Issabel de Qohosaten
(Le Sable et l'Acier -3)
(Le Sable et l'Acier -3)
Francine Pelletier
(Excerpt from chapter 9, p. 187-191)
Later that night, we found water and shelter.
Fruman had guided us into the ruins of a huge building that once must have been four storeys tall. Walls still stood on three sides: a high triangular section on the right, a jagged, half-crumbled wall at the far end, and one last section, of impressive size, on the left. On the ground, in the darkest corner, we could make out a stone circle - a place where someone had built a fire. Farther away, by stirring the sand, we found human excrement, bleached by time. The desert men used it to feed their fires. Someone had camped here, but not recently. At the very least, these traces of human activity showed beyond any doubt that there was water nearby.
Rinnie found the source under a thick tangle of plants, in the middle of what had once been a street. When we pushed aside branches, we were able to look down a very deep well. The wind dissipated the damp rising from the hole, but a slight lapping sound could be heard.
"It's as if there's something wriggling around down there..." mumbled Dolcie.
She was right. Taking a lamp from his bag, she shone the light to the bottom of the well, setting off a concert of squeaks as little rats bit each other as they jostled to escape from the bright rays. I don't like rats much - I saw too many in the ghetto - but I bent further over to look down the hole.
"It looks like a tunnel..."
"It's a pipe carrying running water," Dolcie explained.
In Vilvèq, there were pipes like that bringing water into houses; there was even one that brought water from the middle of the river. Here, in the desert, pumps and generators had fallen silent long ago, however the old pipe collected the rainwater as if in a reservoir.
"At least," Fruman said, "we can be sure that the well isn't poisoned."
Since Dolcie looked shocked, he added:
"Who knows what they are capable of doing to eliminate us?"
I shivered. Death, again and always.
We drew water, drank our fill and topped up our bottles, before setting off to look for shelter. Fruman insisted that we find a refuge before the wind, which was erasing all traces of our passing, died down.
First Rinnie and Fruman found a location that seemed secure to them, close to a water source, in the ruins of another building. The wind had piled up debris, and under it we could make ourselves a hiding place. Fruman was assuming that, even though the Queue-Satan people were doing ground searches, they wouldn't be able to turn over every rock. The important thing, therefore, was to stay out of sight and as quiet as possible. From now on, we would hide in the daytime and travel at night. That made me happy, because that meant I would get a nice long rest.
I didn't feel so happy though when I saw the shelter Fruman had made. It was actually a kind of burrow in a space dug out of the heap of rubble. We would all have to cram ourselves in there like rats!
But we had to make do with it. At the bottom of the burrow, Rinnie had discovered that another space opened up underground, the entrance to what had been the basement of a collapsed building. Fruman went ahead of us, armed with his lamp. Following the pilot, we found a narrow underground chamber where we could squat. First there was a stairway, concrete steps where the sand crunched, then a basement half filled with fallen debris from the floors above. Part of the ceiling of the basement had, however, withstood the collapse. For more than three centuries, the slow work of time had compacted the ruins, until a roof had formed over this base. A part of the basement had been miraculously protected by this thick ceiling.
There were piles of things lying on the floor, mostly stuff I could not imagine a use for. There were flat, rectangular objects that crumbled in our over-eager fingers, falling into dust like the memory of these past years. My shoes caused a clink from a piece of metal: a rusted fork. Something rolled; it was a glass bottle - glass! How could such fragile material have remained intact when everything was collapsing? Rinnie picked up the bottle and held it to her breast, an ecstatic expression on her face.
Among the debris, there were also scraps of cloth of indefinable colours. Fruman picked up a piece of metal pipe into which he pushed some of those pieces of cloth, which he then lit on fire, lighting up the space in a flickering, ghostly light.
"Let's save our lamps," he murmured.
Suddenly, with a strangled scream, Dolcie pointed to a thing that was stuck in the ceiling of the ruins above our heads. The light of the torch highlighted the rounded silhouette of a yellowish ochre, blackened in places. A skull. A dead face with empty eye sockets, a clenched jaw, which the years had fossilized. Rinnie raised a hand in turn, intoning indistinct words, and her finger followed the shape of the skull, then moved, and the light of the torch showed the rest of the skeleton, the torso of crumbly bones, the arms extended above the head, the legs broken into still visible fragments. It looked like a drowned person floating in a concrete tide.
I whispered:
"You... you think we can stay here?"
Fruman handed his torch to Dolcie.
"This ceiling has held for three and a half centuries. I don't see why it would fall down tonight."
With those words, he went up the stairway to check that we hadn't forgotten anything. I could hear him doing something at the top of the steps for a little while. A metal panel scraped the ground, and then I heard softer sounds. Fruman was moving dead branches to erase any trace of our tunnel. Here, under the ruins, we would be impossible to find.
The torch went out with a puff of smoke that stung our eyes. Dolcie felt for his lamp, but she didn't leave it on for long. We settled down to go to sleep, and I sank into a restorative sleep without worrying about the living or the dead...
© 1998 Éditions Alire & Francine Pelletier
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