The Ishim Underground
Carrie Bailey
Copyright 2015 Carrie Bailey
ISBN: 9781311581044
THE ISHIM
UNDERGROUND
Peevish Penman Press
CHAPTER ONE
And that was how it ended. Not a single meteor. Though a few had hit the surface of the Earth with an inexplicable sense of cosmic vengeance. Eron counted backward on his fingers as he walked through the city square. It was in 2065 that the big rocks from the sky fell and knocked the Earth off its axis. That was four years before the start of the Second Global War, which started in a city called Europe.
Meteors 2065.
Meteors 2065.
Global War II 2069.
He repeated the numbers over and over.
Eron had rarely paid attention during his lessons on Apocalyptic Studies and now, the night before his recruitment exam, he was starting to regret it.
He needed to get home and get some sleep. Rounding the edge of a rugged brick cage in the middle of the city square, Eron was trying to remember the dates of the avian flu epidemics when he collided with an eager looking long haired boy about half his height.
He helped the newsboy back onto his bare feet, which were dirtier than a garbage miner’s cart during the rainy season. The small boy seemed to be drowning in the cast off grey guardsman’s tunic more than he was wearing it.
“Direct from the source,” said the boy with the manufactured excitement of a weathered salesman. “Only a few minutes old. It’s the most important news all year.”
“I doubt it,” Eron muttered as he walked away, unconsciously placing the toe of his boots in alignment with the edge of every other cobblestone.
“Malak sends the guard South!” the newsboy shouted after him, but Eron was already entering the alley that would take him back home.
He had no coinage to pay for whatever news the boy was peddling. It was a common misunderstanding. Eron wore the fine cloth and long robes typically reserved for a man of much higher status than he actually held. His mother, Thadine, was a textile merchant and he was uncommonly well dressed for being a broke young man who hadn’t yet started his first job.
Once home, Eron cautiously pushed aside the heavy woolen banner that hung at the entrance to his mom’s factory and tiptoed around the looms to their living quarters. Through the archway, he could see his older brother, Aden’s pike leaning against the wooden table. He lifted the hem of his yellow robe and made a mad dash up the ladder to his bedroom before he could intercept him.
Enough warm street light filtered in through his window for Eron to see the modern calendar he’d etched on the wall. It measured the rotation of the Earth around the sun arbitrarily beginning two thousand five hundred and ninety-three years ago. With a shard of charcoal, he crossed out March 15, blew the dusty bits away and closed his eyes. If there was one date he could remember without using mathematics, it was 2093, the year his ancestor’s cruise ship crashed on the island, the first year of the Liamic calendar. For all the citizen’s of Auck, this was the year 500, a time to celebrate their survival. The fact that they were alive after the modern world disappeared in a blur of war and disease. But for Eron, it was even more important. It was the year he would join the Auckian City Guard. Tomorrow morning, he would take his entrance exam at the yellow recruitment tent and finally start his life as a scribe.
As if attached to spring loaded hinges, Eron’s eyes flew open at the first glimpse of morning light. He rolled off his mat onto the cold brick floor and waited there a moment for his brain to catch up with his ambitions. He was a meticulously organized young man with a limited interest in current events or even previous events and honestly just remembering events in general seemed pretty inconvenient.
Eron liked reading about technology, specifically modern technology. And metals. It was his main passion. He had never missed a lesson on automobiles, computers or guns, which were amazing devices that could move things from one place to another using metal. Technology could take people from one place to another without walking. It could transmit ideas from one mind to another without speaking. Or advance life from the physical world to the afterworld of the gawds without germs. Combined with technology, the moderns could use metal to do almost anything.
Modern Technology was the only part of his exam Eron was confident he would pass. He could identify at least five types of metal. And could tell a drawing of a television from a computer. A skill only one or two Auckians had mastered. He even knew how modern people had used keyboards and could define a button although he had never seen one.
He lifted himself off the floor, fed Steel, his pet mouse and grabbed a fresh robe from the peg on his wall by the door. With barely enough room to turn around, he dressed and sorted the contents of his writing case removing a single extra vial of ink he was certain wouldn’t be needed for the exam.
Thadine, his tall and elegant mother hummed an old tune while she served some boiled grains reheated from the night before adding a few stale nuts and dried fruits then drizzling a syrup made from a sugar beet. She had already plastered her face with the heavy white make up popular among Auckian women, but the ivory and indigo cover she normally used to wrap her hair tightly was still hanging in a loose bundle from sleeping in it and a few strands of her red hair escaped around her temples.
“You have to eat,” she cooed dreamily at Eron who was trying to sneak down to the factory without being noticed. The workers were already at the looms and the familiar din of clanking wooden planks, rustling fibers and endless chatter saturated the cool morning air.
With low ceilings and poor ventilation, the smell of the vegetable dyes used to color the endless stockpiles of thread and fabric carried their unappetizing flavor into every room. Even the kitchen. But, knowing his mother’s cooking, he believed the stench actually improved the meal. But, there was still the matter of texture, which no textile mill could mask.
Thadine glowed with pride as she placed the ceramic bowl in front of him. Her family had never sent a son to join the Yellow Guard as they were typically soldiers and merchants.
He prodded the grains with a wood spoon while Eron’s older brother, Aden, jumped the last rung of the ladder on his way down to the kitchen, yawned, stretched his biceps, which flexed as forcefully the pistons his tutor had brought from the Archive for one of their lessons. And then, with what seemed like a single motion, scarfed the contents of both their bowls before starting to brush his long wavy brown hair with a goat horn comb. Like his mother, Aden’s eyes were a murky blue, neither gray nor brown and both were fixed on him as he ate Eron’s portion.
“May I go?” Eron asked.
His mother nodded.
The frosts of winter still froze the puddles that dotted the allies. As he trotted toward the center of the city, he made sure to step carefully and crack as much of the remaining as possible as though that would help it melt and hurry the warmer weather.
The crisp air carried the smell of people and livestock already mulling about in the streets, which all wafted together and mingled offensively with the smells from his mother’s factory and the others in their part of town. Eron seemed to be the only person who never grew accustomed to it and held his nose closed like a tourist from one of the villages.
Despite the unusual density of the crowds as Eron made his way to the square and climbed the stone barrier that surrounded the corner market so he could see the brightly colored tips of the awnings on the farside of the commotion. Seperate recruitment tents had been erected to sign up prospective guardsmen to one of each of the three branches of the Auckian City Guard and were clearly identifiable by color. Red, Yellow and Green. Necessary, because nei
ther red nor green guardsmen knew how to read.
Eron exhaled slowly and began to wrestle his way through to where the yellow tent stood. Along the main paths through the square, the painted vardos of the nomadic shepherds teemed with mutton, wool, lineaments and stuffed toy lambs with small eyes made from black stone.
Eron stopped to allow a herd of three-horned sheep pass. Though there was still a bit of dew on the ground, Green Guardsmen were already out dousing the street lights.
Nearly dawn.
All the vendors crowding the square would be gone by the time the Lambing Festival officially begin a few weeks later. Through the years, overzealous merchants had set up their booths earlier and earlier until the recruitment of new guardsmen and the celebration of the new flocks merged into a single event.
It made some sense. Often families with young men and woman who had just come of age would trade everything they had to spare for their new guardsmen. New robes. New spears. And they would have little left to spend on sheep-related products.
Dodging the sheep, Eron ducked and wove his way through a sea of drab robes and careless elbows, making his way toward the recruitment tents. But, his progress was halted as the crowds shuffled to standstill where they circled a brick cage in the center of the square just as the murky water of a creek at a tangled dam whirls its brambles and muck tirelessly against though never toward their intended destination.
He should have gotten up earlier.
“Tame the wastelands!” bellowed a densely bearded figure in thick leather armor.
Eron covered his ears. He knew the motto of the Red Guard by heart.
“Have you passed the recruitment tents?” he asked a woman from his mother’s charity league.
“I saw your brother there,” she said pointing him onward with a wealth of fabric dangling from her thin arm. “I bet he’s been busy since making Captain.”
Eron smiled insincerely and pushed his way to the signpost for the Auck Courier Service.
“Join the Renaissance!” cried a man in yellow robes.
Eron knew him. The grumpy old postmaster would probably have preferred to stay inside sending and receiving the endless stream of packages to and from the villages, but everyone had extra responsibilities on Recruitment Day.
Service in one of the three divisions of the Guard was the gateway to citizenship in the city. Everyone was involved. Two years of your life in exchange for the right to live within the protection of stone walls formed from repurposed bits of modern ruins, the Auck City walls. Citizenship meant security from the wastelands, the right to vote and everyone, even the villagers, wanted it.
“Start your career today!”screamed a middle aged guard with a disintegrating physique, trim beard and clean green overalls.
“Yes, thank-you,” said Eron under his breath, avoiding eye contact with the man.
“Be a citizen of the greatest city in the world!”
The only city, Eron thought to himself, shaking his head.
Shouting slogans at young adults on Recruitment Day was traditional. It served no obvious purpose since Auckian children decided early in life which division they would join. Eron, having been incurably bookish as long as he could remember, had been tutored for years in preparation to join the Yellow Guard. Thadine had not been able to afford the most renowned tutor in the city, but anyone who could teach him to write provided him an advantage.
Please do not let them post me with the Golem, he whispered to the city gawds. Or in receiving at the Archive. Or doing record keeping in the shipyard. Or in a temple.
“Oh, I didn’t mean that!” he said aloud. “I would be honored to serve you, any of you, of course.”
But, the gawds knew your thoughts before you did and so piously, Eron abandoned his plea mid-prayer.
Then, finally passing the center of the square, he reached his hand toward the brick structure, a cage, which marked the heart of Auck City, Auckland and the known world. Though he couldn’t see it with all the people milling about, it was always there, barely larger than a cart with openings on the surface where a black box within could be viewed. The black marble box contained a smaller box covered in black velvet, which was presented for viewing to the masses once each year. And under that rested the first carving of the Municipal Code.
Eron kept walking. Dozens of Auckians were holding out their hands, withdrawing them thoughtfully and kissing the tips of their fingers, over and over, whether or not they were close enough to view the relic. Apparently, the gawds gave you credit just for trying.
Eron muttered another prayer toward the box. He needed all the help he could get as he couldn’t even remember the year the Archive was moved underground, which he would certainly be tested on.
“Which way is the yellow tent?” Eron asked a randon stranger.
“Just follow them,” he said pointing at a group of young men in black robes with yellow bands on their upper arms. Guardsmen. Yellow ones. Good idea.
Despite his fears, Eron had little reason to doubt that the Yellow Guard would accept him. He had been preparing a speech on how to identify and classify modern metal artifacts. It was well researched. Anyway, he could read and write.
Any questions they asked would be to help them decide where to post him and as long as he was in the city, indoors, he'd be happy. A perfectly ordered desk where he could move papers from one side to the other. Comfortable clean robes. A steady supply of coffee. While there were important discoveries to be made in the garbage mines for people who could read the old modern texts they unearthed, Eron’s ambitions were more pragmatic.
“Get over here!” said Achazya smiling grandly with his red cheeks ridding high so his tiny pale green eyes couldn't be seen. It was the man who had tutored Eron for the past three years. He took him in a headlock and pulled him toward the yellow tent. He was unusually passionate for an academic.
But, Achazya could make anyone feel that even the most obscure bit of information about the modern world was crucial to restoring order to humanity and generally unlocking the mysteries of the cosmos.
“Scrub, scrub, scrub,” he laughed as Eron gasped for breath.
Scrub.
It was what Yellow Guard called the new recruits, because without exception, they spent their first weeks cleaning out cupboards, desk drawers, bookshelves and the thousands and thousands of drawers that held the card catalogs. And scrubing them.
Unlike the other tutors, Achazya had only the wispy facial hair of young man, held the yellow canvas tent flap open and dragged his captive inside. Almost all of Achazya’s features were unremarkable. He had an average nose and averagely brownish hair. Even his excess weight wasn’t significant enough to help identify him in a crowd. And only a few inches taller than Eron, Achazya stood at average height. In fact, he was average in almost all ways, if you didn’t count the flexibility of his intellect.
“One of the best and brightest,” his tutor boasted to the other guardsmen assembled around the interior of the yellow tent, sitting on their cushions set in a semi-circle.
No one responded.
While Achazya didn’t stand out in an Auckian crowd, he was the only academic on the panel without gray hair and more than one seemed to resent him for that.
“You only had three,” said a lean man in a black robe standing in the enterance behind him.
“As I said,” beamed Achazya. “I reckon he’s one of the top three applicants this year.”
“Please put him out until its his turn,” said a frail looking woman dryly.
A young girl with dark hair bound in a yellow scarf stood beside the tent entrance scowling. First in line, she had probably been waiting long before dawn. Achazya winked. Eron walked to end of the swelling queue of nervous new recruits. And waited.
“The courts,” said the girl who was called first to exam.
“Archive,” shouted the next, as he was leaving. He was a gangly man with rampant acne who seemed pleased with his post. r />
“Archive,” another muttered.
“The Shipyard at the Bay of Maori Tears.”
“The Mines of Taupo,” said a girl wiping away a tear.
“Mines!” shouted the next girl running out of the tent victoriously pumping her fist in the air.
A grief stricken man with no left arm who was assigned to help the Postmaster received the unanimous sympathy of all the recruits still waiting their turn. Eron patted his back as he walked past.
Another recruit entered the yellow tent.
And another.
The sun had risen higher in the clear cloudless sky.
“Is that your brother?” shouted a Red Guardsman.
Aden was standing next to the man in front of the red tent beside them. As a Captain of the Red Guard, he was on the panel evaluating recruits in the red tent. Aden flashed his brother a toothy grin and elbowed his leather-clad companion.
“Who is that?” asked the girl in front of Eron, suddenly much more sociable than she’d been all morning.
Though his thick, wavy hair was tied back, there was still something about Aden’s appearance that commanded everyone’s attention. Maybe it was his ultra-masculine jaw and broad shoulders. Or it could have been the blinding shine on his iron pike and bronze helmet with the red brush of horse hair bristling from the point. Or his massive, perfectly aligned gleamingly white teeth.
“Him?” said Aden, deliberately misunderstanding the girl and pointing at Eron. “We pulled him off the street.”
“Why?” asked the other Red Guard.
He was wearing a red bandana. The loose ends dangling down to his red sash around his waist. The ends of those reached his ankles which he had also tied with red bindings. Everything the Red Guardsmen wore that could be dyed red was dyed red. To represent blood. Warriors were not known for their subtlety.
“What do you mean why?” asked Aden casually.
All the recruits by the yellow tent had turned to listen to their conversation.
“Seems a cruelty to prolong its suffering,” said the guard. “Should have left him there.”
“Well, I thought he was a stray doe,” said Aden.
“A doe?” asked the other guard.
“I love venison,” said Aden theatrically smacking his lips. “I saw those long eyelashes and-”
The guard chuckled. The girl giggled. And Eron flushed as the laughter raged all around him.
It wasn’t even a good joke, but all the recruits kept laughing as if they’d never heard such cutting wit.
He hated Aden.
Rage coursed through Eron’s veins, traveling swiftly into his core and shaking his limbs as it filled his body. He took one step forward and then another.
“Look, he’s coming over,” said the guard.
Before Eron knew it, he was directly in front of the two men.
“Captain, where did you put the carrots?”
Then his brother spoke again.
And he said something, which really infuriated Eron and drove him into a blind rage. In one brief, insane instant, Eron stepped past Aden, entered the red tent and pulled out a bit of charcoal in front of the burly group of soldiers and new Red Guard recruits.
Floating on a wave of adrenaline, he signed his name on their roster.
He would prove himself to Aden one way or another.
The sight of Achazya’s double chin jaw hitting the ground was deafening as he emerged a few moments later. New recruits and the assembled panels of both Red and Yellow Guardsmen starred silently as Eron was escorted away. Even Aden was lost for words.
The Auckian crowds parted at the sight of the polished pike held by the guard escorting Eron. He was led to a shed and tossed unceremoniously unto a bag of gravel covered in shovels.
He knew immediately that he’d gambled away his future like an alchemist mixing saltpeter and quicklime hoping to discover an easy way to make gold. Of course the Red Guard refused him. What had he been thinking?
Eron’s stomach churned as he sat in the dark and waited until one of the men who cleaned horse dung from the streets opened the door to check on him.
“Are you coming out?” said the stocky old man in green pants.
Eron shook his head.
“You have to come out sometime.”
“Not the son of a Red Guardsman,” mouthed Eron.
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” said the man standing in the door. “You’re a Green Guardsman now.”
No sooner had Eron put his charcoal to the paper than the Red Guard had invoked their right to both accept him and transfer him to another branch of the city guard.
“My father was Ronen,” he told the man solemnly, not listening.
“Rowen was a good Captain,” said the man. “But, you must take after your mother.”
“Not really,” said Eron. “She’s a lot taller than me, too.”
“Listen, one day in the Red Guard and a gnat like you would be squashed,” said the man. “You’re just lucky they sent you to us. I doubt you could lift a pike and you’re probably not going to be much better with a shovel, but at least you won’t be depending on that shovel to defend your life out on the road when the highway men attack.”
That much was true.
Eron could barely lift a pike or a shield separately and certainly couldn’t hold up both at the same time. He put his face in his slender hands and wiped his face.
“The whole trajectory of my life has been derailed,” he said miserably.
“Right,” said the old man gruffly grabbing Eron’s arm. “Whatever you say. I don’t know what a trajectory is, but fortunately, I don’t care.”
Eron forced back a few tears. No longer destined to be a scribe, there would be no labeling and no cataloging. No desk. No writing. No studying various metals. He would not be allowed to join the Yellow Guard.
He was going to be a grunt.
“There’s nothing wrong with being a grunt,” said the hairy old man. “It’s honest work.”
Eron was surprised to hear the man call himself a grunt as they walked down the alley back to the square. He had always thought of the term as an insult.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“The Recruitment Ceremony,” said the man in the green overalls. “I know the Green Guard wasn’t your first choice, but you’ll get used to it. Whatever you do up there when they call your name, don’t look ungrateful and remember, we didn’t have to take you either.”
“Maybe you can transfer me to the Yellow Guard?” said Eron hopefully.
“I would if they’d take you,” said the man. “But even that tutor of yours couldn’t convince them. Said you were too emotional. Not a good quality for a scribe.”
At the ceremony, they would announce his post to all the families, all the members of the guard, the villagers visiting for the Lambing Festival as well as each and every citizen of Auck City who had nothing better to do that day. Even nomads were allowed to attend.
“I wish I wasn’t wearing this,” sulked Eron picking bits of straw from his yellow robe. “And why didn’t the Red Guard give me a chance?”
“Because you signed your name,” said the green guardsman.
“You’re supposed to sign your name,” Eron sighed, rolling his eyes. “It’s a roster.”
The man stopped and looked at him as if his eyeball were an awl and Eron’s brain, a freshly tanned sheet of leather. Eron cringed. The Green Guard worked with their hands. They were neither the strongest or the brightest, but they did the work that had to be done. Most of it involving dirt or some sort of filth. Eron did not want to be in the Green Guard, but the only thing worse was not being a citizen at all.
“Now that you’re one of us,” said the man, gripping his green suspenders with both thumbs, “We’re going to have to return that little stamp of yours.”
He held out his rough hand, dirty palm up.
Eron felt like a fool. He slapped his forehead and pulled his hand d
own over his rather prominent nose. Digging into his pocket, he produced a little wooden stem with a carving on one end, stained with ink. The Seal of the Yellow Guard. It had been issued to him from the Office of Literacy during his first year of study with Achazya. He put the stamp in the man’s open palm.
“I did stamp it, didn’t I?” said Eron sheepishly.
“That only made it worse,” grumbled the man, “Your first mistake was writing your name out using letters. I wouldn’t have done that and neither would any Red Guardsman I know. What’s wrong with just marking the paper with a big ‘X?’ Why use all those other shapes?”
“I don’t know,” said Eron.
“I’ll give this to the Archivists after the ceremony,” said the man examining the stamp.
Eron nodded.
It was required by the Municipal Code of Auck City that all writing be stamped with the seal. Only the Yellow Guard or the young men and women training to become Yellow Guardsmen had permission to use it. And the Office of Literacy maintained the exclusive copyright on all the letters of the Auckian language. Permission was never given to the Greens, the Reds or anyone else.
“You know ‘X’ doesn’t actually represent your name,” Eron started to explain. “Scribes write your actual name next to the mark you make.”
The man halted dead in his tracks.
“If you don’t already know the man’s name, how can you know it from the other shapes?” he challenged Eron. “A mark or a bunch of shapes, if you don’t know the man, you don’t know.”
“The shapes make sounds,” said Eron slowly. “The sounds put together speak the man’s name.”
“No, don’t tell me,” he said covering his ears. “You’ve broken enough laws for one day.”
Eron shut his mouth tightly.
“Are you ready?” the Green Guardsman asked.
“No,” said Eron.
“Listen Eron, just make this day the only day you ever break a law and you’ll get through the next two years just fine.”
Eron nodded and turned toward the crowded steps of the Auck Archive where the ceremonial horns were being sounded. Neatly assembled on the steps of the seven level ziggurat, the new recruits were waiting to be presented to the eager audience, which filled every available space in the square, spilling out into the alleys and far down the procession that led out of the city.
Almost yellow. Almost red. Then, finally, green. It was probably the first time a recruit had attempted to join all three branches of the guard in one single day. On his first day in the guard, he had already made Auckian history in the worst way possible.