Notes from the Burning Age

by Claire North

  I think I slept a little again, couldn’t be sure, woke, angry at myself for sleeping, felt the edge of snoozing, raged and cursed and fought against it, found that I had one hand braced against a broken stair.

  Climbed.

  It was all right to stop every few metres.

  It was all right to lie down and try not to cough, to burn, to vanish into this pain.

  Reached the top.

  Lay down in the rain.

  Listened to the earth, hissing, uncoiling from fire to ice.

  Crawled towards the broken door of the tumbled-down church, realised it wasn’t a door but just a hollow where walls should have been. Pressed my fingers over stone and found it warm, warmer even than my body, was amazed, and clung a little bit longer, revelling in this strange sensation.

  Made it all the way out into the ash beyond. Lay on my back to drink down the grey sludge of feathered soot and water falling from the sky.

  Slept again, but felt much better about how far I’d come.

  Dawn, the colour of an iceberg.

  My bicycle was a melted, shrivelled thing, turned in on itself as if ashamed.

  I discovered I was incredibly hungry, and that amazed me. I had no idea that hunger could make itself known over so many other unpleasant sensations.

  There was a tickle at the back of my throat, a single delicate hair tickling my epiglottis, but I could neither cough nor swallow it down.

  I made it to my feet, walked a few paces, crawled a few, walked a few more. If I could walk more than ten, that made the next ten easier. Then I would stop a while, then walk twenty, twenty-five, then rest again. This was how exercise worked, I seemed to recall. You do a little, then a little bit more. It was hard to find a direction and keep to it. The sun swung, a pendulum, back and forth across the sky. I did not aim for the heart of Martyza, for the place riddled with ancient tunnels. But I supposed it was where I needed to be.

  There was no clean cliff where the earth had collapsed. Rather, the land caved in towards the valley in slippery, sodden sheets. Nor was it the black of the fire that had burned away the yellow grass but rather the charcoal, coal-burnt, dust-blazed black of an ancient fuel that had nothing left to give. The rain had liquefied much of the broken soil, creating a sea of dust and mud that stretched to the horizon. Those who had not been crushed when the world gave out beneath them, had suffocated. Those who had not suffocated burned. There were no hands reaching up to the sky; no last pictures of pain. Most had been blasted apart when the sky ignited, and only around the very edges of the broken land were there bodies, black, their moisture boiled away so that, mummified, their limbs had curled in, knees to chest, arms laid across their hearts as if peacefully slumbering as every ligament shrivelled and contracted in the heat. I had expected something more. A scarlet morning over which good people might weep. Carrion, pulling at bare flesh. Survivors howling in their agony. There was none of that. Death was too absolute for human drama.

  I walked south, towards where there had once been a camp.

  The land beneath me squelched and crackled as the rain fell. Sometimes I slipped, half-tumbling into soft earth up to my knee, my thigh, and crawled out hand-over-hand, and then rested a while, drank down air. My breath was wheezing in my chest. A tank was still burning, near the edge of the field. I stared at it, amazed, wondering how there was still fire left in it. Then I smelt the petrol from its broken engine, and it made a little more sense, and either side of it were the foetal, blackened bodies of its crew, ringing it like flowers round a monument.

  I found the first trenches that Jia’s soldiers had dug. Some lay empty; in others, bodies were still hunched, wrapped around their guns, suffocated as the oxygen burned away. I kept going. There were no bodies in the forward station, but the ceiling was black, the floor too, all the way across the room – not collapsed, but rather a tongue of scarring as if some timber-licking ghost has wet its lips at the window frames. There was no sign of life. The turbines had melted, the solar panels cracked into a greenish, liquid stain.

  I walked on as the sun set, and did not hear them over the ringing of my ears but merely stumbled into their camp because it was on the side of the road, and the road was what I was vaguely following. The tents were untouched by char, sagging under the weight of rain, the waxed fabric bowing and bending in pools that the nurses tried to splatter clear with broomsticks from beneath. For a moment I wasn’t sure whose side I was looking at, or what I saw. Stretchers were laid out across the floor, faces without eyes, without skin; the less injured sat in rows, knees hunched up, squinting as if the fire still burned in front of them. No one called for the doctors – there seemed a consensus that this would achieve nothing – and in a buzz of orders and ticking compression batteries alone the camp scuttled on.

  I thought of asking someone for help, but there didn’t seem much point.

  Instead, I found what looked like the end of a line and sat down in the mud.

  The woman next to me didn’t look up, didn’t ask me any questions, didn’t blink. She held her knees to her chest, arms wrapped tight, and watched sights only she could see.

  There was soup.

  I ate too fast, and someone snapped at me to stop.

  There was clean water.

  I choked as I drank it.

  Someone said, “His breathing doesn’t sound too great…”

  Someone told me to lie down on something that bounced.

  Someone else shoved something up my nose that tickled. I tried to swat it away, but hands caught mine and tutted and said, “Leave it – leave it!”

  I think they gave me something that felt nice, like cherry blossom, but inside.

  Sometime later, someone asked: “How are you feeling, earth-kin?”

  I tried to speak, couldn’t. They gave me water. I tried again. “Terrible.”

  “I’m going to do some tests, okay? I just need you to…”

  A little later, someone else leant over, white rags turned black with the soot from my face, my hands, my skin. They’d taken off my robes and manhandled me into some sort of sterile gown that tied at the side. I wasn’t sure if I’d participated in the process or not. They said: “What’s your name?”

  “Ven. My name is Ven.”

  Chapter 69

  There was time in a hospital.

  Then there was time in a temple room.

  Jaqcs came to me and said: “The fires have burned out now. The rain has stopped. The Brotherhood is in full retreat.”

  I didn’t answer, lay curled on my side, staring at the wall.

  A delegation of inquisitors came to me and said: “It was heresy. It was. It was heresy. Blowing the archive at Martyza Eztok… we meant it for the best. The longer the war goes on, the more angry the kakuy become. We had to end the war. We have to keep the peace.”

  Someone turned on the radio, and there was music playing, and it hurt my head.

  Someone gave me an inkstone, and the news showed an artist’s impression of the great kakuy of the pit, and it looked human, it looked like the kind of creature that cared how humans looked.

  I threw the inkstone across the room, and no one asked why.

  Then, one unremarkable day, Jaqcs came to me and said, “Merthe has taken Bukarest,” and asked me if I wanted to light a lantern at the spring festival, and I smelt the cool damp of unfolding green after rain, and held the thin, painted paper between my hands, and that was when I cried.

  So ridiculous, I thought, to cry for the lighting of a lamp. Of all the things to get messed up over, this little, absurd thing, this tiny point of light – it made no sense at all.

  They put one hand awkwardly on my shoulder while I wept, and murmured, there there, it’s all right, it’s all right. You’re all right now.

  In the evening, we processed down to the water’s edge, all the Medj of the city, the temples great and small, and some people came to watch the procession and eat sticky cakes of nuts and honey, and others joined in, dancing and ring
ing bells, for the spring festival of Isdanbul was meant to be a party, not a serious, chanting affair. There were stalls selling sticks of fruit and piles of hot, steaming bread; competing bands trying to out-blare each other, flags flying from the branches of the newly budding trees. The Medj of the Blue Temple lit their lamp first, from a taper they’d carried down the hill, and that fire was then passed to the next lamp, and the next, and the next, until the flame reached me. I cupped it carefully as the wick caught, then passed it on, until at last the lamps of every priest and novice were lit, and the youngest went into the crowd to pass the fire to the waiting tapers and lamps of the hearth-kin waiting there, and I wasn’t sure if I would get through the business in one piece, and Jaqcs stood nearby to say nice things in case I didn’t, and they helped me push my lantern out onto the still waters of the strait, to join the others, swimming in light.

  In the morning after Bukarest fell, Jia went on the radio and said: This is the beginning of the end. We have suffered, we have endured, but now the tide is turning. The tide always turns.

  She sounded tired, but who didn’t these days?

  Kun Mi’s entire second army was gone, along with large parts of the third. The lucky ones would have died too quickly to know how it ended. Council did not report the losses on its side or speak of the tongues of flame that had melted the railway tracks and ripped the nearby villages from the earth.

  The kakuy of Martyza had not cared who it killed, the day the sky caught fire.

  If, that is, there had been a kakuy at all. All you need to start a fire is fuel, oxygen and a spark. And who was there left alive to report on the details of what they’d seen? Not Georg. Not anyone whose report could really be trusted.

  Do you think you saw the kakuy of Martyza? asked Jaqcs as we drank cool water by the temple stream. Do you think you saw the spirit of the flame?

  They had found a few ashen bones from Georg’s body and the metal head of his stick, wolfen, grinning still, its snarl a little twisted at the edges where it had started to melt, turning from a leer to a sobbing scowl.

  Coal dust in the air, I said at last.

  Sparks from a gun.

  Does it make a difference, when the day is done?

  Krima vaMiyani sits, cross-legged, on a cushion by the door of the shrine reading from her inkstone. There is a guard nearby, examining the wall of little prayers inked onto bamboo by the door. I do not know if he is impressed by what he reads. One day, he may be thinking, our civilisation will fall and when people find our prayers they will discover it’s all “please let her love me again” or “I lost my favourite necklace” or “just no morning sickness this time round”.

  I want to take him down, down, to the cold archives beneath the temple, to the tunnels where we keep the past, to show him selfies and pictures of food, jokes and terrible puns in dead, archaic scripts, tell him, look, look – look at people living. Look at how beautiful it is to be alive.

  Instead, I follow the jerk of Krima’s chin into the shrine, where Yue sits, back to the wall, hands loose by her sides. I ease down next to her, bump my shoulder against hers, mutter, “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “You heading out?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Got everything you need? Toothbrush, spare change of pants?”

  “I believe the system provides all that when I get there.”

  “Take it from someone who was a political prisoner: you’ll want your own toothpaste. It makes such a difference.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  She has shaved her hair down to a buzz, perhaps unwilling to trust a prison barber. It makes her look younger, a child with tired eyes.

  “They let you have an inkstone?”

  “They believe that busy, occupied minds are safer than bored, unstimulated ones. So yes, I have an inkstone, and there is a library.”

  “I’ll send you books.”

  “That’s hardly necessary.”

  “I have eclectic taste.”

  She smiled, quickly turning her chin away from me to grimace at the painted ceiling of the shrine, where kakuy of sky and star danced in blue above us. “Nothing too philosophical, please. I think I’ll get enough of that anyway.”

  “Trashy romance?”

  “If you absolutely must.”

  “There are some fascinating old-world texts. Girl meets boy, boy is a dickhead, girl falls for boy, girl meets different boy who isn’t a dickhead, but in her infatuation can’t see the merits of new boy because the first boy is pretty…”

  “Did you study this? Is this what inquisition training involved?”

  “Eclectic tastes,” I repeated. “Good for insomnia.”

  She nodded, unfolded, rose, stretched. I rose too, facing her, a breath apart. She looked past me for a moment, then said: “Don’t wait. It’s very important to me that you don’t wait.”

  “That’s my choice to make, isn’t it?”

  “You can take good advice.”

  “I can find no evidence whatsoever to support that hypothesis.”

  Her eyes flickered to my face as if they would stay there, then danced away again. “According to the priests, everything changes. They say it’s the only thing you can rely on.”

  “Please. I am a professional deliverer of pithy contradictory-yet-demonstrable nuggets of wisdom. And what Temple says is true. The world is vast and everything changes; but that doesn’t mean we don’t try.”

  She nodded again, harder, brisk. Smiled at her shoes, smiled at the painted roof of the shrine and finally smiled at me. “Be well, Ven, kin of earth and sky.”

  “See you around, Yue.”

  One last nod, an ending of all things. She pressed her hands together, and bowed, and so did I. Then Yue walked away, and in the shrine I prayed for her, and felt that she would probably be okay, and that if she wasn’t there were things people could do about it, and that made praying much, much easier.

  Later, the forest grew.

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  meet the author

  Photo credit: Siobhan Watts

  CLAIRE NORTH is a pseudonym for Catherine Webb, a Carnegie Medal–nominated author whose debut novel was written when she was just fourteen years old. Her first book published under the Claire North pen name was The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, which received rave reviews and became a word-of-mouth bestseller. She has since published several hugely popular and critically acclaimed novels, won the World Fantasy Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. She lives in London.

  Find out more about Claire North and other Orbit authors by registering for the free monthly newsletter at orbitbooks.net.

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