Walk to the End of the World

  He was beginning to be amused by this old fem and was not offended when she went on unbidden: ‘If the master is pleased with this fem’s service, perhaps he will condescend to do a small thing for this fern?’

  She didn’t say, favor for favor, but she might as well have, the presumptuous hag. Servan burst out into a delighted guffaw. This episode was more entertaining than he could have hoped. He inquired with exaggerated courtesy into the nature of this ‘small thing.’

  ‘Will the master accept a fem to travel with him and serve him?’ She was making a gift to a master of another fem! It was marvelous.

  Eykar snapped, ‘Servan, this is too much!’

  ‘It is pretty odd,’ Servan admitted, ‘but perhaps this bitch has other help to offer than information — if we cooperate. Besides, think, man: cash is only cash, and we may have to spend high in the City to locate this man Kambl. Like them or not, fems are a form of wealth.’

  Kelmz objected. ‘They’re also a form of trouble. She could cost us more than she’s worth. Fems are stupid and spiteful; you can never even tell just why it is they’ve betrayed you to your enemies. I know them well. But I have these Rovers on my hands now, so who’s to keep an eye on some fem besides?’

  ‘Servan,’ Eykar said, ‘since she was offered to him, and if he still thinks it’s worth the trouble.’ Kelmz shrugged reluctant assent, and Eykar turned sharply on the old fem: ‘What extra aid comes with this gift?’

  Fossa kissed the ground to him. ‘Such poor help as mere fems have to offer,’ she fawned. ‘Yet the masters may find it useful.’

  A bell tinkled somewhere close by. Some of the sleeping fems sat up, reaching for the swaddled cubs beside them or for the clay pitchers kept under their beds. Each of the cubs was put to the breast for a moment only, then handed on to the nearest waking fem who had no cub of her own to start her milk. Some of the fems didn’t even open their eyes as they went through the motions of what was obviously a well established routine. The pitchers, now containing fresh milk, were set on the floor to be picked up by fems who pushed carts down the aisles between the beds. Those whose milk-shift had not yet been called slept through it all.

  ‘Let’s get on with this,’ Eykar said, hoarsely.

  ‘Please-you-masters,’ murmured Fossa, ‘this fem will go and fetch the one spoken of from another place.’

  Servan stood up. ‘We’ll go with you.’ It would hardly be to her advantage to betray them. She would get no reward, for fems were invariably punished for anything found to be out of order. Yet it paid to be wary of their irrationality.

  ‘This fem feels the masters would be happier waiting here,’ she said.

  He laughed. ‘We’re tough enough for anything you or your kind can offer, gray bitch. Lead on.’

  They crossed a hallway beyond the milkery and stepped between two heavy doors into the embrace of a hot, acrid roil of stench and noise that stopped them in their tracks.

  Right at their feet, a hopper was set into the concrete floor. A huge screw-shaft, bedded in a chute, angled up out of it. The screw-thread was gleaming sharp, and wedged into the hollows of its spiral were fragments of flesh, bone and fat. Above the level of the men’s heads, a fem stood on a ladder, carefully scraping this detritus into a bucket. The screw-chute led past her to a row of drums mounted on a platform. The drums turned slowly, driven by a crank shaft at which the fems labored with bent, straining backs. Another fem-crew tended the furnaces under the drums, stepping to and fro with scoops of coal over a gutter in the floor. The gutter flowed with a yellow fluid that drained through a pipe from the drums overhead.

  Fossa put her head close to Servan’s and said at the top of her voice, ‘This is the Rendery, please-you-master.’

  8

  The Rovers began to shiver and snarl; Kelmz turned and thrust them back out into the corridor. Eykar, who never ran away from anything, followed the old fem to the end of the central structure. Not to be outdone, Servan went too, dizzy with the effort to breathe through his skin or his ears, eyes streaming.

  The other side of the machinery featured a broad, sloping table onto which the drums could be emptied. From there, the contents were screw-driven again into an enclosed grinding-mill. On the floor under the mill’s outlet was a conical heap of dark, damp-looking particles. A large, tight-woven basket on wheels stood nearby, with ceramic scoops hung from pegs fixed along the rim.

  Through the half-open lids of the drums, Servan could see fragments dropping from the fixed blades inside back into the churning material below. The end-drum rotated more slowly and loudly than the others. Its lid had been opened completely and fastened back, so that the contents could be drawn out with long-handled hoes. Two fems were working the heavier dregs to the lip of the drum, to be tumbled off onto the steaming hill on the table beneath.

  Servan’s DarkDream-trained mind made the connection between this noxious operation and what the old fem had said about adding other substances to the milk-food, which obviously wouldn’t be plentiful enough to go around unless it were stretched; and what more nutritious additive than the flesh of dead fems and of fem-cubs who did not survive the milkery? What was reputedly poisonous to men, the fems had learned to consume safely, having no other choice but starvation.

  Some man must have designed the process; it was too beautiful, too efficient to be a product of the fems’ own thinking. The concept of making them literally self-sustaining had a certain gruesome sophistication impossible for fems’ thinking. He had to admit, though, that a sort of manly hardness was argued by the ability of fems to accept such an arrangement; unless they were not hardened so much as merely too depraved to be horrified.

  Fossa tapped on the lowest of the footplates leading up onto the platform. The fems working up there looked down. She shouted something. The nearer of the two fems went to the edge, handed down her hoe to one of the furnace-feeders below and descended. At the bottom of the steps, she untied a filthy rag from the railing and wiped off the greasy fragments that spattered her skin. Then, stepping carefully over and around the scraps lying on the floor, she came toward the men with downcast eyes.

  There was no point in trying to speak in these surroundings. When they emerged into the hallway, Kelmz turned from the Rovers and looked the young fem icily up and down, saying with undisguised revulsion, ‘Must we travel attended by a thing that reeks of its own dead?’

  The choice of words was unfortunate. Eykar said in a tight, bitter voice, ‘You great fool, don’t you recognize punishment when you see it?’ Imaginative of him, to see a similarity between Endpath and the Rendery.

  Still staggered by the impact of the Rendery, the men were moved smoothly through the fems’ washroom – it was a relief to scrub off the dank muck of the swamps and the lingering Rendery smell — and out again. They found themselves surrounded by a dozen fems armed with cloth, needles and thread, who cut and stitched, outfitting the men as a party of Hemaways from the City. Using Kelmz’ uniform as a basic pattern, they transformed the Pennelton Rovers into Hemaways; Kelmz held the brutes calm in spite of the fems’ hands darting about them.

  Servan had underestimated the resources at Fossa’s command. The men’s clothes, from Kelmz’ worn blanks to Eykar’s uniform, were completely reworked or replaced. The one item that the fems could not supply was a manna-bracelet. Since a Senior in charge of Rovers would certainly be wearing one, Servan grudgingly lent the captain his own.

  The work was done in the kitchen, the only place where the light was good enough and yet not easily noticeable from the men’s compound. From some corner a pack basket was produced, and food was brought. While the men ate lightly of leafcurd and beer, fems filled the basket with supplies for the journey: a white crock of curdcake at the bottom for the fem who would go with them, two jugs of beer, a bar of lamminchew, a square of hempseed bread wrapped in a damp cloth for freshness, and even a small box of dry laver-flakes of seasoning - that last a real luxury these days. There wasn’t enough to feed t
he men well for the whole trip, but they were all used to going hungry. What was astonishing was that the fems had access to any amount of men’s food at all.

  There was also a razor, some earthenware eating gear, a mending kit, firestones and tinder, and a pair of spare sandals that could only be meant – by the size of them – for Kelmz.

  Fossa drew a diagram on the floor with soot from the cookstoves. The causeways which linked Bayo and the City were easily navigable in daylight, but at night they formed a baffling maze. She drilled the men, ever so respectfully, until they could have picked their way in their sleep. Then she scuffed out the drawing with her heel.

  The other fem, the young one, returned from washing the stink and grease of the Rendery from her skin and hair. She was introduced as Alldera, the old one’s hold-mate, which meant that Fossa’s master had at some time owned this young fem as well. Whoever he was, he seemed to have interesting requirements in his personal femhold. Both fems could speak; neither was in any way beautiful, and in addition the young one had been schooled as a messenger.

  Alldera had one other unusual, visible, attribute: her legs and buttocks were strongly developed (Fossa lifted the young one’s smock to point this out). She had been speed-trained, which was illegal and added to her value. Speed-training was confined to men who specialized in racing competitively for their companies. In any case, no fem should be able to outrun Rovers.

  Though as a runner she was more fluidly muscled than most labor fems, her looks were not appealing. The wet hair clinging to her head only emphasized the breadth of her jaw and cheekbones. She had wide-set eyes of an unremarkable pale hazel color, a nose that had been broken and healed flatbridged, and a heavy-lipped mouth with a sullen turn to the corners. The best that could be said of her face was that the skin was of good quality, though verging on a Dirty coppery cast.

  Servan would have preferred a prettier fem, but there were few of them to be had in Bayo. Anyway, as she was she would lend an added touch of authenticity to their group disguise. A fem of no great beauty but specially skilled was just the sort of property that a man like Kelmz might be expected to acquire, once he took his mantle and with it the right to own fems personally.

  The four of them were to be Senior-Kelmz-and-party come on one of the unannounced spot-checks of work-turf so common lately in the Holdfast. Kelmz would play himself, promoted. Any Penneltons they might encounter closely on the causeways would be unlikely to know that Kelmz had been more or less dumped by his company rather than coaxed at last into Seniorhood. Men assigned to Bayo avoided contact with the City until the end of their five-year, disliking to be called ‘cunt nurses’ and such by other City men. The two younger men were outfitted in simple pants and tunics, to play the parts of Hemaway Juniors in attendance on their superior. Filling out the group to a properly impressive size, there were the two Rovers as an escort and the fem to serve as pack-bearer.

  She, the ostensible reason for this extraordinary activity and risk on the fems’ part, interested Servan. She never said a word. Her story, as Fossa told it, was simple and plausible: a Pennelton, drunk, had gone after her at her work-bench without noticing the red scarf she had been wearing at the time. She had refused him, as she was bound to do in order to protect him from contamination. But the man’s Juniors had witnessed the incident, and he wanted some redress for his injured standing. Alldera had been assigned to the Rendery while the Pennelton Seniors considered whether she should be burned for witching the man into missing the token of her uncleanness in the first place. Doing so would restore the drunkard’s self-respect, so it was a likely outcome.

  So Alldera had to be whisked out of Bayo for her life’s sake. The fems in charge of the Rendery would report that she had bolted into the marshes, where her starved corpse presumably would be discovered someday as others had been before.

  It was no news to Servan that some men were excited by the thought of fucking a fem soiled with her monthly blood-tribute to the Moonwitch. But somehow the account rang false to him. The campaign that old Fossa had mounted was too dangerous to the fems to be performed merely to save the life of this pie-faced youngster. How valuable could one fem be to other ferns? It couldn’t be simply that the two fems had been owned by the same master; that was a source of friction rather than closeness among fems. There had to be something else to justify the lengths to which these fems were going to get Alldera out of Bayo. Even the Rovers wouldn’t be missed, Fossa promised; that could be managed. They had no guarantee that one of the men would not at some point inform the Board of the organization they had found here in Bayo, with the inevitable result. Yet if these fems were worried by any such possibility, they didn’t show it.

  Well, then, suppose they were to be reckoned with in some way that was not yet clear. Let them try to trick him and use him in some game of their own. He accepted the challenge. Everybody was an antagonist, after all, at least potentially. The remedy was simply to recognize that this was so, and to try to use the other person before, and better than, he used you.

  At last, the preparations were done. The fems picked up every scrap of cloth and thread and put out the lights in the kitchen. Fossa and young Alldera took the men out on the roof of the next building, which connected directly on the west side with the causeways. There, the fugitives found themselves suddenly in the midst of a creaking, droning party of hags whose job was to deploy the laver-carts at various points on the causeways for collection of the next day’s harvest. The moon was up, a mere scrap of light not nearly bright enough to show the incongruity of the men’s tall forms to any watching sentries. In no time at all, the lighted windows and the music of Bayo fell behind.

  Soon the old fems with their rattling carts milled to a stop in the windy darkness. Their mumbling and singing died. The stars sparked cold light from the surfaces of the laver-ponds that stretched alway, glimmering, on either side of the causeway.

  Fossa, a stick figure in the starlight, stepped forward. She said, ‘Safe journey, masters.’

  ‘Too bad it’s not you coming with us, old dam,’ Servan said. On that note the men and the young fem, canted forward under the pack-basket on her back, departed westward toward the City as fast as they could travel.

  The idea was to cover as much ground as they could that night, unobserved, rest all morning in one of the shelters built into all major intersections of the causeways, and in the afternoon turn and move as slowly as possible back in the direction of Bayo, as if coming from the City instead of fleeing toward it. It was not unusual for a Senior of one company to inspect, without warning, the work of another company’s Juniors. They often did it, in the name of competition and in hopes of shaving a rival company’s work-points. A day of slow ‘inspection’, followed by another night of hard running in the opposite direction, should see the travelers to the City walls.

  It was the sort of sly plan you might expect from devious creatures like old Fossa. Bajerman would be completely stymied, for he never would descend willingly to thinking like a fem.

  They reached the designated shelter just as the sun edged above the horizon behind them. The shelter was unoccupied, as Fossa had said it would be, and they slept behind its curtain while the Penneltons used the causeways to shift fem-gangs from one set of ponds to another for the day’s work. Servan kept half-waking at the approach of footsteps and the shrill whistle-signals of the Pennelton drovers.

  At midday, the travelers washed and ate and put the lumpy grass-stuffed mattresses they had used back under the benches in the shelter. They rolled up the curtains and stepped out into the brilliant day, facing Bayo again.

  Kelmz looked a really splendid Senior in his bright, striped mantle. He seemed to take ironical pleasure in the impression he made, broad and scarred as he was in his finery. Out of an unsuspected vanity, he hated the openwork sandals he had to wear, as if he felt betrayed by the sight of his own splayed and knotted feet. The two Pennelton Rovers strode stiff-backed in front of him, and Servan and Eykar
followed at a respectful distance from his heels, intoning the Chant Declamatory in reverent tones.

  The fem Alldera trudged along at the rear, her proper place. Servan glanced back; she was just a fem, and an ill-favored one at that. If there were any witchery at Bayo, it was the ability to throw a magnifying and romantic gloss over such a drab.

  The artificial, ambling pace required by their plan was tiring to maintain, but at least the afternoon was breezy and bright-skied. Below on either side, the vast spread of the laver-pools lay like a table of mirrors with stubby-legged causeways bestriding it from edge to edge. Diminished by distance, crews of fems turned the long, flexible cables which brought up the lower level growth of laver for its share of sunlight. The notes of the Penneltons’ signal pipes sounded piercingly over the glittering flats. The Pennelton Juniors were easily distinguishable by the broad straw hats they wore. Each pair of them would wave and salute when they made out the bulk of Kelmz’ mantled shoulders or recognized the Chant Declamatory.

  It was funny to see them joyfully gyrating their lean arms, while they must be thinking, where’s that Hemaway whitehead sprung from without us being piped a warning by Penneltons close to the City? And they would snap out sharp notes to get their fems moving faster, ordering them into new positions, anything to indicate active supervision and to avoid being docked work-points.

  Kelmz played his part to the hilt. Once they dawdled past a gang lifting loaded laver-carts covered with wet canvas onto the loading lane of the causeway. The hoist squealed hideously. Kelmz glared in passing, as if he really would have liked to stop and lambaste the Penneltons in charge for not taking proper care of the equipment that came with their work-turf. No wonder he was servilely saluted on every hand; he made a convincing pillar of order.