She was at once engulfed in the smells — powerful, sweet, sharp, strange. A dim, pungent air. She had the curious sensation that the pictographs and ideograms that covered the walls with bold black and dark-blue shapes were moving, not jumpily like half-seen print but evenly, regularly, expanding and shrinking very gently, as if they were breathing.
The room was high, lighted by the usual high-set windows, and lined with cabinets full of little drawers. As her eyes adjusted, she saw that a thin old man stood behind a counter to her left. Behind his head two characters stood out quite clearly on the wall. She read them automatically, various of their various meanings arriving more or less at once: eminent / peak / felt hat / look down / start up, and two / duality / sides / loins / join / separate.
"Yoz and deyberienduin, may I be of use to you?" She asked if he had an unguent or lotion for dry skin. The proprietor nodded pleasantly and began seeking among his thousand little drawers with an air of peaceful certainty of eventually finding what he wanted, like Iziezi at her desk.
This gave Sutty time to read the walls, but that distracting illusion of movement continued, and she could not make much sense of the writings. They seemed not to be advertisements as she had assumed, but recipes, or charms, or quotations. A lot about branches and roots. A character she knew as blood, but written with a different Elemental qualifier, which might make it mean lymph, or sap. Formulas like "the five from the three, the three from the five." Alchemy? Medicine, prescriptions, charms? All she knew was that these were old words, old rneanings, that for the first time she was reading Aka’s past. And it made no sense.
To judge by his expression, the proprietor had found a drawer he liked. He gazed into it for some while with a satisfied look before he took an unglazed clay jar out of it and put it down on the counter. Then he went back to seeking gently among the rows of unlabeled drawers until he found another one he approved of. He opened it and gazed into it and, after a while, took out a gold-paper box. With this he disappeared into an inner room. Presently he came back with the box, a small, brightly glazed pot, and a spoon. He set them all down on the counter in a row. He spooned out something from the unglazed pot into the glazed pot, wiped the spoon with a red cloth he took from under the counter, mixed two spoonfuls of a fine, talc-like powder from the gold box into the glazed pot, and began to stir the mixture with the same unhurried patience. "It will make the bark quite smooth," he said softly.
"The bark," Sutty repeated.
He smiled and, setting down the spoon, smoothed one hand over the back of the other.
"The body is like a tree?"
"Ah," he said, the way Akidan had said, "Ah." It was a sound of assent, but qualified. It was yes but not quite yes. Or yes but we don’t use that word. Or yes but we don’t need to talk about that. Yes with a loophole.
"In the dark cloud descending out of the sky… the forked… the twice-forked…?" Sutty said, trying to read a faded but magnificently written inscription high on the wall.
The proprietor slapped one hand loudly on the counter and the other over his mouth.
Sutty jumped.
They stared at each other. The old man lowered his hand. He seemed undisturbed, despite his startling reaction. He was perhaps smiling. "Not aloud, yoz," he murmured.
Sutty went on staring for a moment, then shut her mouth.
"Just old decorations," the proprietor said. "Old-fashioned wallpaper. Senseless dots and lines. Old-fashioned people live around here. They leave these old decorations around instead of painting walls clean and white. White and silent. Silence is snowfall. Now, yoz and honored customer, this ointment permits the skin to breathe mildly. Will you try it?"
She dipped a finger in the pot and spread the dab of pale cream on her hands. "Oh, very nice. And what a pleasant smell. What is it called?"
"The scent is the herb immimi, and the ointment is my secret, and the price is nothing."
Sutty had picked up the pot and was admiring it; it was surely an old piece, enamel on heavy glass, with an elegantly fitted cap, a little jewel. "Oh, no, no, no," she said, but the old man raised his clasped hands as Iziezi had done and bowed his head with such dignity that further protest was impossible. She repeated his gesture. Then she smiled and said, "Why?"
"… the twice-forked lightning-tree grows up from earth," he said almost inaudibly.
After a moment she looked back up at the inscription and saw that it ended with the words he had spoken. Their eyes met again. Then he melted into the dim back part of the room and she was out on the street, blinking in the glare, clutching the gift.
Walking back down the steep, complicated streets to her inn, she pondered. It seemed that first the Mobile, then the Monitor, and now the Fertiliser, or whatever he was, had promptly and painlessly co-opted her, involving her in their intentions without telling her what they were. Go find the people who know the stories and report back to me, Tong said. Avoid dissident reactionaries and report back to me, said the Monitor. As for the Fertiliser, had he bribed her to be silent or rewarded her for speaking? The latter, she thought. But all she was certain of was that she was far too ignorant to do what she was doing without danger to herself or others.
The government of this world, to gain technological power and intellectual freedom, had outlawed the past. She did not underestimate the enmity of the Akan Corporation State toward the "old decorations" and what they meant. To this government who had declared they would be free of tradition, custom, and history, all old habits, ways, modes, manners, ideas, pieties were sources of pestilence, rotten corpses to be burned or buried. The writing that had preserved them was to be erased.
If the educational tapes and historical neareal dramas she had studied in the capital were factual, as she thought they were at least in part, within the lifetime of people now living, men and women had been crushed under the walls of temples, burned alive with books they tried to save, imprisoned for life for teaching anachronistic sedition and reactionary ideology. The tapes and dramas glorified this war against the past, relating the bombings, burnings, bulldozings in sternly heroic terms. Brave young men and women broke free from stupid parents, conniving priests, teachers of superstition, fomentors of reaction, and unflinchingly burned the pestilential forests of error, planting healthy orchards in their place — denounced the wicked professor who had hidden a dictionary of ideograms under his bed-blew up the monstrous hives where the poison of ignorance was stored — drove tractors through the flimsy rituals of superstition — and then, hand in hand, led their fellow producer-consumers to join the March to the Stars.
Behind the glib and bloated rhetoric lay real suffering, real passion. On both sides. Sutty knew that. She was a child of violence, as Tong Ov had said. Still she found it hard to keep in mind, and bitterly ironical, that here it was all the reverse of what she had known, the negative: that here the believers weren’t the persecutors but the persecuted.
But they were all true believers, both sides. Secular terrorists or holy terrorists, what difference?
The only thing she had found at all unusual in the endless propaganda from the Ministries of Information and Poetry was that the heroes of the exemplary tales usually came in pairs — a brother and sister, or a betrothed or married couple. If a sexual pair, heterosexual, always. The Akan government was obsessive in its detestation of ’deviance.’ Tong had warned her about it as soon as she arrived: "We must conform. No discussion, no question is possible. Anything that can be seen and reported as a sexual advance to a person of the same sex is a capital offense. So tiresome, so sad. These poor people!" He sighed for the sufferings of bigots and puritans, the sufferings and cruelties.