Notes from the Burning Age

by Claire North

  The smell of fresh bread greets the dawn, though a new fad seems to emerge every few months as the historian-bakers of the city try to outdo each other recreating some ancient recipe – a sweet treat of cherries and rare, precious cocoa or coffee bean, or a folded pastry of extortionate, crumbling butter. Even the food in Vien looks to the past, with countless festivals where people gorge on milk and venison and sing songs from a time when all men were heroes.

  And here a sight unforgivable, for in the doorways of the station sit the homeless men and women, abandoned by their own city. They huddle together on beds of card, until the guardia chase them away. Where should they go? Temple should take them in, but their doors are locked – go away, go away, you are no good here! The Assembly should fund refuges, places of safety, there should be hearths with open doors to give them shelter, but no.

  Not any more.

  “Maze is not here to empower laziness,” proclaims the Chief Minister. “It is upon you to seize opportunity.”

  The Council has laws about this, enacted across all the Provinces – laws that Maze itself helped draft and ratify, in a gentler time. Inequality breeds contempt, Council says. Did we not learn from the great burning how the richest considered their lives more valuable, their moral worth and social deserts superior to those of the poorest? Did we not watch them build walls to keep out their fellow humans, proclaiming, “He who is rich is better to keep alive than the poorest teacher, doctor, nurse, builder, mother, father or child?”

  The sea tore down even their walls, when all was said and done. But we should not wait for the ocean to settle our accounts.

  “The Council is supposed to be advisory, a source of unification!” proclaims Antti Col, the Brotherhood banner flying at his back. “Instead they are tyrants seeking to tell us how to live!”

  As timber falls to build ever bigger and more extravagant homes, where are the libations, the freshly planted saplings and the careful copses to nourish the life of the woods? All gone, all neglected. We take more than we give, and the leaves wither and the river rises; we tip our sewage straight into the fresh water that rises from beneath fertile mud, and the clouds boil and the wind blows icy from the north, and people wonder: are we poisoning ourselves, or will the kakuy do it for us?

  What will we do if the kakuy wake?

  The kakuy never slept, warns the pious Medj of the south. The wind and the ocean never cease, and the earth is patient. Tread lightly, my brethren. Do not shake the world too particularly when you pass.

  No one I met in Vien had ever seen the kakuy.

  Some said they weren’t even real.

  Dawn breaks across the city as I shuffle home through the rising light.

  On the east bank of the Ube River, the streets are clean, broad and practical. Bicycle paths weave between the courtyard-shrouding hearths, old brick mixed with new mycelium and solar cell, creating a jigsaw of beige, white, crimson and grey. From the bathhouses and communal halls the morning smell of pine, yeast and tea brewed long enough to turn your insides brown mingled with polite chatter and discreet silences between courteous people. No one had the same burning interest in gossiping about their neighbours as we had in Tinics; to be caught griping about someone’s plants dribbling onto your laundry was considered thoroughly unsophisticated, and the people of the west so very much wanted to be sophisticated.

  I lived in a hearth like any other, thirteen of us to the tall, winding building. I ate alone, slept alone, declined offers of friendship when given, and rebutted even cordial inquiry with monosyllabic grunts or a shaking of my head. If anyone tried to engage me on questions of politics or faith, I avoided it with a shrug and an “It’s not really my business, is it?”

  Strangely, this answer seemed to be accepted, though I could hardly imagine anything that might be more my business than the running of the world I lived in.

  “Where are you from, with your accent?” a neighbour asked, and: “Lyvodia,” I replied.

  “Oh, Lyvodia! Lovely place. I go on holiday sometimes there. The people are so… so gentle, aren’t they?”

  By “gentle” he meant “lazy”, for there was nothing quite as fashionable at this time as mocking the peoples of another Province. We were all meant to be one, and yet on the radio the Brotherhood howled and wailed against injustice, injustice – the gross injustice of being wedded by Council to Provinces who were lesser than our own!

  “Ever going to go back?” my neighbour inquired, voice light as the butterfly, not meeting my eye.

  “Not if I can help it.”

  He smiled and nodded and said nothing more, and after that didn’t bother to greet me on the stairs.

  So all things in Vien were rotten, including me.

  Then, two months after the Brotherhood nearly cut my thumb off in a bar, they came back.

  Chapter 6

  In the heat of the moment, I had not taken much time to note the features of my assailants. When one of them came up to the counter and ordered a cup of hot rice wine, my stomach recognised him while my mind rebelled. His skin was much like mine, the deep olive that had emerged in those peoples who survived the great migrations, when the old tribal boundaries broke down, but he had dyed his dark hair a streaky crimson and pulled it back into a knot that seemed to elongate his high forehead into a cliff. I poured the drink with clammy hands, took his money, left the flask by his side and went about my business with the small of my back suddenly exposed, every hair on my arms standing tall, fingers clumsy and tongue dull in my mouth.

  He watched me, that was all. The cellar was hot and crowded, filled mostly with the laughter of men and a few cross-legged women pressed into time-crumbling walls. The talk was of crop failures and discontent, of political change and social revolution, mixed with the usual hearth gossip and romantic misadventures. The man who’d tried to cut my thumb off did not participate in such things, but neither was he unknown. People who approached the bar nodded at him and turned away; respect without friendship.

  I did my best to stay away from his end of the counter, but couldn’t for ever. He finished his flask of wine, raised one hand, caught my eye. I approached, fumbled a few words, tried again. “Can I get you something else?”

  “You read this?”

  He pushed a slip of thin yellow paper over the counter. On it, written in archaic German, was a time and a place. The handwriting was stiff, clumsy – as if each unfamiliar character were copied one line at a time from a dictionary, rather than a familiar, flowing thing. I nodded, swallowed. “Anything else?”

  He shook his head, tapped his empty cup three times on the wooden bar as if completing some ritual, rose and pushed his way through the crowd.

  Four hours later, I stood in the doorway of an old-town mansion as the evening rain sang down the water pipes and made the reclaimed cobbles shimmer like the sea. I closed my eyes against the night and stamped my feet and puffed into my cupped hands and wondered whether I’d leave with my fingers still attached.

  A few streets away, I heard a door slam, laughter, the clattering of a bike pushed along a slippery pavement. Someone tried to sing a few verses of a song – a Temple devotional, slurred and out of tune – before someone else louder and differently inebriated cut in with a Brotherhood anthem, a chorus of mankind’s strength and dominion.

  A cat meowed and a flock of pigeons darted away from their warm perches in the grassy roof above. Steam trickled from a vent by my feet, laced with the smell of pine.

  I checked my watch, wound it, checked it again, found barely thirty seconds had passed, pulled my coat tighter, listened. Behind a shutter, a light turned on, then off again, then back on. A figure moved, looking for something in the dark, disturbed by restless dreams or aching bones. They found it; moved back towards a bed. The light turned off again. At the end of the street, the low whine of an electric truck as it passed by, the splash of sheets of water spilling up from a blocked drain in the reclaimed rubber road, the gentle whoosh of a cooling fan from the
server office on the corner. Voices raised in the dark, passing by, fading away.

  After fifteen minutes, I thought of going. Even the heartiest of revellers were headed to bed, leaving only the long-night novices about their sleepy prayers, if they bothered to pray at all.

  I was half snoozing, swaying where I stood, when the car came. I had seen only a few private cars in my life. In Tseonom, the local clinic had one shared between whichever doctors were on call for the area, and in Bukarest the guardia and a few senior Assembly officials had possessed such things, but that was about the limit of it. Most farming hearths had their trucks and tractors, solar panels pressed to cabin roofs for an emergency recharge should they get stuck in the mud, battery packs swung in the middle of their chassis, but in a city like Vien these things were unusual status symbols, as vulgar as they were secretly, quietly envied.

  This car pulled up a few feet in front of me, headlights low, engine silent, and as I approached I had to bend almost double to peer at the reflective windows. Before I could get a good look inside, the door opened, pushing me back, and a voice said: “Oh – he’s wet.”

  I leant down to see the interior of the car. Three grey padded seats lined the back, the middle far smaller than the two either side. In the front were two more seats, both occupied, one by the man who had accosted me at the bar. In the back there was a man, a chiselled slab of human in a high-collared black jacket with translucent seashell buttons down the front and at his wrists.

  “Are you getting in?” he asked, when I didn’t move.

  “Are you going to cut my thumb off?”

  “Only if you don’t get in. Come on, I have an early meeting and would like to shower first.”

  If sleep was also on his list of things to do, he did not say. I got into the car, pulled the door shut awkwardly, clung to the seat in front of me, heard his little snort of derision. “Put your seatbelt on.”

  I fumbled with the belt he indicated, struggled with where my arms were meant to go in relation to the strap. He didn’t seem interested in my escapades, eyes fixed on the gently glowing inkstone in his lap. On this occasion he wore a ring, bearing the crossed axe and spade of the Brotherhood, oversized on a little finger. At the clip of my seatbelt locking shut, he looked up as if the sound were an alarm and passed me his inkstone.

  “Read this.”

  It nearly slipped from my grasp, but I held tight, tried to focus on the words through the strange movement of the car. It was written in archaic English and was largely a preamble about following health and safety guidelines as laid out in legislation, and the importance of ear defenders. In the top right corner was a string of numbers and letters, a serial number that made my heart sink. I flipped to the next page, and when this audacity didn’t elicit violence, kept reading. Soon the generic business gave way to more meaty topics, including guidelines on angles of ascension and declension, and the necessity of having a good wind sock.

  “Well?” asked the man at last.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “What do you make of it?”

  “It’s a training manual.”

  “I was looking for a little more insight.”

  “It’s a training manual for an armament. A mortar. This one is small, transported by one or two people. The explosive can fly over obstacles and be launched while in cover.”

  “What else?”

  “It’s a very dull read.”

  “Is it authentic?”

  “I don’t know, this is just a transcript, not the original. I’d have to see—”

  For the first time since I’d got in the car, the man turned his head to look me straight in the eye. “Is it authentic?” He repeated the question as if confused by my stupidity, baffled that I could still be talking when, clearly, there was nothing else to say.

  His eyes were blue, framed by the dark. The low white lights of the city pushed and pulled the shadows across his features as we sped down empty roads.

  I looked away, swallowed, kept on reading. “The syntax is right, and the grammar’s not bad,” I mumbled. “But archaic English was prone to breaking its own rules. Illustrations are wire-frame renderings, which isn’t unusual in technical guides of this time. There’s no data degradation I can see, although this is a transcript. But you’d expect something to have been lost, a few areas of missing or corrupted text from the original file, unless you were lucky and the hard drive was kept in natural cold storage that minimised contamination until unsealed. It’s also noticeable that there isn’t an exploded view of parts. Most manuals of this sort are designed to allow the operator to maintain their equipment in the field. That’s… curious. Do you have any cross-referencing material?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then I can’t definitively say.”

  “That’s disappointing.”

  I shrugged. “You’d rather I lie? You don’t need much to fake data from the burning; there’s still a thriving black market in snake oil and material sciences. Anyone who says this is authentic without cross-checking is an idiot.”

  I tossed the inkstone onto the empty seat between us, not quite having the guts to throw it in his face. We drove in silence a while, rain running in little sideways-stretched dribbles down the windows, the man from the bar watching me in the driver’s mirror from the front of the car. I found my reflection in the moving light across the glass fascinating, a hollow plucked-out version of how I imagined myself. My frizzy dark hair had grown out around my ears, making the face it framed seem smaller by comparison, green-grey eyes sinking into the sockets. The lines on my skin were deep enough to make my features appear crudely plugged together – a modular chin that didn’t match the modular eyebrows that someone had glued to a second-hand skull. I tried to see the man behind me in the reflection in the glass, but the shadows of the car were too deep, so it was to nothing much and no one in particular that I said: “The serial number at the top.” He didn’t move, hands laced across one folded leg, so I went on. “That’s a Temple librarian’s code. I don’t know the database it’s from, but I recognise the prefix. Highly classified – heretical. The kind of material that gets locked in an archive in some obscure mountain shrine. I don’t know if it’s real, and I absolutely don’t want to know where or how you got it, but if it’s fake, someone’s tried very hard to replicate Temple codes.”

  I turned back to examine my companion, who said nothing. Then he leant across, picked up his inkstone, turned it off, slipped it into a pouch on the side of his seat, smiled at nothing much, nodded at no one in particular and said: “Thank you. We’ll be in touch.”

  The car slowed. I didn’t move. He half-turned his head, seemed to look straight through me, waiting. I thought about opening my mouth to ask a question and instead fumbled with the handle of the door and let myself out, shaking and shivering, into the sodden night.

  Chapter 7

  During the spring festival in Tinics, we would walk into the forest to find the first purple flowers, and it was considered good luck to be the first to spot the buzzing bee or hear the call of the common cuckoo. Even after the forest burned, the Medj took us into its ruins and we would find lesser gifts from the growing land; new green shoots arising from the split-open trunks, or fresh moss on the stone within which lived insect upon insect, so that as your eye adjusted to their tiny wiggling bodies of vanilla, white and grey, you saw more again, and more, zooming down into the heart of the thing as a telescope may look up into the darkness and see nothing but stars.

  At the spring festival in Vien, people went to the temples to give offerings of money in exchange for good harvest, and many more protested outside saying it wasn’t fair that the priests grew fat on their living while citizens suffered, and Antti Col and his Brotherhood cronies made indignant speeches outside the Assembly about the harvest being man’s work, man’s toil, the land being carved by our will, not fickle, faithless nature.

  And in Tinics – in the place that had been my home – the forest g
rew.

  Between winter and spring, I was contacted four more times by the men from the bar. Each time was the same – a late-night pick-up, an archaic document scraped from ancient servers. Two were definitively false. One was almost certainly the genuine article, which I was ordered to translate in full. All of them were heresy.

  On my fifth encounter, I was summoned at 4 a.m. to a hearth near the old palace gardens. It was one of the few fully restored buildings of the old world, complete with tiny blue and green tiles woven into a zig-zag pattern across the floor, banisters of twisted iron, high windows of pure, not even solar, glass, and no more than two or three people living in it. I struggled to imagine inhabiting such a place, uncertain if I should walk on veined white stone or thick red carpet – or how many offerings had been made to the kakuy of earth and sky in thanks for the precious goods that built such a place. Not enough, I suspected. The mind that crafted such things did not have much capacity for humility before the sleepy spirit of the mountain.

  Dawn was a thin greyness on the horizon, and beneath the bending branches of the springtime trees the Medj were beginning their morning prayers, the sound of half-hearted chanting carried by a cold, damp breeze to the cracked-open windows of the first floor. Soon the lights would be turned off for the silver day, and the streets would clatter with bicycles and cargo carriers, and the server offices would power up their networks as the bathhouses filled with steam. Facing it all, back to the door and eyes to the window, there he was: my sometimes-master and unknown blackmailer, dressed now in an old-fashioned silver waistcoat, a glass held in one hand, the contents hidden from my sight by the broad curve of his fingers. A long desk of black wood stood between us, its top adorned with red leather – real leather, perhaps, the real skin of an actual animal, kept supple and buffed by I knew not what magic. On it was his inkstone, the words already turned towards me as if conversation were an inconvenience best left for daylight hours. I approached beneath hanging bulbs in resin-crystal fittings, noted the private server and computer on the desk, the pictures on the wall of long-faded heroes’ valiant deeds, the abstract illustrations and even one crackling, deep-dark work of monotheism that could well have been genuine, depicting a Christian saint with hands upturned towards a trumpeting angel. I had seen no sign that this man believed in anything at all, and the picture seemed to hang as part of a cultural history, a landmark in the journey of how the world came from there to here.