Notes from the Burning Age

by Claire North

  My observations had taken too long, for now he half-turned from the window to glance at me. “Well?”

  I picked up the inkstone, read the first page, flipped to the second, stopped, read again, went back a page, forward a page, stopped. Put the inkstone down and, for the first time since I had met this man, held his gaze.

  If this surprised him, he did not show it. Not an eyelash quivered in contemplation. “Yes?”

  “It is a military paper on the use of radioactive substances in assassination.”

  “Is it genuine?”

  My lips curled against my teeth, and I did not answer.

  Now he turned fully, his shoulders following the angle of his neck as if a rod pinned him to the ground, around which he spun in sections.

  “Is it genuine?”

  “Probably. I am familiar with at least one of the cases it cites.”

  “Good. You will provide a full translation by sixth day.”

  “No.”

  Not an eye twitched, not a capillary flushed, but the corner of his mouth curled, almost as if he would smile. “No?”

  “No. You have an inside source feeding you the kind of heresies that would make Temple inquisition bleed from the eyes, but you need me to verify and translate it. Fine. Pay me.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because my service is valuable to you.”

  “I think you forget the nature of our relationship.”

  “I don’t. Hurting me doesn’t do anything for you. It destroys a resource you want to use. When we met, you called me ‘Medj of the Temple of the Lake’. I never said which temple I was from. You knew about me long before you brought the knives out, knew I wasn’t Kadri Tarrad. You left me alone until I was useful. You have use of me. I’m not greedy; it won’t be too expensive. But I want more. Pay me.”

  Slowly, he sat down, put the glass to one side, splayed his hands out across the desk one finger at a time. “I can see why you found the limited ambitions of your colleagues so frustrating. How much do you want?”

  “Two hundred bi for every translation of fifty pages or less. More to be calculated on a per-page rate based on this figure thereafter. Illustrations still count as pages. And a retainer of one hundred bi a month.”

  “That is, of course, absurd.”

  “Any other translator would charge you twice as much and report you for heresy. It’s a bargain and you know it.”

  “Do not overestimate your value.”

  “I think I have estimated it accurately, based on the current market.”

  The fingers on his left hand rippled, a motion picked up by his right, little finger to little finger across the desk. For a moment, his eyes looked past me, and I wondered if his thugs were waiting for a cue, knives ready, cracked knuckles and dark eyes. It took a physical clenching of my belly, a tightening of my fists, not to turn to check. Then he appeared to relax, nodded once and said: “Very well. But you will increase your output for us, and if we require other services you will comply quickly and without question – fully paid, of course. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  “Excellent. Take the translation. You will deliver it on fifth day.”

  He gestured loosely at the inkstone. I picked it up, swiped the files to my own, returned it to the desk, made to leave, found no monsters standing behind me, no cudgels raised to bash in my skull, stopped, looked back.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “You may call me Georg,” he replied, and turned to contemplate the rising sun.

  So began my involvement with the Brotherhood, heresy and the war.

  Chapter 8

  When I joined the Temple as a layman of the academic review board, my professor, Lah of the Temple of the Lake, sat me down in their little office above the courtyard of pine and pebble and said:

  “In the basement of this temple we have a shelf of hard drives recovered and transcribed from the burning. They contain information on medical experiments conducted on prisoners of war and civilian populations across conflicts down the eras. Nerve gas, bacterial warfare, chemical bombs. Weaponised viruses that turned a body’s immune system against itself, killing the young before killing the old. Compounds that sent a person blind, blistering the skin, the lungs; people drowning in their own fluids. Many were tortured; many died. People were experimented on based on their race and sexual orientation, or allowed to suffer with treatable conditions so that physicians could learn how death progressed. They have been declared heretical, abhorrent, but the academic review board has a duty to review heresies on an ongoing basis with one question in mind: Who are we now? Before the burning, it was considered heretical for women to behave in a manner considered male. Then these words changed – ‘female’, ‘male’. They have changed again since that time. What is our new morality? What is our new heresy? What would you do with this information, kin of sky and earth? What would you do for those who lived, and those who died?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied.

  “Someone must decide. The burden falls on us. Three thousand words on these points by tomorrow afternoon, please.”

  That was when I was Ven Marzouki, before I became Kadri Tarrad, before Nadira came to me and said, “If you can stick your thumb in your assailant’s windpipe, it really is very effective.”

  That was before I saw Yue again.

  The Temple of the Lake in Bukarest was close to the local Assembly. Every winter and summer, the Chief Minister of Lyvodia would come and make offerings and drink hot tea with the priests and walk the grounds around the wide waters and discuss matters both theological and political. When I was a novice, Ull had only just been elected Chief Minister and felt it important to be seen nodding and paying polite attention to the words of the Medj who prayed beneath the spider-silk tree.

  Sometimes, protesters came too, a dozen or so men and women with placards waved outside the temple doors. I was sent to offer them tea, and sometimes they took it, and sometimes they threw the cups on the floor, smashing the thin worked clay, which I swept up and used as ballast at the bottom of potted plants.

  “Separation of church and state!” one man screamed in my face, when I asked him if he wanted a biscuit. “The Temple keeps us down!”

  “Did you know,” I asked politely, “that the idea of ‘separation of church and state’ is from an era known as the Enlightenment? It was an age in which humankind attempted to redefine its internal relationship with itself – with power and tyranny and justice – and its external relationship with the world, i.e. God, and through God, the planet.”

  The man just kept on chanting, his spittle flying in my face, which seemed a terrible waste of good tea.

  After, as we watched Ull cycle away with his entourage back to the Assembly of Bukarest, Lah stood beside me in the half-open sliding door of their little room by the turned vegetable patch, sighed and said: “It is our own fault that the protesters are here. No one else is to blame.”

  I was silent. It was usually best to be silent when Lah was about to speak of things that troubled them.

  “Before the Provinces united – when we were simply Lyvodia and Maze and Damasc and the Delta, and so on – Temple sent missionaries out across the lands in an attempt to convince each nation that we were one, humble beneath mother earth and father sky. Yet our most convincing argument was not one of universal fellowship, of compassion and justice and the beauty of this shared, sacred earth. Our most convincing argument was simply this: do not go to war, lest you wake the kakuy. The kakuy are hardly seen any more, but the memory of the creatures that crushed the cities and scoured humanity from the plains takes a long time to fade, even from the fickle memories of humanity. Fear brought the Provinces together in alliance. Fear created the Council to represent all of us as one; fear created the common laws of Assembly, democracy and peace. But fear is exhausting. Effective, but exhausting. And to the eyes of those who see Council as a tool of oppression, as a mouthpiece for the Temple that helped
create it, there is nothing in our prayers that is not poison. They say that Temple inquisitors have infiltrated every corner of the Provinces – that our spies manipulate Assembly and government. When we say no, no, inquisitors are meant to stop the spread of nerve agents and automatic weaponry, all they hear is fear. Fear of the past. Fear of change. Fear of what humanity could be. The kakuy teach us that every breath of air is a gift, that the first shoot of spring green is a wonder to behold. But it is easier to be big and loud in your terror than to be tiny in your gratitude. We are to blame.”

  “What are we going to do about it?” I asked, young and naïve as I was.

  Lah laughed, a single bark in the settling gloom. “I have no idea. Like the peoples of the Burning Age, I fear we see our ending come – and cannot imagine that we ourselves can prevent it. More tea, novice?”

  In the years between then and now, only one thing has been consistent: as humankind squabbled and bickered, fought for power, prestige and status, back in Tinics the forest grew.

  Chapter 9

  This is how I became part of the Brotherhood, sworn to justice, humanism and the triumph of the human race.

  From translating texts, I was one night summoned to receive some stolen data myself.

  “My usual courier is indisposed,” Georg sighed. “You’ll have to make the drop.”

  “Fine. You’ll pay me double.”

  He grinned, less at my cheek and more, I felt, because he had predicted that I would be cheeky and was glad at the accuracy of his guess. “You’ll be paid by the hour. It should take you less than two.”

  A Medj, face hidden in hood and shadow, whispered to me through the side gate of the Temple of the River: “It’s worth at least five times that!” but I had orders to only pay nine hundred bi for the datastick they slipped me, and they didn’t stay to argue the point.

  I knew how it felt to be that scuttling priest, slipping back into their dormitory in temple grounds, and felt neither sympathy nor fear that night.

  “Well?” Georg asked.

  “It’s a collection of books on the theme of self-empowerment through wealth accumulation. ‘Visualise yourself rich. Then make it happen. No university will teach you this secret. Belief unlocks your human potential and—’”

  Georg waved me to silence. “What a shame,” he sighed. “Another waste of time.”

  From receiving stolen data, I graduated to attending occasional meetings with not only Georg but also Kun Mi, Brika and Tanacha, introduced to me as senior policy figures within the Brotherhood’s political wing. They rarely wanted my opinion on their ideas – tightening abortion laws to encourage births, changing laws on inheritance, re-writing press codes to force journalists to merely report what they said rather than comment on its factuality – but occasionally Georg would turn to me and say: “Did they do this in the burning?” and I would answer yay or nay, and very little more was needed from me.

  One night, after another such meeting, Georg turned to me and said: “What do you think of those three?”

  “I think they’re so blinded by their own personal desire to get rich and get respect that they wouldn’t recognise a good idea if it punched them in the face.”

  He beamed, nodded, brisk and bright, and proclaimed: “Yes. That’s precisely how I feel on the matter.”

  And every month or so Georg passed me another document to translate or verify, and there it was at the top of every page, that little line of numbers and letters that marked the text below as classified, heretical, profane in Temple eyes. He never said where these documents were coming from, and I knew better than to ask.

  Then one day towards the end of summer, he marched up to where I sat huddled over a stolen text and proclaimed: “You are now making the same wage as a medium-salaried assistant within my office. You will start here full-time next first day.”

  “Will I?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you will be quickly promoted, you will be safe, you will be part of one of the greatest movements in human history, and you’ll no longer have to mop up vomit from the front step of the bar. Yes?”

  “May I have a day to think about it?”

  “If you really think it’s necessary. I do not.”

  I quit the bar that very night and was moved to a side office in the same magnificent restored building which Georg had made his home. My work evolved again, from collecting data, performing mildly illicit acts and translating heresy to secretarial work for the Brotherhood itself, planning rallies and editing addresses by its elected Voices in the Assembly, researching talking points for debates, and cataloguing a never-ending stream of spreadsheets and databases of members, assets, resources and the occasional enemy.

  “That is Ayodele,” Georg murmured in my ear one day as we listened to a female voice on the radio proclaiming the need for urgent Temple reform and social dialogue. “She is trouble.”

  Four weeks later, a file with her name crossed my desk, sealed tight. I steamed it open in the local bathhouse, read it by torchlight, closed it up before passing it on to Georg. A week after that, Ayodele stood down from the Assembly, citing personal reasons, and in the by-election that followed her seat fell to the Brotherhood, and Georg invited me to his office for a toast.

  “The good stuff,” he explained, as I filled the glasses on the table. “Seeing how far we’ve come.”

  In the evening, I still translated archaic texts, ranging from the banal to the petrifying.

  hey why arnt u ansring my calls? just call me back ok. I ddnt mean the thing i said. your being a child.

  So many ancient servers were full of noise, noise, noise. Broken images of pets, babies and food. Messages from lovers and enemies long since dead, their passions recorded in stiff fonts and binary numbers.

  babe i luv u wat u want 4 food? u seen what M said?

  Even in the best-kept archives, you had to wade through the voices of the burning, peel back their lives to find the good stuff, the proper heresy for an ancient age.

  People believe what they want to believe. Tell them what they want to hear. Social media moves faster than fact-checkers, so as long as you…

  Improve your Spanish! Tres tristes tigres tragaban trigo en un trigal en tres tristes trastos. En tres tristes trastos tragaban trigo tres tristes tigres.

  As the number of neutrons increase in the atom, it becomes unstable…

  Six months after Georg started paying me for my work, I moved into a Brotherhood hearth built around the columns of what had once been a raised road just for cars. Segments had collapsed down the centuries, leaving only odd standing pillars of the past, on the top of which flocks of sparrows had made their homes, startling in black clouds at the shadow of a predator overhead.

  Though this new place was more like the hearths I knew, with shared food at a shared table, there were no women in it, and chores were enforced as icy discipline rather than familial co-operation. The hydroponic walls were untended; the fish tanks empty. Conversation was the same litany of complaints every evening– of men who felt disappointed with their lot, held back from advancement, punished for failing to conform, unable to make something more. Men trapped within a system where the respect of your hearth was considered more valuable than your material possessions; where money did not pass to your children and the generation of wealth was not considered an accurate reflection of your contribution to society.

  “I want to be a man,” muttered a Brotherhood devotee called Sohrab as we bathed together in the hot tubs below the apartments, the light through the skylight above playing sunset orange and gold across his skin. “There was a time when that meant something. There was a time when it wasn’t heresy to be strong.”

  There were other hearths where the women lived, and perhaps the conversation there was much the same. I had never lived with just one sex before.

  When the rain broke, washing away the last heat of sticky summer, Georg stood with the windows of the office wide open
, smelling the city open beneath the deluge, hands out to catch the fat drops as they pooled in his palm, and said: “How did air conditioning work?”

  “A similar principle to artificial refrigeration,” I answered. The sky blistered purple and yellow, ocean grey and midnight blue, as though the heavens had held their breath and could gasp no more. “When a liquid converts to a gas, it absorbs heat. Compounds flowing through a closed system would constantly evaporate and condense. When they evaporated, they cooled the pipes they flowed through. When they condensed, they released the heat to the outside world.”

  “Why don’t we do that now?”

  “Temple declared it heresy. They said that the chemicals were dangerous, and that making heat in order to move heat away from you just made more heat, and that if you heated up the world in order to keep your parlour cool, you were not living by the ways of the kakuy.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think that trying to stay cool on a hot planet by heating up the planet more… in the long run isn’t a winning idea. It would, as the Medj say, displease the kakuy.”