2
The two-story brick building was still standing -- unlike some of the neighboring metal structures which had long ago rusted and collapsed inward -- and while parts of the heavy stone roof and windows were gone, generations had fashioned replacements with tree trunks and grasses to maintain a weatherproof refuge. The second floor, with its huge rotted gathering place, was unstable; they never used it. But there was space for dozens of families downstairs, in the low oval room ringed with twelve pillars past which hung tattered remnants of pictures and signs in the script of the World builders.
The squat's position, its construction, and these ancient artifacts on the walls, gave it pride of place among folk at the lagoon. The squatters defended it ferociously, and Donal was its leading fighter.
He paused in the portico, blinking water out of his eyes, watching stragglers run for cover and canoes out on the lagoon pulling for shore. He could pick out the foreign visitors -- outsiders -- wandering aimlessly, sight-seers among the ruins even in this far corner of the World. Just a handful; nowhere near the number over at the Castle.
Donal wiped rain off his body, threaded effortlessly through the families crouched on pallets of palm leaves and grasses around the big room. A dim shaft of green stormlight picked out the faces watching from deep in the recesses, and as he walked by, he saw flickering shadows across their troubled eyes.
The rain was nothing new; storms rolled through predictably every afternoon, tiny mirrors of the much larger shift in the seasons. Each wheel of the year the rains started a little earlier; the bogs drained more slowly. The cultivated lands ran riot with grasses and weeds. The horses had nowhere to run. New trackways had to be built across the fens to the Castle each spring.
Donal found his way to the tiny pallet he shared with his five-year-old brother, a tiny square against the wall opposite the doorway, beneath one of the frayed signs of the Bui