Notes from the Burning Age

by Claire North

  I considered running, but there wasn’t anywhere to go.

  Klem squeezed my shoulder as I ducked past him into the car, eyes wide with the breadth of his amusement.

  Closed the door behind me.

  Chapter 42

  Here sits Georg.

  His Bukarest office is not as grand as his office in Vien. He does not stand by the window. Rather he sits behind a desk. The desk is more functional than his grand old thing of blood and leather. His chair is huge and padded. It has been tilted forward a little further than usual, so that he is almost tumbling off it. I wonder if it is to hide the limp, the flinch, the flicker of pain that runs across his face every time he eases himself up, both hands resting on the armrest, weight on only one leg.

  Klem waves me to one of the two chairs opposite, gestures me to sit.

  I do, hands in my lap.

  Georg finishes reading a document on his inkstone. Maybe a report. Maybe a map. Maybe nothing at all. I have tried this trick too, of reading something terribly important while my mind is a thousand miles away. I watch his eyes, and they are not moving side to side, but still, he wastes both his and my time with this game.

  He wears grey that is nearly black.

  He has a private telephone, the handle worn from painted red to softer pink where he’s gripped it.

  He puts the inkstone down, straightens it up so the bottom edge aligns with the line of the desk, folds his hands, looks at me.

  “Kadri,” he says.

  “Georg,” I reply.

  For a moment, that is all there is between us. Klem hovers behind, almost vibrating with the urge to do violence, his delight in the blood that is to come, the expectation of it an arousal that glows in a thin pink blush across his cheeks, youthful and naïve.

  Then Georg pushed the inkstone across the table to me, turned it, fingertips on opposite corners as if he were spinning puppets in a dance. I stared down at it, took a minute longer than I had needed in the past to recognise it, for some slumbering part of my brain to wake.

  “Well?” Georg asked at last.

  For a moment, we are back in Vien, strangers in the snow. “What do you want to know?” The words came as much from memory as now, a familiar call and response, a song once sung to a different tune.

  “What do you make of it?”

  “Archaic French. It is a discourse on toilets in Burning Age military submarines.”

  “Is it authentic?”

  “Do you have cross-referencing material?”

  “I can.”

  “Then I’d have to see that, but off the top of my head, yes, I’d say it’s authentic. It’s a digital copy of an analogue copy of a digital copy, which never bodes well. Signs of interference introduced by the process, remnants of Temple classification markers – not Pontus’ finest theft, if we’re honest. But there’s not much call to fake a document discussing the difficulties of ejecting faeces from a vessel whose interior parts are at a lower pressure than the external environment.”

  “What else?”

  I smiled, half-nodded at the inkstone, met his gaze again, held it without fear. “It’s a very dull read.”

  He nodded thoughtfully, twitched the tips of his fingers towards Klem, returned his attention to a different document on a different reader on his desk. “Good. You will have it fully translated by this evening.”

  “Will I?”

  “Yes. We have the Medj of your old temple – Lah – in cells below. She will be hurt until you comply. It is very simple.”

  “Why would you hurt them, and not me? Lah is a better translator than I am.”

  “I understand how you work. That is enough.”

  “I would like to see Lah.”

  “Once you have completed the translation.”

  I rolled a little deeper into the chair. It was as if I’d never sat in a chair before, never conceived of what an object like this was, how my body bent to it, and it bent to me. I stared up at the ceiling, absurdly high and panelled with wood that rushed into the centre point like an exploding star, and said: “Wouldn’t it be easier – safer even – just to shoot me? I appreciate irony, but from a security point of view this – all of this – is just ego. That’s all it is. Vanity – not even a power play, like Kirrk. The sensible thing to do is to kill me and be done with it. We both know it. Why make the mistake?”

  Georg did not answer, but without raising his eyes from the desk gestured again at Klem, who, still bristling with delight at things yet to come, caught me by the shoulder and pulled me away.

  They put me in an office on the very top floor, in a converted attic. I had read stories about sloping rooms above ancient buildings such as these; places for ghosts to emerge shimmering from the cracked floorboards, or for young lovers to pine away in. Instead, I was sat down on a single deflated beige cushion in the middle of an empty floor, given an inkstone with an empty text file and a few old dictionaries loaded on it, and left alone. A bolt slammed across the door. One window looked out onto pipes and solar panels, twisting up to the obscured sun. A single grey pigeon on a ledge of guano turned an orange eye to examine me, confused by this face in its domain. The window was locked, and while I might have been able to smash the ancient, dribble-distorted glass, there was a sheer drop between me and the nearest roof, several storeys below. The room smelt of old bugs unhappy at a new neighbour, and the winter’s cold had not yet vanished from the shadows. Water ran behind one wall from a thermal exchange, the temperature difference palpable from one side to the other as I traced my hands across the thin plaster.

  I paced the room, and there was only so much room for pacing.

  I sat cross-legged on the floor and tried to find something of the stillness that had come in the dark and empty night of the prison. There, the constant passing of footsteps, the crying out of a voice from a cell, the banging of metal on metal, of fist on brick, had become its own background stillness, a presence which had lowered until at last it comforted. Here, the silence was a faraway city, distance distorted by travelling upwards and dissipating into the clouds.

  My clothes were too thin for the cold.

  I tucked my knees into my chest and translated a page, looked at the translation, tweaked a few words for ease of readability, wondered if any of this could change the nature of the war. There hadn’t been submarines in the seas for centuries, apart from a few dredged-up coffins of ancient bone and the occasional scientific vessel launched into the deep. I was not sure what their relevance could be to Georg now. The Isdanbul fleet was so much stronger than anything Maze could ever put to sea, the idea he would engage in a naval conflict at all was absurd.

  I worked through another page, made a note on an obscurity, a word I didn’t recognise, to cross-check later. Somewhere, Georg would already have a translation of this document, to compare with my work. He would have translations of half of whatever he asked me to work on next, to catch me in a lie. He would start with things that seemed harmless, which could have no effect on the shape of the war. He would then slip in the odd text which may seem on the surface to do no damage but which he could point to in a later time and say, look, see, you have already betrayed your people by translating this, so why make a stand now? You are already damned. You were damned the moment you wrote a single word.

  I stopped.

  Put my pen down.

  Lay out long and cold across the floor, hands on my belly, to wait for the end.

  Chapter 43

  When I was twelve, I was taken along with a handful of other children from the school in Tinics to the dormitory that lay behind the Temple to say goodbye to the oldest of all the Medj who honoured the forest, who would not be long for this world.

  Yue was there too, face furrowed in a perpetual frown. Did her mother and mine sit up long together on the grassy roof of the hearth and whisper of their children, remember Vae’s name, wonder what we truly saw that day in the burning forest? Probably not. The hearths of Tinics were eminently practical a
bout these things.

  Beti, the oldest Medj of the valley, had been the bane of many a merry childhood game, boring us with sermons and insisting on decorum, respect, when a more liberally inclined member of their order might have laughed to see children chase after crows or play at conkers. From their moral austerity, Beti’s physical stature had seemed to evolve too, creating an imposing giant of a priest, filling every door with their shadow and booming out like thunder: “Do not scratch your name into the sacred stones! Do not leave lewd messages in the raked pebbles of the yard!”

  Now cobweb skin hung sunken on calcium skull, the occasional pulsing black wriggle of a vein across temple or crown the only sign of life. Lips cracked and hands folded over chest, their carers had already removed the air vents that had sustained them, and breath came in irregular gasps, strange wheezes as the last hours ticked by. Their successor talked us through the final prayers of farewell, spoke softly into the half-shadows of the room as the moon rose outside and the warm smell of fresh citronella drifted in on the cool spring breeze.

  “Sometimes they will wake, and may say a few words, or ask for water, but before you can bring the sponge to their lips they may sleep again, or forget what they desired, and then their eyes close. Sometimes they will gasp, and you’ll think they are in pain. You’ll think this is terrible, this is monstrous – but it is not, it is just a holding on, a releasing. It can take days, in which time they will neither eat nor drink nor wake. The pain is already past. This is not pain. And an hour will come where you leave the room, just for a minute, just to wash your face or greet the sunrise, and when you return they are gone. It is as if they are waiting for us to leave, for no living eye to look upon them so that, at last, they can let go. We have feared dying more than anything. We invested so much energy, so much time, into fighting death, into refusing to accept that it would come. We painted ourselves to look young, injected chemicals both pointless and poisonous, lived in extraordinary pain and discomfort rather than let nature come, so that we spent perhaps almost as much time fearing dying as we did actually living. A Medj should not die this way; we do not fear change. But it is all right to be sad. It is human to be sad. But do not fear. Go – live – and do not be afraid.”

  With this guidance we were sent home again, and Beti died that very night, when their attendant had left to make a cup of tea.

  Chapter 44

  In the evening, in an attic in Bukarest, Klem came to find me, and the translation was not done.

  I waited for him to kick me, to swing his fists or throw me against a wall. Instead, he grabbed me by the back of my shirt and pulled me down the hall. Every time I found my footing, he shook me a little to the left or a little to the right so that I had to catch onto his arm or claw at his chest to stop myself from tumbling into the throat-clasping pressure of my own dragged clothes as he hauled me before Georg, shoving me at last onto my knees in front of the desk and holding me with one hand across the top of my skull like I was a prize pig.

  This time, Georg looked up with a sigh, no patience for pretence.

  “Well?”

  Klem shook his head.

  “I will kill the priest,” Georg tutted, disappointed, perhaps even annoyed.

  “What will that achieve?” I asked.

  The question seemed to catch him almost by surprise, as if the notion hadn’t even crossed his mind. Then he straightened, a conclusion reached, put his inkstone down, nodded once at Klem, who yanked me back onto my feet. Georg was halfway to the door in a few steps, assistants and would-be supplicants scuttling out of his way like beetles before the spider. Eyes turned downwards as I was shoved along, as mourners may look away from the coffin.

  I lost my footing on the stairs when Klem timed a shove badly and, tripping, caught myself on the only thing in front of me that offered any support – Georg. He grabbed me by my arms before I could tumble past, and for a moment I nearly said thank you, but something I could not see danced behind his eyes and with neither scowl nor smirk he pushed me back into Klem’s grip, which was a little more cautious for the last few stairs into the basement.

  The lower half of this place had been a cold storage for the hearth, the pipes of the thermal exchange still visible in the ceiling, thick, flax-plugged walls and straw spread on the heavy clay floor. A sliding door was held shut with chain and padlock. Georg pulled a bunch of keys from his pocket and worked through four near-identical little silver ones before finding the key that clicked, slinging the loose chain over his shoulder like a silk scarf. The door pulled back and as my eyes adjusted to a little light tumbling through the opening, I saw the pallor of skin, a hint of face and hand. Lah sat up slowly from where they’d been bundled in a ball, blinking against the illumination, shielding their eyes, and finally, as their gaze adjusted, they said: “Is that you?”

  I nodded, realised how futile that was in the shadows, said: “Hello.”

  They nodded, slow, thoughtful. “Ah well,” they sighed. Then, an afterthought: “Imagine, if you will, that you opened the door to find me meditating profoundly.”

  “Of course.”

  A hand to my shoulder; Klem pushed me to the side, spine knocking against the frame, and Georg put a hand against my chest, holding me in place. Lah regarded Klem with polite interest as the man strode into the gloom, drew back his fist and hit the Medj across the face. Lah fell, fumbling at their jaw as if surprised to find that this was what this experience was like, learning something new – they’d always wondered. I caught Georg’s wrist in both my hands, met his eye, saw him shake his head. Behind, two more Brotherhood men approached, idly interested, idly here, wondering what their boss was doing now. Klem hit Lah again, and again Lah fell, and this time they stayed down, tucking head into arms, knees into chest, perhaps not yet in too much pain, but in no hurry to experience more.

  Again, my eyes met Georg’s; again, a slight shake of his head. I felt my lips curl into the beginning of a snarl, had no idea where that came from, heard meat on meat as Klem struck again, again, one more time, this time a grunt of pain from the Medj on the floor. I felt Georg’s hand press a little harder into my chest, knocking a half-puff of air from my lungs as he put his bodyweight into it, pinning me back. The snarl at my lips became a slow grin, the grin of the wolf, the grin the wolf of the forest might make, the kakuy of blood in snow. Georg’s eyes flickered in momentary surprise, and then I let go of his wrist and snapped my right fist into his throat. I didn’t hit hard, the crunch of little bones in my hand rippling up to my elbow. But throats were not designed to be hit and he curled away, gasping, wheezing like old Beti the night they died.

  The Brotherhood boys who’d been waiting their turn lunged forward but I was nearer to Klem than they were to me, got a punch into Klem’s kidneys and a kick into the back of his knee before he even had the chance to turn. I tasted iron in my mouth, felt the snow of winter beneath my feet and heard the forest burning in my ears, wood cracking from within, black splinters and fire in the eyes, felt the river rise and the wind at my back, and as Klem staggered I smacked one hand into the right side of his head, into his ear, hoping to rupture his eardrum, put the other hand against the side of his neck and marched him, skull-first, staggering and confused, into the nearest wall. I drove his head into the glazed ceramic three times, each time throwing more of my body into it, each time feeling a different quality of cracking that rippled through him and into me, before the Brotherhood boys caught me and dragged me back, kicking and growling, untamed, blood on my fingers. Klem collapsed, crimson running down the left side of his face from the ridge where two skull plates join; thinner blood mingling with clear liquid flowing out of his right ear, which he grabbed with both his hands as if I had not already fractured his skull, rocking and groaning, a howl that he dared not release. By the door, Georg was still gasping, doubled over, one hand raised to shoo away the men who ran to help him. To show willing, one man hit me, and then, not to be left behind, another joined in, taking turns to knock
me down and pick me up until Georg had enough air to gasp: “No!”

  Confused, they stopped, each with one fist raised, like children caught in an embarrassing act who are trying to think of some other thing they might plausibly claim to be doing here.

  “No,” he repeated, and that word took all the air he had, and he turned away to wheeze a little more. Klem’s groans now rose again, a strange, almost musical circle of rise and fall, rise and fall, as if he were skipping back and forth over a spinning line of anguish. “Help him!” Georg snapped with his next, meagre breath, and someone ran forward to lift Klem up. Sensing that this was their opportunity to pretend nothing had happened, my captors let me go, and I flopped down next to Lah, who had uncoiled enough from their ball of arm and knee to peer at me, bloody eye to bloody eye from where we both lay, a few inches apart on the floor.

  Here, in this place, our gazes were the only things that we could perceive, and with Lah’s bloody face before mine, all the fight, the rage, tumbled out of me as if plucked away by some ghostly hand. From nowhere, a gasp that might have been the beginning of a sob caught in my throat, and I blinked at blood in my eyes and knew it was not all blood. Lah reached out slowly, one hand catching mine, then the other, squeezing tight. They smiled, and were afraid, and smiled anyway.

  And it seemed to me, in that place, that the temple didn’t just take the children to witness how old priests died but to teach us how we should die too. Come, whispered the Medj, come – let us not make a fuss. Let us not wail and curse and beat against the ending but exhale a final, peaceful breath and make things easy on those who survive. Be easy, be easy. Let us tell you how you should live; let us tell you how you should die. Even when you are screaming: be easy.