Ashes lay caked on the floors, hardened into stone. Bones were scattered about – always bones. The skeleton of a Whip was propped in a doorway, rusty bolt gun in his hand. It was someone’s joke but Xantee felt sick. A fog of cruelty seemed to lie over the city; and with it the invisible weight of the gool.

Ottmar, Duro said.

She looked where he pointed, half expecting to see the man, but it was a name in flaking paint over wide double doors with rails leading into them. OTTMAR SALT: she shivered as she read. Ottmar was the man her mother Pearl had fled from. He had thrown Pearl’s family – and all the Families – from the cliffs. He had made himself king. He had planned to use the green salt to poison his enemies. He had killed and tortured. And then Tarl’s dogs had killed him. The dreadful story made her harden her lips to keep from shrieking.

Duro put his arm around her shoulders. She shook it off. There was no comfort for such pain and cruelty.

They went through the double doors to the place where the rails ended. Wagons had loaded salt from a wooden floor five steps high. There were no wagons now, just emptiness and shadows. They climbed the steps. Grains of salt, brown with age, gritted under their feet. At the far end of the huge shed a row of windows high in the wall let in enough light for them to advance.

‘My father,’ Duro said, aloud. He was almost crying. ‘My father worked here. All his life.’ Xantee tried to take his hand, but he too wanted no comfort. ‘You only get one life and he spent all his here so Ottmar could get fat.’

They went deep into the shed, to a stone floor where salt-cake had been broken with hammers. A heavy wooden door stood in the end wall. The bolt was twisted off but the door was latched with a length of iron pipe. Duro wrenched it out. The door scraped on the stone floor as he pushed it open. The room beyond was airless, windowless, and empty except for rubbish piled against the back wall.

Nothing, he said.

Books, Xantee said, approaching the rubbish.

They were as round as rolling pins and stacked like firewood. Pieces of leather poked out like tongues. They bent and cracked as she eased out a roll and laid it on the floor. But when she tried to open the parchment it broke into pieces in her hand.

It’s no good, Xantee. They must have been here a hundred years, Duro said.

How did Ottmar get them?

Maybe they were stored in this shed before he used it as a warehouse. He must have thought they weren’t worth anything, so he left them.

And we can’t read them, she said. She tried to unroll the parchment again but it broke like the hard bread Danatok had baked, and broke again with each renewed pressure of her hand.

Books were never going to help us, Duro said.

Danatok walked along the stacked rolls.

The workmen sat here, he said, stopping at a place where the stack had been lowered to form a knee-high bench. See how they’re flattened. They make a good seat.

My father sat here, Duro said wonderingly.

Carefully he lowered himself on to the books. Xantee expected them to break in pieces, but instead they gave a groan as his weight forced them down.

These ones are softer, he said, feeling the leather. He brushed his hands. Salt, he said. My father came home covered in salt. It was in his clothes and hair. Tilly said she used to make him shake it on the table and she’d sweep it up and use it for the stew. So here . . .