Notes from the Burning Age

by Claire North

  “Don’t stop!” I hollered at the weaving novices. The water was only a hundred yards away, my throat shrunk to a straw, heart in my ears, the two cars bouncing and shuddering over disturbed earth and churned-up root so high and so far that I thought for a moment they’d shake themselves apart before reaching us. When they opened fire, it seemed such an absurd exercise I almost laughed, the man leaning out of the passenger window of the nearest vehicle utterly unable to aim against the bouncing motion. But at the sound of bullets, the novices slowed, and I tore past them, too little breath left to tell them to run. They got the idea, picked up speed again. Esa wove wide, drawing the beam of the second drone away from the pack, and I silently thanked her and cursed her and thanked her again. One of us would make it, at least; one of us would get to the boat in the dark.

  More gunshots, a little louder now, the first vehicle sliding as the driver tried to control its descent down the slope; fast enough to overtake us, not too fast to slip. I caught the shape of the shooter as he levered himself up a little higher, digging his elbows into two long bars across the roof and taking more careful aim, lining up a shot with the flashing bicycle helmet on Salo’s skull. Then the lights on the other side of the river changed, and for an instant I could see the exact shape of the waiting rescue boat on the water, picked out in chemical yellow as three or four shadows lined up their shots and opened fire.

  The car twisted, spinning nearly 180 degrees in the churned-up mud, turning itself sideways on to the boat. Doors opened and soldiers tumbled out, ducking behind metal and heavy bonnet to return fire. One aimed a shot at me, but it was an afterthought, the drones now sweeping towards the river to light up in full whiteness the little barge that had come to our aid. Then the second car squelched by me, and I was dazzled by its light as it skidded to an uneven halt, back wheels digging themselves into the mud between us and the boat. The doors facing away from the river opened, soldiers tumbling out, not five metres away. They had not yet drawn their pistols; they seemed to expect their mere presence to be enough to induce a surrender. “Run!” I hollered, and Esa was already far enough out of their reach that she went straight past the car without even slowing, without sparing it a second glance, a bag of hard drives bouncing on her back, her chin tilted forward like a hound.

  Salo was less lucky, the arc of his path bringing him straight into the tumbled-down waist-tight grasp of one soldier who threw himself like an uncoiling snake across the gap between them, knocking the novice to the floor. I didn’t slow, running straight into the nearest man in front of me, palms-first, letting the full weight of my body and speed of my descent hit him in the chest. He staggered backwards, slammed into the side of his own vehicle, bending with a crack in the small of his back, eyes wide and bewildered. For a moment, the two of us fumbled for his gun, the strap suddenly a knot of fingers and clasps. I gave up on the weapon first and, having no better ideas, slammed my forehead hard into the bridge of his nose, which cracked as the reverberating impact rippled into the soft bones of my ears. He didn’t howl but curled away from me, both hands pressed to his face, so I turned and kicked at the soldier who held my novice down. He did not expect to be kicked from behind, and though I doubt I hit anything important, the surprise loosened his grasp.

  “Get to the boat!” I snarled. Salo crawled back to his feet and sprinted until he fell the last few metres into the waiting barge. I twisted round to follow him, and a hand caught my ankle, dragging me down. I landed chest first, followed by grazing palm and bouncing skull. The boat was so close I could grab for it, see the faces of the men and women on the deck, dressed in civilian clothes, rifles raised. Someone managed to clip a drone, and one of the lights illuminating them spun to the side then went out. Another rescuer staggered, then recovered herself, fired twice more, then fell without a sound, as if time was running slow for her and the bullet in her chest had arrived sooner than she was prepared to receive it.

  I crawled forward, hoping by sheer will to pull myself free from the hand that held my ankle, but a shadow moved across my side and something ruptured in my back, too big and broad to be a bullet but perhaps a boot, an anvil, a missile falling on me and me alone. I saw my novices crawling into the back of the boat, hiding behind the gunmen, saw the light of the one remaining drone flicker and dart away as more bullets flew skywards, saw another man fall in the last graze of its failing light. Heard someone shout, “We have to go!” and briefly met the eyes of a stranger, a captain perhaps, or the skipper of the barge. I had no idea who this man was, and doubted he knew anything about me other than he was there to rescue a bunch of priests. But I knew he would remember me that day, that my eyes would be with him every dawn and every dusk, and I wished I had time to tell him that it was okay, not to worry about these things, that regret was a changing thing.

  Instead, I shouted – or tried to shout – “Go! Go!” but a soldier had grabbed me from behind and was dragging me by hair and by throat, by shirt and by elbow, by anything hand could get a hold on, back into the shelter of the cars. “Go!” I gasped, and had no hope they’d hear me until I heard the engine on the boat rise.

  Then I was being shoved into one of the cars, head down against the bullets flying, hands covering my skull from shrapnel or angry men. There I stayed, and did not see the boat make it to the furthest shore but knew it must have by the grumbling of weary voices and the slap-slap of despondent boots on torn-up earth, and the slow fading away of the barrage from a few shots, to one or two, to nothing at all. I peeked through my latticed fingers, turned my chin a little away from the ground, and saw the first light of dawn was coming, tulip pink and daisy white.

  Then someone said: “Breakfast?”

  I unrolled slowly from the back of the car, blinking in the gently rising light. A woman held out a hard-boiled egg, a bottle of water. I drank uncertainly, returned the flask, cracked the shell of the egg on the side of the door, peeled it open. One of the cars wouldn’t start; that seemed to be the cause of this sudden quiet, this opening up of rations, this sitting around as if there hadn’t just been a gunfight by the river. Someone who seemed to want to be in charge marched up to me, saw me eating, shook his head, turned away, didn’t have anything much to say. Someone else looked towards the east, and I thought perhaps he was about to utter a morning prayer, bow to the kakuy of the sun as he had done every morning since he had been old enough to put palm to palm. Then he looked at his milling colleagues and changed his mind. I finished the egg gratefully, suddenly realised I was incredibly hungry and yearned for bread, and instead sat on the floor of the broken vehicle, feet dangling out into a muddy field, as someone fell back on hitting the engine with a hammer.

  “Excuse me,” I said to the soldier who’d given me the egg, “are you going to shoot me?”

  “I hope not,” she replied.

  “Oh. Good.”

  She smiled patiently, patted me on the shoulder, reassuring as a surgeon’s blade. “Temple, yes? Trying to cross the border?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why’d you do that? We’re fighting for a good cause. For good people. Temple doesn’t have anything to fear.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  She stared at me with blank surprise. “Of course. We’re fighting for people. For the future of people. Just because Temple is… just because you believe something different doesn’t mean you’ll be hurt.”

  “Thank you for the egg,” I sighed. “That was very kind.”

  Hitting the engine with the hammer clearly did something, for with a popping of sparks and a sudden hiss of suspension, the car came back to life. “Finally!” barked he who would be in command. “Let’s get out of this dump.” His eyes returned to me, sat in a little crescent of broken egg shell and bruised rib. “What the hell are you looking at? Can somebody please arrest him?”

  Chapter 41

  The prison was perfectly polite.

  No one told me my rights or offered me access to an advocate, but the woma
n who entered my details into the system smiled and said, “Not to worry, earth-kin.” I nodded and tried to smile in reply as she filled out the form on her inkstone. “Any allergies?”

  “No.”

  “Are you currently in withdrawal from any narcotics, hallucinogenics, depressants, etcetera?”

  “No.”

  “Do you take any essential medication?”

  “No.”

  “What gender do you identify as?”

  “That question is irrelevant,” snapped an older man behind me, a man who knew perhaps which way the wind was blowing. The two regarded each other over the stoop of my shoulder, then with a beatific flicker of teeth and darting eye the woman murmured: “Until I see the revised guidelines, I’m going to have to follow protocol, you see. I’m sure we’re all looking forward to the retraining.”

  They put me in a cell with two other men. The walls were painted a soft algae green. There was a toilet in the corner. Signs along the corridor invited us to reconciliation classes. The same evening I was admitted, they were taken down and replaced with a noticeboard of emergency proclamations and newly indictable offences.

  Of my two cellmates, one was in for domestic violence. “He made me do it,” he said, face turned to the wall, knees up to his chin. “He just makes me so mad.”

  The other, to my surprise, was an Assembly member. “My name is Bayzed. I voted against allying with Maze. I voted against letting Maze’s army in. I voted against welcoming Kun Mi to the Assembly. I voted against giving up the country to heretics.”

  “Voting isn’t a crime. Why are you here?”

  “Apparently I over-claimed on office stationery. But I’m sure they’ll think of something better soon. What about you?”

  I lay on the top bunk, pressing a palm into the ceiling, feeling the texture of painted resin beneath my fingers, a remnant of what had once been something organic, compressed and reprocessed. “I was an inquisitor. A professional traitor. I think they’re going to kill me. Probably best to get it over with.”

  Bayzed thought it over while the abuser curled against the wall and blamed everyone but himself. “Do you think it will come to that?”

  “Perhaps. Probably. In the early days it’s easiest if it’s an extra-judicial killing, somewhere quiet and out of sight. Paperwork goes astray all the time, especially in times like this. Once people are used to the idea that people just vanish, they will be more comfortable with the reality of executions – just a formalisation of what’s already happening. After they are comfortable with that, public executions are a logical next step, and when you’ve made that a family outing, you can move on to the truly grotesque stuff, for when you need to formalise the fear.”

  “You seem very calm about all this.”

  I pushed both hands into the ceiling, as if I might feel the weight of the building above me, as if I could drive myself all the way into the earth. “I saw the kakuy of the forest,” I breathed. “Twice, actually. Once in fire, once in ice. I don’t want to die; sun and moon, I don’t want to die. But I don’t know if I’m afraid either.”

  At the evening meal, the political prisoners drifted together uneasily, a shoal of fish suddenly thrown into a very different sea. The pride of an ethical position held or the moral delight of defiance counted for nothing within walls of grey and green. They were laughable, a ridiculous thing to risk life and liberty for.

  You are in here for principle? Not for theft? Not for assault or setting fires? Not for murder? You are in here because you wrote something?

  I’ve never heard the like. Never heard the like! The times we live in.

  In the morning, after cleaning the pots in the kitchen and scrubbing the floor, I asked an officer what I was charged with.

  “Your advocate deals with that,” he replied.

  “Who’s my advocate?”

  “Don’t ask me.”

  “Who should I ask?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “No. That’s why I’m asking.”

  “What are you charged with again?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If you don’t know then how do I know who you should be talking to?”

  My mouth hung open, words stopping in a dumb half-syllable. Then I picked up my bucket and mop, smiled, nodded once, and started to think about how I might escape this place.

  On the sixth day, the man accused of domestic violence disappeared. Some said he was released; others, transferred. Rumours of things he’d done and mistakes he’d made – of people he’d crossed and promises broken – immediately circulated round the low halls, echoing from door to door through pipes and notes scrawled on scraps of paper swung by string from hand to hand. A look he’d given someone became a call to arms; the way he hadn’t finished his dinner on a second day became a clue to some unravelling mystery. One man, who worked in Release and Rehab, shrugged and simply said the advocate had got him off, he was going home, but that was far too simple a story for a muted, windowless world to accept.

  Two days after that, Bayzed vanished, and no one asked where he’d gone, and no one remarked on his absence, and no one whispered secrets through bending pipes in the wall.

  One man was assigned as my new cellmate, and he wouldn’t meet my eyes, and three days later he got himself reassigned to a different cell. He was clearly popular amongst the officers because his request was approved within twenty-four hours, and I was left alone with a choice of bunks and a toilet all to myself.

  A month went by, and I was not charged, and no advocate came.

  In the mornings, I cleaned the kitchen. I was told I would be paid for this service, money added to my account. I was not told what my account was, or how I could access it or use it to buy anything for myself, and when I asked the answer was always the same: “Your case officer handles that.”

  I gave up asking who my case officer was, after a little while.

  In the afternoons, I read. There was a library, and a few inkstones could be borrowed, pre-loaded with carefully selected material: educational, legal and light fiction that romped along with reasonable moral character. A few politicals talked to me, a few tolerated my presence, but they were men of ideals and passion, and I had very little of either to give.

  “Well,” mused one, “maybe it’s good to have a pragmatist around?”

  I looked in his eyes and knew then that if I laughed he would cry, so smiled and nodded and turned away to stare into my empty bowl, poking at the edges with the chewed end of my wooden chopsticks.

  From the radio in the workout hall, Maze’s victories filled the air. Cities fell east and west, cutting off huge swathes of land and encircling Jia’s forces in Beograd. Temples burned and a new era of humanity was promised. So much was promised, and the prisoners laughed and said they’d heard talk like that before; sunfire be damned, some of them had even spouted it in their time, to get what they wanted.

  Roads would be driven through mountains; planes would soar in the sky. Everyone could buy everything, and the only thing holding you back would be your own petty limitations.

  “Hey, priest – where are the kakuy?” demanded Brahno, king of the radio, keeper of rechargeable batteries and lubricants of uncertain origin. “Where are your gods of the forest now?”

  “It was never clear in the historical record,” I answered, “if the kakuy brought fire upon the people of the burning or if the world was already on fire, and the kakuy brought rain.”

  “What does that shit even mean?” he growled. “What is that shit anyway?”

  Brahno was a bully, too much of a coward to do anything about the people who really scared him, so he would sometimes exercise his violence on smaller prey, easier fry. I had enough training, enough memory of a knife in my hand and gunshots above the river to put up more of a fight than he expected. I held him off long enough that his lackeys felt the need to step in and get involved, and by then the officers were running into the room to pull me free, to drag Brahno to solitary.r />
  He never left solitary, and no one tried to touch me again. I did not think it was due to my martial prowess and the pointed end of my elbow, but at the time I couldn’t work out what else it could possibly be.

  At night, I managed for the very first time to pray.

  There was no expectation of reply or consequence, nor any invocation for things to change. That was not, I concluded, the point of kneeling in the dark.

  Then one week like any other, I was pulled from my shift in the kitchen, escorted to the gate, let out without paperwork or explanation into the noontime sunlight, and was astonished to discover that spring had come in translucent leaf and buds of cherry blossom, in drifting pollen through shafts of light and thin, larvae-fresh insects uncoiling their wings in the first kiss of heat. I stood for a moment, dumbfounded and blinking in the sudden illumination, when I noticed the combustion car waiting by the gate, the passenger door open, the driver’s door opening too, and there was Klem, grinning as if I were his oldest, long-lost friend, beckoning me in. Sohrab came round the other side, cutting me off.