The Days of Peleg (47 page)

Horses and chariots rumbled by—some without drivers, and small groups of people were huddled on the street corners with panicked looks in their eyes, shouting incomprehensibly with hysteric gestures.

It was too much for his little four-year-old mind to absorb. He glanced around, realizing that somehow he had become separated from his fellow orphans, and was now totally alone. He slowly wandered the rubble-filled streets, dodging falling bricks, questioning, trying to make sense of it all. Grown adults spewing nonsense? He passed street corner after street corner, listening to their gibberish until, amazingly, he saw a man with a torn cape running in the street who stopped suddenly and shouted back to one of the groups. They called to him, and he waved frantically and rushed to join them.

The earth heaved again, and another structure collapsed in front of him. The boy decided to head for the edge of the city where the buildings were not so tall. A cloud of black smoke billowed from a fire on his left, and he choked while running, trying to wipe his tears with his filthy hands.

A gang of juvenile looters knocked him down as they hurried to ransack a nearby jewelry kiosk. They needed only grunts and cheers for communication, and soon they were charging down the street, their arms and necks wrapped in bracelets and necklaces, and their fists full of trinkets.

The boy picked himself up, determined to escape the city. He walked, huddled, through the dust and noise, trying desperately to comprehend the panicked voices which accosted him from all directions.

Suddenly he heard something he
did
understand, and his tiny heart froze.

“
The Gutians have escaped!
”

He looked up and saw a panicked woman leaning out of an arched window five stories above him. She was looking in the direction of the detention center where
Gutians
and their sympathizers were held for interrogation, then sent to hard labor.

Gutians!

Every child was taught of the great danger they presented. They stole children in the middle of the night, mutilated animals and drank their blood, and were always trying to destroy the culture and society which everyone (under the noble leadership of Nimrod) had worked so hard to build.

He had never seen such turmoil, but if anyone were responsible it would surely be
them
.
Gutians
were routinely rounded up; but perhaps there had been an uprising…

“
Can anyone understand us?”
A man across the street was yelling. He was surrounded by several dozen men and women who were all shouting similar phrases.

The young orphan boy dashed over to the man, yelling, “I can, I can!”

The man looked down and grasped the boy’s hand.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“I live at orphan compound seven, and I am ward number twenty-three,” the boy stated dutifully.

Before the man could ask another question, the boy asked, “What is happening? Is this a
Gutian
revolt?”

“No, nothing like that,” said the man impatiently. “I don’t know what has happened.”

The boy was dismayed to discover that this grown man was genuinely scared. He tugged at the man’s hand.

“Can I stay with you?”

“See that lady over there?” he pointed to a tall woman with a light orange robe, now marred with dust.

The boy nodded.

“Go to her and tell her that Ur-Nammu says you can remain with us—for now.”

The man then looked away and resumed his calls for recognition.

The boy headed over to the lady, who had seen the conversation. She reached down to him and comforted him with a hug.

“Everything will be just fine,” she said calmly.

“Who is this?” asked an older boy standing next to her.

“Just a lost orphan,” she said. “He understands. Ur-Nammu said to take him in.”

“What’s his name?” he asked.

“He’s an orphanage ward,” she answered. “Hasn’t been given a name yet.”

The older boy turned up his nose.

“We should at least give him a name,” he said. “Since it looks like we’re all starting over.”

The orphan reacted. “Starting over?”

“Yes,” said the older boy. “Once we get enough people that we can talk to, we’re going to start our own city, far from here.”

He stared at the orphan for a moment, then looked up at the lady decisively.

“Since it looks like everything is breaking up, I’ve decided to call him ‘Cracked’ or ‘Peleg’, since everything is falling apart today.”

“Reu!” chided the lady.

An explosion shook the ground as another building sagged into rubble.

The orphan boy hadn’t expected a proper name until he turned six, so he was actually pleased with this strange turn of events.

“That’s all right,” he nodded earnestly. “I can be Peleg.”

He looked up at the lady.

“What are your names?” he asked.

“I am Gin-Muqayyar, the wife of Satrap Ryn-Thanon.” She looked down at the older boy. “And this is our son, Reu-Nathor.”

The newly named Peleg smiled awkwardly. He had never been this close to such important people.

“Where is your husband?” he asked innocuously.

Muqayyar frowned sadly.

“We haven’t seen him, yet.”

“Let’s go!” shouted the man whom Peleg had first met. “We now have more than sixty people and it is time to evacuate. Collect your belongings and follow me!”

The group began to move amid some protests—most notably Muqayyar who called out that her husband was still nowhere to be found.

“Don’t worry,” answered Ur-Nammu. “Once we’ve established a camp, we can send word back. Your loved ones can join us later.”

Reu-Nathor made a comment about the
Gutians
which included some naughty words. His mother quickly admonished him and he was quiet for a moment.

As they moved out, he looked down at Peleg.

“If I were in charge, I would simply execute crazies who spread myths, lies, and superstitions. It just makes for weak minds.”

The young Peleg nodded with little comprehension. It was a simple thing to believe.

The group made it out of the city just as more buildings and dust came swirling down behind them. Peleg had never been beyond the city walls and was astonished at how empty and vast the outside world was.

He was not particularly scared or even worried. Already these strangers had treated him better than anyone in the orphanage. He suddenly became aware of the fact that he was hungry.

A strange coldness came over him and he somehow felt chilly, although he was walking across the hot open landscape. A flute began to play and he looked around for the performer, but could see no one. The music grew louder and louder while his inexplicable cold chills began to make him shiver. He whirled around in the crowd trying to identify the source of the music which sounded as if it were playing directly into his ear. Louder and louder, piercing his mind, he hunched over, slapping his hands over his ears (which did nothing to diminish the volume), twisting in a frenzy trying to make it stop and …

… Peleg awoke on the same stone slab, in the same dark damp room where he had been held prisoner for unknown weeks ever since his recapture in this strange, unknown, underground community.

The flute player outside of his door continued his haunting melody, as Peleg shook off the residue of this latest dream/flashback. They were coming more frequently now—and stronger all the time. With no mental stimulation in this cell, his dreams were becoming more vivid and dramatic—and also (in this case) more realistic and accurate in immersing him into his own personal history.

He shivered with borderline hypothermia in the cold clammy room, and he reached for the bearskin which had slid off of him while he slept.

Peleg tried again to determine the composition of the flute which constantly played outside his door. It didn’t sound like either wood or metal, (he could easily identify the tone differences of tin, silver and gold flutes) but the sound was too heavy to be any type of reed. He decided (as always) that it was closer to wood than anything else, but that it must be a very heavy, yet porous wood to create such a thick, grainy sound.

His room had not changed since he had first been placed in here. The dim, green light panel, which was replaced periodically, and the shimmering sheet of water that trickled down his right wall were ever-present; and the only breaks in the monotony were the sporadic meals which were placed through the grate at the bottom of the stone door. There was nothing to indicate the passage of days, and his only other activity, besides eating, was the usage of the small toilet hole he had discovered in the floor at the far end of his ‘water’ wall.

When he had first arrived here, he was so exhausted and despairing that his fatigue and apathy bordered on catatonia. His shipmates were gone, his mission was over, and he was hopelessly captured while all of his original reasons for living were gone. He had forced them to carry him as a dead man, and he had watched with disinterest as they took him into a hidden cave opening and brought him down deep into his first cell.

There he had clutched his charts and few possessions in his chest-pack (hidden under his overshirt) next to his chest, and, as he lay in quiet despondency, he had slowly discovered a new emotion.

Rage.

Anger at those who had stolen his purpose. Deep fury and bitterness overtook him as he contemplated their contribution to his emptiness and futility. They had murdered his friends! They had destroyed the
Urbat
—and obliterated his contribution to the Great Discovery.

In a mad frenzy he had lashed out at the guard who brought food to him and ran insanely into the lightless corridors where he had charged blindly in whatever direction he thought might bring him back to the surface.

But they had eventually caught him again and brought him to this place where no door was ever opened for him, and he was forced to lie on the hard mat and allow the stone stockade to secure his ankles before anyone pushed food under the door.

The flute stopped playing, and Peleg listened again to the silence. The opening at the bottom of the door also allowed the music (and occasional footsteps) to filter into his room. Other than the person who brought his food and replaced his light panel, there were no voices; and when
he
spoke, it was the same rehearsed (and probably rote) statement:

Fasten your feet
.

He had spent his first hours (days?) calling out to anyone who might answer, but he soon exhausted all of his languages—and eventually his energy—as it became apparent that no one would respond.

He began to feel a quiet panic creep up on him as it always did when the flute player stopped. There was a deep anxiety that everyone had quietly left, and that he would slowly starve to death and then rot in the damp hole. He had almost starved once before, and would surely find some alternative if that fate ever presented itself again.

The flute playing resumed, and Peleg realized that he had been holding his breath. He exhaled forcibly, and listened.

The flute holes were placed with precise diatonic tuning, and he noticed that it overblew a twelfth when the musician began playing louder.

His mind began to fester as it rehearsed, for the six-thousandth time, the destruction of the
Urbat
. His home for twelve years. The screams of men burning. All for nothing. His fury was fanned as faces from their travels flickered through his thoughts—now rendered meaningless by the atrocities of his captors.

Kupé. The boy with his team of dogs. Manco Chavin. Kreivan, with his large spider tattoo. The mysterious rancher, Dōgon.

Serug.

Peleg’s first son, Reu, (named after the older boy who befriended him, Reu-Nathor) had not been accepted into the
Citadel
, and therefore Peleg had managed to maintain sparse contact with him after he left to study finance in Uruk. When Peleg was celebrating his own sixty-second birthday, he had received a message that his first grandchild had been born to Reu and his first wife. The baby’s name was also Serug.

Peleg had never told his young friend that he had a grandchild with the same name. The image of his friend’s body floating into the frigid south polar sea suddenly churned in his brain.

Meaninglessness. His anger threatened to turn the black room red, as clenched eyelids began to create sparks in his eyes.

“
Fasten your feet
!”

Peleg jumped as the speaker interrupted his mental tirade. It was a different voice! He hadn’t heard anyone approach.

Peleg cleared his head, and resignedly lay back on the mat and waited for the stone cuffs to clamp over his ankles.

Once in place, the door opened, surprising Peleg. The light panel didn’t need to be replaced. A young man entered, pulled a heavy leather cord from his belt, and approached Peleg.

“
Raise hands
.”

Peleg stretched his hands upward, above his chest, as he lay fastened to the mat. The man wrapped the cord tightly around his wrists and fastened it with a bowline. He yelled something incomprehensible to someone standing outside the door, and the stone cuffs slid open.

“
Up!”
he ordered, giving Peleg’s wrists a firm, but not overly cruel tug.

Peleg started to say something, but the man silenced him.

He pulled Peleg up into a sitting position, and then began walking through the doorway, forcing Peleg to follow.

Once outside, Peleg was flanked by two other men, and they started walking down the pitch-black corridor.

After walking for several minutes, Peleg saw wedges of pale blue-green light as they passed by other doorways where curious people peered out at him. He heard the hushed jabbering of children who were not being as silent as they were instructed. Peleg soon realized that others—perhaps entire families—lived in rooms much like his. Except they weren’t prisoners.

The swatches of light
did
reveal that the rough walls were formed out of some kind of white, crystalline substance—probably quartz. It certainly helped in distributing the meager luminescence, but of course, Peleg reasoned, when there is
no
light, a white wall is just as dark as a black wall.