The Ishim Underground

CHAPTER TWO

  Not long after the seasonal windstorms had died down later that same Spring, Eron leaned against a splintery wooden booth in a dimly lit coffee house wiping the sweat from his forehead with his dirty arms. The first signs of warm weather had surrendered early to the heat waves that would assault the nearly barren land for the next four months. And the air at his booth was made denser with the warmth from the kitchen. A gust of wind rattled the wooden panels that partially covered the entrance at the front of the building. They swung inward, but no one entered.

  No, of course not.

  Hardly anyone lived in the tired village where he was posted. On the farthest Eastern corner of the island, many weeks distance from the beautiful mosaics of Auck City, Dunedin was no more than a dozen rows of pillared houses covered in red volcanic mud. Eron knew from his pre-apocalyptic lectures that in modern times, the village had been on a separate island located in the South of the great floating circle Yellow Guardsmen called Earth. Dunedin had been greener back then, but the meteors of 2065 had changed everything. Now, the only good thing that could be said about the dry little village was that it was situated on the trail between the port city of Levelen and the village of Foveau. And that was only positive, because Foveau was an outpost even more remote than Dunedin where a less fortunate recruit had been sent.

  Eron swatted a gnat from his right ear. He couldn’t decide whether he felt more sorry for himself or the dead bug he wiped on the tablecloth. Or perhaps that other guard in Foveau.

  He took a sip from his cup and sighed loudly into the empty room.

  Outside the window, a cart rattled through the village gate. Although a new garbage mine had been built in the nearby hills that produced a steady stream of artifacts and raw materials, the carts rarely stopped in Dunedin. The goods they carried were eventually taken to the Auck Archive where they would be stored underground and catalogued.

  Eron looked out the window anyway. A solid rectangular shape poked from under the tarp of the cart and he immediately fell into a fantasy that he was the Yellow Guardsman who discovered the first functional refrigerator still intact.

  To make a refrigerator, the moderns had harnessed the power of lightening with long thin metal strings and made these boxes cold so they could produce ice, which was cold hard water that held its shape even in the summer heat. It would have been great to have one of those in Dunedin.

  Eron said quick prayer to the gawd of sanitation and took another sip of his coffee. For a change in his nightly routine, he decided to think of something positive about being in Dunedin.

  He was still alive.

  He would eventually get to leave.

  He would be a citizen.

  Aden didn’t live there.

  Just after the Recruitment Day ceremony, the Green Guard had assigned him street sweeping duties for the Festival of Rotten Food. For two days after the Lambing Festival, Auckians threw decaying vegetable matter at each other as part of the process of cleaning out their cellars. And that was fine for Eron until Aden sent the new Red Guard recruits to practice ambush tactics on him while he was ankle deep in the sludge, washing the murals on the procession, the main road through Auck City. The recruits had caught him almost immediately and stuffed him in a barrel. A few hours later, another set of recruits released him during their search and rescue drills, but then they were intercepted by another squad of recruits who were studying advanced interrogation tactics.

  Eron had tried to complain to his supervisors, but neither the Red nor the Green Guard were willing to hold his brother accountable for his innovative, but unorthodox training methods. Eventually, they chose to reprimand Eron for being absent from his street sweeping duties and put him on a carriage to Dunedin where at least where he and his brother wouldn’t be bickering.

  Eron starred deep into his coffee, examining the thick dark residue stuck to the inside of his cup.

  “Problem-acation?” asked the matron of the coffee house trotting past his booth while drying a wooden tray with a brown tattered ball of cloth. The woman had what the villagers called a little character on her face, but Eron thought he had seen leather sofas that looked livelier and more supple than what was stretched across her boney cheeks.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” he said, loosening his grip on the cracked pottery, “May I have some more water?”

  "What manner-isms,” she cooed disappearing through the woolen banner that covered the kitchen door.

  Despite the sweltering heat, the coffee matron served her beverages hot enough to kill the invisible germs that lived in kitchens. She returned and poured some steaming water from a jug into his cup splashing a little on the table, which the cloth soaked in. Eron took another sip and placed his tongue against the roof of his mouth where he felt the numb surface began to separate.

  While passing his hand lazily through the steam rising from the almost entirely unpalatable beverage, he thought he could hear the weeds growing under the floorboards. Even watching one of those pointless ball games Aden played would have been better than sitting alone in the Dunedin coffee house. He picked up a stirring rod, lined it up next to a napkin and straightened three wooden spoons the matron had left on the table.

  With a defeated groan, he slouched down in his sticky tunic and picked up one of his scrolls. Eron focused in on the second line of the parchment, which read, “We do 99% of the work for 100% of the people.”

  It was the official motto of the Green Guard. And though it was no longer legal for him to write, he had been granted permission to read whatever he wanted provided it had the official Seal of the Yellow Guard stamped on it.

  Stretching out his sore right arm, he cracked his neck and continued to glaze over the Sanitation Policies for Auck City and its Surrounding Territories as if he was interested.

  To ensure the continual cleanliness of the city and its territories by providing facilities for the personal evacuation of bodily fluids. To establish guard outposts and improve relations with village residents by providing sanitation technology and blah blah blah blah blah…

  Why did the Yellow Guard write an eight foot long scroll of policy for the Green Guardsman who were almost without exception illiterate?

  Through the window, red bands of a handsome sunset hovered low against the horizon. The coffee house would be closing soon.

  The matron returned and set a tile under Eron’s cup where darkly stained coffee rings from the bottom of his mug had soaked into the cloth.

  “You should try to protect-icate my anti-tablecloth,” she said with a deliberately exaggerated frown.

  Eron cringed.

  Nomads had a distinctive habit of taking a simple word and adding a random prefix or suffix for no obvious reason. Manners became manner-isms. Ponder became ponder-ize. Coffee became supra-coffee. And while it set Eron’s teeth on edge each time he heard a villager using the nomadic embellishments, he’d certainly given up trying to correct them. After his early attempts to explain proper Auckian grammar, the farmers had quickly education-alized him about telling other people how to talk.

  Dunedin. Such a quaint village.

  Eron was about to offer the matron a small strip of copper for his drink when a fiery orange glow appeared on the wooden floor beams through the gap under the door. Growing smaller, it slowly crossed the dusty boards as the sound of footsteps creaked closer to the door. The coffee house doors swung on their hinges. A couple of Auckian guardsmen strolled in.

  A guard with an eye patch held a torch above his metal helmet. The other, whose beard was shorn beneath his nose and chin, had a crossbow in one hand at his side. The man with the missing eye had less notable facial hair, but his mustache trailed down to the middle of his solid chest where the tendrils rested lazily across his studded leather armor.

  Hands shaking, Eron attempted to sip his coffee while they surveyed the empty room. Eron averted his gaze to avoid looking directly into any one of their three beady eyes. As the men approached, th
e loose floor boards bolted beneath their weight and Eron’s heart leaped from his chest leaving a hole from which all of his courage escaped.

  “How long have you been here?” yelled the guard with the crossbow.

  Fashioned from strips of leather woven across his torso and thicker strips hanging loosely from his hips like a skirt, the man wore armor typical for a Red Guardsman over the same gray drab guard-issued tunic Eron had on. But, Eron could clearly see the canary yellow stripes of cord stitched into the fabric on his upper arm indicating his position in the Yellow Guard. Bounty hunters.

  Eron opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

  As if breathing in unison, the guardsmen’s chests heaved as a single unit. A flood of uncomfortable silence filled the air. In the kitchen, a colorful flightless bird called a takahe clucked. The matron scooted it out the back door.

  “How long have you been here?” demanded the guardsman again, leaning toward Eron, enunciating every syllable.

  Eron looked down at the single green cord on his tunic that indicated his own lowly rank.

  “S-s-seven months,” he said with some effort.

  “In the cafe,” whispered the matron loudly from behind the banner covering the kitchen door.

  “A few hours,” he corrected.

  The guard with the torch and the missing eye raised an eyebrow and walked over to an empty booth. He lifted the cloth with his boot.

  “We’re tracking a man who ran out on his contract,” said the other guard. “He’s about your height, but longer hair.”

  “Longer hair,” agreed the one eyed guard checking another table.

  “The fugitive has a long pointy nose - a lot like yours. Dark eyes. Possibly, not as thin as you, but,” he signaled to Eron, “if you could stand for me please?”

  Outranked, out-piked and out-mustached, Eron obeyed. As if pulled by invisible strings, he instinctually lifted his arms and turned around like a marionette.

  “He has fair skin,” said the other guard with a lopsided squint.

  The guard with crossbow and the interminable mustache motioned Eron to sit back down. He produced a drawing that had been tucked into his broad leather belt. Eron glanced at the image and took a mouthful of coffee, which he promptly choked on.

  “I don’t recognize the man,” Eron said, but if he hadn’t known better, he would have thought the picture was a drawing of him. Every detail was the same except the man’s pale skin.

  The guard set his crossbow against the tall edge of the booth and held the image next to Eron's face. Then, he gripped Eron’s crown in one hand, pressing his greasy black hair with his thumbs, and titled Eron’s head around to examine his ears.

  “I honestly haven’t seen anyone who looks like that,” said Eron nervously.

  “I have,” said the guard.

  The other guard lowered the torch nearer Eron’s cheek, “His skin is too dark.”

  The man grunted and picked up his weapon.

  Like the giant dogs that lived on the wastelands, a loogaroo, which had finished sniffing its prey, the guard turned and abruptly crossed the wooden planks kicking up dust as the floorboards slammed back into place. Eron sneezed. Then the bounty hunters questioned the matron briefly and left through the back exit at the rear of the kitchen.

  He was still trembling when it all ended. Eron rubbed his nose and drew in another lungful of dust, sneezing again and again until his eyes begin to water.

  Bounty hunters were known for their prudent application of psychology to achieve any end. Like everyone else in Auckland, Eron feared them. Responsible for tracking and capturing people who left the city in violation of the Municipal Code, they had discovered that the most effective use of psychology involved pikes. Once they had stuck a pike in the ground and fit it with a fugitive’s severed head, the mental and emotional inner workings of the general population were naturally redirected toward good citizenship. And that subtlety of thought was why they operated within the Yellow Guard rather than the Red Guard.

  As Eron started to roll his scrolls back into their leather case, a sound came from under the table where he was sitting.

  Ah-choo!

  Eron bolted upward.

  Next to his right knee, a pasty hand emerged and set a waded fragment of linen on the seat of the booth. Eron compulsively took a sip from his coffee mug and starred at it as if it would go away the longer he looked.

  “Are you alright?” shouted the matron. She pulled the kitchen banner aside and stuck her head out. “I don’t suppose even an Auckian like you could ever get comfortable seeing that much sharpened metal.”

  Eron looked at the woman and then looked at the wad of linen again.

  “Are you still there scribe?” she said sounding a bit more concerned.

  The hand reemerged and set a coin on the bench next to the cloth.

  “Nothing. It was a mouse,” said Eron picking up the coin. “I’m- I’m alright.”

  She chuckled.

  Eron looked over the markings on the coin. Too worn to decipher. Although people in Auckland did pound out little bits of metal collected from the garbage mines, their shape hardly mattered as all metal trades were weighed during sales.

  Eron bit the golden disk exactly as he saw Auckian vendors do during a transaction in the market. He squinted and thought about it for a bit, but he didn’t know how a minted coin was supposed to taste.

  It had a perfect shape. Round and flat.

  Eron nervously opened the linen. It was a drawing of the table with two stickmen facing each other sitting underneath.

  Whatever deviance the stranger had planned, it was greed that drove Eron's curiosity. The coin had to be a bribe. But for what? With a modern coin, even if it was a fake, he might be able to trade for a horse. And if it wasn’t forged, he could easily buy five horses with it, not that he needed that many.

  He craned his head under the low surface until he was nose to nose starring into the man’s dark eyes.

  “Hello handsome,” said the fugitive.

  Eron had only seen his likeness in polished metal and still water. Still, it didn’t take more than that instant to recognize his own doppelgänger.

  “But, my nose isn't that big,” said Eron touching his face remembering what the guard said. And my voice is deeper, too, he thought.

  “I’m sure you can pick cherries with it,” said the man.

  Silence.

  “You know, hang the tip over a branch,” the man continued. “Grab fruit with both hands?”

  Eron didn’t know what to say.

  “Your tip for the day free of charge from Gil, the most famous entertainer on the island,” said fugitive, currently the most wanted man in the small village of Dunedin.

  Eron rubbed the coin firmly with his thumb and index finger. He had no time for the man's folksy cleverness.

  “Right, what do you want from me?” he blurted while flipping the coin over.

  “Your assistance,” said the man who looked exactly like him.

  He motioned Eron to join him under the table.

  Were the bounty hunters were still in the village, Eron could expect a box of salt or maybe an extra ration of sugar beets as a reward for helping them capture him. It was tempting. Not five horses tempting, but less risky. Eron closed his eyes tight.

  "Aren't you afraid I'll turn you into the guard?" he asked.

  A puerile grin spread even farther across the man’s already gleeful face. “The whole guard or just part of it? Would make a very popular act. I can see you’re an idea man. How about this: do you know any good places to hide?”

  “The coffee house is going to be closing any minute. I have to leave. I should be making my way home,” Eron muttered.

  It was just too dangerous to help him.

  “I should be making my way to your home, too, then,” said Gil pretending to yawn.

  “Please,” Eron whispered. “No games. Just tell me what you want.”

  “Hone
stly?” asked Gil.

  Eron nodded.

  “Only two things. A bed,” said the man with the long nose. “And a woman.”

  “I see why they say actors are the lowest form of scribe,” Eron said sneering.

  “Says the village latrine digger,” said Gil.

  “Digging latrines is only one of my duties as the Regional Sanitation Specialist,” Eron replied.

  “And that outranks an actor?”

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” said Eron, although he knew that was exactly the way it was.

  A chart in The Guardsman Occupational Handbook classified actors as scribes, because they were allowed to write and copy the works they performed. They had to be part of the Yellow Guard even if the rest of the scribes didn’t want anything to do with them. However, no actor ever advanced beyond the lowest rank, because their craft required too much emotional expression.

  The Red Guard valued bravery and abhorred sloth. The Green Guard hierarchy rewarded experience and detested snobbery.

  Eron had been conscripted to the third rung of the Green Guard, because at times he had helped repair the machines in his mother’s factory. Thadine pulled a few strings for him. It was something she was good at though Eron couldn’t have cared less. Like all the members of the Yellow Guard, he too, valued only the purest intellectual pursuit of knowledge.

  “No worries,” said Gil. “I’m not an actor.”

  “You just said you were,” said Eron.

  “Entertainer. I juggle,” he corrected. “But, I’m really good at it. And I’ve got other talents, too.”

  Gil motioned as if he were going to start singing.

  But, as Eron started to get up, the man grabbed the sleeve of his tunic. The fugitive’s slender arm made bare takahe bones look meaty. Eron tried to pry the man’s fingers from his tunic and was surprised at the strength of his grip. Though Gil’s physique might have been about as threatening as a feather to a brick, he had astonishing might for such a small man. Eron didn’t. Gil also had presence and he used that to his advantage as he caught Eron’s gaze.

  “I know you’re going to help me,” he said.

  Eron pursed his lips and stole a glance toward the kitchen while the fugitive quietly opened his bindle and started rummaging through it. A few hollowed gourds fastened to the outside, had been dried, cut open and reattached with fasten leather hinges. Something nomads normally used to carry dried foods and spices.

  “I have to go pay for my coffee,” said Eron attempting get up again.

  "Not with that," said Gil placing a hand over Eron’s fist, which was still tightly closed around the coin.

  Eron pulled his hand away. His right eye spasmed at the man’s uncomfortably light touch.

  This was certainly a dilemma.

  Most modern artifacts were kept underground in the heavily guarded Auck Archive. And Eron had never owned anything that was made back when buildings had the power to scrape the sky. Although he never knew which of Achazya’s stories were credible and which weren’t, it was common knowledge that there had not been a mint on the island in 500 years. No mint. No coinage. So, he wanted the small round coin. Badly.

  “Why didn’t the skyscrapers leave any marks?” he thought aloud.

  The juggler tilted his head to one side and looked sympathetically at Eron while Eron realized he'd been bought the moment he saw the artifact. Already bonded to it with the invisible chains of desire, he couldn’t remember ever having wanted anything more than that modern coin.

  Gil finally located a leather pouch and with a little convincing, Eron allowed him to put the coin in it. And he looped it around Eron’s neck just as the gnarled dry feet of the matron passed beside the table. Then, Gil put a cap on his head and tucked in his dark hair. He winked.

  "There it is!" the fugitive shouted as he crawled out from the table on his hands and knees. Eron tried to hold him back. Whatever Gil pretended to find, he put in his mouth.

  The matron set her hand over her hefty sun-crinkled bosom in alarm and gasped, “I thought you’d gone already. I have to shut-ify before dark.”

  “That is abalone, isn’t it?” Gil asked lifting the woman’s hand from her chest so he could examine her bracelet. She giggled.

  Eron bit his lip, breathed deeply and prayed to the gawd of undesirable emotions to take his sudden sense of doom and foreboding away.

  “I have never tasted better coffee than you served tonight,” said Gil yawning. “Don’t you think I could have just one more cup, pre-gorgeous lady?”

  “I’ll have to relight the fire,” she said sounding almost girlish. “But, just one more unless you’re after something stronger.”

  She disappeared back into the kitchen humming.

  Gil slid his pack from underneath the table and yanked on Eron’s left leg with both arms.

  “I’m coming. Let me go?” he said crawling out.

  “Right,” said Gil handing Eron a wad of the linen. “Stuff the lock.”

  Eron quickly pressed enough fabric into the latch so it could close, but not lock completely. Gil peered out the window into the empty streets. Then, Eron hid under the table again before matron returned with more coffee. She smelled strongly of fragrent oils freshly applied to her withered skin. She was also carrying medicinal wine and a roast dinner for the fugitive.

  “I had some leftovers,” she cooed.

  Eron waited impatiently under the table while they ate. The juggler thanked her, kissed her goodnight and she climbed the stairs to the room above where she slept.

  Evening.

  The sky was washed in stars and a light bluish hue from the moon. It was gently coating the stones on the street when Gil finally decided to leave the coffee house. The grainy surfaces of the pillared buildings also reflected the soft glow. A man slept curled in a blanket by the gate, strategically positioned to be the first to beg new visitors who entered the village.

  Outside, they could hear the matron snoring through an open window as they tiptoed down the porch. Having somehow bound his own hands together with the end of a fraying rope, Gil stopped at the edge of the coffee house walkway. In bitter silence, Eron took the dangling end. One good pull might have snapped the dry fibers of the cord apart, but it looked good. At least if they were caught, he could claim Gil was his prisoner.

  “Where are we going?” he whispered to Gil.

  “And why are you here?” said a raspy voice.

  The transient sleeping by the gate stirred into an angry half-sitting position.

  “Ignore him,” said Eron who ran into the man on more than one unfortunate occassion.

  “Excrement!" yelled the old man. "Either I’m drunk or you guys are twin Auckian sponges. How many filthy Auckians do we need? No, I’ll answer that. Zero. Now we’ve got two. And you act like you belong here more than I do. I can’t even even look at your stupid stripes. You ziggaurt climbing, face painting, stone worshiping-”

  The man continued babbling as they walked softly down the main road.

  "Where are we going?" Eron asked again once they were out of hearing range.

  "To the weaver's house,” Gil whispered.

  “I live at the weavers,” said Eron. He stopped immediately, taking care not to pull on the fragile rope.

  “I know you live with the weaver,” the thin man said, “You told me.”

  "No, I didn't," Eron said.

  "Listen, this is a small village.” Gill said. “One man walks in looking exactly like another and people talk. I look like you. You look like me. And they tell me they just saw you at the coffee shop by the West Gate. Are you so surprised I know you live with the weaver?”

  “You aren’t coming to the weaver's with me. We can hide you one of the pits and cover it with a tarp,” said Eron. “And I’ll come back for you in the morning.”

  “First place the guards would look,” said Gil.

  "If they come back," said Eron. "They might search the houses first."

  But, he
knew Gil was right. The weaver's was the safest place town. Even he can’t find what he needed in his mess of looms and textiles.

  "Alright then, let’s just go back to yours,” said Gil poking Eron’s chest with a feminine flourish.

  Eron pulled away.

  “I’ll do it for the coin," he sighed feeling it’s smooth round shape through the bag with his free hand. “But, you have to be gone in the morning.”

  Although Eron would rather hide the juggler in a water barrel, a stable or even the local temple of the village gawd, all of those places would look more guilty if he were caught helping him. As long as he was at the weaver’s, Gil looked like Eron’s captive. It made an unfortunate sense all around.