Notes from the Burning Age

by Claire North

  “I sat through a great deal of philosophy before I was allowed to use invisible ink. Military trainers try to exhaust soldiers into quitting; in the inquisition they see if they can bore you to death. It is a good test for any agent.” At Lah’s disapproving grunt, I added: “But I do remember a few things. Strike the bell once, quietly, a call to attention. Strike it again, a little louder, to invite all who hear it to settle. Then strike it loud and clear, to call to the kakuy within you, who lives not in the past of human suffering, nor in the future of human aspirations, but in this moment, now, breathing in and breathing out the gift of the wind. I think there may also have been a poem you could recite, if you were feeling especially pious; I forget that part.”

  “There are in fact two poems – a profoundly moving verse on the nature of existence, and a somewhat more jaunty limerick we teach to the children visiting on family fun days. It’s good to get them while they’re young, yes?”

  “Please don’t say it like that.”

  “I thought you’d approve. Practicalities over philosophy.”

  We stood a moment more in silence, as the afternoon light slipped into a pinkish haze. Then Lah said: “Nearly time. You should ring the bell.”

  “I don’t know the poem – or the limerick.”

  “So? It’s just words. The world is changing. Who knows when this bell will ring again? You’ll feel like an absolute barnacle if you don’t do this now.”

  “Tell me, when you trained – presumably back in the age of fire and steel – did the temple do classes in sombre piety, austere reverence?”

  “I’m so old I couldn’t possibly remember. Ring the bell, Ven. Now’s the time.”

  The ringing lived a little longer in my ears than I think it did on the air, and then even that died away, and I did not think the bell would ring again.

  “Well done,” Lah said. “Now off you go. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t and so on.”

  I nodded once and, picking up my bicycle helmet, went to flee the city.

  Chapter 39

  Two hours before curfew, three people, the last novices of the Temple of the Lake and an inquisitor, slipped out a back door into the evening light. The woman I sent ahead, as she seemed to have a steady head on her shoulders, pedalling on a bicycle with panniers full of clean towels, painkillers, antiseptics and gleaming ceramic blades for cutting through tissue or snipping an umbilical cord.

  “You are summoned to a patient whose labour has come on early. You cannot be delayed.”

  “I am concerned about a breech birth,” she confirmed calmly. “Even though I have complete confidence in the physicians, I have been assigned as this woman’s midwife for five months, and it is my duty to be there as an emotional support as well as to lend any practical aid I can.”

  I beamed, tapped two knuckles on the top of her bicycle helmet and sent her on her way.

  “Will Esa be all right?” asked the other novice as we closed the door on her retreating back. He was a flat-nosed boy by the name of Salo, considered by Lah to be mostly interested in the idea of priesthood as an easy, simple life where no one would ask too much of him or bother him particularly. What a shock would await him there, cackled the old Medj. The arguments over how to cook peas! The relentless bickering over the best way to transcend the need to bicker! No one bitches like a bitchy little Medj.

  “She’ll be fine. You…?”

  “I am a plumber,” he babbled, too fast, a thing remembered, not understood. “I work for the civil water board. I am working the night shift at the downstream station on the Bovita; my responsibilities include maintenance, monitoring water pressure and on- and off-site repairs. I have been working there for two years. I am still learning a lot.”

  “What are you learning?”

  “I am studying the use of robots to explore and highlight areas for repair in mains water pipes. I am studying for my grade one.”

  “What’s the most commonly used type of robot in this work?”

  “I… I don’t know.”

  “Make something up. They won’t know either.”

  “I… um…”

  “‘It has a proper technical name, but we just call it the squid.’”

  His face drooped in relief and terror. “Yes, I… I see. I see what you did, earth-kin.”

  “Don’t call me that. How’s the wig?”

  “I thought it would be more itchy.”

  “I’m sure it’ll grow less comfortable. Come on.”

  Cycling through the streets of Bukarest. Have I ever looked at this city properly, now I am saying goodbye? Was there always music playing from an open window above the park? Did the white-crowned crows always turn their heads so quickly at the rattling of wheels on old road? The sky is pastel purple, a half-moon the size of my thumb overhead between the criss-crossed walls of the hearths that hem us in, vanishing and reappearing between structures of this place.

  We made it nearly two kilometres before the first roadblock, a line of guardia standing down the middle of the street, flagging down those few electric vehicles that passed, the many bicycles streaming by. The queue was nearly fifteen minutes long, a line of tired men and women trying to get home before the curfew started. Work must go on; just because there’s a war on doesn’t mean people won’t want their curtains cleaned.

  Salo pressed in close to me as we neared the checkpoint, gripping his false identification as if it were the wriggling head of a venomous snake.

  “Mains water and sewage,” I explained briskly, as we reached the head of the line. “Heading to Bovita outlet number three.”

  The guardia read my papers. “Open the bags please,” she intoned, repetition having made the words numb.

  I smiled politely, unclipped the pannier bags on the back of my bicycle, stood well back. The smell of raw sewage and septic tank rose up in a hot wave, cutting through with an acrid immediacy to the tear ducts and settling in a chemical stink on the back of the throat.

  “In the name of…” began the guardia, then stopped herself, lest she invoke the kakuy of sun and moon or some other suddenly unfashionable imprecation to ideas that were quickly going to become unpopular in her chosen profession. “Can’t you clean that?”

  “Why?” I asked, with polite confusion. “We’re going back into the tunnels tonight. What’s the point?”

  “That can’t be healthy.”

  “We have chemical showers,” blurted Salo, trying to do his bit. “It’s perfectly safe.”

  The guardia looked at him for a long moment, but it was not the scepticism of an officer observing a spy that sharpened her gaze, rather the crooked manner of one who can’t quite believe the things people get up to, despite all that she’s seen.

  She waved us on, turning her nose away from our mutual stench, and I dinged my bell merrily as we cycled by.

  Esa was waiting for us beneath a low grey bridge above a thin artificial channel of water that flowed out of the city towards the wider river. Salo half-bowed towards her in joy as he dismounted, catching himself only when he saw the look of disapproval flash across her face, and awkwardly hugged her instead.

  “Any trouble?” I asked.

  “I had to describe the process of a caesarean,” she replied matter-of-factly as we huddled in the gloom of the bridge. “Thankfully, once I got into the details of cutting through the uterine sac and releasing the amniotic fluid, he quickly lost interest.”

  I grinned, rummaging with half-attention through my bicycle bags to make sure the wrapped hard drives were still safely stowed below. “You should have joined the inquisition, sky-kin.”

  “Lah says I’m a good all-rounder,” she answered without a smile. “Where now?”

  “We wait for it to get fully dark, then follow the path another kilometre or so. There’s no in and out of the city without army permission, so main roads are out, but once we cross the old highway there are just fields and some woodland, and then a straight line down to the Ube. The river will be heavily patro
lled, but our friends will be waiting until dawn. That gives us nearly ten hours. Lose everything from your bags that isn’t essential – if we get stopped here on in, no cover story will help.”

  We tossed everything except the hard drives and a few bottles of water into the sluggish canal, then pushed our bicycles up the old ramp onto the bridge and turned south. The canal had once been flanked by busy roads, but time had changed the city’s shape and now smaller paths of pressed gravel and black tyre repurposed into sullen paths criss-crossed between hearth and greenhouse. Trees sprouted through a place where once there had been a terracotta roof; tendrils of green rolled like tongues through the long-cracked windows of old warehouses, and only from above could you see the straight grid-like scars of the old tarmacked roads, framed by the oldest trees that had survived the greatest storms. In the settling night, a dog barked, and the electric hum of a guardia vehicle was drowned out momentarily by the ugly chuntering and bitter bellow of a newer, combustion-driven army car from Maze.

  We cycled as far as we could down the narrowest of paths between greenhouse and hearth, shying away from the few streetlights that glimmered along the wider roads, headtorches on our heads. In the dark, the bouncing of our bicycles on the uneven way was a ringing roar, a siren to summon an unseen enemy.

  From behind the walls of one hearth, a dog barked, and its barking set off another dog barking a few metres away, unseen, and that barking set off a third, until the walls around us rang with busy creatures pronouncing here, here, look, look! We scurried on faster, slipping in and out of pools of light on the corners of the hearths, heads down, eyes up.

  A door opened ahead, and an old man peered out, furtive, into the night, saw us, nodded, closed the door again. The outline of his form seemed like an ally, not a threat, but who could tell?

  Voices were raised, then silenced through a half-open window to the right. On a wall, the shadow of a woman working at a desk grew enormous as she leaned into the light, then shrank back down to a smear of grey against yellow as she stepped away from her midnight labours.

  A fox watched us from across the street, utterly fearless, white belly beneath autumn fur. We pedalled by, heard the electric hum of the guardia again, nearly on top of us, hard to tell where precisely it came from, and barrelled into the narrow passage between two buildings, stinging nettles and ankle-splattering black mud, hot breath on cold air. The vehicle slid by, two figures half-glimpsed inside, headlights on full, crawling at a snail’s pace. I wondered, if the guardia caught us would they really arrest us? Curfew was a strange imposition, unfamiliar and disliked. If I pulled off Salo’s wig and said, look, look, here is a priest fleeing for their life, would the old guardia turn us in? It would come down to who you met, pious or officious, frightened or brave – a bit of luck: some old patroller who doesn’t care much for this new alliance of Farii’s; some young whelp looking to get a promotion in this strange new world.

  We spent nearly twenty minutes in a ditch on the edge of town, caught between patrol behind and idling, chatting soldiers ahead. They were not stopped on this road because they expected trouble or because it was an obvious route out of the city. Rather, they were lingering because their superior was an absolute bastard, a bull rearing at every sight and sound, and they wanted to prolong their absence from him as much as possible, pausing now in the dark to share a drink, have a piss, chat about nothing much.

  Snips of words drifted in from where they sprawled against the hot metal sides of their strange, stinking vehicles. Games played, bets made, awkward love affairs. Anything except the war they would soon be fighting in; anything but the future. Soldiers learned not to speculate early on in their training; it was one of the qualities they shared with priests.

  Once a drone flew overhead, and I heard Salo’s breath rise through flared nostrils, saw his eyes grow into moons, let my breathing fall a little louder, calm and steady, until at last he got the right idea and forced himself to exhale, to breathe out slow, to half-close his eyes and dig his fingers into the soft mud he was pressed against, grit in nails, slime in skin, calm again.

  The clunk of an engine; a slamming of heavy metal doors. The combustion vehicles of Maze were crude, growling things, bigger than their burning era counterparts, all pipe and joint and heavy tyre that bounced and cracked on uneven ways. In time, the designers would get it right, somehow manage to mimic the sleek, shark-like qualities of the older vehicles, start talking about whether a car had a friendly face or a feminine bonnet, whether it had headlights like eagle eyes or a grille like the smiling mouth of a predator. For now, they were built to work, and intimidate, and didn’t yet run as far or as fast as their electric counterparts, but who cared? In time they would; for now, the symbol was all.

  We waited for the sound of engine to drift away, then crawled, teeth chattering and skin grey, up onto the empty road. I turned my headtorch on low, bent over the map, traced the route to the river, turned my torch off, fumbled in the thin gloom for a drink of water, sipped, shared the flask, returned it empty to my pack.

  “What if the drones come back?” asked Salo.

  “Just keep moving,” I replied, turning away before he could ask anything else.

  In the headtorch gloom, the rittle-rattle clackety-clack of the speeding night, there is no sight, no sound, no change in colour nor heat nor cold that the mind may hook onto, no passing world that isn’t dark, no motion that isn’t seamless, the same, endless and without form.

  I think that Georg is still in my brain, still watching my every thought, and that Lah is there too, an antibody devouring the other’s spreading poison. Like gobbling amoeba, they exist for now in perfect balance, consuming and expanding, consuming and expanding, until there is no room for anything that resembles me left.

  Then I heard a vehicle up ahead, turned my headtorch off and gestured the others into the side of the road, and it turned out the void all around was not void at all, but a busy, teeming night of hunting bird and scurrying prey, of thorn and bark and worm and ant, of thin spitting rain and wind rolling across the first leaves in the highest trees, the breath of a giant exhaling after a long, cold sleep.

  We cowered in the woodland on the side of the road, bicycles thrown down into bracken, bodies against branch, as a convoy of five electric cars, accompanied by one grunting, grumbling truck of Maze, slithered by in a snake of dazzling whiteness, almost too bright to look at after the long night.

  Then they too were gone, and the darkness in which my mind wandered was now a terrible, gnawing thing, a huge monster that would consume us whole if we let it. I switched my torch back on, and with every turn of my head imagined I would see a rifle raised, see Georg as if he had ruptured from the earth like a spire of lava, inches from me. The novices looked at me, and for a moment I think they saw my terror, and I knew they would never fully trust me again. I picked my sodden bicycle up from the dirt, barked some order, heard the authority of one who has crossed over into that place where authority derives not from some experience or moral quality but from fear. Nothing to be done about that now.

  “Three hours to dawn,” I snapped, checking my watch. “Not far now.”

  Chapter 40

  On the banks of the Ube, the last of the trees were being cleared. I could see the distant lights of the trucks as they worked through the night, hear the timber crashing down. The broken cover and churned, sodden mud would make it harder, at least on the north bank, for anyone to cross over without being seen.

  Timber groaned, followed by a hairy brushing of a hundred twigs shattering as the trunk that bore them fell, and for a moment I thought I heard an answering sound, a shuddering through the earth, as if a creature with lungs of stone had been disturbed by the noise and now lay restless in shallow sleep, remembering the nightmares which previously had passed it by.

  We lay flat on our bellies on the edge of a field of turned-over, crunchy earth, watching the slope down to the water below. No lights moved; nothing stirred in the darkn
ess.

  Esa said: Perhaps no one guards it?

  Salo replied, hope seeping into his voice: The river is long. They can’t have patrols all the way across it. Praise the river.

  I looked up at the overcast sky, tried to hear the sound of drones, catch the glimpse of light on wing. Saw nothing. Heard only the wind. I took my headtorch, flashed it five times down at the water, then five times again, then waited.

  We waited a minute, then two.

  I flashed my headtorch five times, then five times again.

  We waited.

  A light answered from the opposite bank, four flashes, then three. I replied with three flashes, then put my torch away. If I closed my eyes, I thought I could hear the sluggish tumble of the Ube itself, the slow, fat weight of it as it finally neared the end of its journey, rising from mountain and slewing into sea. The Medj said there was one great kakuy of the Ube, a dragon of snow and silt, but the sailors swore they had seen dozens, maybe a hundred different creatures down the years, from the dancing sprites that played beneath tumbling alpine waterfalls to the ponderous, slug-bellied beast that surfaced sometimes from the twisted reeds of the delta. I wondered if we would see the kakuy tonight, and doubted it very much. The Ube did not care for three travellers in the dark.

  “Run straight for the river,” I said. “If they’re slowing you down, throw the hard drives.”

  “We’re nearly there,” Esa breathed, her eyes flickering skyward, before returning back to the dark between us and the river. “We’re nearly done.”

  A flash from the water, three points of light in the dark.

  “Go. Go now.”

  They did not need telling twice. They were off, crawling onto hands and knees then sprinting straight down, visible only as muted darkness against the reflective ribbon of the river below. I followed a few steps behind, my head tipping down and feet skidding behind as I ran, a toe curl from catastrophe. A few seconds later I heard the low hum of the drone as it descended from the dark behind, then caught the sweep of the searchlight as it powered up its main lamp and swung towards us. The beam tumbled past me, moving too fast, overshot the novices, then slowed and inched back, the unseen controller working to keep pace as we descended. The light caught on the back of the bicycle helmet still on Salo’s head; he swung to the side, trying to dodge out of the beam, and it didn’t bother to follow him, didn’t play that game but jerked sideways, spilling over Esa as she barrelled for the water. Against the white of the drone’s light, I could barely see the flashing of our rescue boat as it turned towards us, but I caught the glow of a dozen other lights illuminating the far bank – Council troops, perhaps, or local guardia alerted to our escape – voices rising and engines coming to life. The drone lost pace with us for a second; then it found us again, and now a second unit was sweeping in from the north, the conical white beam a three-dimensional thing picked out in cold drizzle, two bouncing military vehicles behind it, headlights on full, tracking the light above us as we tumbled for the water.