by Claire North
“I will pray,” she replied firmly, and turned away, seemingly satisfied.
At night, I crawled to the tiny square window in my low room, watched the feet of passers-by splash through the rain, and did not pray.
Then one day, much like any other, Colas hollered my newest name.
“Pityr! Take this upstairs!”
A tray of sweet teas and candied fruits was thrust into my hands. “Third-floor reception room, quick quick!”
My life, to that moment, had not deviated from its narrow course of locked bedroom to observed washroom to kitchen to courtyard. I knew in some abstract sense that there was a house – you could even call it a small palace – overhead, the inhabitants of which we constantly served with treats sweet, succulent and savoury, but I had not encountered a shred of it down in the places I dwelt. Qathir was my duty guard that day, and, seeing my hesitation, he shrugged and pointed with one single waggling digit towards the heretofore unregarded staircase.
I went up.
The floor beneath my feet turned from ceramic to bare clay, from bare clay to warm timber.
One floor up, the timber became carpeted, with worn undyed wool.
A floor above that, the carpet was dyed a sudden, vivid green.
The floor above that, the tattered carpet of the stairwell gave way to a new, thick weave, the warmest, softest thing I had ever felt beneath my grubby toes. I hesitated as I stepped onto it, blinking in kind yellow light and twisting my head round side to side, blanketed in the comfort of the place. Qathir nudged my shoulder, pointed the same wagging digit towards a half-open set of double doors, waited.
I shuffled towards them, was stopped by a woman who sat guard as once I had sat for Georg all those months ago; she rose, knocked politely twice, did not wait for an answer, then opened the doors to gesture me in.
Inside, sofas arranged in a u-shape were assembled before a long table on which much tea and many nibbles had already been consumed and many more left half-chewed with a disregard that might once have been an embarrassing breach of etiquette; these days it seemed a badge of pride. Arrayed in knots and gaggles around the room were the great and good of Maze and their new Lyvodian allies; some I recognised, some I did not. The conversation was low, the occasional spike of laughter too loud, the occasional brush of a hidden confidence murmured into a sleeve. Farii stood nearest the door, pressed into a triangle of conspiracy with two others. Whatever time had passed since I saw her pronounce her eulogy over Ull’s corpse, it had not been kind. Her eyes were puffy grey bags around tired, blood-wrinkled slits. Her lips were thin and shoulders pressed towards her neck, like a starving vulture that doesn’t dare feast while the hyenas are still gnawing. She glanced up as I passed, started in surprise, recognised me, one hand squeezing the arm of a compatriot who stopped talking and glanced my way too, her mouth widening in amazement. Merthe moved towards me, but Farii held her back, and I looked away and walked to the long table, feeling suddenly dirty, small, Qathir watching me from the door.
I put my tray down, glanced to my left and saw Kun Mi, pride and peacock-feathered, her dark hair wound in braids across her skull, head high and neck stuck forward as if she would peck at the faces of those who addressed her. Bukarest had become her new home, the forward line of her advance; and besides, the whispers went, Vien was a stinking plague-pit. The water that came from the taps was stained orange-brown; the air was thick and hard to breathe. No wonder the greatest of the war had moved somewhere a little closer to the front lines.
I turned, and there he was.
Georg, right behind me, leaning a little on his walking stick, his eyes running from head to toe as if he was wondering, had I grabbed a knife? There were plenty of blades in the kitchen, but his face flickered curiosity, not fear. His shoulders were pulled back, bound up in a knot, ready to be unleashed, ready to fight, he was so ready to fight, the smile on his lips barely creasing the soft tissue of his face. For a moment, we stood regarding each other, and I was tempted to reach behind myself, to mime the action of a killer, just to see what happened, to smile, to snarl, to see if I could make him jump. I did not. This was not the time for such games.
He saw that realisation in my eyes the moment I had it, and now his smile was something real, and he nodded once, and looked as if he might speak, and instead stepped to the side to let me pass, which I did, closing the door behind me.
Chapter 46
Time passes without days, days without name. In that too, there is a kind of honesty. Autumn comes in bloody leaf and yellow fruits. The slugs slither out in the rain and are crushed by passing vehicles, guts spilt into the sodden earth. It has rained for nearly nine days without end, and in the morning I cannot see anything except fog through the tiny window of my room. The soap from the dishes is making my hands peel. I pick at little flakes of white unconsciously now, though sometimes I pick too deep and blood wells up beneath the scales of skin.
Since there is no one left in the temples of Bukarest to offer the autumn libations, I do the best I can. I steal a little barley from the kitchen and scatter it when I am sent to take the recycling out. I spill a little water on the already sodden earth, and put my hands together at dusk when no one is looking, and bow to the west. Such things, when done alone, are largely meaningless. It takes a society that bows, all of humanity honouring its place upon this earth, to live with the kakuy. The temple never had magic; there was never any mystic power in the prayers of the Medj. Their power was one of teacher and guide who taught the children to think before they felled the forest, to thank the animal whose flesh they feasted on, to cherish the earth that carried them. Get them young, Lah had said, and where were their ditties now, their songs of balance?
They are dead, and it has not stopped raining it seems for a month, a year, and in Tinics I do not know if the forest grows.
Having been sent once to deliver tea to the upstairs rooms, I was sent again. Three times a week, then five – then, it seemed, every day. Sometimes to offices, sometimes to halls, barefoot I plodded round the villa with a guard at my back, occasionally noticed, rarely remarked on. Georg glances my way as I lay the warm bread down at the end of his table, but he otherwise does not cease his dictations. Farii watches me in the corridor as I pass by. Kun Mi does not know, nor care, who I am. I am invisible to her, except for once, when she stopped me and barked:
“Why aren’t you wearing shoes?”
“I am a political prisoner,” I replied, bowing politely. “Although by now I thought everyone was used to this kind of thing.”
The answer seemed to throw her, a bafflement to her dignity, so she tilted her chin higher and swept on by, and I have no doubt that fifteen minutes later she worked out something profoundly insightful to say.
“Beograd has fallen,” Qathir said one night, just before locking the door to my little room. “Jia has fled to Isdanbul. They say she’ll sue for peace.”
“Is that so.”
He nodded, a little disappointed at my neutrality. Then: “We used bombers. We firebombed the city. We did it with planes.”
These ideas – bombers, planes, firebombing – were strange and unfamiliar to him. He was not sure what to do with the words, how to form them, but he knew they were important, and impressive, and it made him feel good to say them. I opened my mouth to lecture him on heretical history, on twenty-five thousand burned to death in a single night during the wars of our ancestors, on how adult bodies shrivelled to the size of children as the water boiled from them, of how fleeing refugees tumbled from lack of oxygen and just lay there, rag dolls, before the coming inferno. I tried to explain how after a great fire there was often a great rain, but he had already locked the door and pushed the bolt home, so I lay instead on my back, and wondered if I should cry, and felt absolutely nothing at all.
The next day, Colas found weevils wriggling through his rice stores. There were millions of them, tiny brown bodies grown to a colony within the sacks. He cursed and swore and was uncertai
n if he should throw the bags away, not knowing whether he would get more. But someone upstairs heard of his plight and swore that he would receive more rice soon, have no fear. The household of Georg Mestri would not go hungry. No one would go hungry, in this great new age.
“Lovely bit of protein, your weevil,” chuckled Makris, but he was only half-laughing, and as I stirred the mulching, steaming compost in the vats out back he shuffled a little closer and whispered: “Do you bless people, priest?”
“No,” I replied, not looking up from my work. “I was never that kind of priest. Besides, all a blessing is good for is reminding you not to be a total pillock, so I’m not sure if it’s up your street.”
He bristled a little at this reply, but didn’t retaliate, and later helped me scrub the greywater vats, which he had never done before.
A sliding back of bolts in the dead of night. Perhaps the city is flooding again; perhaps tonight they will kill me. A woman I half-recognised, Georg’s new assistant, guardian of his door, stood in the light.
“Come with me,” she barked, and I wished for the little kitchen knife I’d stolen three days before, which I could not now easily reach without revealing its hiding place.
“What time is it?” I asked, and she didn’t answer.
Upstairs, and up again, to a little reception room that I had visited two or three times before to deliver the fruits of the kitchen. Pillows across the floor, a low table with a single cut flower in a jar on it, mementos of past glories of Bukarest on the wall. There was only one person in the room – the one person it was always going to be. The woman gestured to a pillow opposite him, and I sat cross-legged on it, as she closed the door behind her.
Georg, awake as always when all normal people should be asleep, sipped tepid tea, cup clasped between both hands, and watched me over the rim. I adjusted my posture, stretched out some of the hard constrictions of my brick-like bed, shuffled a little to the left and a little to the right, like a cat kneading an unwilling lap into submission, folded my hands palm on palm, and waited.
Finally he said: “You heard?”
“No. What haven’t I heard?”
“We bombed Beograd.”
“Ah – no, I heard that. Firebombed, yes?”
“Yes.”
“How’d it go?”
“Well, all things considered. It was our first time attempting incendiary carpet bombing. The information we had was piecemeal. Our scientists had to work hard to fill in the gaps, do a little thinking for themselves. I think the exercise was good for their imaginations.”
“I see. What next? Nuclear?”
“Hardly. It wouldn’t achieve anything strategic. And there are too many barriers between us and fissionable material. Temple was wise to keep that secret to itself. Although I do sometimes wonder as the war progresses, do you think the Medj will tell Jia how to do it? Where to find radioactive rocks, how to split the atom?”
“Nuclear winter would not please the kakuy.”
“Please. Let’s not pretend Temple was ever interested in the spirits. Everything you people have ever done has always been about man – keeping mankind in its place, obedient, passive.”
“Yes.” His eyebrows flickered up in surprise at my admission, and I shrugged. “The kakuy never gave a damn for individual humans or individual hearts. Prayers are just words, thrown up in hope. Temple teaches people to pray in order to shape what we hope for. It is pure social engineering. But fundamentally, Georg, with your pissing little ego-bastard war, you are doing precisely the same thing. You are trying to redefine what people hope for, and what they fear. And at the end of the day, I would far rather hope for the kakuy not to burn us all to ashes through the general equality and peace of all humankind, than the destructive nonsense you’re selling.”
He nodded, eyes running to some other place. “Interesting.”
“Is it?”
“Not philosophically, of course. Philosophically you’re a coward, blighted by your own internalised inferiority. But it is interesting to hear you speak as yourself – as an inquisitor. I thought you didn’t believe in anything at all.”
“I have seen the kakuy too,” I said, and surprise flickered like the first spark in a fire before he hid his face again behind a bored smile. “Belief doesn’t really come into it.”
He nodded again, neither here nor there. Perhaps there should have been words, and for a moment there were none. Georg smiled at nothing much, nodded to himself alone, put down his cup, straightened, hands mimicking mine in his lap – consciously or not, I couldn’t tell.
“There is disease in Vien,” he said at last.
“What kind of disease?”
“The water. Something in it. A heavy metal of some kind – they think perhaps lead. It is rational to say that there was error at the armament factories further upstream. They have released chemicals into the water, a toxic wave. You can even see it, the land turned scarlet. The responsible parties have been reprimanded. But in Vien they say it is a curse. That the kakuy are doing this to them. What do you think?”
“I think it is a spill from the armaments factory,” I replied. “I think you have poisoned your own land. I think when children start coughing up black, when the old die in the heat and the young die in the cold, it will be because of what you did.”
“And the kakuy?”
“I do not think they will help you. More I cannot say.”
He nodded, staring straight through me at his own thoughts. Then: “We dragged a few priests out of prison. Some of the novices. Got them to say their prayers. They seemed very keen to help.”
“I imagine they would be.”
“By spring, Jia will be on the other side of the Bosphorus. It is a good natural border; she will sue for peace then.”
“Will you give it?”
He shook his head. “Farii wants us to, of course. Even Kun Mi is getting anxious. But they both are beginning to understand the inevitability of this conquest. To win, we must tear down the mountains and the forest; the mechanics of this war require no less. The land we move through is turned to ash, and it does not heal. The water in Vien is the colour of piss, and it does not heal. We cannot stop at the Bosphorus. We must keep going. We cannot let our army disband or our soldiers go home. If they go home, they may find that they do not have a home to go to.”
“So your plan is… what? Circle the world for ever, conquering everything you can and leaving devastation in your wake? Cross the sea to Amerika and sweep across that land too until it is poison? Then come back to Maze and hope that enough time passed while you were warring over there that the forest over here has grown? That is a terrible plan.”
“They say in Amerika,” he mused, “that the people hunt kakuy for sport. That the walls of the militia forts are hung with severed limbs of ghastly creatures.”
“They say that Amerika is nothing but yellow dust and acid,” I retorted. “That beasts bigger than men roam the ashen wastes with stinging tails and poison spit; that in the spindle forests where once men cracked the earth in two, the trees have grown fingers that claw at travellers and pull them into a bloody, boiling earth. So much for that.”
He sighed, reached for his tea cup, stopped himself, folded his hands again, turned his head as if the corner of the room had suddenly become fascinating. “Men and the kakuy,” he sighed. “What a frustrating thing.”
I waited, motionless, eyes tired and body buzzing.
“I’m told that when you were young, the forest burned. That’s correct, isn’t it? The forest of your home town, burned to the ground.”
My heart is a great hollow thing, bloodless and dry. I licked my lips, tried to swallow this knot back into my chest, nodded. “Yes.”
“Is that why you joined Temple?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Then why? There are a thousand more interesting things to do with a life than offer prayers you know will never be answered and indoctrinate children to bow and scrape to wo
rms.”
I thought about it, then said:
“Firstly, I ended up an inquisitor, not a Medj. I was never pastoral in my inclinations. But you’re also wrong – Temple is fascinating to work for, if you have the right mindset. In the burning, humankind was taught that human nature was fundamentally violent, selfish. That the most successful iteration of a life was to make wealth and be, in some manner, superior to others: socially superior, superior in fame or standing or riches, in material belongings, in ruthlessness. We turned our backs on the essential truth of our species, which is that we are co-operative. Oh, certainly, some societies dabbled with the idea that individuals were nothing but servants of a state, to be crushed and disposed of at will, forgetting that the state is made of people too. And others embraced the notion that individualism rose above all else and forgot that it was society that carried these lone heroes up. So when the forests burned and the seas turned to acid, the great authoritarian states said, “Our power is more important than our people,” because by then such bodies were nothing more than monarchies for a corrupt few, ruling in the name of the many. And the individual heroes who had been lauded for their wealth, their ambition, their beauty or their fame… well, they rushed to protect what they had too, leveraging their meagre social capital to protect themselves from the dust and the famine while all around them everybody died.
“How easily humans are swayed. When things go wrong, we look to the oldest story of all – to a messiah, to a change – and it doesn’t matter what that change is so long as we believe there will be a hero. But it took three thousand firefighters to hold back the fire that burned through my childhood, and in the end it was the rain, not a hero, that doused the flames. In the burning, we raged, raged, raged against the truth that the fire and the sea were stronger than us. Temple taught us that humility before the storm was sacred – but it failed. Temple has failed you. You believe that you deserve what you receive, that you alone are the hero of your story. And yes, sooner or later, the only way to prove this is by conquering your fellow humans, mastering them with your strength. And when that is done, when humans are cowed and there is only annihilation, the only thing left is to kill a god. To kill the kakuy themselves. And that is how you will die, if you’re wondering. You will end raging against the sky that fed you, the river that gave you life. That’s why I joined Temple. To be part of something more.”
