HARM (7 page)

“When it is dark, I shall return outside the Center. The scarf will tell me which is your cell. I will give you further instructions then. Meanwhile…”

He brought from his pocket a quantity of salack. “Chew this. Rest yourself. Fear nothing.”

Essanits left.

Fremant propped himself against a wall and chewed on the herb. Gradually, some of his strength returned.

The day waned. A jailer came, bringing a small pitcher of water and a hunk of bread. The bread tasted stale. Fremant washed it down with gulps of water.

As darkness closed in, Fremant detected—so sensitized was he by now to such things—an additional alteration in the light; he realized that the Shawl was about to pass over Stygia once again.

When darkness became complete, and a chilly wind blew through his grating, he heard a sound outside. The scarf was removed from the bars. A glowworm of light showed. Then came a dull clumping of a heavy instrument striking the mortar in which the bars were embedded. A pause. The bars were being tested, shaken. More clumping. A bar was being wrenched away. Then another bar. Then another.

A hand extended into the prison cell, holding a small light in a glass. It was followed by a rope. The light was the signal. It was withdrawn.

Fremant grasped the rope, tested it to see that it was secure, then seized it firmly and climbed up the wall. He wriggled his way through the toothless gap of his window, to arrive on all fours on the ground outside. Willing hands helped him to his feet. Someone clapped him on his back.

“Horses nearby,” said Essanits. “Are you all right? Let’s hurry!”

They guided him downhill, a young unknown man holding tightly to the escaped prisoner’s arm to prevent him falling. It was the darkest of nights. No one was about. Not a glimmer of light showed in any window. There was no doubt that the passing of the Shawl awoke superstitious dread in local hearts, and not in Astaroth’s alone.

They hurried into a side street heading away from the Center. Cats scurried off at their approach. Four men were accompanying Fremant—Essanits and three younger men.

“Steady!” Essanits ordered. They slowed their pace.

A thickset man was waiting for them in the street ahead. He emerged from a doorway, where he had been lounging against the doorpost, to beckon them in. They were led along a narrow passageway and through another door, where the air was heavy with the smell of hay and horses and the noise of clawed hooves restless on tile.

This stranger shook Fremant’s hand with his leathery one. “I’m the stablekeeper,” he said in a deep voice. “I help Essanits against my better judgment, see?”

Fremant could barely speak in reply.

A lantern hung from a beam in the stable. Fremant was able to see his rescuers. Essanits he recognized immediately—the tall, well-shaped man with a large, square, clean-shaven face and deep-set eyes. His mouth, with its pale lips, seemed to spread across his face. The younger men in his company looked much alike, all stressed and anxious, differing most clearly in hairstyles: One had plentiful locks, one had fair hair cut almost to stubble, and the third was prematurely bald.

“All right,” said Essanits, “we’re going to make for the hills. I know a place where you’ll be safe, a little township called Haven. Some religion prevails there. The sooner we leave here, the better.”

Under the stablekeeper’s supervision, certain of the best horses were in the process of being saddled.

These insects bore little resemblance to ordinary horses. However, they were sturdy creatures, with pronounced hind legs, and fully capable of carrying a human burden. They had been bred for strength. Since their lives were comparatively short, breeding had rapidly taken place. They had been bred for distinctive colors as well as strength. Fremant couldn’t help viewing them with suspicion.

The beasts fought against saddling, as if well aware of the cold outside and the hardship to come. Kicking and rearing, they managed to fill the air with fragments of straw; so much so that one of Essanits’s youths, the frailest one, by name Hazelmarr, went into a sneezing fit.

Recovering slightly, he spoke pleadingly, “Essanits, sir, I’m not up to this adventure, I fear. You must do without me, as I am sure you can well manage.”

Essanits stared hard at him, while the other two young men tried to argue Hazelmarr out of his decision. “Very well,” said Essanits. “If you have no faith or stomach, then go. Speak to no one of this, you understand?”

Hazelmarr nodded dumbly, shaking his head of hair, but as he turned to leave, the stablekeeper grabbed him by the arm. “You can’t let this little snot go, just like that,” he told Essanits. “He’ll tell on you for sure. I know his kind—you can’t trust ’em. A real snake, he is!”

“So you plan to kill him?” said Essanits coldly.

“That’s the way to make sure he stays silent, ain’t it?”

“Let him go, man, will you? He may be a coward, but he doesn’t deserve to die.”

With that, Hazelmarr was allowed to sneak away into the night, assisted by the stablekeeper’s boot.

Fremant, Essanits, and the two remaining youths mounted their selected horses. Fremant was on a skewbald called Snowflake. Its vestigial wings creaked as he settled himself in the saddle.

After Essanits had given the stablekeeper a bag of stigs, they made their way out to the street in single file.

“I must stop by to pay Bellamia,” Fremant told Essanits. “I owe her for my room.”

“Forget about that,” said the fair-haired Oniversin. “We need to get out of town fast.”

Essanits reined his horse. “Fremant is good and honest. All men should pay their debts. To Bellamia’s house, then. It will take but a minute extra.”

Bellamia was asleep. It took a good deal of hammering at her door to rouse her. She opened the door only a crack, to show them she had a cudgel in her hand, and to swear at them.

“You’ve already got me into trouble, you devil,” she told Fremant, who had dismounted. “Some brutes from the Center was round here asking all about you. Said I should not have lodged you. I’m in fear of my life, I am.”

“Look, Bellamia, we’re in great haste. Here’s the money I owe you.”

He held the money out to her.

“Money’s no good to me if my throat’s cut, is it now?” She pulled her door wide open. “Here, take me with you, wherever you’re going. I’ll cook for the lot of you.”

“It means trouble to take a woman with us,” said Ragundy, the bald youth.

“I’ll give you trouble if you trouble me,” she told him.

Bellamia had been sleeping in her clothes and now appeared ready to leave immediately.

“What about the parrot?” Fremant asked.

“To hell with the parrot,” she replied. “I’ll let it go free.”

After a short argument, Essanits ordered her to mount his horse behind him and to hold tight. He hauled her into position. Then they were off.

T
HE CONTINENT ON THE EDGE
of which Stygia City perched had long ago tipped toward the ocean. Thus, leaving Stygia City to travel inland entailed a steady climb upward—not exactly steep at first, but unremitting: unremitting until the horsemen came, on the second day, to a veritable hill, which marked the beginning of more broken terrain, and a different kind of land.

“Everyone dismount,” Essanits ordered. He helped Bellamia down from his horse.

The others also dismounted, looking about them rather uncertainly.

“We must offer thanks to God for keeping us in safety so far.”

“God?” exclaimed Ragundy. “We left God behind long since.”

“Jesus Christ visited this planet only for a short while, leaving never to return. From that absence stem many of our problems,” Essanits declared. He lifted his eyes. “We offer thanks to God, if he is listening, for our safety so far, and for our arrival in a territory where we are free of the pollutions of Stygia City. Keep us steadfast and may we enter more fully into your mind. Amen.”

Embarrassed, Fremant and Ragundy muttered their own amens in response.

Ragundy asked if God’s mind included women. To which Essanits replied patiently, “You will always try to vex me, Ragundy. You voice your own troubled character. When you tire of doing so, you will move nearer to God and feel happier. I pray for that day.”

Bellamia was more strident. “Just supposing there was a god, he’d be more likely to include me than a little dottle like you!”

“Ah, shut up, the pair of you,” said Oniversin.

“We must all hold our tongues,” said Essanits, “in the hope that good sense may thereby govern our lips.”

Fremant asked what they were going to do now.

Wordlessly, Essanits flung up an arm and pointed into the hills.

They mounted their horses, which had been grazing, and headed onward again.

Now there was a faint trail, leading among boulders. Some boulders were the size of houses. Many had streaks of colored clay in them, yellow zigzags through the rock. At the feet of these boulders grew various plants. Some were in bloom, bearing modest black-and-white petals. Bellamia wanted to dismount to pick some but Essanits would not stop.

As the horses picked their way along, small wingless birdlike insects flitted among the boulders, clucking their disgust at human intrusion.

On the following day, they came on a more open space, where the ground was level. Ahead of them lay a small hill. On the hill, and below it, stood a scatter of houses.

“Yonder is Haven,” said Essanits, “where we shall be favorably received.”

It was as he said. Nearer the houses, they dismounted so as not to appear formidable to a small group of people who were coming to greet them.

The greetings were serious and unsmiling but friendly nevertheless. The newcomers were welcomed into the village, Fremant leading Snowflake. He felt the strangeness of the place; the sense of being an Eternal Stranger, as Breeth had called him, came upon him. He struggled with himself.

“Thanks be to Jesus Christ, who guided us here,” Essanits had said to the crowd, before dismounting.

Many of the cottages were built on stilts, with ladders leading up to the living quarters. Insectoid creatures resembling small goats were kept tethered under the houses, together with an occasional horse, and the roofs of the houses were covered with turf. A forge and a stable with horses for hire stood together on one side of the square. Another house sold milk and cheese of a kind called katchkall.

A stiltless cottage housed a potter; behind his cottage was a litter of broken pots, their brown fragments resembling the wreckage of the shells of marine creatures. Above the potter, Fremant was told, lived a man, a hermit, who made clothes. One of the houses standing on what served as the village square was reserved for guests, and here the newcomers were installed.

On the whole, the village of Haven did not present a welcoming appearance. Centuries of technology had brought these humans here; now they gave every appearance of having sunk back to Earth’s Middle Ages.

It seemed to Fremant at first that the population of Haven consisted either of babies or of the aged. Instead of sounds of music came the sound of babies crying, or at the least uttering cries. He found the cries particularly unnerving. On closer inspection, the aged were less aged than withered, worn out by their labors in the fields. The seed stored in the holds of the
New Worlds,
which had brought them to Stygia, was unsuited to the soil of Stygia. And the soil was mainly barren, as many readily complained.

Despite its name, Haven was a harsh environment, where music and laughter were lacking. An old man, by name Deselden, reinforced the gloom with his sermons—to which most people listened, for want of better entertainment.

Essanits was known here and given a courteous welcome. In particular, two rows of neatly dressed children, one of boys, one of girls, sang a chant for their visitor, repeating over and over the phrase, “May you find some comfort here, and in Jesus.” After their song, they stood quietly, well-behaved under the control of a gray-haired woman who introduced herself as Liddley. She was known as “The Schoolteacher.”

The portly elder by the name of Deselden, who clearly wielded local authority, gave a rambling speech and uttered a prayer, long in words and strong in self-abasement, in Essanits’s honor, to which Essanits responded in kind. That evening, they were served a frugal meal, on the understanding that they would have to cook for themselves the next day. Bellamia was pleased to hear that.

“The water from their well tastes vile,” she said, behind her hand. “Vile! I’ll have to boil every drop of it or else we’ll fall ill.”

The horses were stabled below the guest house. When the company lay on mattresses to sleep, the restless movements of the horses could be heard beneath their heads.

The noise sounded like doors slamming. As Fremant lay drowsing, the cries came to him again, and he could hear men talking.

One voice was familiar. He remembered the cultivated American tones from long ago. The name came back to him on a tide of fear. Abraham Ramson! With the recognition dawned the knowledge that he was lying shackled on a hard floor.

Abraham Ramson was saying, “…wasting our time. Set him free, Algy. He’s a nobody. He wants to feel British. He has some English or Irish wife, whatever her name is, and he has written what he thinks is a funny book. I scanned it. It’s stupid and harmless.”

Another voice said, “But he does talk about the prime minister being assassinated.”

Ramson replied. “So what? I am inclined to believe him when he says it was intended as humor. Had he really planned to assassinate your PM, he would hardly be likely to put the idea into print, would he, now?”

“Okay, so what? You advocate setting him free, Abraham?”

“Sure do. Show the little bastard mercy. Kick him out on the street! Get rid of him! He’s free to go.”

“E
NJOY WHAT YOU CALL YOUR FREEDOM,”
Essanits told Fremant. “You can live here in Haven and regain spiritual qualities.” He and Fremant, together with Bellamia, Ragundy, and Oniversin, were breaking their fast with bread and honey and glasses of water from the village well. The water did indeed taste vile.