The Height Drinks

by Leigh Brackett, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

There had been water under Tarvassa for longer than there had been men on Earth, and on the night it stopped, the whole city woke up.

Kittredge woke with the rest of them. He lay on the rope bed in the back room of the wine-shop with his boots on and listened, not knowing what for. The wind was going over the roofs the way it always went, thin and dry, hissing where it caught the sand on the tiles. Something barked down by the dead docks. Somewhere a woman was saying one word over and over, softly, in the old canal speech, of which he had about forty words, and this was not one of them. Then he knew. Every night for three months he had gone to sleep over a sound under the floor, a long low mutter like a man talking to himself in the next room, and after the second week he had stopped hearing it, the way you stop hearing your own heart.

It was not there now.

He went out into the street.

---

They were all going the same way, down the lanes between the blind red walls, toward the Well of Measures: old men in hooded robes, women with jars on their hips from habit and nothing in them, children carried asleep. Nobody ran. They walked fast and close and nobody spoke, and their bare feet on the stone made a sound like rain, which was a sound nobody in Tarvassa had heard in nine hundred years. Phobos was coming up out of the west, going the wrong way across the sky as it always did, and it laid their shadows down in front of them, long and black and shaking.

The Well of Measures was a square pit as big as a ballroom, cut into the bedrock, with steps going down all four sides to the water. The steps were worn into shallow dishes by a hundred thousand years of feet. Kittredge had stood at the rim his first night in Tarvassa and counted forty of them showing above the black surface, and been told, by the wine-seller, that in the wine-seller's grandfather's time it had been nine.

Tonight there were sixty-one. He counted them by the lamps the people were holding. At the bottom there was a skin of wet on the stone, shining, and a smell came up out of the pit, cold and mineral, with rot in it.

On the lowest step stood an old woman in grey with a cup in her hands.

He knew who she was. Everybody knew. Ashtri, the Keeper of the Height, whatever that meant: a tall stooped woman with a face like a knife wrapped in brown paper, who went through the market every morning with a boy carrying her basket and never once looked at an Earthman. She was looking at the wet stone. She stood quite still. Then she turned the cup over and let what was in it fall, a little silver thread in the lamplight, and it made a small sound on the bottom of the Well, and the crowd made a sound too, all together, low.

Kittredge said, not loudly, "The canal's still running."

He said it in Terran, and he hadn't meant to say it at all. But the old woman's head came round and found him over all those lamps, and he saw she had understood it.

---

Purcell came into the wine-shop at the third hour of the morning, when the sun was up and the street outside was white and the flies had found the spilled wine on the tables.

He wore a white suit with the dust beaten out of it and a Terran Water Company badge on a chain. He sat down across from Kittredge without being asked and put his hat on the table, crown down. He had pale blue eyes in a sunburned face and they did not miss much. He looked at the cup of thin red wine, and the hour, and Kittredge's hands, and then he smiled a little, the way a man smiles at a horse he has decided not to buy.

"Joe Kittredge," he said. "Pipe gang, Syrtis Station. They tell me you put a foreman through a pump-house wall."

"Only partway."

"Partway." Purcell nodded. "It's a long walk home from here, Joe."

"I'm not walking anywhere."

"No. I know what you owe Sabbak for the room." He took a thin fold of Company scrip out of his breast pocket and laid it on the table beside the hat and did not push it across. "The Company's got a passenger crawler going out to Syrtis Thursday. There's a berth on it. There's a job at the other end, if a man wanted one. Fitting, not digging."

Kittredge looked at the scrip. "That's nice of the Company."

"The Company's a nice outfit." Purcell glanced at the floor, at the flagstones, as if he too were listening for something under them. "You know how the charter reads on these old canal towns? I'll tell you. The water's theirs as long as they can draw it. Ten days dry and the rights lapse, and the Company can bring a pipe in from the polar main and sell it back to them at a fair price. Very fair. Fairer than nature's been." He stood up and took his hat. He left the scrip where it was. "The old woman's been asking about you," he said. "I'd hate to see you get in over your head, Joe. You don't swim."

He went out into the white glare. The flies went back to the wine.

Kittredge sat a while. Then he folded the scrip once and put it in his shirt, and finished the wine, which was bad, and went out the back way.

---

She was waiting for him at the end of the lane, with the boy.

"You said the canal runs," Ashtri said. Her Terran was old-fashioned and very clear, a trader's Terran from a century ago. "How do you know this?"

"I walked out along it last night before dark. It's down, maybe a man's height from the old mark. It's running."

"Then why is the Well dry?"

"I don't know," Kittredge said. "Where does the water come in?"

She looked at him a long time. Up close her eyes were the yellow of old amber and there was no softness in them anywhere. Then she said a word to the boy, and the boy went off at a run, and she turned and began to walk, and after a moment Kittredge followed her.

They went out through the north gate and along the canal bank. The canal was a hundred yards wide between walls of dressed stone, and the water lay at the bottom of it, dark and slow and narrow, a green stripe with a crust of white salt along both edges. It smelled of weed. Little brown crabs ran on the salt and went down into the water sideways as the shadows reached them. Between the canal and the city there was a ridge of red rock, steep but not high, perhaps twenty feet above the canal walls, and on the top of the ridge was a squat round building of black stone with no windows.

"The Height," Ashtri said.

A path went up to it in steps. She climbed slowly, with a hand on her knee at every step, and would not take his arm. The wind up there was cold even in the sun and it tasted of grit. The door of the Height was bronze, or something like bronze, green-black, and there was a key on a cord round her neck, and the lock turned as if it had been oiled yesterday.

Inside it was dim and still and cool, and smelled of stone and old oil. A shaft of light came down from a hole in the dome. Under the light, in the floor, there was a stone basin, dry, and in the basin a short bronze column with a spout, and standing up out of the column a long bar with a handle of black wood worn pale by hands.

Kittredge stood and looked at it, and the hair stood up on his arms.

"Every year at the turning of the cold," Ashtri said behind him, "the Keeper comes. She pours the cup into the mouth of the Height. She says, the Height drinks. She takes the handle and moves it three times. She says, the Height gives. My mother did this, and her mother. Last year I did this, the same." Her voice did not change at all. "This year I poured the cup into the Well instead, because the Height did not give."

He did not answer her. He went down on his knees on the cold floor.

The pipe came up through the floor on one side, from the canal, as thick as a man's body, and went down through the floor on the other side, toward the city. It was the same green-black metal as the door. He put his palm on the canal side and knocked with the heel of the other hand, low, then higher, then higher still, and listened. Low down it was dead and solid. Higher up it rang. He did the same on the city side. It rang all the way down as far as he could reach.

"Air," he said.

"What is air?"

"The pipe goes up over the ridge and down the other side." He drew it in the dust on the floor with his finger, an arch. "Water'll go up and over like that, and down, and keep on going, long as the pipe stays full. It pulls itself along. But let air in at the top, let a big enough bubble get in up here, and it breaks. It just stops. The water drops back down both sides and sits there." He rubbed it out. "Canal's been dropping for a long time. Water gets lower, the lift gets longer, there's more air coming out of it at the top every year. Every year a little bigger bubble."

"And the Keeper's cup."

"That," Kittredge said, and put his hand on the bronze column, "is a pump. You pull the air out of the top with this, the water comes up behind it to fill the space. You pour your cup in first because there's a leather in there and the leather's got to be wet or it won't seal." He looked up at her. "Your grandmothers weren't praying, lady. They were priming it."

She stood with her hands folded in her sleeves and the light from the dome on her face.

"My grandmothers," she said at last, "knew the words. Someone once knew why. We kept the words." It was not an apology. "Can you make it give?"

He was already working the handle. It went down a quarter of the way and stopped with a gritty dead feel, like a bone grinding on a bone.

"Maybe," he said.

---

It took him the rest of the day to get the head off it.

The boy came back with Kittredge's tools in a sack, and with bread and dried fish, and with three men from the city who stood in the doorway of the Height and would not come in until Ashtri spoke to them sharply. Kittredge had no proper wrench that would fit the old bolts; he made one, of a sort, with a cold chisel and a block of hardwood and a great deal of swearing, and the men in the door listened to the swearing with interest, and the boy learned several words. When the head came off at last the inside of the cylinder was scored and dry and there was a smell out of it like a tomb. The piston was a thick bronze disk. Around it, in a groove, there was something black and brittle that broke into flakes when he touched it.

The leather. Whatever beast it had come off had been extinct a long time.

He sat back on his heels. Then he took off his left boot.

It was a Terran boot, good cowhide, the only thing he owned that had been worth what he paid for it. He cut the top off it with his knife, a long strip as wide as his hand, and soaked it in the last of the water from the boy's flask, and worked it with his thumbs while the sun went down the hole in the dome and the light went red on the wall. Then he cut it and trimmed it and stretched it round the piston and bound it into the groove with copper wire, and did it again, because the first time it was wrong.

There was one more thing. Down in the city, at the bottom of the Well, there had to be a gate on the outlet. Pull the air out of a pipe that's open at the bottom end and you're just pulling air out of the town. It had to be shut.

Ashtri took him down herself, with a lamp.

There were steps behind a door in the side of the Well, under the sixty-first step, and they went down a long way into the rock. The air got cold and wet. The lamp showed him carvings on the walls, long processions of tall people with narrow heads, carrying jars, carrying tools that he half recognised, a pipe-tongs, a level, things like that, and the carvings were as sharp as the day they were cut because no wind had ever touched them. At the bottom was a round chamber with a pool of black water in the floor and the great pipe coming in out of the wall above it, and on the pipe a wheel, as tall as Kittredge, crusted green.

It would not turn. He hung his whole weight on it and it would not turn.

"Wait," Ashtri said.

She held up the lamp. Up on the wall, above the wheel, cut into the stone: a picture of a tall narrow man with his foot on the rim of a wheel and a long bar through the spokes, leaning on it. And in a niche beside the picture, lying where somebody had laid it down, a bar.

Kittredge stood looking at it. Then he laughed, out loud, and the sound went round and round the chamber and up the stairs.

He put the bar through the spokes and his foot on the rim like the man in the picture and leaned on it, and the wheel groaned, and a flake of green came off the hub, and it turned.

---

They began to pump when Deimos came up, a little after midnight. Two of the three men had gone down under the Well with a lamp, to sit by the wheel and wait for word.

The cup came first. Ashtri poured it, out of the same plain clay cup, into the basin and down the mouth of the Height, and said the words in the old tongue, and Kittredge did not laugh at that. Then he took the handle.

It went down stiff, with a wet suck, and came up, and from somewhere down inside the column came a gasp of foul cold air out of the spout, right into his face. It tasted of rust and dust and a very long time. Down. Up. Gasp. The new leather held. He settled into it, his back and his thighs, the long even swing that is the only way to pump for any length of time, and he counted, and at five hundred he gave it to the biggest of the three men, and showed him how, and sat down against the wall.

They had come up the hill after dark, a few at first and then more, and now the slope below the Height was covered with them, sitting in their robes with their lamps beside them, and they did not speak. Every man who could do it took his turn on the handle. Some of the women did. The gasp from the spout got weaker and wetter as the night went on, and around the third hour Kittredge put his hand on the city side of the pipe and knocked, and it did not ring quite so high up as it had.

That was when Gorran came.

Kittredge knew him from the wine-shop: a big canal-man with a broken nose who ran errands for the Company and drank on the Company's money. He came in out of the dark at the door with a sledge in his hands, very fast and quiet, and the man on the pump never saw him. Kittredge did. He was on his feet before he knew he'd moved.

Gorran swung at the column. Kittredge went in under the swing, inside it, and took the handle of the sledge across his shoulder instead of the head, and the shock of it went right down to his bare foot. Then they were close, too close for the hammer, and Gorran let it go and got his hands on Kittredge's throat. His hands were enormous. His breath stank of the wine-shop. The lamp went over and rolled, and the room spun red and black, and Kittredge drove his head forward into the broken nose, once, and again, and felt it go, and the hands came off. Gorran staggered back against the doorframe with his face streaming. He looked out at the hillside. Three hundred of the people of Tarvassa were standing up out there in the dark, silent, with their lamps.

He went off down the far side of the ridge, running. Nobody followed him.

Kittredge picked up the lamp. His shoulder had gone numb. "Pump," he said to the big man, who had not stopped.

---

The water came a little before dawn.

There was no warning. The spout gasped, and gasped, and then it coughed, and a gout of brown water came out of it all at once and splashed into the dry basin and over Kittredge's one bare foot, so cold it burned. The man on the handle stopped and stared. The next stroke brought more, cleaner. The one after, clean.

"Now," Kittredge said, and the boy was off down the steps like a shot rabbit, with Ashtri's word to the men waiting at the wheel under the Well.

They waited. Kittredge sat with his back against the pipe on the city side and his hand flat on it. The metal was cold and quite still. Out on the slope nobody moved. The sky over the dead sea-bottom to the east had gone the colour of a bruise, and then of ashes, and the wind had dropped, the way it does before sunrise, so that he could hear his own blood.

Then the pipe moved under his hand.

It was not a sound, not yet. It was a shiver in the metal, like something waking. Then there was a long hollow knock, deep down, and then a rush, a sound like a crowd drawing breath, and then the mutter, low and steady and endless, a man talking to himself in the next room. Out on the hill somebody began to cry, and somebody else began to sing, and Kittredge leaned his head back against the stone and shut his eyes.

---

When it was light Ashtri found him crouched by the pump with the lamp, looking at the base of the column.

There was writing there, cut small into the metal where the basin had hidden it. He had seen it when he first knelt down and not paid it any mind; it was only marks. Now he held the lamp close. A row of narrow angled letters, and after them a little sign: a hand, open, with something in it that might have been a wrench.

"Can you read it?"

She bent, slowly, with her hand on her knee. She was a long time about it. When she straightened up her face had not changed, but her voice had.

"It is the old writing. It says: Oruth made this. Pour before you pull. It will hold."

Kittredge looked at the little open hand.

"A fitter," he said. "Just a pipe-fitter." He had to stop and clear his throat. "Not a king or anything. Just the man who put it in."

"Yes."

"And you've been doing what he said. All this time. Without knowing why."

"We kept the words," Ashtri said.

He thought about Purcell's scrip in his shirt, and the crawler going out to Syrtis Thursday, and the job at the other end, fitting, not digging. He thought about the leather. Good cowhide, but cowhide; it would want changing. Every spring, likely, maybe sooner, in this dry. And somebody would have to knock on the pipe every month and listen for the ring, and bleed the air off before the bubble got too big, and teach the boy to do it, and write it down.

He took the cold chisel out of the sack. Below Oruth's line, small, in square capitals, he began to cut:

NEW LEATHER EVERY SPRING. KNOCK MONTHLY. — J.K.

The metal was hard and the chisel was blunt and it took him most of the morning, and the old woman stood by and held the lamp the whole time and did not once say anything.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, prīdiē Nōnās Octōbrēs (6 October 2026), ā Leighā Brackett per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.

Leigh Brackett, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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