The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [49]
“Son?”
His father was shaking him; he was not immersed in liquid.
Groggily, he said, “I am a mother . . .”
But, blinking away the dream, another vision faded, joining the first to lie mingling inside him.
They were stopped by the side of the road. His father peered down at him. Others, curious, gathered around. Path shuddered. His mouth was very dry and he felt sweat trickling his forehead.
“You all right? You was flopping about. Then you went all still.”
“I’m okay,” he said. “Let’s go . . .”
The stall of artifacts was no longer at the roadside; either the business had relocated or, he thought, had never existed.
As they moved again, scents such as path had not before encountered, and residues of the vision, made him cough, feverish in the damp sling. His imagination flared with virulent but elusive images. As far as he could see, in both directions—even upward—extended the massive perimeter wall of Nowy Solum. The road they were on led over a stone bridge to huge, opened gates, through which he could now see the forms of structures. Above the top of the wall, several towers were visible, high enough to penetrate the clouds, where a stone room perched in the haze.
His stubs twitched. What would he find here?
Who he was becoming?
Path’s father also seemed to be experiencing distress now; path felt tortured heat from the scrawny body pressed against him. Together they were a furnace.
He hissed encouragements from low in his sling as his father stumbled up the incline, toward the bridge. Here, vendors manned small grills, selling food, or blankets of products were spread out. Clearly, even to path—who had only ever been to that one wretched market before, where a handful of desert merchants had set up—the items available here were substandard: rotten things, half-eaten or broken.
He and his father had no money to purchase anything, no matter what the quality, and no things with which to trade. The only food they had was bread and a skin of water—which kept path’s belly satisfied for now, as they walked the bridge—but then what? He would not beg in this place and he did not think people would donate food, no matter what stories he might eventually tell them.
During his life in the desert—certainly before enlightenment—he had never thought much about money, nor, he knew, had his parents ever possessed any; people where he came from bartered or traded, yet as path and his father passed through this aisle of desperate commerce, not having money, or a way to get money, was clearly an oversight in the hasty plan they had made to leave home. Path sensed how people with money could live inside the city, and he sensed the hunger for it in these people at the gates, who had none. Want of money was one of the scents this close to Nowy Solum, another stench in the air.
Along the stone wall of the bridge, families lived in primitive tents or slept directly on tarps right on the wooden slats. Beggars, kneeling, averted eyes. Path saw dirty children running with their siblings. Filthy, but intact. Children with the ability to be independent. He had never seen anything like this before. These were gangly, awkward creatures: loud, their motions swift and constant. He blinked, for his eyes had grown bleary. He had to turn away when he could no longer bear the sight.
Onward his father tottered, walking a gauntlet toward the gates.
Passing below was a wide, brown river. The smell of the slow water as his father looked over the edge made path gag; it seemed to be a current of waste, bleeding sludge from the city.
From shadows inside the gates, the definition of individual structures rose over heaps of tumbled masses; he saw chimneys, roofs, sagging walls.
And people in there, throngs of people.
Cresting the bridge, path and his father passed under the stone arch, between the great doors, and into Nowy Solum.
Red-robed guards eyed them as, buffeted, his father lurched to a stop in the broad terrace.
Path saw a creature he never could have imagined: two hands high, bluish, with eyes like a woman and a laugh, when it saw