Sanctuary, page 20
Murray took Alex’s spare scaleskin. “This will fetch a bit,” he said to Miranda. “I’ll leave you here with my Da to get acquainted. He would be trouble if he could, but he’s too crippled to do much damage.”
“Is he really your father?”
“What passes for a relationship in COS,” Murray replied cryptically. He turned to his da, who had been following the conversation by looking from one to the other with red, rheumy eyes.
“Da, this is Miranda. She and I will be staying for a few days.”
His father looked her up and down, much as the guard at the COS gate had. “Too ol’,” he said critically.
“Get your mind out of whatever rat hole it is skulking in,” Murray responded. The words were harsh, but the tone was almost gentle. “She’s the founder of whatever feast we have tonight. Keep her entertained until I return.”
He slipped out the door. Miranda reluctantly pulled the only other chair, a stool with no back, closer to the fire. The smell was worse the closer she got to the old man, but the entryway was very cold as the wind whistled through the chinks of the battered door.
“How are you?” she asked the old man. If nothing else, this would be a good chance to practice understanding the strange glottal speech of the inhabitants. The old man had other ideas. He glared at her through his heavy slanted lids, put his gruel carefully on the floor to the other side of his chair. “Sta tha!” he commanded.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she promised.
He watched her until his eyelids grew too heavy and he drifted into a noisy slumber, with many snores, snorts and hawkings in his sleep. Miranda closed her eyes to shut out the unlovely sight and nodded off herself without realizing it, until an acrid smell woke her up. She opened her eyes to see the man sprawling in his chair. A wet stain spread across his lap. He had wet himself in his sleep.
To distract herself until Murray returned, she looked around the room, careful not to creak in her chair and wake the old man. She had an idea he was better at entertaining her asleep than when he was awake. The house was a shotgun with an open door leading to what was probably the kitchen, then through to the bedroom. She could see through the open doors to a small wooden table and chairs and a frowsy single bed. She wondered where the bathroom was and decided she probably didn’t want to know.
She dozed off again until Murray pushed the door open and woke her.
“Not too bad,” he said. “We’ll have these for dinner.” He brought the small table out from the kitchen and set down three pastries, oozing with red that looked like blood. Miranda shivered superstitiously, remembering the coyote on the road. Surely not—
The old man grabbed a pastry and began gnawing on it with the few stubs that remained of his teeth. “Bee!” he said happily.
“That’s right,” Murray said. “I found a baker just closing down in the marketplace and picked up beet pies.” He bit into the pastry, oblivious to the red juice that coursed down his chin. “Eat it,” he told Miranda; “you won’t do better at the best bakery in Sanctuary.”
Miranda took a cautious bite. The juice squirted in all directions. She tried not to notice how battered the outside looked, with fingerprints clearly showing where the pastry edges had been pressed around the filling. It was surprisingly good, rich and sweet, with chopped green leaves adding a sharp savory taste and texture to balance the mushiness of the beets. She just knew what beets were from the hydroponics garden in Sanctuary. They didn’t grow them in enough numbers for the town, so they were reserved for some committee members who had a taste for them. She noticed a grittiness as she ate that caught in her teeth. She probed the grit with her tongue. Murray noticed.
“They can’t clean vegetables the way they do in Sanctuary,” he said. “No water to waste. Besides, these are probably pilfered, so they wouldn’t risk preparing them where anyone could see. Likely roasted in a house stove like this one.”
Miranda looked at the smelly stove, stuffed with rags and oily rocks, and shuddered.
Murray and the old man had finished their pies. The old man was eyeing hers.
She was no longer hungry. “You can have what’s left,” she said.
He might not talk full English, but he understood it well enough. He snatched the pie from her hand and shoved it down in two bites before Murray could intervene.
“Food is different here,” Murray said mildly. “And scarce. Beet pie is something special. You can’t let the hygiene of COS stop you from filling your belly. Not if you want to find your son and then trek back to Sanctuary. The old man is better looked after than you might suppose. Don’t give him your rations anymore.”
He grabbed rusty tongs by the stove and pulled out a rock and sniffed. “A form of coke. They scavenge it from an old mine on the outskirts of town. I told them not to do that. If this place didn’t have so many holes, they would be poisoned by this.” He looked down at the cracked pot full of foamy yellow-brown sputum. “It’s not doing his lungs any good.”
Miranda wondered who “they” were. The house was too clean for just the old man. Did Murray’s mother live here also? She was too tired to ask.
The man didn’t like being ignored. “Wha tha?”
“We’ll go out now before it gets too dark and look for some wood to burn,” Murray said. “Better for your lungs”
The man reached for the stone, which Murray held at arm’s length. “Coh,” he said.
Murray showed Miranda where she could place her bedroll in a corner of the main room. Her heart sank as she unfurled her blanket on the floor. If she ever returned to Sanctuary, she would never take a soft bed for granted again.
“Are you ready to hunt for something to burn in the stove?” Murray asked.
“Did you mean it about actual wood?”
“You never know,” he replied.
Murray led the way down the narrow, twisty street with the ease of a COS native. Miranda stared up at the claustrophobic buildings. Why did they jut the second story over the first, blocking out all light and making the city look like a hastily constructed jumble of sticks, cloth and mud that could break apart and bury you at any time? She found herself ducking and pulling her neck into her scaleskin in response to the looming buildings. And where were all the people?
When they reached the next street, Murray stopped and looked about. “I don’t want to do any scavenging on the street where we are staying,” he said. “Spying is an easy way to make money in City of the South. You’re a stranger and will attract a lot of interest.
“But they’ve already marked us,” Miranda said. “At the gate. Aren’t they already keeping tabs on us?”
Murray leaned in. “Keep your voice low,” he advised. “They mark everybody, but the tracking capabilities are very primitive. They depend a lot on people to keep them informed. And it works very well for them.”
The rain began to fall as Murray led Miranda down dingy streets with rickety buildings that looked abandoned and dismal—a steady, monotonous tumble of drops that turned the cloud-covered sky into a perpetually shaken sieve. Miranda found herself longing for a slashing downpour that stabbed and stung your exposed face and hands but made the world seem alive and fighting back, not abandoned. “Abandoned,” that was the word. City of the South was a place that had given up. She thought of Alex, experiencing this somewhere, and shivered.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “All the stories you see of City of the South, there are people everywhere, robbing and murdering each other but also talking, laughing, drinking. This place seems deserted.”
“City of the South is lively enough when it wants to be—on market days, for example—but the citizens are careful. You are dressed too well to be a beggar, who would be easy prey. You might be a family spy. Some family members are known to cover themselves in cloaks and visit the town. It’s a safe adventure for them because they fool no one with their disguises.”
“And, of course, I’m with you,” Miranda hazarded. “No one is going to challenge me while I am with you.” She was figuring out that Murray was not who he seemed. He only shrugged.
Miranda had another question. “Why do they build their houses such an awkward way? Blocking out what little light the sky offers?”
Murray looked up at the tottering houses. “This is a pilfering society,” he said. “There isn’t much open crime, except at night, but in the absence of regular employment and guardians, people break into the homes of others to take what they need. The second story is for watching and for showering missiles down on anyone unexpected who comes to your front door.”
“They look like they will fall down,” Miranda said, and shivered.
“Education, including learning a trade, is sketchy in COS,” Murray said. “Builders are in short supply, and most work for the rulers. But after enough people were crushed in falling buildings, people have learned where and how to prop the buildings to keep them steady.”
“But how do you get anything done?” Miranda asked in frustration. “How do you get something fixed when it breaks? How do you find food or clothes? Are there no stores?”
“There are some stores, mostly catering to the rulers. Very little coin except what the ruling families distribute when they visit for ceremonies. There are some pubs, where you can get a drink and a pie and even a warm welcome, if they already know you. But you have to be careful flashing coin or barter goods about. You might walk in alone but then leave with several interested people following behind.”
Miranda wasn’t satisfied with his answer. She stopped in her tracks as she realized what was lacking: any sense of people trying to improve their lot. This felt like a place where people were just marking time.
Murray led the way to what felt like the outskirts of town, being more tumbledown and seemingly abandoned than the city center. It was marked by tottering piles of garbage—discarded, filthy rags too tattered for housework and broken bits of buildings in pieces too small and rotted to use for repairs. And the smell. Pipes tentacled up from the ground; green, gray, and brown stuff the thickness of pie filling oozed from holes in the pipes. Murray pulled face masks and gloves from his pack. “There are sanitary pipes to pull the sewage out of the city proper, but they break down a lot, and repairs are sketchy,” he said. “We don’t want to stay here long. It’s not healthy. Gather up pieces of wood and cloth for burning. Make sure whatever you grab is clean, and don’t go near the pipes.” He grabbed some sticks and stacked them on the ground. “Make a pile,” he said. “Enough to burn for a day. I wish we had a cart.”
Miranda looked at the piles of trash, steaming in the warm rain, and shuddered. She grabbed what looked like sticks attached to cloth, a tent of some kind. As she shook it, small fuzzy creatures fell out and squeaked away. She jumped and squeaked herself with alarm. The cloth was coated with droppings. She couldn’t bring herself to pull the cloth from the sticks, then she remembered her knife in its sheath and cut the cloth away. Fifteen minutes of burning, anyway, she thought. She knew it was just her imagination, but her skin felt squirmy and itchy, as if the things that lived in the garbage heaps were crawling up the legs and arms of her scaleskin. She couldn’t help but compare this to the garbage disposal in Sanctuary, where magcarts brought refuse for recycling and disposing. Everything, including the magcarts, would be sanitized after use and gleaming. It was hard to believe that in Sanctuary, disposal was considered a dirty occupation.
She noticed that Murray had assembled a pile of battered wooden objects while she was woolgathering. The old-fashioned term made her smile.
“I’m impressed,” she said. “How did you find all this?”
He surveyed the pile critically. “It’s not much,” he replied. “The depleted ground is getting too fragile to support two-story buildings. Each rainy season, more fall down. Any debris is scavenged for repairs. There’s not much left for firewood. COS won’t be a city in a few years, just a collection of hovels, if things don’t change.”
Miranda noted with surprise that he seemed sad at the idea, which was at odds with his carefree attitude on the road. She hadn’t seen anything about City of the South that made her give a damn about its future. It could wash into the sea, if the sea still existed, for all she cared.
Murray looked at his pile and at her much smaller pile. “We’ll leave yours for another time,” he said tactfully. “We have enough for a couple of days, which may be all we need. Let’s head back.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Alex was woken by his father rather than by a child or Birna. “Woken” was probably not the appropriate term. Alex woke up on his own to see his father sitting on a chair beside his cot. How long had he been sitting there? Alex knew he sometimes talked in his sleep. He looked sharply at his father, but Peter’s eyes gave nothing away.
“We have a busy day,” he said. “Let’s get started with some basic things to get you more comfortable in COS.”
Alex realized he had apparently passed some test involving the family, which he supposed was a good thing. Even if he didn’t plan to stay forever, he didn’t want to be immediately kicked out. His thoughts drifted back to the girl he had met yesterday. She was pretty, maybe even beautiful, but there were plenty of pretty girls in Sanctuary. She just seemed, he groped mentally for the term, she seemed more aware than the kids his age in Sanctuary. She seemed like someone he could talk to, maybe even hang out with. Thinking about her reminded him of the other girl he had met, Agarita One, with the scarred face. He mentally kicked himself for thinking first thing about her face. There was probably a sad story behind it.
While he was mentally processing the previous day, his dad was moving around his room. He positioned the chair next to a table with a basin and some sort of small rod.
His father motioned for him to sit on the chair and asked him to tilt his head back. Alex was still only half awake and did what he was told. His father seized the slender metal rod. Alex realized, too late, that there was something attached to its end that his father shoved up his nostril. It was painful and caused Alex to cry out.
He started to rise from the chair, but his father restrained him, attached another small square and shoved into the other nostril. His nose felt enormous, swollen and burning. He glared at his father through watery eyes.
“It will burn and itch for a while, but you’ll get used to it,” his father advised. “These are very fine nose screens. They don’t interfere with breathing, but they keep most of the dust out of your throat and lungs. Birna also found you some clothes that will probably fit. Get dressed and we’ll get breakfast and do a bit of work before visiting the town.”
Alex didn’t respond. He was angry that he was given no explanation and no choice in what happened to his body. His mother was not the easiest person, but at least she treated him like an adult, not a child. He sensed there would be many boundaries crossed by his dad, and this probably wasn’t the time to take a stand. He was also excited about seeing the city itself.
After breakfast, his dad took him to the bee enclosure and left him. Aggie was dressed in her hat with mesh mask and gloves. She motioned to him to come out to the hives. He grabbed a hat and gloves from the box at the enclosure door and put them on.
He sniffed the air and was disappointed to find it wasn’t as fragrant as the day before, although he could still smell sweetness. Aggie showed him how to pull the white, sticky frames out of their slots in the hives. She did it so smoothly, no angry bees swarmed out to investigate. She still hadn’t looked directly at him, whether from indifference or because she was feeling as shy around a boy her age as he felt with her, he couldn’t tell. They carried the frames back to the lab.
Alex saw that each frame was layered on both sides with a thick porous material in a beautiful waffle pattern that was clumped with white deposits. “This is the honeycomb that holds the honey extruded by the bees in place,” she explained. “The white coating is called capping.” She grabbed a knife on a nearby bench and expertly sliced the capping off. It came off in sheets and pieces, which she placed in a battered metal tray.
Alex reached over to touch the comb that remained. Hexagonal shapes created a large golden mesh. “It’s amazing,” he said. The honey came off on his fingers in sticky droplets. He started to brush his fingers off against the frame, but Aggie stopped him.
“Don’t waste it,” she said. “This is our reward.” She ran a slender finger lightly over the comb and then placed the dripping finger in her mouth. Alex followed her example. Warm and sweet. He had never liked sweet things like packfruit, but this was different, as natural to swallow as water or air. He looked up to find Aggie smiling at him. She turned solemn as soon as he noticed. He looked away, but the moment had changed to something else. Something as thick as the honey dripping into a large bucket underneath the frame.
“How do you get the honey out of the comb?” His voice sounded stilted and odd. He wasn’t sure what was going on. He wasn’t attracted to this girl. In fact, he wasn’t sure he even liked her. His reaction to Ada was much simpler. Once he’d met Ada, he hadn’t given Aggie another thought. And yet. He was definitely feeling a warmth that wasn’t just the honey coating his lips and oozing down his throat.
As if to help him out, Aggie brushed her curly hair behind her ear, exposing the red puffy scar to its full extent. Alex looked away, although once you knew about it, it wasn’t really much of a distraction. He cleared his throat. “What do you want me to do?”
