Notes from the Burning Age

by Claire North

  I kept out of her line of sight, positioning myself in corners and behind inkstone and briefcase, little more than portable furniture in human form. From here, I watched Yue. She walked some three metres behind Jia, buried in the older woman’s entourage. Where Jia’s stick-like straightness bespoke a harsh dignity, Yue was a metal string pulled between two rods, humming with a tension ready to snap. Her hair was braided either side, close to her skull; her tunic was crow-black, her hands encased in thin grey gloves. She carried her inkstone like a weapon, ready to draw and smash against her opponents, and her eyes scanned left and right, up and down, taking in everything like a cat who is unsure if it sees prey or a trap.

  Everything except me.

  For a moment, I thought of calling out to her, stepping out and catching her hand.

  I did not.

  Somewhere, hundreds of miles away, the forest was coming back to life. Vae never would.

  “The mining – strip mining! When the kakuy wake…”

  “When the kakuy wake, when the kakuy wake, when the hell did the kakuy last wake?”

  Voices half-heard through the door, arguments about politics, war, a glimpse of Yue at the back, in the room but not of it, stiff and straight as the winter pine.

  “The kakuy don’t care about borders; what happens in Maze will affect us all!”

  Georg sticks his head out of the room to murmur: “More alcohol. This will be a delight.”

  I nod and go to fetch another bottle. The door closes tight behind Georg, blocking out the little trickle of sound I had been so attentively noting from the gloom.

  I find Krima vaMiyani sat on a long balcony round the side of the room where Jia and her cohorts argued and raged, booted feet up on the railing, a drink of something fruity and full of seeds by her side, hat pulled across her eyes to block out the hard winter sun. Seeing her, I immediately move to retreat, but before I can she says: “Kadri Tarrad, isn’t it?”

  I freeze, turn, wait.

  “Georg’s assistant. I’ve seen you scurrying around in his wake. Do you love him?”

  “What?” I blurt.

  She tilts the hat a little back from her eyes, revealing eyebrows like razorblades, cobalt-black skin and lips painted shocking crimson, so bright on her face it is almost impossible to see anything but her thin, polite smile. “Do you love him?”

  “No. I don’t love him.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “Depends what you mean.”

  “That’s a no, then. Are you greedy? I know you used to steal secrets from Temple.”

  From behind the door to her left, I hear voices raised in a sudden gale, then subsiding again. Her eyes don’t leave my face as mine flicker to door, to sky, to my shoes and finally back to her. “It occurs to me,” I say at last, “if you could convince me to spy for you between now and the time it takes for someone to miss you, that would probably be one of the fastest recruitments in the history of espionage.”

  She tuts and shakes her head. “On the contrary. The only way I could recruit you in the few charming seconds we have would be if I had spent months researching you to establish precisely how to leverage my approach. You may experience this moment as an instant, but I know how much work has gone into it. I know that there are gaps in your story, Kadri. Things even Georg doesn’t know.”

  “Perhaps – but I’m not convinced you know them either. All you can see are the empty places, not what should fill them.”

  “I am chief of security for Council itself. I can find out.”

  “You can threaten me, of course. But you have to consider how scared I am of Georg. And I am. I am scared of him.”

  She sighs, shakes her head. The moment is gone. She has lost interest, returned to lounging in the last dredges of sun. Did this encounter even happen? Who’s to say.

  “Too bad,” she muses, soft as autumn rain. “Too bad.”

  Two days later, Jia was gone, and Yue with her, riding the train back to Bukarest.

  “That’s enough for now,” Georg mused, as I closed the shutters across the study windows. “That’s enough.”

  I nodded, picked up my things, turned to leave, my standard dismissal.

  “Will you drink?”

  I stopped in the door, turned slowly, looked at him, found myself wanting to look away – a habit I thought I had broken in our months of association. He had turned from his customary position by the window to gaze directly at me, and when I didn’t immediately answer he nodded towards the decanter on the cabinet by the wall. I put my bag down, walked numbly to the vessel, poured – one for him, one for me – returned to where he stood, handed his drink over, stood dumb as he held it up.

  “You are supposed to chink your glass,” he explained. “It is a tradition of the Burning Age.”

  I knocked my glass against his, surprised at the heaviness of it, the depth of its ring. He drained his drink down in a single gulp, so I followed suit. The alcohol burned all the way to my stomach, a sickly-sweet taste of plum and syrup lingering on my tongue. Georg gestured at his couch. I sat, knees together, hands wrapped round my empty glass, and waited. He slipped into his desk chair, rolling back a little into its tanned depths, watched me, said at last: “What do you believe, Kadri Tarrad?”

  I thought about the question a long, long time. I had learned that it was always better to stop and think, where Georg was concerned.

  “Nothing,” I said at last. “But there are things I know to be true, which you might call beliefs. I know that humanity was once master of this world. I know that there was a time when everyone had a car, and big houses, and… well, maybe not everyone. But it was the aspiration. We aspired. We made our choices.”

  “You’re just quoting Antti’s speeches – my speeches,” he chided. “I asked what you believe.”

  “I told you. Nothing. None of this makes a difference to me. None of this changes a damn about who I am, or what I do.”

  “That seems… disappointing. For you, I mean. On a personal level.”

  I blinked, swallowed every other flutter of feeling that threatened to run across my face. In my time knowing him, I had never heard Georg express anything to do with sorrow, or joy, or any shred of human experience beyond the turning of the sun and the march of an idea. I thought I should say something, claw back the moment to some time before he had found a place in his heart to judge me, couldn’t find anything worth saying.

  He spared me the effort. “You come from Lyvodia, yes?”

  I nodded.

  “Where in Lyvodia?”

  “Tseonom.”

  “So you would have been a child when the forest burned?”

  In the place where the red leaves fall above a roaring river, the kakuy dies. Close my eyes and the forest is in me, burning still. I understand now that it will burn until the day I die.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did it look like?”

  “It… there was a lot of smoke. I saw blackness, but heard the fire. They took the children away. They kept us safe.”

  In the ashes of the night, Mama Taaq does not comfort her daughter who sits in the back of the ambulance. Tomorrow she will. Tonight Vae has died, and even the adults are human when the rain falls.

  “Did they tell you why the fire started?”

  I shook my head.

  “Do you know?”

  “I found out later. The old Chief Minister, he wanted a new… something… a road… but the Medj told him it would damage too much. They said the forest protected the land, and cutting down so much would bring harm and the anger of the kakuy. So he burned it all, because he could, and the kakuy did not stop him.”

  “No. They didn’t.”

  “Neither did he build his road,” I added, a little sharper than I meant, and he replied with a knife-edge look, a cutting into my soul, an inquiry that ripped through my bones and out the other side. “These things have always been… obscure,”
I stumbled. “When the forest burned, the land suffered. Mudslides and floods, crop failures, wild beasts attacking, stinking summers and freezing nights. Was this because the kakuy were wrathful? Or was it because trees have roots that bind the soil together in heavy rain? Temple says that these things are one and the same.”

  “What do you think?”

  I half-closed my eyes. “I don’t, any more.”

  Georg’s lips drew in thin, a tiny motion I had learned to recognise over many years. Not exactly displeasure, but a sign of something to come, a change in the air. Then he barked: “Come with me.”

  I followed, scuttling to keep up as he marched down through the building, to a small triangular door set in the wall beneath a staircase, then down again. The cellar was cold and dry, the walls lined with inactive hard drives, boxed-up files and spare batteries, some large enough to boost a car, some tiny enough to slip into an inkstone. At the back was a low white door, with bolts at top and bottom. I had never been through it, never seen it unlocked, but now it opened with a juddering, time-warped scrape along the earth. Beyond was a smaller room, adapted for storage and then abandoned again, the remnants of fans and coolers still visible hanging from the walls, a shocking waste of valuable resources. In the middle, beneath a long white strip of lights, was a stool, and sitting on the stool was a man.

  His nose was broken, the blood across his face so smeared by beating it was hard to tell the source of each splattered bleed. Spit, snot, tears and the broken liquids of shattered bones all mixed together to create rivers through the crimson, and he held one hand close to his chest – a hand from which two fingers and a thumb had already been removed. Klem, my next-door neighbour from the cold, stern hearth, sat against the back wall, reading. Sohrab doodled on his inkstone.

  Georg pulled the door behind us closed, shutting in the cold and stink of iron. The bloody man looked up slowly, struggled to find focus, looked away. I huddled against the wall, trying to vanish into it as I had when Yue walked by. Georg said: “He’s a spy. Sent by the Council. One of Krima’s, meant to undermine us. Council says it doesn’t interfere in Provincial democracy, and here he is.”

  The man shook his head but didn’t speak, as if this were an ancient argument between old friends – no point continuing it now. Georg patted him on the shoulder, a gesture he’d performed on me a hundred thoughtless times, a habit that had seemed paternal and now would never be the same again. “Jia thinks Maze is going to split from the Provinces. They think we have fallen to humanism.”

  I looked from Georg to the man in the chair and back again. The childishness of it struck me suddenly, so hard I nearly laughed, and I had to squeeze my arms around my chest to hold in the bizarre hysteria.

  “Would you?” Georg asked, and he had a knife in his hand. I had not seen him pick it up from a shelf or be handed it by my digit-clipping neighbour. It had a wooden handle, a folding steel blade. I took it, resting the tip on my left hand, like a royal sceptre. Georg gestured towards the man in the chair, who coughed on what might have been a whimper, a cry for mercy. I stepped towards him. He started to cry, not loudly, but with hiccupping gasps of breath. Somewhere through the stink of blood there was the high acid of urine and the severed fibres of the butcher’s yard.

  I shook my head, stepped away.

  “No.” I turned the blade, offered the handle back to Georg. He didn’t take it, one eyebrow raised – another familiar gesture, the mountain buckling before the volcano bursts. “Get him to organise your spreadsheets,” I snapped, tilting my chin towards Sohrab, who barely lifted his eyes from his inkstone. “Get him to run your errands or translate archaic text. When these two” – I indicated Sohrab and Klem – “can tell the difference between data corruption from degraded hard drives and random letters thrown in by a greedy forger, then come back to me and I’ll do your dirty work.”

  “You’re sacked,” Georg replied.

  I shrugged, and as no one seemed willing to take the knife, I folded the blade, walked to the door, laid it down. Perhaps the bloody man might make a run for it, have a chance; I doubted it, but he eyed that weapon with a sudden alertness that could be his doom.

  “Pack your belongings and leave the hearth,” added Georg as I jostled with the warped door, my exit somewhat undermined by its slow drag across the floor.

  I nodded, hesitated, put my hands together in front of my heart, and bowed.

  Then I turned and walked away from the killing room, leaving behind my boss, two murderers and a living corpse.

  Chapter 13

  Here I am.

  Packing up my life.

  The room in the hearth is small and grey. I have not filled it with possessions. Temple teaches us that the valuing of material things is how the Burning Age fell. We do not need to buy pretty things to prove our worth. From the earth we come, to the earth we shall return, and no gold or silver will change the crumbling of our bones.

  Here, whispers Lah in my ear – here is the fellowship of your kin.

  Here, proclaims Nadira as she stands upon the hill – here is the wind and there is the road. Travel it, and see where it will take you.

  Here, calls out Vae in her child’s sing-song. Here is the forest! Come into the forest, come play!

  Here, tuts Georg. Here. Here are men who dream bigger than all that.

  There is a telephone in the kitchen. Spin the dialler and listen to it clickety-clack, a sprung shudder as it waits for the next number. I could call the guardia. I could call someone. I do not. Winter has turned the world monochrome. The yellow lights of the hearth are the only colour in a world drained to grey. Even the streetlamps are the white of snow, picking out stardust in the ice below.

  I think I feel hungry, but it is not hunger. The idea of eating enthrals and terrifies me.

  I fold my clothes, smoothing out the creases, sleeve over chest, taking up the smallest, neatest place in the bag. The first train to Bukarest won’t leave for another three hours. The journey will take approximately seventeen hours, with a change in Budapesht. Usually I’d take the night train, setting off just after supper and arriving in time for a brunch of hot bread, fresh tomato and cheese. I wonder what I will say when I go home. I wonder if the lake around the temple has frozen again, and if the novices go skating when their chores are done.

  Downstairs, the telephone is silent above the kitchen sink. No one calls, and neither do I.

  Most of what I own is on an inkstone. My clothes fit in a bag across my shoulder. I took no memorabilia with me nor made anything here that was worth remembering. The burning is over, but on the surface of the moon there is a portrait of a man’s family, left by an astronaut hundreds of years ago who was allowed to carry no more than that little weight with him into space. I have no pictures of my past, nothing worth remembering in my present.

  I pull my sleeves down over my wrists, adjust my bag over my shoulder, head for the door. There are a couple of floorboards which squeak loudly; I avoid them on automatic, glance into the courtyard below as I pass the window, see the turned-over mud which in spring will be a lettuce patch and stems of garlic, carrot and potato, the winding tendrils of the sweet pea. There had been days when I was almost happy in the garden, helping tie fresh growth to the trellis wall, nibbling on the first pods of the harvest. My feet carry me away.

  The gate is timber coated with the slick resin from the algae vats. I push it open just wide enough to let myself out into the dark, trying to keep the screeching to a minimum. Outside, sitting on the bonnet of his car, Klem is waiting for me. There is still some blood on the side of his neck, fresh from his work in the cellar. I stop and stare at him. He does not smile. Nods once. Puts a hand on my arm, guides me into the open passenger door and slams it shut behind me.

  Chapter 14

  There is a shrine a few miles outside the city, built on stilts above the wet earth. When the Ube floods, the water rises up beneath it until it appears to float in an inland sea. At such times, you must reach it by b
oat, the slippery green steps vanished beneath the river’s skin. It boasts no resident Medj nor lay acolytes; it stands so the fishermen may stop when reeling in the nets and give thanks to the kakuy of the river and the blessings that the water gave and the life that will feed them until they perish. Not many people visit these days.

  The wooden structure is little more than a platform with a small roofed shed at one end, where the liquid form of the kakuy of the Ube is represented in ancient fused glass pulled from the landfill mines. Offerings of bits of net and the occasional hook are left before it, along with the more traditional incense and alcohol. Unlike the larger temples, these offerings are not regularly cleaned out by the novices, and the wax candles have spilt rivers of white and yellow down the altar like a frozen waterfall. The Medj in Maze long ago grew neglectful of their tasks, and on that night of waning moon, the river stank of something chemical, and white foam bubbled and shifted on the surface like oil on silt, cracking the thin sheet of ice that was trying to form.

  It was a strange place for an execution, I thought, but so be it. The tide was low enough that I could see the stairs to the single hanging lantern above the wooden gateway to the shrine, and towards these I was waved, Klem waiting below as if the idea of setting foot on sanctified ground displeased him.

  I climbed the steps, clinging to the rail as my feet skidded on decades of tide-washed grime that never fully dried, that was too alive to freeze. One candle burned in the altar; three more hung in lanterns round the high-beamed timber frame of this little floating pavilion, peeking through fat-coned icicles. There was no electricity, nor any attempt to generate it, just the creaking timbers of the floor and the smell of mud. A small wooden bench was set to the side of the shrine for the older fishermen to sit on after a long day’s contemplation. Here, bent over and ankles crossed, was Georg. He looked smaller than I had ever seen him, older, as if the presence of the kakuy took something from him. Or perhaps he was going to sleep – perhaps this night was the one night of the year when he actually closed his eyes and snored like a hibernating bear. His breath puffed in clouds captured by yellow candlelight, rolling up towards the moon. He didn’t look at me as I approached. Georg never looked at much that wasn’t inside his own head. I stood before the shrine for a moment, contemplating my next move. Then I put my hands together and bowed. Here, now, seemed as good a time as any.