Notes from the Burning Age

by Claire North

  An army Medj, head shaven and uniform indistinguishable from anyone else’s, met me at the edge of the camp as I pedalled up on my borrowed bicycle. “Inquisitor!” they exclaimed, bowing low. “Welcome to Martyza Eztok.”

  “Temple-kin,” I replied, slipping off my muddy vehicle and returning the bow. “I had no idea there’d be so many soldiers here.”

  “Brotherhood troops have been seen heading south towards the mines, bypassing Plovdiq altogether. The assumption is they’re going for the archives – more heresy, I assume.”

  “You assume wisely. What is your role?”

  “Me?” they answered. “I’m here for sermons and hugs.”

  In the evening, I shared dinner in a tent with the Medj and a bustle of soldiers, knees stained with dust and coal. They led the prayers. We thank you, earth, for the food we eat. We thank you, night, for the safety you give. We thank you, dawn, for all that will follow.

  I wondered where this soldier-priest had been, and what they’d seen in this war, and didn’t have the courage to ask.

  An hour before sunrise, I woke, freezing cold on the thin mat between my body and the earth, legs stiff inside the barrel of my sleeping bag. I uncurled, wound up the little torch that lay beside my head, fumbled out in the night, trying not to step on too many slumbering bodies, looked to the east and saw a hint of grey that might have been the approaching sun, and tried to remember where the toilet was.

  A guard sat hunched like a raven on the broken roof of the little farmhouse, weapon tucked into chest. A low light burned from the makeshift kitchen, where breakfast was already being prepared. I sat on the broken wall on the edge of the compound and looked towards the skeletal valley beyond, wondering what it had been like when the cracked towers and toppled chimneys of this place were living, powerful things. The people of the past had made their own kakuy, spirits of metal and steam, great gods that, for a little while, challenged the thunder itself. They had seeded the clouds and put machines into space. Perhaps Georg was right; perhaps with steel and oil they could have tamed the earth. Those who survived, at least. Those with the will to survive.

  Something moved overhead. I glanced up, tried to pick it out in the darkness, strained my ears for the telltale whine of the rotors, couldn’t hear it. The sky was streaked with scudding clouds that opened and closed like tired eyes. Sometimes I saw stars behind them, a promise of infinity – a busy, beaming void. Then it vanished again, and again I looked and thought a tiny point of darkness moved, but when I looked one last time it was gone.

  “Brotherhood drone,” explained a sergeant in the breakfast queue. “They say the main force will be here by tomorrow.”

  “Aren’t you… a little concerned by that?”

  He shrugged. “Witt’s good at rearguard actions. Didn’t think it’d be over some stinking archive, but still…” But still, but still. What’s a soldier to do, when the inevitable calls?

  By daylight, I drift through the camp, half-listening to the soldiers talk. They glance to the north, the flat, broken plain between us and the wide horizon. They do not talk about the approaching Brotherhood forces. One drops his pants to stick his buttocks up at a passing drone, until a colleague hisses that it’s one of theirs. They wonder where Merthe is; rumours and gossip from Lyvodia. A few wonder where they will be when the day is done, and are hushed, and go back to talking of little, idle things.

  There are muddy crates stamped with the mark of the inquisition being loaded into a truck. They look crudely out of place, each one designed to fit a rack of ancient hard drives or chipsets preserved from static, moisture and time. They should not be slathered in mud or thrown from soldier to soldier like a toy box. There should be Medj here, protecting the history of our ancestors, of the burning ones who died wishing us well.

  Old Lah walks beside me and reminisces about the ancient hard drives they’ve unlocked, piecing together the code of our history. Pornography; bank statements; computer games full of slathering demons and sexy aliens. Family photos. Endless pictures of food on white, round plates with captions full of yellow smiley faces and exclamation marks. Infants beaming up at a camera, at the parent that wielded it. Children running through autumn leaves in red rubber boots, being pushed on swings by cobweb Grandma, come alive again. Lovers, puckered lips, cheek-to-cheek, black background, overlit, over-bright faces and black-rimmed eyes. Friends dancing in the summer streets, drinks in hand; holiday shots across monuments even more ancient than the fires that ended the last great age. Lounging in sunlight on a golden beach. Running, sweaty and out of breath across the victory line. Waving goodbye at an airport, bags packed and guidebook in hand. Thumbs up and big grins. A father who cannot find his child in the ruins of war. A glimpse of someone famous on a bright red carpet, the shot out of focus against the hordes of fans trying to get in close. Wedding photos, confetti, tears; the kind of beauty that can only be born of joy. A woman sleeping in afternoon sun.

  It is strange to imagine that the dead were ever young, children covered in cream, teenagers falling in and out of love.

  I want to go back to Georg.

  I want to sit him down and tell him: You never find what you expect when you dig through the archives. You want nuclear fission and geoengineering. You want oil refineries and investment banking prime-mortgage re-packaged bonds. You want pesticides and herbicides and humanicides and a way to kill the kakuy.

  But look, look. Here’s what you get.

  Three pictures of different kinds of food shared between friends, an out-of-focus shot of two lovers sticking their tongues out at the camera, a screenshot of an ex-boyfriend’s stupid text message to share with friends, because you can’t believe he’d say that shit.

  Here’s the history of the world for you.

  Here’s what the burning left behind.

  You want gods, and all you get are people.

  I see Krima vaMiyani.

  She nods at me once, from the passenger side of the heavy truck she rides in, then turns away.

  In the morning, the truck of crates marked with the badge of the inquisition is gone, and on the other side of the gouged-out valley there are black fumes in the air as an army approaches.

  Chapter 67

  Once, on the edge of Martyza, there was a church.

  It was far older than the coal mines, than the black claw raked through the earth. It did not make itself especially denominational, having at some point in its history been a place of worship for nearly every flavour of monotheism imaginable. Its yellow stones had cracked and fallen away in places, and the roof was long since tumbled down. Moss grew on the piled mounds of fallen masonry, glistening in the morning frost. A hollow stair led to a soggy black below, perhaps a place of corpses and snakes, of ankle-deep fetid water and ancient bones with wet hair on bare skulls, and sometimes children dared each other to go inside, and sometimes they did, and usually they did not, because some darknesses were a little too conclusive.

  I cycled there on a borrowed bike as two armies lined up across the scarred field of Martyza. They told me it was far enough away from the main battle lines that I probably wouldn’t be mortared to death, that the worst of the crossfire would pass me by. They told me, if it didn’t, if the battle raged out of control and soldiers with guns descended upon me, to surrender immediately and grovel for mercy. They seemed fairly sanguine about the whole affair.

  “How does a battle begin?” I asked one.

  “Oh – they’ll probably start shelling us when they’ve had a bite to eat, and if they don’t, we might try shelling them. There’s a lot more of them than there are of us, of course, but they’ve had to travel a long way so they might not be feeling too frisky.”

  I wondered what “frisky” could possibly mean when two armies faced each other over the black-dust belly of the earth, and decided not to ask.

  In the church on the edge of the field, I left my bicycle by the dry mouth of a little bowl where worshippers had once dipped their fingers by the
broken door, and sat inside on a stone near a place where once an altar had been, swathed in my priest’s robes, and closed my eyes, and waited for the end of all things.

  I did not pray, since there are no gods with interests in human things.

  But, for a little while, I let my mind be in the cold morning air, and my toes be in the cold morning earth, and my heart beat with the fluttering of the wings of the crow on the wall overhead, and my mind grow slowly, so slowly, with the moss unfolding over fallen stones. And for a little while, that was enough, and I was nothing, and everywhere, and everything, and I was the kakuy.

  All around: nothing.

  No forest, no hills, no mounds of slagged chemical sewage belched from the belly of a machine. Nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. Just the flatland before the fall into the pits and the dry rasping of brown grass rubbing against the dead stems of its nearest neighbour.

  A little snow fell, crystals melting slowly on my sleeve. I watched each one, determined to spot a pair, and soon lost interest. Drew myself a little tighter into my robes, drank tea from a hot flask, felt the knife buried in my boot, listened.

  I heard the armies move before I heard him.

  They didn’t open with shelling, as had been promised. Everyone was in too much of a rush to get the artillery out. I had imagined the belching roar of the Brotherhood’s tanks to be an offensive shuddering in the land, a tumour in the ear. But the morning was kind, and the faint snow muffled the rumble of their movement to a distant animal growling as they revved their engines and charged forward. Drones buzzed high overhead, impossible to tell which was on whose side, sweeping back and forth across the field. I wondered where Antoni Witt was now, and what his soldiers thought of the lumbering death shuffling towards them. I waited for the sound of artillery, and the odd big gun fired desultorily into the sky, and no more. The sound of small arms fire when it began was an erratic, far-off thing, odd units skirmishing in strange places, the constant dance of fire-withdraw-fire that was Witt’s calling card. I wondered if his troops could outrun a tank. I wondered how much fuel a tank needed to mow down men. I waited, checked my watch, waited.

  Put my fingers on the earth and felt the hum of the vehicles moving across it, far away.

  Listened for the sound of birds; heard none.

  For the crack of animals moving across frost; heard none.

  Only the distant thump of unseen shadows, inhuman things, busy about killing.

  Understood, for a little while, why Yue wanted to go to prison. Missed for one startling moment my cell in Bukarest. Decided I was, indeed, finally, mad. Drank some more tea.

  When he came, he did so on foot, and that surprised me. I heard his stick on stone, striking hard as he approached the church, near enough to cut through the chunking, thumping, rumbling growl of the Brotherhood soldiers pouring across the ruined land to the west. Was Witt even bothering to fight back? Perhaps not. Say what you will of the general, he liked his troops to live.

  The man approached at the pace of one out for a hearty constitutional, a pleasant early morning walk. There should have been mist on the ground and bells ringing in the air; he should have nodded politely at people who owed him favours as he passed, a grand fellow about his business.

  Instead, he stopped on the edge of the church, listened to a sudden swell of distant gunfire, knocked once with the tip of his cane on the broken porch, stepped across the threshold, a smile on his lips.

  “Hello, Georg,” I said.

  He was surprised enough for the smile to freeze, for the stick to hang in the air for an instant. Then his smile changed; he nodded, beamed, tucked the stick under one arm and straightened a little, as if he could hide his limp from me. “Kadri. Congratulations – I am surprised. Goodness, indeed yes. Well done.”

  “Tea?” I held out my steaming flask.

  “What is it?”

  “Jasmine.”

  “Thank you, no. Are you alone?”

  “Regrettably, yes. With so many of your drones flitting about, it didn’t seem prudent to bring a whole military convoy with me, however much I would have liked the cover.”

  “I didn’t expect to see a priest so close to the battlefield.”

  “I don’t think anyone expected to see you so close to one either. Not Georg Mestri – not sticking his neck out. But then you expected Yue.”

  His smile widened, a flicker of something real, something familiar. His eyes roamed round the ruined place, he paced a little forward, a little back, saw no threat as he talked. “Ah. Yes. I did. I do believe this is what it’s like to feel… flustered. How novel. Are you armed?”

  “With more than tea? Are you sure you won’t drink?”

  A hesitation; a memory in his eye, perhaps, of hours spent in each other’s company, playing games, drinking wine, talking of nothing much. He gestured towards a little mound of stone slightly lower and less comfortable than mine, tried to find a comfortable way to perch on it, found it impossible, tried for the sake of the illusion anyway, one leg high, one leg low, smiled again, hands folded, stick tucked into the bend of his hip, watched me, watching him. Finally, he said: “I’ve never seen you in priest’s robes before.”

  “That would have somewhat blown my cover.”

  “You look like an ugly duckling, all fluff and a tiny head.”

  “They’re not really cut for style. The sexy Medj with gleaming torso was always something of a myth. How are you doing?”

  “Oh, fine, fine – you know. Fine. Busy as ever. You may have spotted the little ruckus happening a few thousand metres from here. Yourself?”

  “Could be worse. I mean – significantly better than in recent months. Keeping busy, and so on. I’ve been reliably informed that I’m going insane. But I’m not of any strategic significance, so it probably doesn’t matter.”

  “Probably not. Where is Yue, out of curiosity?”

  “Under close arrest, behind the lines.”

  “And she’s turned, presumably? Her message told me to meet her here, but it showed none of the duress protocols we established.”

  “She is no longer your agent, as you can see. But then again, all we asked her to do was bring you here – that’s hardly so much, given that you brought an army with you.”

  “What? Oh, yes. Technically I brought the army for Martyza Eztok, for the archives. Yue’s message suggested they would be heavily defended. I am beginning to suspect that was also a lie, yes?”

  I’ve left the lid off the flask of tea. It’ll be getting cold, ruined soon. Never mind.

  In the distance, someone opens up with a high-speed kind of gun, nothing I’ve ever heard before; they must have dug the designs out of some sealed archive, a hundred bullets a minute, two hundred, pop pop pop, you’re dead and you’re dead and you’re dead, so easy, so much easier if you do it right, just like a game, really, a short story on a winter’s morning.

  “Witt has brought in a few divisions – enough to make a scene worthy of your attention. It was… nice of you to come for Yue personally, when she asked. I wasn’t sure you would. Wasn’t sure if you cared so much for your assets.”

  “Yue was more than an asset. She was… she is… special. She has done more for my cause than you’ll ever know. And I’m fond of her. We were friends, when we were young, did you know that? We lived together for a few months, argued about all sorts of things – we had some serious fallings out, in the way you only really can do when you’re that naïve and pig-headed. I can still make her favourite dinner. Do you know what her favourite dinner is?”

  “What would you offer, in exchange for her?”

  “Is that what this is? You’ve asked me here to negotiate a prisoner exchange? Really? Not a special operations team – not an assassin?”

  “You would have spotted an armed bunch of bastards with big guns a kilometre off. And killing you isn’t Jia’s preferred outcome. But seriously – what would you give for Yue?”

  “Oh… some of the politicals we’ve got in Buk
arest, perhaps? Now that Farii has betrayed us, I imagine she’ll be keen to get a few of her last surviving allies out before we shoot the lot of them.”

  “I didn’t know there were any you hadn’t shot.”

  “That’s because you’re middle management, if that. Secretarial – that’s more accurate, isn’t it? A competent secretary.”

  “I imagine you burn through staff at a terrible rate.”

  He smiled, shifted his position on his uncomfortable seat, found it too much, stood, walked a little back and forth, hiding the limp now, hiding the pain as the weight fell on his injured leg, swinging his stick side to side as if it were just an ornament he carried for fun. I closed my eyes, heard gunfire but nothing human behind it – no screams, no cries on the wind, just the tearing of broken air.

  “Do you know this place?” he asked, sweeping his stick towards Martyza. “Do you know what it was?”

  “Coal mines. Power stations. A relic of the burning. Nothing grows here, any more.”

  “Coal mines and power stations,” he mused, half-nodding into the grey morning gloom. “The burning lifted people out of poverty in numbers never seen before. It extended the life of man to nearly a hundred years – a century of living. It made it possible to travel the world, to change the face of the planet. It changed what it meant to be human. Our minds expanded as our potential did; we could conceive so big, so far, of so much. Ability was rewarded. We were not afraid of consequences; there was nothing that could hold us back. It breaks my heart to see what we have become. So scared of the kakuy, we barely dare tread on a dandelion for fear it brings down the thundercloud.”

  “We’ve understood very different things from the past. All I see are a few people getting rich in paradise, while everyone else chokes and burns. An age of economic tyrants with too much power and not enough care. One man may burn a forest, but he can’t make it grow again.”

  Georg rolled his eyes. “Do the robes make you more pompous, or have you always been like this? There will always be a top and a bottom of society, but at least it will be one of merit. War teaches us that there are generals and there are soldiers, but you too could be rewarded, if you are strong enough.”