Notes from the Burning Age

by Claire North

  The inflatables either side of the ship had stopped firing, and as I dragged Farii further up I felt the boat tip, a little at first, and then irrefutable, nose-first, and thought for a moment we were being sucked down beneath some great wave. Now the shape of Yoko’s mouth had some meaning to it, and I dragged Farii backwards, hooking one loose arm across my shoulders and hauling her towards the stern, which began to rise like a closing drawbridge. Glass tinkled all around, and I managed to gasp: “Khasimav? Where’s Khasimav?” but Yoko just grabbed Farii’s other arm and pulled her, nearly climbing now over the wreckage of the cabin, away from the sinking prow. I looked down into the blackness of the stairwell at our backs and thought I glimpsed a face turned up to me, eyes closed, something dark smeared across its skin. The water rose from beneath it, through the shattered hull, briefly floating it a little nearer to me, or perhaps I was descending as the ship did, all things in motion. I wondered if the fish gave thanks for the food they ate. I wondered if there was a place at the bottom of the sea where the creatures of the deep sucked on the white flesh of the kakuy as it flaked away like dust in sunlight.

  Then the water was rising, pricking at my toes, and I scrambled hand-over-hand up the sloping deck of the ship towards the stern, where the motor had lifted from beneath the sea, blades still spinning on loose momentum, flopping in the air. I crawled onto the hull of the boat itself as we began to tip over, grabbing the limp form of Farii and hauling as Yoko crawled up with me. A drone fell into the water a few metres away, sending up a splash that shivered through my sodden clothing. In the distance, the patrol cutter was now thoroughly on fire, the two inflatables rushing back towards it to rescue the sailors jumping from its blazing decks.

  I didn’t know how we would fall, what it was like to be on a ship that was drowning. Yoko was shaking Farii, snarling, wake up, wake up, and I saw Farii begin to blink, fingers tightening around her loyal guard’s arms – perhaps too late. The boat jutted upwards, stern tipped to the sky like a spire, and balanced there for a moment. Perhaps we would stay like this, bobbling like a bottle through the sea. Then it began to roll to the side, and I jumped, hurling myself as far as I could as the broken vessel slammed into the water, hull stuck up into the sky and the flat, shattered deck below, flinging us into the darkness of the sea.

  Chapter 56

  In the winter wood, the kakuy makes no sound as it moves across the snow, nor leaves any trace.

  Tseonom is buried beneath a mudslide, and in Tinics the forest burned, and the kakuy too.

  The forest will return, of course, one day. One day, there will be nothing but forest on the earth, when humankind is gone. The forest was always better at co-operation than man.

  In the middle of a sea that is a forest, teeming with life, I felt the boat lurch beneath me and jumped as far as I could away from it, into the frozen water. It hit like stone, slamming the breath out of me, flushing up my nose and straight into my brain, as if the fluid sac that cushioned my skull would pop. I pawed at the surface of the water as I fell and kept on sinking. I had not imagined it was possible to be colder than the deepest ice of the winter wood, but in this place my arms were wet sand, everything so slow. To drown starts as a constriction in the throat, a closing in of the chest, a popping of final breath from nose and mouth, as heaving, heaving, heaving as you swallow down the need to swallow for air, a gasping, gasping, gasping, each moment this will be the one where you inhale the sea and fall like a stone, fingers of blue, eyes of red, at least this will only be a moment, only a little, terrible moment.

  I hit the surface, hauled in air, bobbed down, water rushing up my nose, brain sloshing in salt, surfaced again, tried to swing my legs up, to float, saw the sky lit up in silver-white as something burst in the night, and in that instant understood the need to scream, not in fear or hysteria but pure frustration, pure inexpressible grief that this was it, this was how it ended, a thing without words, all the things I’d never do, never be. Managed to surface again, tilted my head back so that water sloshed into my ears, choked out water and felt my back begin to bend upwards, every breath shivering fast as a mouse’s racing heart.

  There were no stars above. The waves pitched me side to side, constantly tipping a mask over my face so I spat salt and blinked fire, unable to predict their motion, arms floating like flotsam, dead in the water. The burning patrol ship was a pyre in the dark, bright enough to cast a glow on the low sky. Somewhere nearby, there was the ship that had destroyed it, coming for us, but whether it was five minutes or five hours away I couldn’t tell.

  I tried to fight the sea, to find stability in its motion, and couldn’t. I tried to relax into it, to let it carry me, to trust that I was still here, still breathing, still alive, and for a little while that was easier, and I could focus on shivering, shivering, shivering, until I wasn’t shivering any more. I felt my shoulders roll down from my ears, as Lah had taught us back in the temple – let go, let go. These stories you hold in your body, these stories you hold in your mind – let go. Every time my ears rose and fell between water and air, a roaring, then a silence – so much easier to listen to the roaring than the silence, but listen, listen, here it is, that quiet place that is inside as well as outside. I felt the salt seep into the raw skin of my scrubbed red hands, and for a while the fire was pleasant, cleansing, and I knew that I would heal, if I did not die, and I didn’t want to die, and I knew as surely as anything I had ever known that I might, and I might not. Both these knowings seemed so certain, so absolute, it was almost impossible to imagine they could live together, and yet like the turning of the sea they rolled over me. Now I breathe and will live; now I do not and will die.

  Around the wreckage of the cutter, the inflatables circled, their mission of murder now one of rescue. The pilots had their orders, but a higher order prevailed on the ocean: you saved your friends. The sea would take care of the rest. The sea did not care for prayers.

  A light shone in my eyes. I tried to swat at it, irritated, and found that my left hand could move, a little, a limb far away, belonging to another nation state. The light blinked at me, then swung to my right, then swung back, then swung once more to my right, like a hungry gull circling the smell of snacks. I looked where its light flickered and saw a shape, stable and black in the moving world. The drone danced towards it, bright across the water, picking out the upside-down hull of the fishing boat. It stayed there, hovering, light flashing, waiting. I tried to kick, on my back, a little, and didn’t go anywhere. I rolled onto my front and tried to swim, the head-spinning, shoulder-slapping crawl of a creature not used to water. That took me a little closer, but so slow, so slow. The distance could not have been fifteen metres, and it was swimming through tar, swimming with the great kakuy of the deep already half-entangled round my legs, her tentacles embedded through the tears in my skin, running all the way into my veins, the two of us already one, like the roots of the tree in the soil of the earth. My arms smacked the water like falling sacks, fingers spreading and wrists buckling beneath the waves, and it occurred to me that if I didn’t make it to the hull of the broken ship I would drown for sure. Five metres, and a wave tipped my head under, and when I surfaced again I didn’t know where I was, couldn’t see, couldn’t make my legs kick, arms drag, then saw the light of the drone again, bright white to my right, and threw myself towards it, fingers stretched, as if I could bridge the gap by will alone. A turn of water picked me up from behind and pushed me, sudden, hard, towards the inverted vessel, and my fingers scrambled and scratched against the scars of old, scrubbed-off barnacle, ancient algae and newer resin.

  I lunged to find a grip, nails cracking as I slid, the same water that had flung me forward trying to haul me back. Lost my hold, fell into the water, swallowed salt and felt my eyes tear as ice filled my nostrils and every tiny tube and empty corner of my skull, then was pushed forward again, grabbing for the thin ridge of the hull, right hand missing, left catching by a few curled fingers as I clung on. I felt every musc
le in my arm stretching, could feel the tiny tendons where they joined, the full length of each fibre and the shape it made as my fingers began to give way, sliding back like a broken lock. I began to fall, for the last time, and as I did a hand, an arm, a shoulder flung itself up from the other side of the hull and caught me by my forearm as I slid backwards, holding me tight.

  I looked up, saw the pallor of Yoko’s face as she draped herself, bent almost double over the ridge of the hull, bringing her left arm round to join her right and snatching me before I could fall. I swung my right arm round, held her tight, and for a moment the two of us hung in precarious balance on the slippery, tossing curve of the boat, her feet braced as I slithered and slipped to some sort of purchase. Her eyes were wide, black in the brightness of the drone’s light, her hair riddled across her face like seaweed. Somewhere, once, she had perhaps seen images of drowning women returned as demons, flesh bloated and skin shining, swollen, liquid things, and in her face now was a determination that bordered on fury – not her. Not today. I did not know when I had last seen – if I had ever seen – such a will to live. I tried to remember what that might have felt like, to steal a little of her fire for my own, and as she pulled me in I let myself flop beside her, our grips changing as we locked tight into a woven fortress of hand and arm, sprawled across the tipping hull of the boat.

  There was a ship. It was a destroyer of some kind, low in the water, hull textured like the skin of the shark. It launched inflatables, as the cutter that pursued us had, two points of bright white rushing towards us across the sea. Above, drones zipped back and forth over the water, one staying bright above us, catching us in a fountain of light. Another hovered some twenty metres away, and I thought I saw a glimpse of someone in the water, and couldn’t be sure, and didn’t know, and held onto Yoko like a child in the forest.

  Don’t let go

  Vae

  Don’t let go

  Behind us, the cutter burned. In the past, the fires would have been of gasoline, yellow and black. Today, it is the pop-pop-popping of biomatter resin straight from the vats, flares of pale pink and flashes of spring-soft green, bursts of lithium white and blue when the batteries burst, the stink of silica, black puffs of carbon from melting fibres and withering corn as the cellulose bonds in the hull started hissing and breaking apart in the flaming, turning air.

  Yoko, I whispered. Yoko, listen to me.

  Listen to me.

  If I die here—

  Don’t you die, priest.

  If I die – I know who Pontus is.

  I know who

  I know

  I know why Georg never killed me.

  If I die—

  You’re not going to die, shut up!

  You need to remember this.

  You need to tell them.

  I leant in and whispered a name in Yoko’s ear. And it was the breaking apart of a world, and it was the great rain that follows the endless burning fire, and she nodded once, and we held on tight to each other’s arms in the burning dark, and she said: don’t let go.

  The rescue boats went to the first pool of light before they came to us. Then they motored over, so slow, the cold a moment-to-moment discovery in our bones. Voices spoke words, hands reached up for our legs, hips, and I didn’t let go until Yoko nodded, until even she believed it would be okay. Then I did, and slid backwards onto the rigid deck of the inflatable, saw faces that seemed barely human, felt someone wrap something that was meant to be warm and felt cold around me, heard commands, questions, didn’t answer. Floated a little while in the dark and watched the burning remains of the ship that had pursued us tearing apart. Tried to say a prayer for the dead. Thought of Khasimav’s corpse, perhaps only a hull’s width away from me. Perhaps there was still air inside, perhaps he wasn’t dead at all but screaming for help. I leaned over to press my ear against the hull to listen, but someone stopped me, pulled me back, said something polite, or maybe rude, and probably had a point. Yoko watched me as we pulled away from the wreck, as if looking at a dead man.

  Chapter 57

  The destroyer was called the Shearwater. They dropped planks on rope for us to sit on rather than ask us to climb the net slung over its side. On deck, two sailors in thick, padded jackets and dark woolly hats hustled myself and Yoko towards a door, all the while asking us questions: are you bleeding, what’s your name, can you tell me what day it is?

  I couldn’t. I had no idea. I hadn’t known for a very long time.

  A larger crowd stood round a more complex assembly of pulleys that had hauled up an orange stretcher, scampering to the bark of a woman’s voice. A man ran past holding a yellow box slathered with warning signs; someone else pulled their gloves off with their teeth so they could load a syringe from a small, transparent bottle. Yoko stopped and stared while the sailors tried to hustle us inside.

  “Farii,” she said flatly, and when no one seemed to respond, she raised her voice, one arm out to lean on the wall of the ship as if her legs might finally go. “Farii. Chief Minister of Lyvodia. If she dies, you lose the war.”

  “Sea-kin,” murmured the sailor with the most common sense, “I need you to be clear. You are saying that woman is Chief Minister?”

  “Yes. We are defecting.”

  “Who are ‘we’?”

  “I am her head of security, Yoko Blagha. This is Ven of the Temple of the Lake. We are defecting. We didn’t broadcast Farii’s name because it would have brought the entire Brotherhood on us. We only broadcast Ven’s because…” Her voice trailed off, and she looked at me, and there was something in her gaze that made me feel ashamed. Then she turned away, eyes fixed on the gaggle of sailors. “We have vital information for Jia. Only Jia.”

  “Sea-kin, I need you to go inside now. We need to get you warm.” Yoko didn’t move. “We will give the Minister the best possible medical attention.”

  “I am her head of security.” A mantra, intoned, as Yoko did not move.

  “She’s safe. Please, come inside.”

  Yoko stood a moment longer, then nodded once, and I followed her into the warm.

  There was a medical bay.

  We sat in it, watched by a sailor at the door.

  The doctor and nurse were nowhere to be seen. Cupboards stood open, their contents ripped out as medics ran onto deck. We were given tea, wrapped in blankets. My teeth clattered like castanets, but the sailor said we couldn’t be warmed up too fast, that it would be dangerous. Drink your tea; stay here. You’re safe. You’re safe.

  After a while, an officer, dark skin tinged with the deepest blue as if something of the ocean had grown within her, came to our beds. Tell it to me again, she said. Who are you? How did you come to be here?

  I am Yoko Blagha; this is Ven of the Temple of the Lake. We are defecting.

       And the woman?

    Farii of Lyvodia. How is she?

          She has a heartbeat. She is not awake.

       I need to see her.

    The doctor will bring her here soon.

          I need to see her. I am her… her friend.

          My name is Yoko Blagha.

             She’s getting the best possible care.

             And who are you, Ven?

  There is another question here, far more interesting to this young officer. The question is: why in the name of sun and sky did we come to rescue you, shivering man, when someone much more important was on your boat? Why did we race across the sea to save your body from the deep?

  I’m a spy, I replied. I have information of vital importance for the Council.

  What kind of information?

  I know how to win the war.

  Chapter 58

  Here: land. We arrived mid-afternoon, overcast, grey, thin snowy slush on the shore, a bobbing, sulky sea. My legs did not quite know how to walk for the first few steps, teetering like a baby deer
.

  Here: a small delegation of military types and one civic dignitary to meet us, scrambled from who knew where to say they knew not what, awkwardly assembled in haste to deal with a problem beyond their expertise or authority. An ambulance waited by the quay, charging off one of the electrical posts fuelled by the tidal turbines beneath the water. Yoko walked next to Farii’s stretcher as they carried it into the back, one hand gripping Farii’s. Farii did not grip back, half a dozen lines and tubes running from her flesh to a small scaffolding of bamboo that a nurse pushed alongside her.

  I looked, and did not see Yue. Instead, a man who introduced himself as Nkasogi and smelt faintly of menthol and mint stood before me, pressed both his hands together and bowed. I bowed in reply, awkward, fumbling and slow, a thing almost forgotten, mumbling some half-apology. “Sea-kin,” he announced, taking my arm by the elbow as if I were a dry flower about to crumble, “I have been sent by the Council to bring you home.”

  Home is a thousand kilometres away, inaccessible to me. Perhaps he saw this in my eyes because he pressed his hands together again and bowed a little deeper. “I have been sent,” he corrected, “to bring you to Yue Taaq.”

  Farii and Yoko rode in the ambulance. Nkagosi and I rode with eight others on the back of a navy truck, heading inland. Low hills of needle-dark winter green stepped in long undulations away from the sea, hard mountains blasted to a soft bulwark by millennia of salty wind. A few cargo bicycles passed us by, heading towards the sea, and one fish truck, coasting down the side of a hill with the casual familiarity of a driver who knows every ridge and switchback and doesn’t care if no one else does.