Hegira

  The thirty were lined up on the concrete and snow in two rows and made to stand until they were blue.

  A second craft climbed from the water of the lake and whisked across the concrete apron to park beside the first. A third followed, and both disgorged loads of prisoners. These were lined up twenty meters behind Kiril's row. He craned his neck searching for Bar-Woten and Barthel. He thought he saw the Khemite, but couldn't be sure. He was afraid to turn. His teeth chattered until they threatened to vibrate his aching eyes out. His ears were numb, and when he touched his armpit-warmed fingers to them, they tingled.

  Trucks with canvas-covered beds rolled onto the strip and stood with engines idling, white smoke belching from pipes hung near the cabs. Kiril saw the shrouded figure climb down a ladder from the second hovercraft. It wore a silvery mask beneath its dark hood. Two men conferred with it, then took its arms and led it to the cab of the truck. It tugged them to a stop and turned to point to the ranks of prisoners. Its hand, Kiril saw, was gloved. Beneath the silvery mesh of the glove there could only have been three fingers, unless more than one digit occupied each finger. He felt a tremor pass through him that was more than just cold. Where could such a thing have come from? Perhaps, he consoled himself, it was only a man made up to look strange to cow the captives. But its walk was so authentically different that he doubted it was human.

  The guards prodded the captives with their guns and marched them into the backs of the trucks. There in the windy canvas tunnels they sat until the gates were closed and the trucks lurched ahead. Then they rushed to peer between the truck panels and the canvas.

  Kiril found a position where he could see the concrete landing field pass beneath them, changing to a rocky, ice-pocketed road.

  "We're being guarded from the cab," word passed. "They have guns aimed at us."

  "Maybe we can slip out the rear," a woman suggested. She stood up to see if the folds of canvas above the gate were tied down, but was wrenched back into her seat by a sudden bump.

  "We're going too fast," a man said. "We'd be killed."

  "We're going to be killed anyway," the jail guard said.

  "You know who these people are? They're from the east … " He said the word as if it were synonymous with evil.

  "We don't know that yet," another said.

  "Who else could build machines like these but the ones who've been dropping rockets on the Library Cities?"

  "There may be others, but even so, they're all trying to destroy us," the woman near the gate spoke up. "We have to get away from them and fight!"

  Kiril listened with interest. "Two equals," he murmured to himself. "They have to fight it out."

  But it wasn't only their fight. With instruments like the fire guns and flying ships it wouldn't be long before everyone on Hegira would face a rout. It would be Bar-Woten's March all over again—but this time the Ibisians would look like reckless children.

  He remembered the Bible and thought of Cain and Abel. Cain meant "smithy," or forger of tools. The tool-forger slew his farmer brother because God looked on the brother's sacrifice with more favor. Now in a different place and far different time, those with the better tools won—just as the tiger with the swifter claws gained dominance in the forest. Mercy, kindness, grace, and beauty had nothing to do with human existence in such crazed times. He shook his head. He was so far from all of it, so isolated in mind and temper—yet he dearly wished, with a portion of his darker soul, that he had the finest tools of all. He would scourge his way to the Wall like a tide of cats through a mouse village—a tide of stray cats. All the stray cats were licking at him, testing him with claws, pulling away the pieces of soggy paper he had wrapped around himself for warmth. They mewed and purred and rubbed against him—

  He lifted his head up and wrapped his arms around himself to stop his shivering. He was freezing—they all were. More and more quiet, eyes glazed, faces blue, lips purple. The truck jolted to a stop.

  Hardly aware where he was going, Kiril followed the stumbling crowd of prisoners down a sloping ramp into a concrete corridor. The guards jostled the slow ones until they regained their footing and lurched after. Kiril's feet were numb.

  But it was warm! Warm air flowed up to meet them as an inner door opened, and they leaned into the revivifying breeze as if it were life itself. Moaning, crying and grunting with pain, they were pushed into a narrow, gray-green waiting room. Kiril felt his pants crackle, then go damp. He had urinated, and the urine had frozen on his trouser legs. He didn't care.

  He thumped himself and grinned and kicked his legs out, as the others did. But in a few minutes their joy turned to misery. Their limbs began to thaw, and with each inroad of warmth a rigid needle poked at their bones. Then their muscles cramped and they cried out in agony.

  Other prisoners followed. Barthel came through the door, his face haggard and pale olive, and behind him a man with a patch over one eye—Bar-Woten. They were both alive! Kiril felt like shouting at them, but his tongue tripped up his words. He was filled with a deadly thirst.

  He had never been more miserable in all his life. But each little addition of misery, which in itself would have made him weak and ill, seemed to diminish the total. He seemed to draw strength from his pain and discomfort.

  The groups weren't allowed to mingle. They were pushed up against the opposite walls and told to flatten themselves or lose their legs. Iron bars swung from the ceiling and enclosed them, giving just enough room to stand flat to the wall. They could only look across at their caged companions. Bar-Woten reached his hand out to Kiril and feebly gestured. A guard butted it with his rifle.

  Hoses sprayed lukewarm water on them. The air was filled with fog as the water struck the cold walls. Blood, dirt, urine, and feces washed from the prisoners and whirled away down the drains in the middle of the room.

  Kiril guessed there were about a hundred of them. They were shivering again in the wet and screaming with the pain of their thaw. Kiril suddenly found himself elevated to a level of calm detachment. He looked on the prisoners and their captors and saw only silly, inconsequential animals. Then what was he? Another animal, temporarily jolted above concern with his body, perhaps to share some higher sense of humor. They all looked ridiculous—playacting amateur roles conjured by ridiculously limited talents.

  Could he think of anything better? No, he admitted. He was no better. Just less blind.

  A second spray, pungent with disinfectant, was directed over them. Fans and radiant heaters were brought in from another door. The heaters were turned on, then the fans.

  When it was over a third of them were dead. Kiril dragged himself out of a swimming haze and looked at the middle of the room. The cloaked figure stood talking to a uniformed man. The man's face held a mixture of obedience and repugnance. The ends of his mouth curled downward in a half-sneer, half-snarl. He said something Kiril couldn't hear.

  The figure gestured with a draped arm, and the fans and heaters were carried out. The officer walked before the opposite row of prisoners, glancing diffidently at the hanging corpses. He spoke, first in the melodic tongue of the People of the Wall, then in loud, clear Teutan.

  "Some of you here may be important to us."

  "I am!" a man shouted. "I'll talk about anything!"

  The officer's look changed to scorn. "You'll be asked questions. They require specific answers, correct answers." The officer smiled. "If you don't answer correctly, I'll turn you over to this fellow. He's a demon. You've noticed his shape? He comes from hell, not a woman's womb. He'll broil your hearts as if they were on a spit. I hope you understand."

  The cloaked figure turned to the wall opposite Kiril and began at one end. Its sibilant voice reached through the sudden quiet like a serpent's hiss.

  Kiril struggled to stay awake, but he couldn't. His vision narrowed. He looked at everything through a wind-filled cave, drawing farther back with each second until the rush carried him from the receding light.

  "And you?" the voice asked
. "You are from very far, too, are you?"

  Kiril looked up. He wiped a dribble of saliva from his lower jaw as he stared into the silvery mask. "Elena," he said softly.

  "How far away do you live?"

  "Mediweva," he answered. "Very far."

  "Just a sailor who's traveled far? Or did something compel you to come here?"

  "Something," Kiril said. "Elena. Take off your mask."

  "What brought you here?"

  "You did."

  "Not I. Something specific."

  Kiril saw Barthel and Bar-Woten standing in the middle of the room under close watch by three guards.

  "I had to save you. Save her." He was aware now whom he was talking to.

  "Her?"

  "My only love." That was hypocritical, he thought. The self-accusation echoed and vanished.

  "Ah." The figure gestured.

  The cage opened. When he fell, he was caught by yielding arms and taken to join his companions.

  "Did you see where we are?" Bar-Woten asked. A guard shouted at him. He glared back. "We're in the country of the Wall!"

  The guard raised his rifle, and Bar-Woten backed off with hands up, placating.

  The Wall.

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  Twenty-two

  They sat in the tiny cell and stared listlessly at the padded walls. Bar-Woten crouched with his hands clasped between his knees, knocking his knuckles against his legs. Barthel stood and picked his teeth with a fingernail. They had been given a thick gruel three hours before. It was acting on them unpleasantly. Kiril lay on his back with head and shoulders against a wall, looking green and feeling very docile.

  "We've been drugged," Bar-Woten said. Kiril nodded. They wouldn't offer much resistance in their condition. A small window in the door showed them the hall outside, and by peering at an angle they could see the rigid shoulder of a guard, but nothing more.

  The door swung open. An officer stepped into the cell and looked down at Kiril. "You are the Mediwevan?" he asked in thickly accented Teutan.

  "Speak English. I can understand. Yes, I'm the Mediwevan."

  "Come with me," the officer said. He reached down and picked Kiril up. With a last look over his shoulder at his companions he was pulled down the hall to a brightly lit room beyond.

  The room was outfitted like a surgery ward, with a central couch covered by worn brown leather and strips of absorbent cotton. He was strapped onto the couch and his pulse and blood pressure were taken. An orange-robed man with intersecting black lines drawn across his bald scalp bent over him with a syringe in hand.

  The demon-figure entered from another door. "You may administer," it said. It leaned over Kiril as the needle went into his arm. "This will not hurt you. Just to find out what you are … "

  Kiril went blank.

  He awoke with a sour taste in his mouth and the shock of smelling salts in his nose.

  "You've been cooperative," the thing in black told him. He was taken to the cell. Barthel and Bar-Woten were removed next. Kiril asked the guard why they were both going. The guard looked at him sternly, then checked up and down the corridor before answering. "We believe you're the one we want," he said. "But we will test these two just in case." He swung the door shut and locked it.

  In two hours the Ibisian and the Khemite were brought back. Bar-Woten weaved a little and slumped to the floor. Barthel stood rigid against the wall, eyes wide and staring into the opposite corner of the cell.

  "What did they make me say?" Bar-Woten asked.

  "Nothing," Barthel snapped. The Khemite looked into the corner and flinched as if from a blow. What Bar-Woten had revealed under hypnosis was slowly mangling Barthel's insides. He had never suspected.…

  Overhead they heard the sounds of distant explosions. Kiril peered through the window and saw the guard standing away from the cell, looking anxiously down the hall.

  The lights went out. After an hour they slept. Bar-Woten snored loudly, head lolling between his legs. Kiril hung on the edge of sleep. He heard someone move in the cell, but stirred and drifted off.

  "No," Barthel said. He closed his eyes but couldn't block out what he saw. In the corner, standing above the reclining Kiril, was Barthel's mother. She glowed faintly like the sea, and her throat opened into a second smiling mouth. What she murmured to him he could not accept. But it was true. He had heard. "Not now," he said.

  She spoke to him again.

  "No."

  He turned away from the corner and butted his head softly against the padding.

  The lights came on again. Kiril stood and stretched in the cramped space. Barthel slept on, standing with his head wedged into the corner. Bar-Woten looked at Kiril speculatively from his spot on the floor.

  "You're the chosen one," he said. "They're sure you're the one who'll get them into the Wall."

  "Get who in?"

  "The thin ones. You told the right story, I suppose. Barthel didn't. I'm sure I didn't. The one who isn't human, it spoke to the guard while they were making Barthel talk. It spoke English but I could understand. There are three of them here."

  "Three of who?" Kiril asked, mind still foggy from sleep.

  "The thin, strange ones. They aren't from this part of Hegira. They came across the Wall in a ship of some sort. They've made a pact, and they're sharing knowledge with the English-speakers."

  "They want me to take them to the Wall?"

  "You're lucky," Bar-Woten said, nodding. "You'll reach your goal. I doubt if we will."

  "I don't want to help them with anything," Kiril said. "They don't deserve it."

  "The thin ones might be more friendly than the English-speakers. They didn't like the slaughter at the Obelisk camp. Seemed to think there might have been more like you. Dead pilgrims are no good to them."

  "What are the English-speakers doing for them?"

  "Didn't say." Bar-Woten's face crinkled into a smile. "It's fairly obvious, though. The thin ones want to get back to where they came from."

  "Through the Wall?"

  "Any way they can. Perhaps the English-speakers are building them another rocket."

  "Then I pity them. They'll be double-crossed."

  Bar-Woten shrugged. "I don't understand much of anything now."

  Barthel jerked and pulled away from his corner. He rubbed his eyes, then looked over Kiril's shoulder and seemed relieved.

  The door opened an hour after they were all awake. Another officer, paunchy and florid, ordered them out of the cell and took them down the hall in the direction opposite the laboratory. Two young, wan-faced guards followed with holstered pistols.

  A hovercraft waited on the concrete airstrip. Craters ten and twenty meters across had been punched into the pavement and the surrounding rocky hills. Fragments of metal littered the area.

  The fat officer rapped the butt of his gun on the port of the hovercraft. The port swung open, and a ladder came down. "Climb in," he told them. They went up the ladder into the ship. The guards followed, and the officer managed to squeeze through with some straining. A low, round metal tube led them around the circumference to the main cabin. A small barred cell had been welded to the floor and ceiling of the adjacent passenger cubicle. The guards put them in and locked the door behind.

  The hovercraft coughed and roared. Somewhere metal screeched across concrete. Then she lurched and rose. The pilot, hidden behind a thick steel shield, took them across the apron and over the lake.

  They could get glimpses of their flight only through the edges of the clear canopy that extended beyond the shield. Gray, cragged mountains came toward them as they skirted the perimeter of the lake. The rocks passed away abruptly as the hovercraft made a long, slow turn to the right toward the middle of the lake. Rock walls flashed by on both sides as they passed through a narrow sound.

  Barthel stared with determination through the bars at the shield. Bar-Woten sat relaxed with his back wedged into one corner of the cell, studying the slender view of their travel.
Kiril alternated between his two companions and the view, trying to puzzle what had happened to all of them.

  The trip took an hour. The hovercraft slowed and pulled into a narrow harbor ringed with walls of slate-black stone. It vaulted with a rumble and a slight bump up a ramp of wooden pilings. The guards came alert suddenly and opened the cell on orders from the fat officer. They were led outside.

  "We have a special treat," the officer said, slipping the words conspiratorially from the side of his mouth as they walked beside him. "A parade. You should enjoy tomorrow."

  Ahead of them lay a solid mass of grayness, as though concentrated storms had packed so thickly they merged without feature. Nearer, clouds broke from the monotony and asserted their own turmoil. Rain fell in wind-blown draperies onto the green, jungle-covered hills and valleys that butted up against the ascending curve of the Wall. Nearer still, obscured by plummets and feathers of mist pouring over the hills, were masses of buildings, angular, like scattered blocks of lead. The sight made Kiril's heart sink. A land of no cheer, no variety … it choked the eyes. Yet it had an unmistakable, grave grandeur.

  The officer was obviously proud of his city. But he was also a little cowed, as though the solemnity and monotony were not exactly what he'd expected. Thunder pranced near the gray end of the world. The Wall flashed sheet-white with an eyelike wink—roof of clouds the upper lid, gray-green jungled hills and peaks the lower. The gaze was cold and expectant, like the eye of an untersay draken.

  "Faster," the officer said. The wind picked up and ruffled their matted hair.

  A long, sleek silver train waited for them at the end of the wood ramp. Steam hissed from the engine. The rails made plaintive squeaks. The air smelled of lightning and storm. It tickled Bar-Woten's nose, and he wriggled his face, making his patch bob. He threw a side look at Kiril as he rubbed his nose. Clearer than anything, it told Kiril the Ibisian was worried.