Rise

by Kim Lakin-Smith

  The blockers set upon him. There were no guards in the vicinity to activate the nicks and that wasn’t what the blockers wanted anyway. Creatures born of the gutter, there was pleasure to be found in violence – each punch to the male’s gut, the crunch of the cosh to an eye socket. It wounded Kali’s pride to see this stranger beaten in her place. She almost felt sorry for him.

  “Stop it!” she cried in the voice that had commanded battalions. The stiff cord struck her in the face. Kali reeled backwards, feeling the pain whip-sharp across her cheek. Her foot caught on the feed-shaft and she fell, jarring her wrists on the floor as she tried to brace herself. A few feet away, the blockers kept up their assault on the prisoner. Kali heard his stifled moans and the slam of weapons against flesh. She strained to see the other worker. The male cowered by his stool, a hand pressed over his mouth to keep the fear in.

  “Leave the man alone,” she said thickly, for which she received a second thump of the rope. Her head ricocheted back, and when she looked at the ground again, she found herself focusing in on a square of white. Spidering out her hand, she pinched the object between a thumb and forefinger and brought it to her eye. It was a tooth. Kali ran her tongue around her mouth; there wasn’t a gap.

  She homed in on the Vary male, spread-eagled on the floor, the upper portion of his skull caved in. One of his front teeth was missing.

  Later, when the blocker had gone and the body of the lungrot sufferer had been thrown into the furnaces, she managed to sit up and, holding the tooth up to the sunlight, asked herself why it looked so small and ordinary?

  Grizmare sent the driver home. Truth be told, she wasn’t sure that she even wanted to employ a driver any more. The past weeks had seen a sharp decline in her willingness to leave home. What’s out there for me, she wondered? Amongst the black towers where the sky baked and the earth boiled. Better to stay in the shade of the temperature-controlled house her son had built for her. Cooped up in the darkness which reminded her of their cave home where his father died of lungrot and which had been replaced all too soon by something new and shiny.

  Grizmare stroked the ornate walking cane that rested against her chair. Her son had gifted that to her as well, with the reassurance that its unusually light alloy was exceedingly strong, rather rare, and worth a small fortune. Nothing wrong with my old one, she had told him at the time. Nonsense, her son had told her, and demonstrated the worth of the new cane by using it to smash the old.

  “Can I get you anything, Madam Titian? Lemon cider, perhaps.”

  Lizabeth, a Gothendore sister and Grizmare’s paid companion, checked the hands of the water-clock taking up an entire wall, another of her son’s extravagances in that time of draught. “It’s not yet noon. I’m thinking we wait on cracking open a new bottle of sour gin a few minutes yet.”

  Grizmare snorted. “What exactly are we waiting for? And when I say we, I mean me. It’s not as if you’re about to touch a drop.”

  Lizabeth pulled her ‘Are we going there again?’ face, which always made her look younger. So much more of the girl she really was, Grizmare thought, and so much less of the nun.

  “Not everyone in the order is corrupt, Madam Titian.”

  “Grizmare! I’ve told you a million times already. Use my name or I’ll shit the sheets on purpose and you’ll be the one left rolling up your sleeves to change them.”

  “Grizmare.” The woman stared out from her wimple, serene and irritatingly knowing. “Shall we start our rounds? As I understand it, the bill deer have developed mange and the anus glands of the Metadonian tiger dog need squeezing.” Lizabeth lifted her chin a notch. Her green eyes sparkled. “That is one job I draw the line at.”

  Luckily for the nun, Grizmare had never been squeamish when it came to animals. As she informed Lizabeth when the girl first arrived, “Animals make sense. There is nothing affected or malicious about them, unless we have made them so. We are the assholes.” Fifteen minutes later, as she sat on her milking stool in the pen of the muzzled tiger dog and attended its backend, she was grateful for the basicness of the task.

  “Better than cooking myself alive on that damned rooftop,” she muttered, wiping at the dog’s backend. “Harriot really is quite the imbecile! Not that Morantha is much better. Both are puffed up with their self-importance. Liable to float away into the ether if they don’t keep a grip on something.”

  “You okay there, Grizmare? Muttering away to yourself.” Lizabeth stayed outside the pen rather than risk close quarters with the tiger dog.

  “I’m okay.” Grizmare threw the dirty rag past the woman’s shoulder and struggled to her feet. “Can’t say the same about the rest of those society lollygaggers!” She handed over the stool and hobbled up to the gate. The tiger dog followed her, recognising its master while still wild enough to bite the hand that feeds. Beneath the stripes, it was a densely boned, muscular creature with a jaw full of curved black teeth. Grizmare got the other side of the gate before leaning over to yank the muzzle away in one swift, well-practised movement.

  “I thought you enjoyed seeing your friends?” Lizabeth poured a scoopful of blood pelts into the feed funnel. The tiger dog snapped and snarled at the emptying pipe, bolting down mouthfuls.

  “You make me sound like a babe in kindergarten! The only reason I enjoy seeing either of those old hags Morantha and Harriot is to make their lives as miserable as mine is.”

  They moved on to Grizmare’s favourite pets – a family of desert otters. While the young splashed about in the sand, the mating pair, Shy-lo, the male, and Boohoo, the female, peered out the entrance to their burrow and nosed the air.

  “Boohoo! Come see the old gal!” said Grizmare, easing down onto the sand bank inside the large pen. The skylight was open, so she had Lizabeth set up the parasol which enabled the two of them to withstand the heat of the sun razoring down. Once they had settled, Boohoo came bouncing over, Shy-lo following, and soon the two adult otters were chitter-chattering as they crawled over Grizmare’s lap.

  “You can smell the worms in my pocket. This is false love. False love!” Grizmare was laughing.

  “It’s good to see you smile, Grizmare.” Lizabeth nodded to the otters. “We should bring Shy-lo and Boohoo up to the house. Let you play with them awhile.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous! They’re animals, not aristocracy. We don’t invite them to supper.” Grizmare pushed the squirming otters off her lap and struggled to her feet, refusing Lizabeth’s offered hand.

  “I just meant if you are… lonely.”

  Lizabeth was taking time with her words; doesn’t want to hurt me, thought Grizmare. Well, tough!

  “I am lonely, yes, Lizabeth. My son has forgotten me and sent my granddaughter to certain slaughter.”

  “And how do you feel about that?”

  Oh, Lizabeth! Not careful enough with those words. It was the kind of question a doctor might ask. Or a person who was fishing.

  “I’m tired. Get the keeper to muck out the rest. I’ve had my fill.”

  “Of course, Grizmare. Shall I call for a riser chair or will you manage the walk back?”

  Grizmare grabbed her ornate cane from where it rested against the wall and waggled it aggressively. “Call for a chair if you are tired, Lizabeth. Me? I’m not done with my own two feet just yet!”

  Ten

  The sweat between them had its own perfume – oakmoss at the foot of the damask tree in her grandmother’s garden, the fetidness of stank bulb in the desert, and the death notes of sulphur at the Nedmark Traps. It was very different to the brew of Vary males in their tin can barracks. There was taste too, alien and sour as tongues touched. The sensations belonged to her old life, this crushing hand around her breast, the sound of a belt being unbuckled. She had gone to Joltu to plead for clemency in the workplace, arguing, “Why do you let the blockers break skulls at will? The factory is forced to train up Vary replacements constantly.” Now they were rutting, she suspected her motivation was a lie. The soak of mouths a
nd clutch of fingers – these were the reasons she had sought him out. If there was rage to be spent, it would be spent on him. She clawed the man’s back, folding him up inside her like a secret.

  It was strange and sour-tasting and empty, this fucking when her belly ached with hunger and lice infested her hair. At the same time, she didn’t want it to stop. Here, there was peace from her harsh reality. It also reminded her of the baseness she had enjoyed as a free woman. She rocked fiercely against Joltu, drove his mouth to her breasts. He was no different to the others, just a pinprick of cold emotion.

  His smear left between her thighs, she got dressed and waited to be dismissed. It was a more intimate imposition when Joltu started to talk. Pouring a glass of wine, he sat down behind the desk where her backside had so recently rested.

  “Do you miss home, Lieutenant? By which, I don’t mean your grandmother’s estate. I mean life in the National Guard? The freedom it afforded you?”

  Now the adrenaline of the sex was fading, Kali felt the weight of her fellow worker’s death again. “I don’t miss my part in the mistreatment of the Vary. I do miss the freedom to speak out.”

  “But wasn’t speaking out what put you here?” Joltu didn’t let up. “Do you feel that you let down your battalion? Your command was ironclad. Even as a child, you were committed to the cause. At every party, your father would produce you to recite his manifesto. ‘To raise my voice as one pure son or daughter, to oppress those who would leech our holy nation.’ You remember, of course.”

  Kali nodded. “I remember that my father wrote that manifesto, not Lord Gothendore or any other divinity. My father is an outstanding orator, an astonishing strategist, a national hero. But he is as fallible as any other man. We had a simple disagreement on policy.”

  “You betrayed him!” Joltu snapped, eyes blazing. He visibly calmed himself. “You betrayed us.”

  “Who do you mean by us? The National Guard? Bleekland? Does it not occur to you, Commandant Superintendent, that I was trying to repair our Bleekness? Since when do we murder infants, tear apart families, mutilate the old, punish the weak? Is that part of our holy manifesto? Or is it the posturing of one man at a time when we are debt-riddled and desperately need someone to blame? The Vary are our scapegoat. We are sacrificing their blood in an effort to fertilise the land, or appease whatever God is angry with us.” She wiped spit from her lips. His warmth soaked the crotch of her coarse pyjama bottoms.

  Joltu took a sip of wine. “I would never have pinned you for a romantic, Lieutenant.”

  “Romantic, no. Compassionate...? Well, I got there in the end.”

  “And ordered the deaths of Vary every step of the way.”

  “I saw a tooth today.” Kali pictured the tooth in her palm and how she had thrown it aside, as if the truth might burn her.

  “A tooth?” The Commandant Superintendent looked amused.

  Kali shook her head; the tooth itself was irrelevant. Rubbing her temples, she did her best to explain. “I’m less and less certain that we are the divine. Every day I see Vary beaten and bled out by dent of their inferiority. But the more I live alongside them, the less vulgar they appear. Perhaps the differences between us are not so great.”

  “Perhaps.” Joltu squinted across the desk. “But the great thing about putting faith in one man – in your father – is that our fellow Bleek don’t have to question the morality of such acts. They are simply ridding Bleekland of a blight. The rest of the world might even thank us for it one day.”

  “Unless they succeed in their campaign against us. We are not indestructible.”

  Joltu snorted. “Tell that to your father.” He drained the last of his wine and pointed to the door. “I will instruct the blockers to back off at the factory. The Vary do a good enough job of dying on their own. It makes sense to keep those that can working.”

  Kali nodded at the Commandant Superintendent. “Thank you.”

  “I don’t give a fuck about your thanks, Lieutenant. I’m just interested in keeping the stone-wool quotas in line and burning as much coke in the furnaces as we do bodies. Coke produces a hotter flame.” Joltu slid on his glasses and returned to his paperwork.

  Kali straightened her jacket and left.

  “Might want to finish that before we leave the ward. The block chief and his men will prise it from your cold dead hands otherwise.” Groff offered a look of encouragement until the Speaker’s son tore up the black bread and swallowed it down in chunks. He couldn’t help a pang of resentment as the last bit was swallowed without any being offered.

  “Good, good.” He gave the bed a glance over. “You got everything?”

  Mohab huffed. “Camp issue uniform, the socks my mother knitted for me two winters past, the boots I was arrested in. What else is there?”

  “There is your health, Mohab. Your health!” Groff patted Mohab on the shoulder. “Not much to go on, I know. But look on the bright side. You get to escape these vampires.” He nodded in the direction of the sisters negotiating the ward, sucker syringes in hand. “You get air in your lungs. And you get to see your papa!”

  Mohab crossed his arms and stayed quiet.

  Groff persevered. “You’ll be glad to see your father, yes? He’s older, a little doddery on his feet. But the voice is still strong.”

  “And do they beat him for it?”

  Groff shrank under Mohab’s gaze. “They do on occasion. But as with you, the more they despise a man, the keener they are to keep him alive and suffering.” He shrugged. “It’s a blessing and a curse.”

  Mohab stared at the ground a moment. He took a sharp intake of breath and nodded towards the door. “Lead the way then. It’s about time I got the tour.”

  Sunset bled over the buildings. Leaving the infirmary behind, Mohab passed a range of offices Groff described as “The political buildings. Where the newbies get measured, weighed and processed.” Further on was a glass-sheet dome. “Home to the guards.” Groff kept his voice low. “Commandant Superintendent Joltu has his office inside.”

  The nurse’s voice trailed off as a woman emerged from the dome. Mohab was surprised to recognise Lieutenant Kali Titian, wearing the coarse pyjamas uniform allotted to the Vary men. The women usually wore camp issue shifts; he had registered as much in the infirmary.

  “Strange goings on.” Groff shuffled on the spot.

  “I don’t think any of us believed the court indictment. And yet here she is like the rest of us. Only, not quite like the rest. Sneaking out of the Commandant Superintendent’s quarters. I don’t think it’s too hard to guess why.”

  “The High Judge’s daughter and Joltu?” Groff sniffed and ran a finger under his nose. “More likely she’s put in an appeal for clemency. And who can blame her? Forced to tuck up between the men in the stinking barracks.”

  “She sleeps in with the Vary? And her throat hasn’t been slit?” Mohab watched the Lieutenant hurry away. He imagined her directing troops into the homes of the innocent, or heading up one of the grand marches through the streets of Geno or Nilreb. His heart hurt with loathing.

  “She is safe because your father ordered it.” With a tilt of his chin, Groff added, “We are not animals, Mohab. We may be caged and menaced for the pleasure of the masses, but we have worth. Your father taught us that much.”

  Mohab felt a hollow space beneath his ribs. “He’s dying. My father.” He looked over at Groff. “You’re a nurse so you know that.”

  Groff concentrated on the flaming sky. “People say he has lungrot.”

  “He’s also old, and the equivalent of a living saint. People don’t want to imagine a time when he might not be here any more.”

  They walked along the fence where guards patrolled. Groff’s voice brightened. “But now you are here the old man can pass on his speaker duties. A strong young voice, that’s what the Vary need.”

  “Screw that!” said Mohab so resolutely that Groff physically jumped.

  “But isn’t that why you are here? To find a w
ay to unite and overthrow the Bleek. To lead us underground so we can add our number to the ranks of the Resistance.”

  Mohab heard the longing, but it did nothing more than anger him. How dare these starving fools presume he would lead them in his father’s place? What with the blood of his mother, the arrest of his father, and the death of his siblings from lungrot in the Vary slums, hadn’t his family given enough?

  “What are you doing here if not to save us?” Groff pleaded with his eyes.

  “I was arrested the same as any other fucker. I didn’t criticise the state or otherwise aggravate the status quo.” Mohab pointed to the receding figure of Lieutenant Titian. “Titian’s daughter did more to advocate the Vary cause. And still they condemn me to die in this hellhole.” He clenched his hands. “Head down, mouth shut. That always worked for me.”

  “Until now.”

  Mohab stared at the vast silhouette of the factory and the threatening edge of the quarry. “Until now.”

  Eleven

  “Do you miss her?”

  Oh, but it was an impertinent question, thought Grizmare. A childish question, because how could she not?

  “You really do ask the most ridiculous things, Lizabeth! Do you miss your family? They are in Nilreb, no?”

  “Yes, I miss my family.”

  “So how do you expect me to feel about Kali’s absence? Her being sent away is the single most devastating thing that has ever happened to me. And I hate my own son for his part in the whole wretched event.”

  There. She had said it. The unsayable. Grizmare was glad the fact was out, and confused as to why it should be the young nun who coaxed it from her and not her fellow matriarchs Harriot or Morantha. Or even High Judge Titian himself!

  The young woman nodded thoughtfully. She was fixing Grizmare’s second sour gin of the afternoon. “I was surprised by your daughter’s actions. She was such a key figure in the National Guard.” Pouring the lemony coloured liquor over the back of a tiny teaspoon, she took care to lay the sour gin directly on the surface of the ice and soda.