Finally she sighed, put most of her treasures away, and slid the disruptor case into the slot she’d left for it. She kept back one sack of coins and a few pieces of jewelry for living costs in Linojin, then tied the canvas into place and left.
Yseyl came to the Outlook where the Pilgrim Road began mid-morning of the next day, a hot, still summer day, so quiet and filled with peace that the War could have been a nightmare she was waking from.
Beyond the patchwork fields of the farms and the nubbly green of the fruit orchards, there was the city-white marble lace on an emerald green ground, the streets like darker threads winding through it, the ponds and fountains jewels on those threads. And the radio tower, rising above them. And the fishing village to the south, a dull, ugly blot that only emphasized the beauty of the rest.
And out where the sky met the sea, was the Fence. Yseyl stared at it. You aren’t so great. Not any more. I put a hole in your gut, and you didn’t even know it.
The first time she’d seen the Fence, there was an agony in her head as if someone pounded a nail from temple to temple. That was gone. I put a hole in your gut. I watched it ooze shut, but I can do it again, any time I want.
She turned away because she couldn’t think while she was looking at that THING, sat down on the half-moon of polished stone, and pulled off her boots. She added the boots to her pack and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. Slow, she thought. Be careful. You don’t know who you can trust. Be the proper little Pilgrim. Be like all the rest. Have your story ready. Who am I? Yes. I’ll take my mother’s name. Lankya of Wendlu iris. Visit the Prophet’s Grave. Gahh, just the thought makes me sick… I have to do it. I have to find someone who can lead people. I can escape, but I can’t lead. I knew that. I didn’t think it through. Someone HAS to know how to use that thing. Drive holes through the Fence, let the people out who want to go, let the killers keep on killing. God! I wish I could still believe… I wish…
She shook off the sudden malaise and rose; feet dragging at first, she stepped onto the Pilgrim Road and started for Linojin.
The Road was paved with yellow brick, hollows worn in it by thousands of bare pilgrim feet over centuries of use. The bricks were warm from the sun and gritty from the dust the summer breeze blew across them. How strange to walk here. Yseyl felt old ghosts rising in and around her-warm and slightly stale ghosts like threeday-old bread in greasy sandwiches, shoved into a back pocket for lunch that never got to happen.
She began to pass the outlying farms.
Short-legged, with curly horns and flickering tails that continually showed their white undersides, herds of lowland maphiks grazed in fenced pastures.
Farmers plowed fields behind teams of ska77, the iron plowshares turning over rich black earth. The smell of that earth was pleasant in her nostrils, though as Pixa, she should be appalled by such slashing at the body of God.
The iron plowshares roused a memory that chased the other ghosts away.
When she was six, already on her way to being the target of all the malice in the ixis, a Prophet Mal came to Wendlu his and spent tedious time at Night Praise inveighing against Impix sins, particularly their mines and mills.
In the morning he gathered the ixis children and quizzed them about their learning, asking them to recite the Sayings of the Prophet and giving out wrapped candies to those who had the answers he wanted. After a while he noticed Yseyl squatting at the back, scowling and silent. She knew she wasn’t going to get any candy, and even if she did, Shung and Huddla would jump her and take it away. They were the oldest and the strongest and they knew from long experience that anything they did to her would not be punished. If she complained, it was she who’d get the whack.
He beckoned to her.
She tried to pretend she didn’t see him.
“You, femlit,” he said. “Yes, I mean you. Come here.”
She trudged through pinches and hisses of “don’t disgrace us,”
“crazy Yseyl,”
“you mess up, we gonna get you.” When she reached the Prophet Mal, she stopped and stood staring at the ground, not daring to look at him.
“You have not tried to answer.” He caught hold of her chin and lifted her head so she was forced to gaze at his stern, lined face. “Have you no answers?”
He smelled sweaty and something else she didn’t know but didn’t like, and his hands felt wrong, like polished leather, not skin. She wanted to pull away, but his hold was too strong; all she could do was drop her eyes again and stare at his chest rather than his face. The loose thing he wore that wasn’t quite a shirt-it was made from Impix cloth. Silk. She knew that because just a month ago at the Yubikha Gather Thombe and Busa and Anya Bilin had a yelling, slapping argument over Busa taking her lace money and spending it on a piece of silk. And he had an Impix knife on the leather strap that belted it to his body.
“What is the Path of the Child? Tell me the first Saying.”
Despite her fear and her nervousness, the Whys had got hold of her. Crazy Delelan said Why was the first word she spoke when she crawled from the pouch. Without thinking, Yseyl lifted her hand and pointed at the shirt. “If Impix are so bad,” she said with regrettable clarity, “if the things they make are hated by God and the Prophet, why are you wearing Impix silk and how come you use an Impix knife?”
Yseyl shook her head at the memory. Bad timing, she thought, but the truth, for all the whipping I got. It was a question no one had ever answered for her. The Pixa couldn’t live without the things they fulminated against. No mines, no iron, no mills, no steel. And no fine cloth or thread. No ax heads or axle bolts, no needles or knives or chains. Not the first time nor the last she’d experienced the twisty logic of adults.
Except for a few soaring spires and the openwork steel radio tower, now that she was down on the plain, the city was hidden from view by the ancient thile groves, huge trees with curving triple trunks that arced over and out with smaller limbs growing straight up from the arches, limbs thick with hand-shaped leaves of dark green.
A number of walkers were ahead of her, a few Impix pilgrims in their bright yellow robes, two or three Pixa in dark green; the rest were refugees from both branches of the Impixol family, dressed in whatever they wore when they turned hohekil and ran from their kin and their homes.
Much more of this and half the people left alive will be coming here. God, I hope there is someone behind those walls who can whip up enough heat and light to organize this escape. Funny, or maybe not, now that I have the disruptor, there’s nothing I can do with it. Not alone. I should be steamed at Cerex because he must have known it was just a stupid gadget and no use at all to what I want. She wasn’t angry, not really. After all, she’d started out by trying to kill him. Which he’d accepted with remarkable equanimity. And she liked him. I just have to figure it out, she thought. Find some way to make it useful.
Up close, the walls of the city were more like lace than she’d expected, the white marble facing carved and pierced in an intricate flow of images and words, Sayings of the Prophet, Songs from the Book of God. And all of it was exquisitely clean. As she waited in the line of those seeking entrance to the city, she saw a group of ferns and anyas in coarse unbleached robes carry buckets and brushes to a section of wall. They chanted a Song as they scrubbed delicately at the stone.
The line of folk ahead of her curved round a screen and vanished inside the gate. Step by step she moved forward, weary and bored but putting on a face of patience. She wanted no one looking at her and remembering her.