Notes from the Burning Age

by Claire North

  Georg nodded again, without seeming to see me. “I think that’s fatalistic shit.”

  I shrugged, and the motion felt like a sudden freedom, a giddy escape.

  “You think so little of people – you talk about ‘care’ but you think so little of them. I think you’re a coward, Ven of the Temple of the Lake. Kadri Tarrad. I think you hide and hide and hide, because you can’t accept that some men are great, and others are small, and you have always been tiny. That’s what I think.”

  “In that case, you may as well shoot me now. Why haven’t you? I doubt you’re keeping me alive for the conversation.”

  “Not for that. You bore me. You can go now.” One hand had drifted to his leg, rubbing along the old knife wound, the great scar I’d carved through his flesh. “Go back to the kitchen.”

  I rose, put my hands together, bowed a little, saw the flicker of something in the corner of his lips that could have been anger. Let myself out and barely noticed the bolts slide shut on my prison door.

  Chapter 47

  I guessed when the first day of winter was, and pressed my hands together, and gave thanks for the seeds hidden beneath the snow, the wool grown thick on the back of the sheep, the summer water now falling in winter rain, the wood from the curling tree and the stars spinning infinite overhead. The next day, Colas fired two of his staff. There was less food to cook, less food to eat; the season of abundance was ended.

  I was summoned, bare-footed, almost every night to wait at Georg’s table. I did so in silence, serving cold meat when commanded, topping up wine and flasks of tea. It was easier to serve than to clean. Farii avoided meeting my gaze, when she ate with the men of Maze. Merthe, wearing the uniform of a woman who’d been promoted, stared with open-mouthed amazement whenever I entered the room until nudged by Farii to hide her dismay. Kun Mi watched with open dislike, until one day she blurted: “Why. The shitting. Do you keep that around?”

  It takes the table a moment to realise she is talking about me. Conversation lulls, eyes drifting to my previously unregarded form, a pitcher of water held in both my hands. Georg, picking at hot dumplings from his bowl, doesn’t look up as he says: “That is Pityr. He works in the kitchens.”

  “He’s a political. Your enemy. You let your enemy serve you food?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it pleases me.”

  Kun Mi glowers down the table, and for the first time it strikes me how young she is, how utterly unequipped for the role chosen for her. Georg sighs, lays down his spoon, rises awkwardly, unable to disguise the slight wince of pain as his weight shifts from one leg to the other. “Look.” He puts one hand across the back of my neck, pulls me in closer to the table as if he might embrace me. “He is entirely docile.” Shakes me a little, side to side, and, when nothing falls out, laughs, pushes me away.

  “Isn’t he dangerous?”

  Another sigh from Georg. He gestures me closer again, and closer I come. “Pityr,” he sighs, “put the pitcher down.”

  I put the pitcher down.

  “Pityr,” he sighs, “kneel.”

  There is a kitchen knife taped to the small of my back. I have been carrying it for the best part of a month, and no one has bothered to search me or my room since summer, given how passive I’ve become. Given how little I have fought back. I kneel at his feet.

  “Pityr,” he tuts, holding out one foot. The boot itself is clean; Georg almost never leaves his office. I bend down and kiss it, hinging at the hips, bend back up, wait. Georg smiles, ruffles my hair, turns back to the assembly.

  “You see? Harmless. He knows his place. There are masters in this world, and there are the mastered. Pityr understands this now.”

  I study his knees carefully. One trouser leg sits a little lower than the other, his weight favouring his uninjured leg. It is a subtle imbalance, but there if you bother to look for it. Kun Mi grunts a kind of approval, and with the tips of his fingers Georg gestures for me to stand. I do, pick up the pitcher, resume my station. A few people stare. Merthe cannot hide her sympathy, or her disgust, but directs it to her plate. Farii does not meet my eye or the eyes of anyone else.

  A new guard on my shift, replacing Makris.

  She does not say her name, does not sit on the now-habitual stool by the sink in the kitchen but stands, bolt upright, hands behind her back, to attention. She remains like this for two days, until finally it is time for me to wash and clean myself in icy water. She stands by the washroom door as I strip and rub thin soap into cold fingers, eyes straight ahead. Then she crosses the floor so fast I don’t even hear her coming, and I think this is it, she’s the assassin sent at last to kill me, the end of everything, but instead she pushes my head towards the sink, presses her lips in close and whispers:

  “There is a traitor in Council. They call him Pontus.”

  I brace with both hands against the sink, try to see her face in the tarnished shard of mirror, soap drying to scaly prickles on my skin.

  “Do you know who it is?”

  I don’t answer, and after a moment, she lets me go and marches back to the door to resume her station as if she had never moved. I carry on washing myself, pull my clothes back on, go back to work.

  The next day, she was not on shift.

  Nor the day after that.

  The day after that, I turned on the taps in the kitchen and the stink of raw sewage filled my nostrils, hot and clinging to the back of my throat. I turned the taps off, waited in Colas’ office for him to come to work, let him shout, was sent back to my cell; nothing to do until the water ran clean.

  When the door next opened, it was her again, and downstairs there was a truck from I knew not where, fresh water flowing from a nozzle at its back. She watched me carry buckets all day, and never once moved to help, until one time when I slipped and sloshed liquid over the edge, and Colas shouted – although by then he was simply shouting at the day, at the world, at this stupid fucking universe – and she passed me a cloth to clean it up, and as she bent down she said:

  “Who killed Ull of Lyvodia?”

  I laid out the cloth on the floor, watched it absorb the spill, squeezed it tight into the bucket, laid it back down in the next puddle. “Georg, obviously. Obviously.”

  “If we get you out, will Jia listen to you?”

  I shrugged, kept on scrubbing, without a word.

  In the evening, Georg summoned me again.

  The villa was empty; no point feasting while the taps ran with shit.

  He drank from a bottle of wine – safer than even boiled tea – and, when I sat opposite him, gestured to the inkstone in front of him. I picked it up. It was archaic German. I put it back down. “I don’t translate for you. Shoot whoever you want.”

  “I don’t need you to translate it; I know what it says. Read it.”

  Cautiously, I picked it up again, half reading while watching him over the tip of the stone. I had not read any words other than the hygiene instructions in the kitchen for months. The feel of it was like an alien crawling into my mind, a strange and disturbing notion settling over my consciousness. It was an ancient tract on the benefits of innumerable forms of implausible healing. Lavender oil and tea tree; cloves of garlic and sweet-smelling citrus. Crystals and diets and vapours of dissolved salts. I put it down, met Georg’s eye, shrugged. “And?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think if you like nice things it’s perfectly nice. If you want to cure your cancer, it’s nonsense.”

  “It was very popular, once upon a time. As science became more impenetrable, people turned to simple, comforting things. They said they were getting back to nature; that it was not mankind’s place to inoculate against disease or edit DNA, that it upset the order of things.”

  “You are using a facetious example to prove a lacklustre point,” I retorted. “You are conflating the genuine human urge to have control over one’s life with the heretical urge to conquer the world.”

 
; “And when men cannot control their world, what things might they do? Temple took away man’s control, his freedom to choose; it made us no better than beasts. You inquisitors should have realised long ago there would be consequences.”

  “We always want the pain to end quickly – it is so much easier than hard work,” I replied. “And if Temple takes away your right to set the world on fire, so be it. Grow up. Find some other game. Why are we still talking, Georg?”

  He licked his top lip, gestured at the bottle of wine. “Pour, please.” I refilled his cup. There was none for me. “Do you think about him? Pontus, I mean?”

  I lowered the bottle slowly, rested it on a stained round coaster, folded my hands in my lap. “I don’t.”

  “You think perhaps you are alike? You spied on me, he spies on Jia – and so forth?”

  “That would be presumptuous. Presumption would make discovery harder. You know that, I believe.”

  “You must have suspected someone, by the end. Who? Krima, perhaps? Pav?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No. I know two things about Pontus – that they got to me before I got to them, and that they have limits. Pontus makes mistakes. It took them far too long to catch me. This implies that even my speculation, my casual suspicions shared over a cup of tea, might offer actionable intelligence. So no. You can talk about Pontus if it makes you feel big, but you’ll excuse me if I only pretend to listen.”

  “You’re going to die in Bukarest. You know that.”

  “I think it’s very likely.”

  “Don’t you want to know who Pontus is, before the end?”

  “If I’m to die, what difference would it make?”

  He clicked his tongue in the roof of his mouth, sat back a little in his chair, the wine untouched, hand rubbing unconsciously along the hidden scar across his leg. I watched for a moment, then asked: “How’s the war going?”

  “We’re winning. Decisively.”

  “And yet the taps run with shit.”

  “That is not Jia’s doing.”

  “You say that as though it makes things better. I thought you’d rather deal with humans than something worse?”

  “I am dealing with humans. Stupid fucking humans all the time.”

  “You look tired. Perhaps a little peace might do your side the world of good too.”

  “Honestly, I could do with a break. I’ve had terrible trouble with the staff.”

  “I always had you down as a seaside kind of man. Rolled-up trousers, an oversized tome about philosophy in dappled shade while drinking fruity concoctions.”

  A tiny smile, the first real smile I thought I’d seen for a very long time, flickered across his face; it was gone almost instantly, as if ashamed of its own merriment. He shook his head. “Skiing. I grew up in the mountains, you will recall.”

  “Ah yes. You saw the black wolf.”

  “And it can die. I know that. I know it.”

  “The wolf can. I imagine even you haven’t worked out what to do about the mountain.”

  “Goodness, you must have worked hard to keep your sanctimony in check when you were Kadri Tarrad.”

  “Honestly, it was the least of my worries.”

  “Does it make you feel bigger? Does it make you feel brave?”

  “You misunderstand. Your mistake is imagining that in understanding the size and majesty of creation, the wonder of this world and the richness within it, you become small. A tiny scuttling thing without centre, without identity and form. You fail to see how, in grasping your small place within this life, you become part of something that is so much bigger than you could ever be when you were being a hero alone.”

  His brow flickered in brief exasperation, his hand pulling unthinkingly back from his leg. Then he gestured briskly towards the door, all conversation over. “Piss off, Ven. You bore me.”

  I rose, bowed, palm pressed to palm, and let myself out.

  Chapter 48

  Two days later, a mudslide buried half of Tseonom. I felt the panic rise as news came over the radio, bit back on asking, what about Tinics? What about my home? It was only a few kilometres away, was it hit too? Who of my clan had cycled into town that day? Who of my hearth were visiting the clinic or taking tea with friends when the world turned brown?

  An inquisitor hides their home, hides their fear, but I was an inquisitor no more, so I stood squarely in Colas’ door and said:

  “Tseonom is near my home. May I see?”

  Colas opened his mouth to say the usual – piss off, Pityr; get lost, Pityr – then didn’t. He handed me his inkstone without a word, sat back and waited, arms folded and tea cooling on his desk, until my reading was done.

  It was the mudslide that caused Farii to rush through the censorship law, if one could say Farii was still in charge by then. But she was too late to stop the news from Tseonom, and as word spread of liquid death shaking itself loose from the hillside and tumbling down faster than a speeding train to drown and crush those unfortunate enough to be in its path – children and adults – one of the cooks grabbed me by the arm and hissed: “Is it the kakuy? Did they do this? You were a priest – are they punishing us?”

  “Deforestation often results in mudslides,” I replied, not looking up from the sink. “Roots hold the soil together and a rich, bio-diverse landscape is better at absorbing excess water from rain than bare, dry earth.”

  He blinked at me in surprise, bewilderment, then gripped my arm a little harder. “Are the kakuy punishing us?”

  I sighed, laid the dish to one side, rinsed it clear. “Deforestation often results in mudslides. Humans and kakuy are born from the same ecosystem.”

  He shook his head in disgust, threw a cloth over one shoulder like he would whip himself with it, and turned away.

  After that, the radio broadcast mostly patriotic songs and excerpts from speeches on the theme of mankind ascendant.

  On a day without name, I went out in bare feet from the back door of the kitchen to find five feet of snow blanketed over the biomass chutes. I listened for the sounds of the city and found that it was quieter even than the winter wood where once the icy kakuy had prowled between the trees. Colas, peering through the door behind me, arms wrapped around his chest, swore, marched back into the kitchen, re-emerged a moment later with a shovel and, to my surprise, his own winter coat. “Just a loan, dimwit,” he muttered. “Can’t have you dropping dead.” I put on the coat, the smell of vegetable stock and toasted nuts warm in the collar, and when I looked at him again saw, to my astonishment, that he was taking off his shoes. “What?” he snapped. “Don’t think I’m going to kiss you!”

  His shoes were far too big for me, but they offered some meagre protection for the next few hours as I flopped and slapped around, trying to pile the snow as evenly as I could so the delivery trucks could get through. When I was done, I felt warm all the way through my body, until I moved my hands near a stove and nearly sobbed at the pain as blood returned to frozen flesh. Colas let me keep his coat for another hour as I chattered and shivered in the warmth, before sending Qathir to reclaim it and his shoes, which he did with something that was almost an apology.

  In the dead of night, the bolts slid back on my door.

  “Come,” snapped Qathir, clearly as annoyed as I was at being disturbed.

  I shuffled after him through the winding corridor to the floors of green carpet, swaying a little for the first few steps as blood sloshed back into sluggish limbs. I didn’t have tea to deliver, or any duties to perform, but was led as usual to Georg’s study door, where Qathir knocked three times, awkward, a crunching in his shoulders that was unlike any of his normal leg-lolloping ease, before letting me in.

  I stepped inside to the warmth of a fire and the smell of strong black tea. There was Georg, looking perhaps a little tired – did Georg ever look tired? Farii, sat in a corner, shrinking into it as if she was little more than an old pillow on a tatty chair; Merthe, face wrinkled with distaste; and Y
ue.

  Yue, dressed in winter grey, black hair in a skin-tugging bun on the top of her head, an inkstone held so tight I thought she might crack the case. She rose as I entered, looked me in the eye, then looked away.

  “Happy?” asked Georg, legs stretched out across the low tabletop. He made it look like a sprawl, hiding the discomfort in his injured limb, turning disadvantage to a performance of strength.

  Yue looked back up, met my eye again, and I didn’t know what I saw in her face, had no idea what was running across mine. “Not yet,” she replied, forced strength, forced confidence, what in the name of sunfire was she doing here? “Ven – I need to ask you some questions. Are you being mistreated?”

  “What?”

  “Yue is here to negotiate,” Georg intoned, a ritual chant from a priest who had long since lost interest in the things he said. “Jia wants to end the war.”

  “What?”

  “Ven.” Yue’s voice snapped my full attention back to her, standing stiff and straight as a turbine in the storm. “Have you been mistreated?”

  “Yes, of course,” I retorted. “I mean – of course. But I’m far less dead than I should be. What in the name of sun and fire are you doing here? Yue?”

  “I have been sent to discuss preliminary negotiations.”

  “Secret negotiations – Jia doesn’t want the Provinces to know how badly she’s losing,” corrected Georg.

  “Kun Mi isn’t exactly able to reject Jia’s overtures,” I snapped back. “How is the water in Vien these days?”

  In her little, huddled corner, Farii has closed her eyes, like one at prayer, detaching herself from this place and moving to another world.