VanRoark went ashore with some of the crew in search of provisions and water; they were armed and really had little to fear. VanRoark found the place weirdly enchanting. There was very little physical destruction, aside from a complete lack of any maintenance for more than ten years, he estimated. The sight of Soril's poor citizens wandering through the overgrown gardens, the clogged pools and gently crumbling buildings awakened an odd pity in him.
They were utterly alone; the diseases and gases of someone's inspired national policy had robbed them of any recourse, not the mouthings of Yarrow, or Tapp's drink, or even the sorry self-delusions of Smythe. Time had ended for them; they were beyond the reach of anything.
Even the crew could sense this, although their feelings were never articulated past the stage of superstitious fear. They had stolen all they needed, their presence having hardly been acknowledged by Soril's people. The few questions they had asked had been answered in a highly elliptical and confusing manner. There had been a war eight years ago between the two nations in which they had wiped out each other. Now the only difference was that Ihetah's dead were still walking around, whereas Cynibal's were comfortably underground. The former had used conventional explosives hoarded and purchased from traders like the
Garnet
; the latter nation had used gases and synthetic plagues that had been mined up from the seemingly inexhaustible Armories and brought overland at great cost.
Smythe had come ashore that last day, and he had questioned the comparatively clear-headed girl who had told VanRoark about the war. "Why did it begin?" Smythe asked gently.
"It was a good fight, sir, a very good fight, fought with honor and courage and cunning on both sides."
"I'm sure, but how did it begin?"
"You know, for a while there—before the war—it could be very fine, you know, the two of us; all very peaceful and lovely. But if it had to end, we guess the war was a good end for it. It was a good fight, sir."
"But who started it?"
"What?" she asked blankly.
"The war! Your well-fought war!" Smythe exploded and at once felt sorry for it.
"Oh yes." She tugged lightly at a curl of auburn hair; VanRoark began to feel sick with helplessness. She was beyond his touch no matter what he might do, no matter what he might say, "Well, I guess we, they . . . oh yes . . . yes!" Her eyes sparkled briefly and she looked up at the men for the first time; she was smiling. "The war began . . . something so little . . . I think someone wrote a book and old Bournmouth thought he was in it and . . . " Then she lost control and began to shake with close detonations of hysterical laughter. " . . . Book, Christ! a book . . . " She really thought it was funny, by the looks of her. VanRoark glanced at Smythe, wondering whether he should be embarrassed or wait for the end of the joke.
Slowly, the laughings and chucklings grated off into long, partially suppressed sobs and curses. She looked up at them once more, her hair matted and the dirt on her face streaked and stained by tears; then she closed her reddened eyes, which might have been opal or green or gold near the pupil but which were now only dull gray, and wandered away from them.
"Should we do anything . . . anything?" VanRoark asked Smythe, hoping that the old man might have remembered an appropriate cure for the disease from his Libraries.
"Yes, leave. Away from this place, Amon, now." He began walking quickly toward the piers, away from the girl; then he stopped and turned to the younger man. "And look at this place—look at her again, once; that's how all of it will be soon,"
VanRoark was unprepared for this. "But the Meadows," he blurted.
"Not even that, I think. Not even our Meadows will stop it." Smythe's voice was harder than he had ever heard it before. That was the Bad thing, that there was no confusion in it, as if he were speaking about ships or history, things that at the bottom of his heart, he knew.
VanRoark was relieved to notice that once they had shipped out of Mount Soril and were heading clear of the Bay, Smythe returned to his normal, pathetically confused character; he was much more comfortable to live with that way.
They stayed close to the well charted northern shore as they had on the way in, where the fires by land and Sea guided them at night. Cape Lane was soon rounded and they glided down Ihetah-Incalam's gentle seacoast. The harsh, blasted tangles of Cynibal's cities were replaced by calm white sand beaches and buildings of soiled, crumbling stucco. The remnants of flags were still fluttering from some flagpoles along the seawalls and esplanades. Figures could be seen wandering along the beaches or through the dead towns; once in a while one of the figures would see them and burst into sudden action, yelling and beating his fellows on the back to attract their attention. Then he might run down to the Sea or out along a pier, raise his arms to call to them; but no call ever came. The figure would stand there a bit, arms open to the air, saluting. The arms would lower hesitantly and the retreating figure would shake with suppressed sobs.
They could tell they had left Incalam behind when the people came running from the cities with swords in their hands. The architecture and atmosphere of the ruins were strange and alien to all but Smythe, who would smile at things they could not guess at. Tapp worried long and loud that they might run out of liquor; Yarrow was only loud.
The land was sere and charred, the grasses poisoned, the trees stunted, with nothing but bones and corpse-nations to mark the passage of men. VanRoark got progressively sicker of the skeletal coastline, deserts and salt marshes alternating with sterile cliffs of basalt and granite. He withdrew from Smythe, leaving the man to his incomprehensible joy as he recognized some feature of a gutted building or hulk lying awash on a reef. Even Tapp was abandoned for the time, or rather they both got the same idea at once.
Tapp was having to conserve his drink now, no one having any idea how far the Meadows might be, and he was rather reserved, at times even brittle, during the day. VanRoark supposed he slept a lot, as he was seldom on deck.
VanRoark only continued his daily session with the boatswain, a burly man named Prager, whose leprous hands were still proficient in knot-tying and the usual business of sailing. He was going to the Meadows for one thing: "A good little pistol, like the one my dad had before it was lifted. Real nice. Automatic, know? Little pearl around the butt, nice heavy feel to it."
"Is that all?" VanRoark would ask; he did not like talking with Prager, in spite of the man's friendliness.
"Well, mate, see this?" He held up his right hand so VanRoark could see the splotches of dirty white along its back and running up the small finger. "Pretty soon that won't be there; gonna tie a nice knot, pull it tight, take my arm back and there's still gonna be one or two fingers where I was holding it. So all you need for a gun is two fingers to hold it and one to shoot it. Gimme that and I can still keep this lot up and running." He motioned toward a group of men lounging in the shade of the upturned jolly boat. "And when that's gone, sir, I'm gonna have Sawdust over there make up a little sort of wooden hand with my automatic bolted right into it. I saw once, in Enador I think, how this guy had a fake hand, like the one I'm talking about, and he had this cord running up it and around his back so when he moved a muscle somewhere, the hand'd move." Prager smiled, almost in anticipation. "So it won't matter if I lose both of 'em. Little wood, little cord, nice gun from the Meadows and I'll still be the only one who can keep the old
Garnet
afloat and headed in the right direction."
VanRoark was repelled at this image, for he instantly conceived of Prager in the last stages of his illness: a wooden man with open bones and slop bucket head, the whole affair being run through a cobweb tangle of strings operated by the stomach muscles and the genitalia which, if not the most intelligent parts of Prager, were almost certainly the most rugged. Then he found it funny and would spend some of his off hours imagining the sailor with rusty nails already at his elbows and knees, a trapdoor mouth, and eyes that opened and snapped shut like a ventriloquist's dummy.
The high Meadows, he thought, the sacred ground where mankind was to spill the last of its blood. . . . It was growing hot again as they moved farther south. The coastline and Sea were perpetually bounded by an insubstantial haze. The wind was slack and irregular; sometimes, when it died entirely and the Sea went dead and oily smooth, he began to view his quest as unvarnished idiocy, and Timonias as a highly accomplished nut and charlatan, nothing more. Tapp and Smythe gradually lost the quixotic charm and courage with which he had formally endowed them. Yarrow, at times, seemed to be the only honest man on board; at least he did not try to hide the fact that he was an idiot and therefore did not have to be ashamed that he should be so taken by such a preposterous myth.
At that instant, Tapp was just an old, beaten man, one who could find no other refuge than liquor from his own failures and those of his similarly flawed world. The grand language deteriorated each time it was used again; the archaic usages that had seemed so wonderfully gallant in the submarine pens were as affected and boring as Yarrow's. In addition to all of these things, Tapp was a traitor, and the age of the nation state had not so completely vanished as to make this less of a blasphemy to some men. The bleeding sore on the back of his neck became a more appropriate emblem.
And why was he truly going to the Meadows? That was a bit harder for VanRoark. Ideally, this new Tapp he had constructed should be running as fast as possible in the opposite direction. But perhaps he had already been in the other directions and found only the things that had driven him from Cynibal; now there might be no place left for him but the Meadows. He would be dead within two years, that was known beyond any doubt, and it could be, as the little man had pointed out himself in one of his heroic drunks, that his death might be a gallant one. This last possibility momentarily grasped VanRoark's consciousness and he concluded that if Tapp had such a fine time proclaiming how he would die, then perhaps VanRoark might also pass some time in so pleasant a manner; he tried it once, snitching a little of Tapp's closely guarded brew and some of the crew's swill.
Actually it wasn't much, but he was tired and inexperienced, so the liquor worked with satisfactory efficiency. He got violently ill, of course (the worst part about
that
was being physically unable to escape Yarrow and his predictable sermon on the evils of drink), but before that he had almost enjoyed it for a while. He grew very quiet and peaceful, and once again the Sea with all its swarming life enchanted him: starlight glistened on the metallic sides of flying fish and barracuda—deeper down in the clear water the shadow forms of manta-rays, colonies of luminous bacteria clinging along the edges of their wings and barbed tails, glowed milk and turquoise. All was as it should be there, all calm and naturally complete, living in accordance with whatever plan or agency had created it. Where, he wondered, could Tapp's raging energy, anger, and defiant cynicism come from in such a peaceful world?
Then the twisted, agonizing howling of the land would sigh across to him and he tried to tell whether it was a man or an animal, and who was feeding on whom. The coast was nothing more than a black outline, like the manta-rays, but devoid of their cool luminosity.
For five days they had sailed past a salt desert that ran only a few feet above sea level, almost to the horizon, where it met a range of low, iron red cliffs. The concrete and rusted steel foundations of the ruins rising above the flats with jarring abruptness were there, as they were everywhere else; collections of flying boats were occasionally seen gathered together, usually about a mile or two inland, the metal panels and fabric torn from their ribs. They looked like dead sailfish or marlin washed up by some storm, and slowly being picked apart by the sea gulls and salt lizards.
VanRoark thought of Smythe then; firstly, because he had been the one to identify the aircraft and even guess that the faded, black and yellow roundels and tail blazons meant they had once served a nation called the Synod; secondly, he thought of him because Smythe was dead too, although not half so beautifully as the planes. He was like the people in Mount Soril, dead but still walking.
It had been the dead men, he remembered, that he had so sagely concluded would truly fight at the Meadows. Now Smythe and Tapp were dead and nothing more. They had not even enough courage to determine their own motivations for the physical formality of death. VanRoark's drunken stupor heaved itself about, vaguely aiming at an anger with men who had allowed the learning of Krysale Abbey to vanish, or betrayed their own homeland, trading them for the doubtful myth of the Meadows.
Unconsciously, his hand felt along the ship's side, looking for an unused belaying pin to use first on Smythe and then on Tapp; he felt around the back of the board searching for one, when he touched something at once sandy and sponge-like, like an old cigarette someone had dropped. He held it up to the starlight; that was when he got sick, for it was Prager's little finger. The land had produced yet another ingenious variation on the usual afflictions of mankind, and Prager's mutated leprosy had cut straight through the finger, rotting bone and nerve alike. Prager, good-humored and stupidly resigned as ever, had left the finger there on purpose; when he heard about it in the morning he waved the cauterized red and white stump in VanRoark's face and laughed himself silly over the youth's still rebellious stomach.
VanRoark recovered from this episode, though now he pursued his education in sailing as best he could alone; ashamed at the sorry treatment he had given Smythe and Tapp, he retreated even further from the two, seldom thinking very deeply about them or their motives.
They had been at Sea for quite some time now and not even several mildly successful expeditions ashore into some ruined city or rare patch of healthy vegetation for food and water helped much in fending off scurvy and pellagra; not even the
Garnet
's crew were having a very good time of it and there was brooding talk drifting aft from the forecastle at night. They were in no danger, the captain assured them, for the crew, normally a gutless lot anyway, were now even more cowed by their reduced numbers and the captain's monopoly on water and limes, all of which were kept in his cabin and would be instantly emptied into the Sea should any mutiny begin.