The Texts Of Festival by Mick Farren Read Free Book Online Page A

save civilisation, without even a clear concept of what civilisation might mean.
    Starkweather limped along the high stone wall. The wall that sheltered the privileged from Common Festival, the sanctuary of the lords, the textkeepers and élite protected by their military. Unwittingly it had been Starkweather himself who had created that military.
    He paused at the south-west corner of the wall and stared out over the sprawling city. Immediately beneath him was the Merchants’ Quarter, sheltered by its own walls: a solid wooden stockade which was protected by its own guards and retainers. Beside its tents and buildings, the flags of the various craft guilds and traders, with their individual symbols, fluttered in the breeze. Beyond the south wall of the Merchants’ Quarter ran the Drag, with its thieves, whores and gamblers. In the morning sunlight its gaudy facias looked cheap and tawdry. Many of his people had joined the merchants, the guards or the hustlers on the Drag: the whole spectrum of human behaviour that the founders of the commune had worked to make a thing of the past. Yet the work of the founders had come to nothing.
    Along beside him, with the morning sun just clearing the top of its high canopy, was the enormous structure of the Stage, the focus of authority and culture in Festival.
    The actual Stage level was some twenty feet off the ground, with the superstructure that had once held banks of speakers and electric lights, and the great plastic canopy. Originally the Stage had been enclosed in wooden side walls, like a barn with one side missing, but over the years all but the boards of the Stage itself had been removed for other buildings, and now only the spidery structure of black rusted iron scaffolding remained. To Joe the Stage represented Festival as a whole, a skeleton that would not concede that its purpose was long dead.
    In his youth things had been different. He had grown to manhood in the Western Commune, a busy healthy community organised in the spirit of the text and the writings of the legendary, pre-disaster heroes. He remembered the great names Mao, Huey, Guevara, Angela and Brother John, and the way life in the commune had run on lines of open equality; how they had tackled the problems of reconstructing a culture out of the chaos left behind after the death of the great civilisation.
    Of course life had been hard; the ruined soil and poisoned rivers didn’t yield a lot to live on but, little by little, they had managed to bring life back to the tainted land. Then the conflicts of the outside world had begun to threaten their work, and Joe had been elected to lead the people’s army against the savage tribes who had grown from the greaser gangs that had survived through the disaster years.
    The sadness had begun when he had returned from the final campaign. His victorious men and women had returned from the October battle to find the commune fallen into decay. Dogmatism had replaced enlightenment, and the wisdom of the old writings was ignored in a fury of blind worship for the memory of the writers. Reluctantly he had offered his army the choice of staying in the commune, with its narrow code and ideological witch hunts, or following him to find some kind of free life. Most had followed and the commune had closed its doors on the outside world and become a tight, isolated community. Eventually Starkweather and his people had drifted to Festival and had been absorbed by it. The lords had welcomed him; he had organised its military. The years of peace had made him soft. An ageing, half-forgotten hero who clung to a few neglected principles that would probably die with him.
    Joe limped along the south wall. The pain in his damaged leg decreased in the morning sun. In front of him, beside the Arena Gate, a group of courtiers craned over the wall, laughing and shouting, obviously amused by some spectacle taking place at the foot of the wall.
    Joe leaned over the parapet. It was a merchant