Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,270

as he walked about, most of the townspeople seemed to find him unremarkable.

“Since before it was a town,” Walksfar affirmed. “I dwelled in the First Town.” He looked them both up and down. “As it would seem you did—and yet I do not recognize you from those days, and I knew every soul in the place.”

“This is the only town we have ever been to,” said Adam, “and we only just got here.”

“Where is the First Town?” Eve asked. “If there are more like us there, perhaps we should—”

“It no longer exists,” said Walksfar, “and that you do not know as much suggests to me that you must have some very odd tale to tell concerning how you came to be here.”

Adam shrugged. “It is not odd to us. But from what we have lately seen up in the kirk and down here along the river, I will readily admit that it would seem odd when told in this company.”

“Not in the company I keep,” said Walksfar. “Come with me, if you are so inclined, to Camp.” And he directed his gaze across the river.

The west bank too was built up with kilns and forges and houses, but not so much as the east; and what was here seemed smaller and worn out. They crossed over to it in a boat that Walksfar drove across the stream with oars or with a long pole, depending on its depth. A short walk up out of the floodplain took them to a hill settled with log dwellings that were plainly much older than the ones on the eastern bank. Some great trees had been suffered to remain standing and so Camp, as Walksfar called the place, gave Adam and Eve the sense of being once again in the forest—but without wolves.

Camp appeared to have started in a flattish area near the top of a hill, with a ring of dwellings that formed a rough oval centered on a hole in the ground whence they could draw water up in buckets. Around this, more such houses had later been built, but the full count of them did not exceed twenty. Most had but a single room with bed, hearth, and table. Walksfar’s dwelling was no exception, though he had extended it with a sloping roof supported by stilts made of small tree trunks planted in the earth. On their upper surface, all of the roofs of Camp were so deeply covered with moss and leaf mold, as well as grass and other small plants that had taken root in them, that the whole neighborhood seemed as if it were being absorbed by the hill.

On his porch, as he called the place under the roof before his dwelling, Walksfar had made a small hearth of kiln stones where a few embers still glowed. Adam and Eve could guess that during the hours they had slept Mab must have sought him out and persuaded him to cross the river and meet the newcomers. He now stoked the fire back up and began to heat water in a container that looked to have been hammered out of a thin sheet of reddish metal. As he busied himself, Adam and Eve sat on a bench on the porch and gazed out over the central area of Camp. They knew themselves to be on a hilltop, but the trees and dwellings were so arranged as to block much of the view. Above them in the distance they could see Elkirk, but all views farther east were closed off by the ridge on which it stood. They did not miss seeing, or being seen by, the distant Palace of El. Mostly what they saw was Camp itself, and a few souls coming and going among its dwellings. Most had the general form of Eve, Adam, and Walksfar. “Those too must have come from the place you spoke of—First Town,” Eve remarked.

“That they did,” Walksfar said. “Some others dwelled here even before First Town existed. For example Cairn, over yonder.”

Walksfar seemed to be indicating a column of brownish-gray stone that was standing on the other side of Camp—and that seemed to have been there for a long time, judging from its shaggy pelt of moss. But then it altered its shape, collecting itself into a somewhat taller and narrower figure. It shook off a few days’ accumulation of leaves and advanced into the trees in a swaying, stomping gait that reminded Adam and Eve of how their hill had moved