As Simple As Hunger

by D Des Anges

  “No it isn’t,” Magda scowled, not looking at the diagram.

  “Irenbend says it is,” Hajar said, raising her eyebrows. “If he’s right, that’s going to explode on you.” She carefully excised the ‘again’ from the sentence, and laid out her component tray. The absence of the diagrams was hardly an impediment (she knew what the bloody thing was supposed to look like) but if Magda was going to start on practical work again instead of sticking to what she was good at, it would be hard to concentrate. The burnt diesel incident from the other day suggested she’d already started that misguided course again.

  Hajar considered screwing some of the packing-wool from the tube valves of last week into tapers and thrusting them into her ears, but she knew Magda would take it to heart.

  Fuck her heart, Hajar thought, reaching for the measuring tape and the new inner valve ring.

  “Scrydan has not spoken to me today,” Magda said, knocking something metal against something else metal and making Hajar wince unintentionally. The equipment was sturdy and Magda wasn’t allowed near the more delicate operations for reasons of precisely this kind, but Hajar could not prevent the engineer’s instinctive cringe at the unwanted scrape of some process not running smoothly. “I hope it is because he is waiting to see me at lunch so that we can talk for a full hour.”

  Hajar had been working with her for eighteen months now, and was quite sure she had catalogued all of Magda’s many, many problems. The problem with Magda, however, was that she had the idea of romance, taken from Wireless epics and the poetry of the various Empires, but the mind of, well, of an engineer. Albion as a whole did not excel at romantic poetry.

  She might be hopelessly inept at the practice and experiment of her theories but, much as it pained Hajar to admit and caused her to grind her teeth when she thought of it, Magda’s theoretical work was invariably sound and solid as the foundations of the building in which they toiled.

  “Scrydan is so tall,” Magda sighed.

  In this, Hajar felt, she was inaccurate. Scrydan was the same height as every other undergraduate Magda had declared herself to be in love with, and as dull.

  The day trickled by in a long litany of things Scrydan had said, things Scrydan had done, one small explosion which made the laboratory smell extremely acrid and left Magda, Hajar, and a frantically-coughing Odo standing in the corridor holding the door shut, with the windows propped open. Hajar increased injection speed by eight seconds, made a note of this, and looked up to find the tea Odo had brought was entirely cold and that Odo and Irenbend (Magda having thankfully disappeared to shove her tongue into Scrydan’s mouth as if trying to feed it to him) were setting up a borrowed Wireless receiver.

  “Time for What’s My Purpose?,” Irenbend said, seeing her. It was unnecessary: after the interrogation broadcasts there was nothing else that they would disrupt their experiments for, and it had grown dark outside without her notice. “Leave it alone, we’re going to listen to the Wireless. It can wait. You didn’t eat lunch—”

  “Yes I did,” Hajar corrected, but she put down the notation sheet and joined Odo and Irenbend by the Wireless.

  “Five minutes,” Odo said with undisguised eagerness, shifting his bony behind across the sole free-standing seat in the room.

  “Have either of you seen Ben today, at all?” Hajar asked, as Irenbend nudged the receiver positions into a better angle.

  “No, Gooddoctor Shout has left everyone’s ears alone today,” Odo said happily, as if he had been around these last two weeks to hear anything Benjon had to say. “That fat idiot with the seaweed fixation was looking for him earlier, I suppose he’s hiding from the inevitable clash of character.”

  “Character,” Irenbend echoed, giving the receivers one last prod before turning up the level until the reedy voice of proclamation from the membranes overcame the hum of the tube valves as current passed through them, “Whatshisname hasn’t a characteristic to him and Benjon’s is like a drunk hedgehog. Shh now. It’s starting.”

  Neither Hajar nor Odo needed to be told this, either; Irenbend had a leaning toward pointing out the obvious. The introductory music to What’s My Purpose? was as familiar to those who had grown up in Albion’s dominions, if not more so, as the chorus of the Albion anthem or those of its separate dominions. Today the bassoon was in need of seeing to, and the bugler had evidently not been paying attention to his cue. The introduction seemed disparate and discordant even when compared to the usual cacophony.

  Odo fidgeted with his keenness, and Irenbend made a show of checking the dials at the front panel of the Wireless receiver, although it was easy to tell from the pitch and clarity that there was no further adjustment to be made.

  “Good evening, Albion,” said the reedy but undistorted voice of Seaton Ruadson, as familiar and even comforting as a mint infusion or a warm bath. Hajar still remembered, though it was more than fifteen years ago now, when he had taken over from Rowena Sihtric, when she died, and everyone who had voiced an opinion had been sure he could never take her place. “We here with What’s My Purpose? are sorry to say that due to ill-health, Hugo Waldren is unable to join in tonight. Hugo’s place on the team will fortunately be taken by Rand Torr Wyne—”

  Irenbend groaned in disappointed disgust, and Odo said, “Bollocks!” with such incredulous anger that for a moment he sounded very much like Benjon.

  After some impassioned swearing, Irenbend turned the level back down on the Wireless receiver. “May as well call it a night.”

  “I was going to –” Hajar began, making a small gesture to her unfinished notation sheets.

  “It’s dark, go home,” Irenbend said, not offering to accompany her as he might Magda.

  The available evidence thus far (and she smiled to herself at the careful empiricism, even in her own head) would seem to support a suggestion that Benjon had indeed found a source of sickness in Hugo Waldren, and that it was severe enough to need him in Edinburgh to induce treatment.

  The imagining of this kept her occupied through the corridors: Benjon would tend with his terrible, curt, bossy bedside manner and try to coerce Hugo Waldren into promising a supportive shoulder to empiricism. It would be excruciating to sit in upon, not least if Benjon’s wild story about Hugo and Hugo’s samefucking lover was not just Benjon seeing samefuckers everywhere again. He was so sensitive to this deviance, the poor man.

  At the doorway, Gull (who must have taken over from Klonos during the day) was blocking the way and in argument with some would-be visitor:

  “No, you ain’t got a letter of invitation, you ain’t a student, you ain’t staff, so no, you ain’t coming inside. I told you, he’s not bloody here. Push off, Moor.”

  Hajar hurried to the door. Gull at the end of his guarding time became bullish and belligerent, and required soothing. She was not sure how this always seemed to fall upon her, but she took it upon herself this time without question.

  “Gull–?”

  “One minute, Gooddaughter, this bugger won’t take no for an answer and he’s a big ‘un.”

  There was an angry sound from beyond Gull’s grey-clad shoulder, and in the darkness beyond the gas light Hajar glimpsed a tall, well-dressed Iberian Moor. His dark skin was speckled with the falling rain and his eyes red-shot with what might have been tears, or might merely have been tiredness.

  “I only asked you to tell me where I can find Doctor Silverstein,” said the Moor with tested patience in his voice like thunder in clouds, “there’s no need to be so obstructive. I have to talk to him.”

  “I told you to push off,” Gull said, a thousandfold more aggressive, “do you want me to call the night watch, is that it? Looking for a cudgel in the skull, are you?”

  “Gull—” Hajar sighed. The Moor had engine smuts on his good clothes, and the rough hands of someone who spends his life tugging recalcitrant machinery: hers would like as not degenerate to the same state in a week were it not for her mother’s insistence on a hundred scented lotions. And here thi
s engineer was asking for Benjon, which narrowed down his identity to a field of one. “He’s from Albion Broadcasting. Let me out, please.”

  Reluctant and bristling, his neck and ears red with rage or cold or both, Gull edged away to let her through. “Are you sure there, Gooddaughter – he’s a big 'un...”

  Hajar stretched a very false smile over her teeth and said to the tall Moor, “I had thought he was still in Edinburgh, but if he’s not at his business there he’ll be at his home, shall I take you?”

  The Edinburgh Moor seemed agitated, but this offer placated him some small way. “If you would, Gooddaughter,” he said, with a very Albion interpretation of a bow. It was evident from this as much as his accent that he was an Albion Moor through and through.

  As they left the frustrated and little-intoxicated Gull behind, standing in his pool of dim gas light, Hajar felt trepidation flutter in her chest. This stranger could easily overpower her, even though (and it seemed Benjon might have been right after all) she was sure her virtue, at least, would be safe from him. She considered taking the canal path, keeping him on guard against the robber gangs to keep him from acting against her, but he seemed already quite distracted.

  “In truth,” Hajar said, leading the Moor from the buildings like a shepherd's goat leading sheep, “I have not seen him since he left for Edinburgh. Did he not perform his duty?”

  The Moor started, then said in some bitterness, “I suppose it was too much to ask a man to keep a secret like that.”

  “He’s told only me, and that under duress,” said Hajar, knowing that for Benjon ‘duress’ was the equal to ‘being asked a direct question’, for he was no strategist. “And I have no one else to tell.”

  This was not the whole truth, for her mother might well have seen some profit in the knowing of it, had she been inclined to listen, or had Hajar been inclined to speak.

  “Your name?” Hajar asked, struggling to marry the protocol her mother had impressed upon her, with what she had learned elsewhere was normal for Albion, as she often did.

  “Oh, he didn't tell you that,” the Moor muttered, grimly.

  “He’s bad with names,” Hajar said, as she often had to. “I am Hajar al-Fihri.”

  “Ferdinand del Cadiz,” said the Moor, offering his hand abruptly. “Your friend tried to do his duty, I'll grant you, but to bugger all avail – sorry – and now Himself has vanished.”

  “He’s not ill?” Hajar asked, shaking Ferdinand’s huge and not-as-rough-as-it-looked hand with some surprise.

  “Oh no,” Ferdinand said, withdrawing his hand. “There is something the matter, except now he's pissed off – sorry – somewhere too. He missed a broadcast, al-Fihri, you listen, when has he ever missed one? I've know the stubborn old bugger broadcast dripping fever sweat into the hljóðnema. This goes long outside the bloody norm.” He sighed, and Hajar heard his breath catch in his throat. Benjon had not been wrong at all, and contrary to the wisdom of the lore and her colleagues, she found it more a comfort than cause for distress. “He did last night, then made off after your bloody doctor, I think.” Ferdinand cleared his throat. “At least, Hogarth at the station said he’d bought a ticket to Durham. And Hugo thinks this place is the arse of the earth –”

  He's not far wrong, thought Hajar, who was fond of the city but far from under any illusion as to its charms.

  “– He'd only come on urgent business, and after his best effort to drag whomever to Edinburgh to no effect, I know him –” Ferdinand lowered his voice, and in it Hajar almost balked to hear distressed affection. “I know him, Gooddaughter, he never misses a broadcast. Can you but imagine the panic at Albion Broadcasting at this moment? I've only broken free these past few hours –”

  The broadcast was only a few minutes past, Hajar thought dumbly, before realising that Ferdinand must mean one of the earlier Wireless epics in which Hugo Waldren's unmistakable, warm voice often rang out: by What's My Purpose?'s time they had already known, had already found Rand Torr Wyne to replace him.

  “Why would he have come to see Ben?” Hajar asked, more to herself than to Ferdinand. Benjon’s house was up the end of a sharp hill, and her legs were growing tired.

  “I don't bloody know,” Ferdinand said, but he sounded more exhausted than angry. “What if he's run mad?”

  Hajar saved her breath for the hill, and soon Ferdinand fell into silence beside her. The streets were more thronged than usual at this time of night, thanks to the absence of Hugo Waldren from his place on the What's My Purpose? team. Every curtained window was illuminated faintly by the glow of gas lights, while out in the street the wind picked up.

  Benjon’s house was illuminated as all the others on his street, the upstairs dark and downstairs lit up, and it stood near the crest of the hill a few houses down from the peak.

  His neighbours had long since given up banging on the walls or shouting through the windows about his mad unsociable hours and the almost-continual stench of decay after (Benjon had told her, somehow not seeing the humour of it) he had offered to show them his work and been effusive on the subject of the delicate structure of the gut lining. They had left him alone since then, and Hajar consoled him that perhaps his neighbours – a tailor and an importer of furs respectively – were less enthused than he for reasons of profession.

  The smell of vinegar spilled out into the street before they reached the house, and Ferdinand gagged.

  “It’s worse inside,” Hajar said simply, reaching for the door knocker with her breath held. She pummelled the stop with a few ferocious smacks, and turned to look at him: he had covered his nose and mouth with his scarf and she supposed that he was trying to keep out from his stomach the scent of turned meat that accompanied the vinegar. It would not work.

  There was no reply to her pounding, and with an interval of silence which held an audible oath from Benjon’s neighbours, Hajar muttered, “Well he’s probably not asleep,” and reached for the handle.

  He usually locked it whether he was in or not, being of a paranoid cast, but Benjon’s precautions rarely took into account that Hajar knew full well how locks worked.

  She glanced back at her temporary companion, who was regarding her with no small incredulity.

  “Why would he be asleep?” Ferdinand asked, in reference to the hour. It was early, the dark no indication of time in winter months.

  “Benjon and clocks keep unrelated hours,” Hajar assured him. There was the possibility that she’d find him slumped on some manuscripts: he rarely slept a-bed, and she had it on her own eyes’ evidence that his bed lay buried under a forest’s worth of books and was quite unusable. He was soon enough revived with coffee in such a case.

  She rattled the handle, and felt it give: Benjon had not even locked it this time. Her breath hung hot and visible in the air before her.

  “Come,” she said, leading Ferdinand into the hallway. It was lined with incomplete diagrams of bodily systems, weak shelves groaning under the weight of many thick books, and a forgotten stuffed and dried bat pinned to the plaster, a relic of Benjon’s brief fascination with the anatomy of natural flight.

  Ferdinand appeared taken aback by the chaotic interior, but superficially so: it was plain the core of his mind directed itself to the discovery of Benjon and, through this, the return of Hugo Waldren. Hajar opened a door onto the abattoir air of the ‘dining’ room. She thought he had the type of face that would look kind. There were laughter lines about his mouth and eyes, no frown marks. Worry did not suit him.

  The shambles of Benjon’s dining room was missing its defining characteristic: the greedy buzzing of overfed bluebottles and corpse-flies, and the only vermin helping itself to the remnants of Benjon’s studies in gross anatomy was a lone, sleek-looking polecat which had surely come for the rats and stayed for the unexpected bonanza of rotting meat.

  “He is a murderer,” Ferdinand blurted, his voice but not his horror muffled by the scarf wrapped over his mouth and nose against the reek.

 
; “A doctor,” said Hajar impatiently, peering about, “They don’t just mix tinctures and tell you to rest – how else are we to learn of the body’s misgivings, if we cannot see first how it should work?” She was lecturing, she could hear it in her voice: and what was more, she was lecturing in the tone-deaf stern and strident manner of Benjon, which would not do at all and endear her to no one. She cleared her throat. “Benjon?”

  They discovered him in the kitchen, perched upon a high-seated stool with more poise than was common, his throat working. He seemed ill-at-ease, among the stacked-high tin cups and half-empty plates.

  “Where is Hugo?” Ferdinand snapped, pulling his scarf from his mouth with one huge hand.

  “Oh, half-way down the cellar stairs,” Benjon said, distractedly, his throat still working and his hands turning over and over each other in a lazy dance just above his lap.

  “What?” Ferdinand shouted, so far rooted to the spot in disbelief.

  Hajar stared at Benjon. He was capable of seeming very callous to the uninitiated, true, but his chief reactions to distress in others were ordinarily to either freeze or back away as though they were hungry hunting wolves, and neither situation went unaccompanied by awkwardly-delivered stock platitudes learned word-by-word from colleagues. He had certainly never displayed this glib unconcern in the face of interrogatory shouts: at the very least he should be irritable and animated by now.

  “He’s dead,” Benjon clarified, which was when Ferdinand lunged at him like a well-dressed bull, roaring in wounded dismay.

  Chapter 8

  Hajar leapt for Ferdinand without thinking, sinking her fingers into his bicep with all the strength she had, but the thick wool of his coat was too greased to afford her much purchase. He pushed forward, smashing a glass vessel underfoot, and Benjon dodged from his high stool as easily as a bird taking to the wing, his long limbs working in perfect coordination for the first time since she’d known him.