As Simple As Hunger

by D Des Anges

  By her understanding, it was most like to have enough charge remaining for this journey, without reliance on the hateful, stinking alchemical reaction which brought electrification to the engine of conveyance. It would however be a poor call for her if she was wrong, for it could not be brought into use half-way through a flight.

  Hajar sat in the narrow, uncomfortable seat of the ornithopter, and started the alchemical process again. It was deafeningly loud, and even fouler to smell when sitting this close.

  The body of the ornithopter, as light and fragile as a bird’s skeleton and for the same reason, shook with the contained explosions and ignitions.

  She pulled out the damper that drove the current to the engines of conveyance and the membranes and cycles began again to move. They increased in speed until her headscarf flapped and battered at her face, but there was no time and no free hand to tighten it.

  With a jerk so violent that for a moment she believed she might be about to perish in the inevitable explosion, the ornithopter came free of the clutches of the ground.

  Even as she shoved and wrestled with the many levers to which she must attend, Hajar marvelled at the way the scorched earth slipped out from below her. She marvelled and even thrilled a little at how the unsupportable fragility of the ornithopter’s skeleton somehow broke her from the weight of the world that had cradled her all her preceding years.

  It stank and rattled and the fear of fire was ever a second away, but as she came level with the top of the wall, she found herself a little bereft that she might never fly again after today, in the same part of her that thrilled to the mating of one knowledge to another to produce a new discovery.

  The wall’s summit was wider than she had anticipated, and Ferdinand was even now lowering their supplies to the far side.

  The landing of the contraption on the breadth of the wall was such a trickish endeavour that several times Hajar wished she could just close her eyes and entrust her fate to luck, but she snapped I am an empiricist to herself in Benjon’s waspish voice. She twisted the appropriate membranes and thrust in the dampener at the moment that seemed most appropriate, and came to a successful if not comfortable landing. Nothing exploded.

  “How many times have you done that, exactly?” Ferdinand asked, as she staggered from the ornithopter, stinking and coughing.

  She clutched shamefully at his arm to keep herself from plunging over the wall.

  “One, now,” she admitted, watching him run the rope over to Benjon’s expectant figure.

  “This is the very facsimile of madness,” Ferdinand tutted. “TIE IT ABOUT YOUR WAIST AND WE WILL PULL.”

  And pull they did. For a thin man, Benjon seemed to have grown quite dense, and Hajar was sore in the arms by the time their burden rolled to Ferdinand’s feet like a coiled carpet.

  “Have you been eating stones, ‘doctor?” Ferdinand asked, untying him as Benjon lay prone and wheezed.

  He was so reminiscent of his right mind that for a second Hajar was compelled to wonder, absurdly, if he had somehow squeezed the occupation from him.

  “Alright,” Ferdinand said, when Benjon regained his feet. “I think … Hajar. Climb down, I shall lower Benjon, and bring the ornithopter myself last.”

  “Climb,” Hajar gaped, leaning over the edge of the wall to see what this would entail.

  The drop was farther on this side, the Wall spanning, it seemed, the crest of the hill upon which it was built. It might make their descent into the forbidden territory smoother, but it also made the descent from the Wall’s zenith more arduous.

  Their supplies lay at rest against the wide base of a tree, having rolled some feet from where they landed. On the strange side of the wall there had been no clear effort to demolish any growth, but though the trees drew closer there was no vine nor helpful branch abutting the great grey granite edifice to aid Hajar’s climb.

  “Down the rope,” Ferdinand said, as if this information made the business less daunting.

  “Could I not fly—”

  “Could you not fall,” snickered the thing that misused Benjon’s voice.

  “Could you not keep a civil hold on your bastard tongue or wear a bit on it,” Ferdinand said angrily, without looking at him. “Al-Fihri – Hajar, my friend, I might not be able to lower you myself. But climbing down a wall with a rope is not so daunting as it sounds. Listen. We will coil the rope about your waist thus –” he demonstrated on himself, “—and with your sinister hand – thus – you control your speed. Brace your feet against the stones, and walk backward. You will walk down the Wall. It will burn your hands as it passes through them, but then you must clench your fist, not release, for then – if you release – you will fall.”

  Hajar stared at him with suspicion, but he did not appear to be joking. The wind at the top of the wall was not fierce enough to tug them to the edge of the breadth, but it abused her headscarf most sorely, and whipped about her coat as easily as her scarf.

  “Pietr Firth does it down the face of Broadcasting’s Mount for fun,” Ferdinand assured her. “I have seen him many times.”

  “Have you done it?” Hajar asked, letting him coil the rope about her waist reluctantly. It was not tight, and the thick wool of her coat should keep it from tangling in her clothes. This was little comfort.

  “Had you flown a bloody ornithopter before you threw me in one? No? Here, I will wind the rope about my waist too,” Ferdinand continued in a conversational, soothing voice: again Hajar was struck by how alike the very voice of Albion Broadcasting he sounded. He sounded akin to the voice of some news, or some passage from one form of entertainment to another. He wrapped the rope about his waist, and gripped it tight with his hands, and braced himself as if preparing to pull the wall down upon him.

  “I’m going to die,” Hajar said with a great and terrible conviction.

  “We all die,” Ferdinand said, and there was such sadness in his eyes that she regretted her fear at once: for Ferdinand the worst had already come to pass. “Lean back. Lean back. Lean back until the Wall’s flank is your floor.”

  She did so with her eyes closed as she choked at the madness of it.

  “Now walk.”

  Hajar took a few steps backward, feeling the rope run pain and rough through her hand. She clenched her fist: the rope halted, her descent halted, and Ferdinand grunted above her.

  Right.

  Hajar bent her knees, braced herself, loosened her hand, and leapt away from the wall as if she was trying to head butt the nearby trees.

  “WHAT THE BLOODY FUCK ARE YOU DOING—” Ferdinand shouted.

  Hajar came to rest some several yards down the wall, her hand clenched about the rope once more, and bent her knees again.

  It was not flying, but there was that sensation of flight: the unexpected release of the proper order of things, leaving her sailing and out of reach of the clutching fingers of the land more often below her feet.

  She was quite disappointed when there was no more wall, and she walked the last few paces onto what was true ground. She uncoiled the rope.

  It vanished above her like a rising bird, and for a second Hajar was reminded that unless it descended again, she was trapped alone on the Gated Continent with no way to ever return.

  “I AM LOWERING BENJON,” Ferdinand bawled.

  Hajar leaned against the great grey granite stones of the Wall, and extended her arms with distaste. When Benjon’s occupied body came to a rest in them she immediately thrust him from her, leaving him to untie the rope himself.

  The end of the rope came down the wall as fast as a dropped stone. After a long pause in which Hajar fancied Ferdinand was working up the courage to step back into the ornithopter, there came the ugly belching and coughs of the alchemical reactor.

  Hajar watched the black dot the ornithopter made against the white-grey clouded sky. It wobbled, and began slowly to lower.

  They lowered poorly, Hajar knew. For this reason buildings with much use of them were marked out
by conspicuous added ledges high up their bodies to save the inconvenience of frequent catastrophe. They were otherwise identified by the scorch-pocked stones where unlucky pilots had burned to death trying to land.

  The ornithopter made further ugly noises as it came down, and the frantic chaos of its moving parts whipped up great eddies of pine needles into Hajar and Benjon’s faces. The thing that controlled Benjon seemed not to mind, but Hajar drew her scarf across her mouth and nose until she viewed the ornithopter’s landing through only the narrowest slit in the cloth.

  Gradually the membranes and cycles and paddles slowed to stillness as the ornithopter touched the sloping ground and stopped making disgusting noises.

  “Ow,” Ferdinand said, from within, and he half-climbed, half-crawled from the machine, staggering to his feet as he came away from the ornithopter’s carcass. “Now, should we leave this here or … we can’t carry it, and there’s no way to pitch it back over the wall, and—”

  Hajar smelled the wisp of acrid smoke only as the memory of a dream, but it was enough.

  “It’s burning,” she said, backing away from the ornithopter’s landing place. She gathered those supplies that Benjon had not already picked up. “Get back.”

  “I don’t see any—”

  “Back and down, ideally,” Hajar added, edging behind one of the tree trunks.

  Ferdinand squinted at her askance, but he did as she suggested, huddling with Hajar and Benjon against the far side of the thick treetrunk. The intimacy of this position did not go unmissed on Hajar, and she began to feel more and more absurd and ill-judged in her insistence as the moments passed and nothing but a foul smoke came from the ornithopter.

  “I may have been—” she acknowledged.

  This moment was when the ornithopter’s alchemical battery came into contact with the sparks from the smouldering wooden frame, and the entire elderly flying machine came apart with a deafening blast that left Hajar’s ears singing.

  The sides of trees caught light in the intense heat, choking foul smoke billowed black over their small party and shielded them from the sun, and for a moment it seemed the whole forest would go up in an inferno of dried pine needles. But the trees here were further apart, and the damp in the ground too great; whatever the reason, the tree trunks hissed and smouldered and finally sputtered into sullen, smoking fire-free silence. Their bark stood scorched and in some places stripped, but the forest remained unravaged by an inferno.

  “Beetle shit,” Ferdinand said, stamping away from their shelter and coughing until he bent himself double.

  “We should probably get away from where the very loud noise just took place,” Hajar suggested, pulling her bag onto her back, “before someone on the other side of the Wall starts firing arrows over it.

  * * *

  For three days they walked through the forest.

  They came upon a narrow, fast stream lined with slippery stones and some stubborn and apparently season-ignorant white flowers the size of dewdrops; they came upon a brown fox, which stared at them accusingly before returning to energetic digging at the foot of a tree; they came upon the pug-marks of what might have been bears (none of them knew what this should look like, and all agreed to pretend they hadn’t seen them rather than waste hours in furious dispute on whether or not they were bear prints).

  What they did not come upon was any indication that there any were greater number of vast arthropods on this side of the wall than on their own.

  “We may have planned this badly,” Ferdinand said, hauling their makeshift tent up the other side of the deep stream, and throwing it into Benjon’s waiting hands. “No one knows anything about where they go or what they do. Suppose we do not encounter any for months?”

  Hajar only strengthened her grip on the tree root she held, and tried a little harder to pull herself up the river bank. She had entertained the same thought many times over the last three days, although not so many times as she had played host to the determination to never again leave a city of median size after this adventure.

  * * *

  On the afternoon of the third day, they came on what were distinctly hoof prints.

  “What wild horse lives in a forest?” Ferdinand asked, as they stopped to rest their feet once more.

  “Schwarzwälder Kaltblut?” Hajar suggested, irritable at the question. How was she meant to know what livestock lived where? Her feet ached from walking and her back ached from sleeping on the ground and she was cold and hungry and tired of eating cheese, and beginning to smell very ripe.

  “That’s not wild,” Ferdinand frowned into the gloom between the trees. “Frankish husbandry adopted by the Prussians. They’re not very good horses, either.”

  I don’t care, Hajar thought, cross and sore. Benjon remained as indefatigable and inscrutable as he had since the outset, and she felt suddenly isolated from any confederacy. As if to further this sense, Ferdinand ducked and peered and squinted through the trees in the direction the hoof prints led in silence.

  She was still alarmed when, without a word to her, Ferdinand pushed himself from the tree trunk he rested against and moved away at a slow, stealthy walk in the direction of the hoof prints.

  “Does he want us to follow him?” asked the thing inhabiting Benjon. Benjon’s mouth was chewing something, and Hajar had no desire to know what.

  “I don’t know,” she muttered, watching Ferdinand all but disappear into the half-shadows, his dull-grey coat becoming invisible in the dull-grey light. It occurred to her that one might hide easily in plain sight with the right clothing, and the thought did little to calm her. “I don’t know what he’s doing.”

  “He’s left his bag,” the thing in Benjon’s body added.

  “Stop talking,” Hajar said wearily, trying to determine where Ferdinand had gone. In the trees, sounds were muffled: in part by the thick carpet beneath their feet, and in part by the endless barriers of tree trunks rising up every few feet to divert and dilute even the heartiest bellow.

  She squinted into the grey unnatural dusk beneath the tree branches for so long that at first when she saw the movement she thought it was a mere trick of the light.

  Closer, and closer came Ferdinand, walking backward to them with his hands outstretched before him. This was less remarkable than what he stretched his hands out to: a quintet of horses, four adult and one very young, keeping pace with its fellows as they trotted toward Ferdinand with pricked ears.

  One of the horses was white, a colour Hajar was sure was an invitation to predators and a quick demise.

  “They’re broken,” Ferdinand called.

  As he turned back to the horses Hajar heard him click his tongue.

  “I told you,” he said, with masterful division of attention between the horses, the ground underfoot, the ground behind him, and the conversation he appeared intent on conducting, “you won’t find wild horses in a forest. They are plains animals. These must have been left here. They’re still waiting.”

  Hajar looked at the foal, which edged between the larger horses as the group drew near them, and thought, they’ve been waiting a while.

  The horses and Ferdinand drew nearer.

  “It seems some other fools have tried to venture into the Gated Continent a little better-prepared than us,” Ferdinand said, beaming at the horses with greater joy than he’d shown about anything since Hajar had met him. “Failed, but left their rather well-bred steeds. These aren’t Albion or Moorish. I think Romish, perhaps. Romish stock.”

  “Why have you lured a herd of ponies to come and stare at us, Ferdinand?”

  He smiled over his shoulder. It was a true smile, which even reached his eyes for a brief moment. It made her wonder what he had looked like before the thing inside Benjon had killed Hugo without warning or telling him where he might embrace his corpse.

  “To ride, of course. If we’re going to look for these bloody arthropods we should at least not wear our legs down to stumps.”

  Hajar said, “
But what about –” and pointed vaguely at Benjon.

  “Hugo could ride,” said Ferdinand, a pall falling over his features. “So he can. That’s how it works, isn’t it?”

  “I can ride,” agreed the thing inside Benjon.

  “But they won’t –” Hajar began, as Ferdinand clicked his tongue to the nearest horse.

  “What?”

  “Be… disturbed…”

  “Oh,” Ferdinand patted the closest horse on the muzzle. “By the… whatever-it-is? The murderer? No. Horses are beautiful, noble, strong animals, but they are still animals and they are still,” he said, leading the first horse by the head, the others following as obediently as if tied together, “stupid.”

  He picked up the rope from their packs, still making soothing noises to the horses. Hajar watched Benjon with a suspicious mind, but they did not bolt, scatter, or even flick their ears at him.

  “Can you ride bareback?” Ferdinand asked, stroking the white horse as he busied himself about her with rope and their packs.

  Hajar did not say ‘of course’ or ‘do you know who my mother is’ or anything of the sort. She only nodded, and picked up her bag.

  * * *

  They rode for four days.

  Hajar’s backside began to ache as much as her feet had, though she was not as cold, and slept a little better for knowing that the animals would panic should anything come upon them in the night. She came to miss the cheese, when it was gone and replaced with what they could find, kill, or force themselves to swallow in the forest.

  The forest itself changed little in character, though here and there opportunist flat-leaved trees had eked out their summer amid the canopy of firs, and clearings where great conifers had fallen were filled with briars and shrubs.

  She was hungry, all the time, and wondered quite when the smallest of the five horses would start to look delicious instead of vulnerable.

  On the fourth day, Hajar struggled to her feet from the litter of pine needles in which she had been sleeping back-to-back with Ferdinand (for Benjon, true in this at least to his nature, did not sleep). She tried not to inhale too deeply, knowing that both she and her companions now smelled very much like goodmen of the road.