by Claire North
“That sounds fantastically risky. Why haven’t you contacted Council already? Arranged extraction?”
“Georg has a spy in the Council.”
I let out a sigh, a little nod. “Pontus.”
“Georg knows everything Jia does. Everything. We can’t contact Council until it’s too late for Pontus to stop us; do you understand?”
“I do.”
She nodded, once, sharp. “The southern army is going to defect. Merthe thinks she can bring nearly all the divisions over. We have plans, documents.”
“You want to barter this for your lives.”
“No.” Farii had been so stiff for so long that I was almost surprised to hear her speak. For another moment she didn’t turn, still regarding the darkness outside; at last, she angled her shoulders away from the window, and like the blades on top of the windmill slowly turned her head to look at Yoko, then at me. “No. It is not about our lives. I am going to be arrested as a prisoner of war; I know that. If I am lucky, Jia will see the benefit of keeping me as a figurehead, a… a symbol of reformation that says whatever she needs me to say. If not, she’ll lock me up somewhere while she works out the best use of me. I accept that. It’s the correct thing to do. We need to end this war. Kun Mi cannot accept peace. She cannot. It is impossible.”
“Why?”
Now she looked at me fully, and I thought there were tears in her eyes.
“In the north, the land is burning. The river is on fire and they can’t put it out. They say the kakuy are awake, they are striding from the forest in plague and ash. There are bodies in the streets in Vien, frozen in the places where they died, soot in their mouths, hands clawed, still scratching at their skin. I’ve seen them. Their blood is ebony. It’s starting in Lyvodia too, the plague coming out of the trees like mist. We haven’t seen the worst of it, but it’s coming. The kakuy are coming. Georg cannot stop them, no matter how hard he tries, so he has to run. Outrun the kakuy. They cannot stop fighting, because if they stop taking land then they will be trapped between the kakuy in the north and Jia in the south, and if Jia doesn’t crush them the kakuy will. The Ube is on fire. We were wrong.”
I have never seen a river burn, though I remember how orange it looked in the light of the blazing forest.
I wonder whether it burns because the kakuy will it, incensed to rage by the arrogance of man, or if Georg’s engineers didn’t know what to do with all the waste products of their military factories. Not that it makes much difference, any more.
Farii’s hand had fallen on my arm, gripping tight, the strangest human contact I had felt for months. Her eyes were wide, reflective baubles in the gloom, her fingers digging into my putty flesh as if looking for bone. I put my left hand over hers, squeezed once, and she didn’t let go.
“You were inquisition. Jia will listen to you.”
I sighed, and suddenly all the exhaustion that had been pushed down beneath the simple imperative of moving, of getting out alive, swelled up like the foaming tide. I slumped back into my seat, pulling my arm free of Farii’s grip, pressed cold palms over aching eyes. “All right. What’s to lose?”
Chapter 52
There are things which were not real, when life was lived in a kitchen, that now are.
Exhaustion, so profound and bone deep that the idea of moving my legs at more than a tree-stalk shuffle seems impossible.
The shrivelled, wrinkled, old-man hands in my lap that I hardly recognise any more.
An ache in my back that has been there for months, but which I got used to when it ached on the floor, ached by the sink. Now it aches in the soft back of a seat, and I don’t know if I can handle it.
Emotions, loud as the shingle sea. They are unacceptable on the job. Farii cannot look away from the dark, in case someone glances at her with sympathy, understanding or forgiveness. Such things would break her in two, and there is no time for that now. So Georg kills Nadira, shoots Lah in the head; so the temples burn; so you run across a moonlight field and are caught. These things are facts and factually you will deal with them, because there is stuff to do. Stay alive. Hope is a trap. Sorrow is self-pity and unproductive. Watch the night; stay alive.
I can hear my heartbeat in my ears, feel it in my chest, in my back, as if bone curled like ageing paper. If I listen to my breathing, as the Medj taught, it gets faster and faster and faster, and that definitely wasn’t in the manual of serene practices for stable minds. Wind and earth, I need someone to try and shoot me now. A good punch to the face. Anything to focus the mind, turn off this rising fire in my brain that is, and cannot be, spinning on the edge of hysteria.
Twenty kilometres from the sea, a checkpoint. Bored soldiers given a boring shift. We slow. Yoko hands over papers, says Farii’s name, and this time, rather than scamper in deference, the men shine torches in our faces, squint at me, at Farii, until she snaps: “Are you quite done?”
“Sorry, Minister,” grumbles one. “Restricted area and that.”
“I understand.” Prim, tolerant; a hint of annoyance. “If it will make you more comfortable, please call ahead to the general. He knows I’m coming.”
The soldier is a little older than his peers. He has the face of one who knows the language of wolves, and loves them, and has no illusions that they might ever love him back. In Temple, there were often men and women such as he, people of the deepest mountains, who would stop to eat and drink at the shrine, where no one troubled them much for conversation. I wonder what dragged him to this midnight road.
The snowfall has slowed, just the occasional white flake that could be stirred-up powder shook from the ground below rather than falling from the sky. Boots crunch like breaking bones; Yoko idles out the inspection by scraping ice from the windscreen, scratching away tight curves of crystal, the motion hiding how close her other hand rests to her gun.
The soldier compares our documents with a colleague. They nod, flick through photos, nod again. Return them to Yoko, who smiles without a word, slips them into her pocket, climbs back into the driver’s seat.
“Go slow,” says the man who ran with wolves. “It’s a treacherous road.”
The battery is nearly empty, a little warning light flashing on the car’s dashboard.
Yoko checks her watch, then checks it again. On the third time checking it, less than five minutes have passed, and she is clicking her teeth, jaw popping back and forth like a hungry eel.
The restricted zone runs all the way from checkpoint to sea. Signs along the road warn: permits must be shown at all times. A few watchtowers have been erected, staring down to the water. Perhaps the Council will attempt an amphibious assault; perhaps they will bring the fleet in from the Middle Sea up the Golden Straits and try to land an army behind Brotherhood lines. Such things have been considered in great depth, it seems, but no one really believes Jia could pull it off. She is far too tepid for such things, the generals say. Perhaps.
Pontus would know, and therefore so does Georg. These towers are for people fleeing, not an army come to invade.
Four kilometres from the water’s edge, we pulled into the open doors of an empty barn by a small hearth. One lamp shone in a round, storm-scarred window, a crown of icicles hanging down the edge of the roof, tinged blue where the light shaved the ice. We slithered into the gloom, cut the engine. Yoko murmured: “Wait here,” and got out, pulling the wind-up torch from her pocket to shine weakly round the space. A flurry of movement, a slap of heavy foot, then a mumble of recognition, a hug, perhaps, in the darkness; the doors were drawn shut behind us, another torch flickered on, flashing across the interior of the car before pointing to Yoko’s chest. She called: “It’s clear.”
My legs were so stiff I had to lean on the roof of the car for a moment while blood shuffled back into them. My eyes hurt from sleepless blinking. Farii squinted round the gloom of the barn, then, turning to the man who’d greeted Yoko, put both hands together in front of her and bowed. “Sea-kin,” she said, and there was a weariness in
her voice, a bone-deep exhaustion that ran deeper than anything I could imagine. “Thank you for your shelter.”
A man in a dark blue domed hat with padded wool over his ears and a hanging oilskin down the back of his neck, heavy beige coat puffed up to a fluffy ball around his frame, returned Farii’s bow. His face was deep olive stained pink by years of sun bouncing off the reflective sea; his eyes were heavy and his smile long. “You lot look miserable,” he blurted. “Can’t be having that.”
His name was Khasimav, and he kept a messy hearth.
“Yes, just move that – oh, put it on the floor – yes, don’t mind – no, careful, there’s – yes under that, if you just – sorry – we don’t get many visitors.”
The hearth usually held ten or eleven people who worked the scrubby fields that rolled down to the sea, or rode the fishing boats when the weather was calm. But the war had changed that, turned the edge of the ocean into a mess of wire and permits, patrols and passports. In the end, it had been easier to leave than stay – some joining the army, others slouching off to friendly hearths further from the front lines, where they didn’t have to account for their every movement to the midnight men with guns.
Only Khasimav and his wife had stayed, and, finding themselves with sudden space, they had taken the attitude that they could fill it. Strewn across the pantry floor were half-mended nets and broken crab pots, clogged engines and vats of stinking algae oil, buckets still reeking of fish gut and shredded scale, boots discarded by the door and torn trousers with needle and thread hanging from the half-finished patches around the knee. Khasimav dug out a few cushions from amongst the debris, slapped them hard against his thighs in clouds of dust until he felt they were suitably plumped, gestured us to sit. “Please, please!”
In the centre of the room he boiled tea, black as seaweed, slightly salty on the tongue, and added a splash of something dubbed “a little helper”, which burned on the way down, tingled hot in the stomach.
Outside, a single bell jangled, disturbed by unheard footsteps in the snow. A patrol car chuntered by, the smell of petrol suffocated by the still, frozen air. Dawn was lost behind a bank of cloud, an obscure greying out of black, smothered in a blanket sky.
Yoko said: “When do—”
He silenced her with a flap of a huge, starfish hand. “The tide, the tide. We are scheduled with the tide. You can sleep a little now, if you want. Sleep a little.”
Farii was already half-nodding, chin jerking in short, electric pops. I found a corner near the stove, dug myself out a little nook as I had so often done in the kitchen, unashamed. Yoko did not move but held her empty cup between two hands as if its lingering heat were the last embers of a dying star. I lay on my back, staring upwards, heart in my ears.
Above my head was a sign, ancient rusted metal polished into something sacred. Written on it were words in an archaic tongue – not one I knew fluently, but with bits and pieces I could grasp. Khasimav caught me staring, blurted: “Ah, my relic! It has been in the family for generations. It brings us fortune. Do you know what it says?”
“‘No parking, 8 p.m. – 6 a.m. Fine of 6000 hryvnia.’ I can’t read the rest.”
Khasimav stared at me, eyes so wide I thought he had choked on his own tea. Then he laughed loud enough to bring an army down, and held his chest tight in case he burst with it, and spluttered: “You’re funny! Isn’t he – that’s so – you’re so funny!” and kept on laughing until he cried.
In the middle of the night, I dream of fire without end and wake to see Farii, eyes wide next to me, gripping my arm tight. There are pins and needles in my fingers; how long has she been lying next to me, short of breath?
“The bomb,” she whispers. “The bomb. The bomb that killed Ull. The bomb.”
I prise my arm free of her fingers, wrap her hands in mine. But she is half-awake, half-asleep, eyes still staring at nothing. I try to find words to comfort her, and cannot, and eventually roll over to sleep and dream again.
Chapter 53
Khasimav roused us a little before midday, arms heavy with clothes.
“Yes, no – yes that will – try this one!”
We changed, sluggish and weary, into the garments he offered. Farii vanished behind a huge green hat, peaked to a cone above her coiled-up hair. Yoko wrapped the cord of a slick brown apron around her waist three times, tying it so tight I thought her eyes might pop. I swam in trousers far too big for me, pinched and wriggled into a shirt a little too tight. When we were assembled, we were three utterly misshapen sailors, as natural on the ocean as a whale to the mountain.
“You look perfect!” Khasimav exclaimed, and none of us believed him. “Just do as I say and everything will be fine. Easy easy!”
He slung nets over our backs, loading up Farii with so many buckets and bags she was less woman than walking luggage rack. “If anyone stops us, I’ll do the talking,” he chirruped, opening the door of the hearth into a day of crystal white and smoke-drenched grey. “Ah, see, we are blessed! The kakuy gave us fog!”
I shuddered, unsure if it was at the sudden cold or the brightness of his voice, only slightly muffled in winter weight, and followed him out the door.
The path from the hearth to the sea was a little track, impossible to see beneath its fresh covering of snow save by the spindle-black thorns of half-buried shrubs sticking out either side of it, like a saluting line of skeletons, guiding us to the water’s edge. The fog thinned as we approached the shore, blasted into licking smoke by the wind off the ocean . Cracked slabs of thin ice had formed at the top of the beach, creating a shattered skin of dirty mirror above black stone, and where the soldiers had laid barricades against a potential invasion a second wall of frozen foam had grown like fingers from the earth.
Towards the water’s edge, the pounding of the sea had kept the ice from forming in more than tiny, quickly made, instantly broken salty lumps. The fishing boats of the village lay just above the high-tide line, most covered in oiled cloth and listing to one side, untouched and smothered in caverns of snow. Khasimav’s was one of the few that still stood propped up above its wooden tracks, mast tipped back onto the deck, propeller hooded and still. It seemed, to my uneducated eye, little more than a skiff for catching the occasional tiny shad from a school of summer fish. I looked from it to the waves as they crashed into the shore. The sea popped with white, hissed and grumbled as if some hidden city were trying to rise from its depths, only for the raging water to smother it down again. I wondered what the kakuy of this place might be; black, perhaps, as its ancient namesake, with the shining body of a jellyfish that, when it reared up, revealed teeth of basalt beneath its belly, stinging tendrils longer than a city street with barbs flecked bloody. Temple had always taught that the kakuy of the sea had been the first to rise in anger during the Burning Age. The cataract-eyed spirits of the deep were less patient than their kin of earth and stone.
“Up, up, yes, come on now!” chanted Khasimav, hoicking Farii up the side of the balancing little vessel with the dignity of an errant pup. “You, priest, and you, soldier! We push!”
I followed his flapping directions, pressing both hands to the ice-crackling, salt-crusted, sea-bitten timber of the boat, and made to push when a voice called out: “Khasimav! Good neighbour!”
It was not an unpleasant voice, young and familiar, but I saw Khasimav tense, smile locked and eyes tight as if stung on the leg by stingray barbs. He glanced up to Farii, on the higher deck of the boat, and half-nodded. She returned the gesture, then vanished from sight, slipping down into the interior. Then he turned, waved at the approaching figures coming through the thin shore mist, called their names, hollered: “And greetings to you too, kin of sky and sea!”
There were two of them, both dressed in mismatched, oversized military uniforms, as if the quartermaster who’d bartered for their gear had turned up drunk to the storehouse and come away with the dregs of some other war. Neither could be older than twenty-one, and though both had pistols on their
hips, only one carried a rifle, the barrel glistening with frost. The boy who’d called out Khasimav’s name approached, smiling brightly – a neighbour, perhaps, who’d joined the army for something to do, a bit of a laugh. Behind him, a woman with a young face that looked already like the older woman she would become, picked with furrows between her brow and curls around the corner of her mouth, managed the barest quiver of a smile to Khasimav before her eyes swept, grey as the ocean, to Yoko and me.
“Heading out?” asked the boy. “Got the authority?”
“When don’t I?” demanded Khasimav, in the voice of one who had played this game before. He started patting his jacket, his pockets, fumbling around with exaggerated deliberation, while the boy smiled – a familiar ritual between them.
“Who’s this?” the woman barked, and I looked away from her moon-rock stare.
“Oskar and Lin; my new crew. Oskar, Lin – say hello.”
“Hi,” I mumbled, as Yoko tilted her chin in greeting, and for a moment I thought she was going to betray us with her sheer bearing, one military woman greeting another. But Khasimav interjected with a cry of “Ah, here!” and pulled out a tatty piece of much-fumbled laminated paper. “Wouldn’t catch me going to do my job without au-thor-is-ation, would you?” he drawled, the grin of a troublemaker still yearning to make trouble.
The boy read it and, still playing the game, laughed and waved it in Khasimav’s face. “I don’t see any mention of your friends here.”
Yoko had a gun, hidden somewhere in her clothes. It would take her a while to get to it, of course; I’d probably be expected to tackle the woman with the rifle. If I was lucky, the cold would lead to a misfire, but even then I’d need to get to her before she had time to react and just hope Khasimav had the good sense to hit the boy before he could draw his gun. The odds were even, I concluded, given the distance between us.
