Salt (3 page)

‘I was ten years old when they came,’ Lo said. ‘I was back from my first voyage as cabin boy on my father’s ship. We lay in port on a fine morning and saw a cloud rise out of the sea, and swell, and grow. It was the black fleet, a hundred ships, boy, great iron ships with engines that roared, and the red hand painted on their sides. Engines driven by steam. We had never seen steam used in that way. Guns that threw bolts of fire, and we had crossbows and spears . . .’

‘Company,’ Hari sobbed.

‘Company returned.’

‘And they stood off Freeport for ten days and nights, firing their cannons into the town until there was no building left whole, until Cowl had no army left. Then Company sent its troops ashore and the slaughter began, and only people who fled into the country survived, or those who hid deep in the ruins. They captured Cowl and his generals and threw them off the cliff, the way we had thrown their families. They marched into the countryside and conquered all the towns; they marched as far as the jungles and the desert, taking everything. And here in Belong they let the ruins lie, as a reminder to those who survived, but built Ceebeedee and a new Compound and Port – and they ruled, while we lived in the ruins. In the burrows. We lived like rats. I will . . . I will . . .’

‘Yes, boy, what will you do?’

‘I’ll drive them out. I’ll kill them.’

‘As your father would have done?’

‘Yes, like my father.’

‘Who was captured by the Whips and taken to Deep Salt. Hari, let me tell you, Company will not be defeated by swords and spears. Or by bolt guns either. Company will rule until the end of time.’

‘No,’ Hari cried.

‘Unless . . .’

‘Unless?’

‘. . . you find another way.’

‘What way?’

‘I don’t know. But sometimes I see the curtain of the future twitch, and seem to see light on the other side and hear a fading whisper that might be a name. I can’t be sure. And I can never raise myself and go there . . .’

‘What name?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Is it mine? Will I fight Company? Will we be free?’

‘I don’t hear armies fighting. I hear a voice that whispers: “Find the way.”’

‘How?’

‘I ask that question but no answer ever comes.’

‘By saving my father?’

‘If that is what you have promised. Save him if you can. And if you die there . . .’ Lo shook his head. ‘Hari, there’s nothing we can be sure of. And perhaps I heard what I wished to hear. But now you must keep your mind on things to do. How to leave the burrows. How to travel in the mountains and the jungle. I know nothing of these matters. You must find out for yourself.’

‘Where is Salt? Where is Deep Salt?’

‘North. There were salt mines in the mountains when I was a boy. Perhaps they are still there.’

‘How will they take my father?’

‘By ship. You must go by land.’

‘How?’

‘By doing each day what you must do. I can tell you no more than that.’

They sat side by side, in silence, for a long time. I will leave Blood Burrow and find my father, Hari thought. It would be like stepping into the dark and not knowing where his foot might fall. He had no faith that he would hear a voice calling his name, or see a curtain lifting and a light shining ahead. That was for Lo, who had not shifted from his tiny cell for many years. It is the end for this old man, he thought.

He rose to his feet. ‘I’ll bring you food and water before I leave.’

‘No, Hari. I have a crust of bread and a pannikin. After that, I need no more.’

‘You will die?’

‘Yes, I’ll die. But help me feel the wind and hear the sea before you go. And say goodbye in the way I’ve taught you, so I can hear your true voice.’

Hari lifted Lo to his feet, put an arm around him and helped him to the hole in the wall. The old man leaned there, feeling a breeze that rose from Port and found its way through the ruins to his face. He smiled. ‘The wind is rising. I can hear waves breaking far away. Leave me here, Hari. I won’t shift again.’

Hari fetched his pannikin of water and crust of bread and put them on the ground where the old man would find them when he sank down. He touched his shoulder and stepped back. Then he spoke, not with his tongue but silently: Thank you, Father Lo, for all you have taught me.

For a moment no answer came. Then he felt a breeze and heard waves breaking softly in his head, and Lo’s young voice, not creaking now or halting, spoke in the cavern behind his eyes: Hari, you have been the son I never had. Don’t forget what I’ve taught you. And learn new things I haven’t known.

I’ll try, Hari said.

Then go where you must go. Remember me.

Hari touched Lo’s arm. Then he turned and left the old man’s cell and made his way back through the ruins to Blood Burrow.

He did not go to Dorm. He and his father had been outsiders in the tribe, tolerated for their fighting skills. It would be known by now that Tarl had been taken, and believed that Hari was drowned. So let me be dead, Hari thought. It was safer that no whisper of him existed anywhere. He went instead to the wasteland that had been Freedom Park, where the largest of the packs of wild dogs came each night to sleep. They were not his friends, but not enemies either. If they caught him unprepared they would tear him to pieces for food. But if he stood in some place they could not climb to, on some jag of masonry, with his line of retreat clear in his mind, they would talk and listen in their way.

He found a gaping wall with a tumble of bricks and rotting timber below it, and climbed down silently until he crouched at head height above the resting pack. They scented him, rose clamouring – sixty dogs and bitches, some with pups at heel. Hari waited as they rushed and leaped hungrily. They had not taken many rats today. He waited until they had learned he was out of reach. Then he locked eyes with the pack leader, a brown and yellow dog, once heavy in his body but skinny now, and grey haired about his muzzle. His time as leader was nearly done.

Food, Hari spoke silently.

The dog gave a yelp of hunger.

But you must wait, Hari said, and do what I say.

One of the bitches understood and howled with despair.

There’s an old man dying, Hari said. Rats will smell him out before he’s dead. You must kill the rats. There will be many. Then you will eat.

It was the last thing he could do for Lo, whose mind would be too weak to repel rats as he died.

Where? said the dog.

You must let the old man die in his own time.

Then he is food? said the dog.

He is food. Leave him clean.

Crack his bones?

Hari knew he could not prevent it. They would get little enough meat from Lo.

Crack his bones.

Where is he?

Wait.

This was the hard part. He cast his mind about the pack, hunting for one he might speak with secretly. At the rear, behind the half-grown pups, a starved black and yellow dog limped back and forth, wanting to join in but ready to run if the leader turned on him. He had been strong once, square in his body and wide in his head, but injury had slowed him and starvation weakened him. One day the others would kill him for food.

Hari narrowed his concentration, sent a spear of thought out: Stay, dog, when they go. I will give you food.

The animal gave a yelp of surprise.

Hari turned back to the leader: Say you will wait until the old man dies.

We will wait if there are rats enough.

Hari would have to take that chance for Lo. Already it might be too late.

Then here is the way.

He pictured the route: the tunnels, broken rooms, hollow streets, falls of shattered masonry, the tongue of ruined city poking into Port, and lastly the curtain hiding the entrance to Lo’s cell.

Run silently or the rats will hear, he said.

Do not try to teach dogs how to hunt.

The leader gave a bark, turned once, and set off in a hungry lope across the wasted park. In a moment the pack was gone. Only the black and yellow dog remained.

Food, it whined.

Soon, Hari said. Follow me. And obey.

He jumped down from his perch and ran across the park, in the opposite direction from the pack. The dog followed, limping. Hari skirted Dorm. He climbed towards the walls of Ceebeedee. Twice he lifted the dog up barriers of stone too high for him. Then he wriggled along sinuous paths and crawled through tunnels and came to an iron door set in an undamaged wall. The dog stood at his heels, whining piteously. Hari thrust his arm deep in a crack between two stones and pulled out a key. He fitted it into the door and turned, hearing a rumble and click as a mechanism worked to open the lock. He did not understand any of this, just knew what his father had taught him. He pushed hard, and the door opened with a squeal of hinges.

The dog smelled food and tried to run past him, but Hari kicked it away.

‘Wait,’ he said, not bothering to make himself understood any more.

The room that had opened was pitch dark. Hari felt on the floor by the door post, found a flint stone and a twist of cloth and a pan of oil; struck a spark, blew it into flame on the cloth, lit the wick in the oil and a tiny room was revealed. The dog whined with eagerness and fright.

‘Quiet, dog.’

He crossed to the far wall and opened a chest lying there. Inside, wrapped in cloth, were strips of dried meat, from rats and cats and dogs, and a few from sheep (animals he had heard of but never seen) stolen from the food carts Company traders stationed at the burrow gates. Hari threw two strips to the dog – rat and cat – and took sheep for himself. He sat and gnawed at the leathery strip, while the dog chewed hungrily, trying to bite off bits small enough to swallow.

‘My father found this room, dog. Now he’ll never come back.’ He drank water from a leather bottle and poured some on the floor for the dog to lap up. ‘He stored food and weapons here for his revolution. See the knives and crossbows and spears. Enough for ten men.’ Hari laughed. ‘Ten men to tear down Company. But he said one day there would be ten hundred. Then ten thousand. Small beginnings in a tiny room – that’s what he said. And now he’s gone to Deep Salt.’

The dog gave a frightened yelp at the shadowy image appearing in its head. And Hari, too, gave an involuntary yelp of fear. To calm himself he drew Tarl’s knife and looked at the blade, tested its sharpness on his thumb. Then he took another strip of meat and cut it into bite-sized chunks and threw them to the dog.

‘Don’t be afraid, dog. We’ll travel together. I need you to sniff out dangers I can’t see. But stay with me and you’ll eat well.’

He made images of the route he meant to follow through the burrows, out into the wastelands beyond Ceebedee, and into the hills to the north – made images of small imaginary animals he would kill and pools of water they would drink at. Beyond that he could not go. There were deserts, Lo had told him, and mountains and rivers – and what were they? And beyond everything was Deep Salt . . .

The dog rose to its feet with a fearful whine. It slunk towards the door.

‘Stay with me, dog,’ Hari said softly. ‘You’re nothing alone. You’re food for the rats.’

An image came back from the dog – the pack sleeping after a kill – and Hari said, ‘Do you think you can go there? Next time they’re hungry they’ll tear you apart. How many times have you seen it happen?’ He sent the image savagely and the dog howled and turned in a helpless circle, then lay down as though its legs were suddenly weak.

‘Yes, dog, you’re mine, and I am yours. There’s no other way.’

He got up and rummaged through a pile of garments thrown into a corner – trousers, leather jerkins, hooded capes that Tarl had scavenged over the years. He took off his rags and reclothed himself, then filled a satchel with the rest of the meat and the leather bottle with water. Last, he chose a sheath for Tarl’s knife and a belt to hang it on. He would take no other weapons – swords and spears were clumsy and he had not learned to use a crossbow, but his knife skills were equal to his father’s. The knife and the dog were all he would need. And if he found no animals, the dog would serve as food.

‘We’ll go through the burrows tonight and sleep in a hole I know beyond Ceebeedee. Then we’ll cross the wasteland to the mountains.’

He blew out the lamp, pushed the dog out of the room with his foot, closed the door and hid the key.

‘Follow,’ he told the dog, ‘and don’t try to sneak away or my knife will find you.’

Hari started north through the ruins. The dog slunk at his heels with a strip of rat meat in its jaws.

THREE

Radiant Pearl of the Deep Blue Sea, also known as Pearl, rose fully clothed from her bed and crept across the darkened room to her maid, Tealeaf, dozing in a chair.

‘It’s time to go.’

‘Not yet,’ Tealeaf said, opening her eyes. ‘The doorman isn’t sleeping.’ She smiled. ‘But his eyelids droop. A few more minutes.’

‘You can make him sleep. Use the word.’

‘Only when I must. Be patient, Pearl. We’ll start our journey tonight.’

‘And tomorrow they’ll hunt me,’ Pearl said. ‘And capture me and bring me back. Then I’ll poison my husband-to-be, and poison myself.’

Tealeaf laughed two notes, like the singing of the glassbird, and said, ‘You’ll poison no one, child. We’ll walk out of here as easily as a butterfly flies. Rest a little more.’

‘Don’t call me child,’ Pearl said. ‘I’m old enough to be given in marriage. Cement our two Houses together, my father says, as though I’m a stone to be fixed in a wall, and he, my husband –’ she spat the word – ‘another stone. You’ve seen him, Tealeaf. A man who has outlived two wives already, and looks fat enough to have swallowed them whole. I won’t – I will not – marry him.’

‘No, you will not. You’re meant for something else,’ Tealeaf said.

‘He hunts men in the wastelands for sport, and makes them run from his hounds. And I’ve heard . . .’

‘Enough, Pearl.’

‘. . . I’ve heard if one of his servants spills a drop of soup – one of them did, on his sleeve, and he had the man’s hand cut off.’

‘Ottmar of Salt is a cruel man. But forget him, Pearl. You’re not running away, you’re running towards.’

‘Yes, to what? I can’t stand mysteries.’

Tealeaf stood up from the chair and put her hand on Pearl’s brow. ‘Go back a little, child. Forget the spoiled daughter of Company. You can put that off like the jewelled cloak you wear to the ball and be the unspoiled young woman you are – and how you’ve kept her safe I’ll never know. But there, you’ve found her: you are Pearl.’

‘If I know my true self it’s because of you – what you’ve taught me,’ Pearl said.

‘Oh, no. I’ve simply given you a nudge now and then. You’ve grown into Pearl by yourself. Now, my dear, the doorman sleeps and we can go. Be quiet in the corridors and, if you must speak, speak in our way.’

‘What if someone sees us?’

‘Then I’ll make him think he hasn’t,’ Tealeaf said.

Pearl looked at her servant for a moment, wondering at her calmness and the powers she had: things that after all the years of knowing her, and growing from a child into a woman in her care, were still mysterious and frightening. What happened in those parts of Tealeaf made differently from the way humans were made?

‘Tealeaf, when we get where we’re going, what will happen to me? Will I be like you?’

‘Is that what you want?’

‘I don’t think so. But I don’t want to be Radiant Pearl of the Deep Blue Sea, or Tender Blossom in the Dewy Dawn like my sister, or, or . . . Why do they give us these names? Is it to make us think we must only smile and paint ourselves and be what we’re not? My brothers can be George and William and Hubert. I’d sooner live in the burrows than be Radiant Pearl – and Ottmar’s wife.’

‘You’ll be neither. Come, Pearl. The doorman sleeps.’

‘Do I look all right?’ She stepped to the mirror for one last look, and saw in the darkened glass a person she barely recognised, dressed in a brown cape and grey skirt, with a bonnet tied under her chin. She had only seen clothes like this when she went by carriage into Ceebeedee and townswomen stepped out of her way. She could hardly believe she was wearing them and she felt a moment of revulsion, as though these coarse clothes would make her dirty. She could hardly recognise her face either, without painted lips and starred cheeks and her band of pearls across her brow.

‘Take your bag,’ Tealeaf said, handing it to her – a plain bag of grey cloth with rope handles, and so heavy that Pearl almost dropped it. She had rarely lifted anything heavier than a hand mirror in her life. Yet she was strong – Tealeaf had seen to that, with exercises done secretly in the night that toughened every muscle in her body, and improved her quickness as well, so that, like Tealeaf, she could catch an insect on the wing and study it with sharpened eyes and understand the language of its buzzing. These were skills no other human had; skills no human was aware of. She hoped that on her journey – but where, where were they going? – Tealeaf would teach her the word that made men fail to see the thing they saw.

‘Stop dreaming, Pearl. And stop admiring yourself. It’s time to go.’

Tealeaf hefted her own bag, slung it on her back and led the way to the door. It was after midnight. The house was quiet. Pearl’s father, Chairman Bowles, and mother, Sweet Stream ’neath the Budding Grove, had retired to their rooms long ago; her sister was sleeping; her brothers were roistering in the town and would not be home until dawn; and the servants had finished their tasks and were sleeping exhausted in their basement dormitory. Hooded lamps made puddles of light in the corridors. The staircase was like a waterfall. Tealeaf went down boldly. She knew where everyone was, and how deeply they slept. The doorman sat snoring on his seat by the door. She went to him quickly, put her hand on his brow and deepened his sleep.

‘My father will have him whipped,’ Pearl whispered.

‘It can’t be helped,’ Tealeaf said. ‘Now quiet, Pearl. I must work harder with the gateman.’

She opened the door quietly, and they stepped into the portico and went down the steps. From there to the gate they walked on the lawn so the gateman in his box would not hear the sound of feet on the lime-chip driveway.

‘He’s awake,’ Tealeaf whispered. She sharpened her eyes and spoke soundlessly. ‘Now he stares ahead and will not see. Quickly, Pearl.’

They ran to the box, where the man stood inside with his eyes staring ahead and his mouth hanging as though he had been caught in a yawn.

Tealeaf took the gate key from his belt. She opened the gate and stepped out. Pearl followed.

‘He’ll be whipped too.’

Tealeaf made no answer. She locked the gate and threw the key over the wall onto the lawn.

‘Now, child . . .’

‘No. Call me Pearl.’

‘Now, Pearl, we must look like hired serving women going home from working at a banquet. Keep your face down like me. Be quick and humble . . .’

‘Humble?’

‘Unless you want Ottmar for a husband. There are steps further along leading down to the town, and men there who would harm us. Let me deal with them.’

‘With the word? If you’d teach me . . .’

‘The time will come. Now, by my side, as though we’re worn out and anxious for our beds.’

They crossed the broad avenue and found the narrow mouth of a stairway to the town. Pearl turned for a last look at the mansion where she had grown up: the tall roof with the Bowles flag fluttering on top, the windows lit by the moon, the portico, the white driveway and wide lawns. A fountain sparkled. Only two or three mansions were grander than the one where Chairman Bowles and his family lived. She would not miss it. Life there, the endless dressing in gowns, endless painting of her face, the schoolroom where the first lesson taught was the glory of Company and the smaller companies under it, the days of learning dancing and etiquette and the rules of womanly conduct, had been a kind of slavery after the knowledge Tealeaf had revealed to her. She would not miss her family either – her father proud and remote, her mother proud and cruel, and Blossom, her sister, silly and cruel (always slapping her maids), her brothers loudly aggressive, with nothing on their minds, it seemed, but horses and sword-fighting and the pleasures of the town. They spent more on clothes than Blossom did, and almost as much time at the mirror. She would miss none of them. None of them would miss her, except as property to be given in marriage, to the greater glory and profit of their House.

Pearl turned away. She followed Tealeaf down the steps, and although they descended into darkness she felt her heart grow lighter and the weight of all she had learned in her father’s house lift from her mind.

She heard Tealeaf whisper like a breeze across her mind: There are two men at the next turning.

What do we do? she answered, in the same way.

They’re drunk and slow. We’ll be gone before they can move.

They went down lightfooted. One of the men lunged at them and grabbed at Pearl’s cloak, but stumbled, cursing, and fell to his knees. The slurred shouts of the other followed them down the steps.

The town came into view, smudged with tavern lights and gas lamps. The buildings of Ceebeedee rose beyond, lit by the moon. Over to the south, stretching to the lights of Port, lay the burrows. Pearl could not believe how wide and far the ruined city stretched, with tumbled roofs catching the light and dead ponds gleaming.

‘It’s so huge.’

‘It was a great city once,’ Tealeaf said.

‘And people still live there?’

‘Thousands of them, in their holes and burrows, living like rats.’

‘But Company feeds them.’

‘Company sends water carts and food carts when the thirst and hunger grow too much. The burrows are a garden, Pearl, cultivated in its way. When workers in the mines and factories die, the Whips go in and pick some more.’

Pearl shivered. Tealeaf had told her this before but she had never wanted to believe it was true. ‘What’s that noise?’

‘Dogs howling. They’re hunting someone. Hurry, Pearl. We must get through the town before dawn. The hunt for us starts then.’

They went down another dozen zigzags and hurried through dark streets towards the fuzz of light and rising clamour of the parts of the town that never slept.

‘Can’t we go round?’ Pearl said.

‘There’s not enough time. We’ve got to be at the walls by dawn and find a place to rest for the day. Keep your face down. Say nothing. Do as I do.’

Suddenly they were in a lighted street, with taverns and bars spilling men onto the pavements, and doorways where women leaned, showing their breasts and limbs through clothing artfully disarranged. The doors and alleys led to houses of ill-fame, Pearl supposed, and she could not understand: some of the women were so worn and old. They called out raucously as the two serving women passed by. Men too called after them, making lewd offers and threats, but they kept their eyes lowered modestly and hurried past.

‘There,’ Tealeaf said as they rounded the corner. ‘That’s the worst street. It’s where the men and women from the slums and factories go.’

‘People from the burrows?’

‘No. You won’t see burrows-people in the town. None are allowed. They offend the eye – have you heard that said?’

‘Yes.’

‘These are the poor and criminals of your race. Slaves from the burrows aren’t free to come and go. They live in barracks at the places where they work.’

‘But my father says no one is poor, only lazy. And in the burrows . . .’

‘Has he also told you Company cares?’

‘Yes, all the time. We feed them. They’d die without us, he says.’

Tealeaf smiled. ‘Now isn’t the time for lessons, Pearl. Stay in the shadows. No one is safe in these parts.’

It took them another hour to work their way through the district of taverns and gambling dens and brothels. They came to a wealthier part of the town, where the vices and debaucheries were more discreet, but here too they faced insults and threats. A coachman swung his whip at Pearl when she tried to touch his horse, and a powdered and wigged doorman at the entrance of a club shooed them past like stray dogs. In the doorway of another house that Tealeaf said was a casino, Pearl saw her brother Hubert staggering out, supported by a woman in a red velvet cloak and a cat mask. A coach with the Bowles emblem (a hand grasping a lightning bolt) painted on the door drew up, and the coachman helped Hubert and the woman inside.

Pearl kept her face down, although Hubert had not spoken more than a dozen words to her in her life. Hurrying, thinking about her family and how she would not miss them, she almost bumped into a Whip.

‘Stop,’ the man said softly, taking hold of her with a glove that buzzed like bees. He lifted her face with his other hand. Pearl felt a tingling under her chin. The man’s sharp eyes ran over her face. ‘It’s late to be out. But I think you’re not what you seem.’

No one had ever touched Pearl so casually before, or spoken so freely, and she cried, ‘How dare you? I’ll have you whipped.’

Then she felt a softer pulse than the man’s glove on her skin and Tealeaf’s voice spoke in her head: Quiet, Pearl. She subsided, but kept the hearing part of her mind open as Tealeaf turned her speech silently to the Whip: Lower your hand. Close off your sight. You have seen no women passing. You have seen nothing tonight.

The man lowered his glove from Pearl’s chin. His eyes grew blank. He stepped away until his back touched a gas-lamp post.

Wait there until we’re gone, then go about your rounds. You have nothing to report. Tealeaf took Pearl’s arm. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘And never let me hear you talk of whipping again.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Pearl said. Her chin was still tingling from the man’s touch. She wondered what she would have felt if he had turned his gloves to full power.

They went through quieter streets towards Ceebeedee. Few lights showed in the windows of the modest houses where Company’s clerks and under-managers lived. The buildings of Ceebeedee showed dark against the moonlit sky. They looked like frogs squatting in a lily pond, as though they might shoot out tongues and eat what they caught. These were the local head offices of the many companies that made a small part of the great one, Company, which had its headquarters around the other side of the world. It was hard for Pearl to understand that her father, so important in the city as head of a great House, would be unimportant if he travelled there. And the buildings, with their marble columns and stairways flowing down to the street, would seem little more than jungle huts to the men who ruled Company from that other place. Yet she felt oppressed by their bulk and squatness, and said to Tealeaf, ‘Do we have to go through here?’