As Simple As Hunger

by D Des Anges

  Even in this cold the sun brought out red-nosed Goodwives to stand upon their doorsteps and chatter, sending up steam like horses at rest. With these Hana was obliged to converse in turn despite her clear haste.

  She came then to the station just as the train for York arrived at platform from farther west. She choked still as discreet as she could upon the smuts when Radigis came from the dirty fog like a spectre and said, “I have your fare of passage, only climb aboard. Quickly.”

  Disliking even greater his presumption and the absence of explanation, Hana seized upon the nearest handle and with his help pulled open the heavy carriage door. It was an empty compartment, but he slipped into the seat beside her and slammed the door behind them as if it were full.

  Radigis lowered his hood and with excitement in his pale eyes opened his mouth to speak, when a family outside laid hand on the door handle.

  “No,” Radigis said, pulling the door shut again and waving them on down the platform. “I shall not have eavesdropping. This is for your ear alone.”

  From the glow upon his face and their clandestine meeting place’s cost falling to him, Hana gathered that the debt here would lie instead with her. She wondered what gain she was to receive that placed her so fully in his hands, and resented him again.

  He waited then, until the sluggish gulp of the engine was such that they both knew the train about to pull from the station. Hana steeled herself stern against sad memory and the thought of how the great iron road had somehow replaced Qadi.

  When the train came out from the station and seemed to hang above Durham on the raised rail bridge, Radigis said in a hiss that carried within the hiss of pistons, “It has yet to be proclaimed upon the Wireless. I might not have known, but as family of the Winedryhten I am friend to his friends –”

  Hana did not speak, only pulled from her head the outermost of her scarves, and gave Radigis her ear with pointed patience.

  “Hermegliscus Redwaldsson’s eyes and ears, as my eyes and ears, extend within and without Albion’s domains,” Radigis said in the same hushed whisper, “and therefore it is both of our business to know what takes place in the name of securing those dominions. All captures, all irregularities.” He licked is lips. “On the coast north of Groat there was spotted a strange vessel moving beneath the waves, and captured thereafter by Secure Guardians who have great knowledge of the mechanisms of the arthropods, and know a bugcraft when they see it.”

  Hana might, some other time, have chided that there was no need for such language; but the secrecy, urgency, and pre-sights all of them wove together to keep her silent and waiting. She held her breath even as the train passed from the air above the city and into the hillside before them.

  “In the capture of it they lanced this boil, and on breaking it found it disgorged not only the body of a great centipede, but first –” Radigis paused here again to wet his lips, though Hana knew they must not yet be dry, and that he drew breath only to tease her into further excitation. “—It gave up to the sea three men.”

  Were he not so plain in his own air of quivering anticipation, Hana might have suspected him of telling an elaborate joke. It was the setting to which many jokes of Albionmen were placed.

  “One, an Iberian Moor or Nubian, was dead, and left to the waves,” said Radigis, as if recounting exact the tale of another: for his tone was that of a report. He took without asking Hana’s gloved hand in his. “The others were a man of the oil rig who vanished him some more than sixty days past at the hands of one in the guise of a Secure Guardian –” Radigis leaned very close, and Hana wondered should she push him from her, “—and the other was a young woman who has given her name as Hajar al-Fihri Auda Bedu Ird.”

  She clutched, as she knew he knew she would clutch, at his proffered hand, and said, “And where is my daughter now?”

  Radigis grew grave, and held her clutching hand between his. “In York, Emira, in the hands of the Secure Guardians. A woman caught in seeming consort with an arthropod must find herself subject to a great many questions.”

  Hana jerked her hand from his and rested it calm beneath her own other. “Are these the species of question that are broadcast upon the Wireless in the company of screams?”

  “Not yet,” said Radigis, “and as we go to her they may not have to be. I give you my word, Emira al-Fihri, that if by any power of mine I can remove your daughter unharmed from York and return her to safety – nay, respectability – I am at your disposal and humble, eager service.”

  Hana watched his face all the closer and said, with the calculated coating of sincere gratitude near-effacing the turmoil which boiled within her blood, “However can one poor woman ever hope to repay such a debt?”

  Radigis frowned, “O but what are debts between friends?”

  What got us both to where we are now, Hana thought, holding herself straight as the train rattled onward to York.

  * * *

  The Secure Guardianship’s buildings of interrogation lay not at the centre of the city, but into the moor beyond, toward Whitby. That, Radigis said as they paid a short-hire horseman to drive them there, was so they might more easily bring captives from the sea and less often distress the townspeople.

  It took another hour of cold conveyance in silence through the city and moor beyond before Hana glimpsed the great granite fortress.

  It had about it the very air of an executioner’s block, and Hana near gave way to the expectation of a head upon a pike over the gateway as they came to it. It reminded her too clear of the frantic, panicked news from without: they have taken the Emir’s head.

  At the gatehouse, however, under the cold bright light of the winter day, matters were more civil.

  The porter of the gate was not so very far removed from the porters of the university buildings in Durham, though his woollen garb was of more severe cut. When Radigis showed the man his seal the porter only waved and congratulated him on the appointment.

  They came across the courtyard, filled with cold and steaming horses, grooms, and the crossing paths of Secure Guardians lost in jokes with each other. They came into the far side, where no less than six men in the uniform of the Secure Guardians of Albion-of-the-Britons awaited them.

  Each of them was taller than Radigis, and all of them younger: two had scarce begun their beards, and one of those two was so young that his face still bore the red rash of youth-pox.

  “We are come on the business of Hermegliscus Redwaldsson,” said Radigis, showing a different seal than that which he had shown at the gate, “to speak with the captives taken from Groat this last week.”

  “Good luck to you,” moaned one of the elder among them. “The one’s mad and the other won’t speak.”

  “We would speak with the woman,” said Hana, unbidden.

  “She broke Dorf’s nose,” said another of the six, with sullenness. “Kicked me in the neck an’ all.”

  Hana sighed inward at this. After all she had taught, Hajar had forgot that the management of captivity came from cooperation and charm, not from spite and struggle.

  It was unlike her, for Hana had always known her biddable and attentive, but she had oft suspected that in the absence of true tutelage of the kind she might have received in Fihriana, Hajar’s learning might sooner or later go awry and leave her coarse and foolish. It could not be helped: they were surrounded everywhere by women who fought like cats and men who thought it polite to spit indoors.

  “Never heard such oaths,” agreed one of the younger. “Calls that’d put a whore to shame – pardon,” he added, glancing at Hana, as if the acknowledgement of the existence of prostitution might offend her.

  She wondered what he thought her to be, for it was no doubt as plain as the scarf on her brow that Hajar was in some way her kinswoman.

  They were then led by the whole six down through a poor maze of granite corridors: each corridor ran the length of the building before turning and giving way to a dank staircase lit only by gaslight.

&nb
sp; A full three times they made the length, burrowing deeper and deeper into the very rocks of the moor, before their escort came to a stop and gave them knowledge of two metal-clad doors. Each door opposite each other.

  “Man,” proclaimed the tallest of the six, pointing to the right. “Woman,” he said, pointing to the left.”

  “We would speak with the woman,” Radigis said, giving glance to Hana to confirm her wish.

  “Just as well,” said one of the other Secure Guardians. “Man won’t speak. We’ve beat him, won’t speak. Won’t move. Might as well be dead.”

  “Won’t eat, either,” said another, a-glow with the desire to be of use as a key was taken from about the neck of their leader. Hana rather believed the Secure Guardians got them few enough visitors who were not prisoners. “Maybe he wants to die.”

  “Maybe shut up,” said one of the quietest, pushing him.

  The first of the six opened the door to the left and stood aside to let Hana and Radigis pass. They came then into a narrow chamber scarce big enough for them both, quite without illumination, and blocked then by a similar door at the far end.

  Hana was troubled indeed when the first door was closed upon them and a key turned in the lock. It left her trapped with Radigis in a dark, near-airless chamber deep below the earth, but it was only for a moment.

  There was a booming blow against the door by which they had entered, a cry of, “IN CHAMBER,” and soon enough a key or ten turned in the door before them.

  It swung open, inward, and Hana and Radigis were admitted to a blank-walled and windowless granite box in which a sole gaslight descended from the ceiling. A Secure Guardian stood to either side of the door, and on their full entry gave close to it once more, and locked it.

  Hana paid all of this very little mind: before her sat Hajar upon a low wooden bunk without mattress and only one blanket.

  She wore a formless grey woollen shift which must have itched like the pox, and nothing on her feet, and they had shaven her head to within an inch. Hajar for all this seemed as fierce and as unbiddable as a caged beast. Hana’s daughter sat with her hands bound before her, glaring at the Secure Guardians as if daring them to come to her.

  Here she bore bruises, cuts, and a bump on her naked scalp. The set of her jaw was uneven, and unwiped blood crusted her upper lip in dark brown.

  Radigis placed a discreet hand upon Hana’s arm to keep her back, and cleared his throat as if he meant to make some great proclamation.

  “Hajar al-Fihri?” he said. “I am Radigis of Yeavering.”

  “Are you going to listen to me?” she asked, but there was little hope in her voice.

  “Yes,” said Radigis, stooping to make eye-line with Hana’s daughter. “We have come from Durham to listen to you.” He spoke as one might speak to the dying, with gentleness and the tender excuse of all wrongdoing, but Hajar did not seem moved.

  “I see you have brought my mother in some effort to shame me into changing my story?” she said, with a great sigh. “Hello, mother.”

  The Secure Guardians did credit to their station in neither changing their stance nor their breathing at this.

  “Hello, daughter,” said Hana, with great forbearance. “Where have you been?”

  “Half-way around the world and back,” said Hajar with a smile Hana had never seen before. “I have seen sights well-worth the telling of, but I have also information of great import which is thus far scoffed at and quarrelled with as if I were in debate with some hand-plucked Wiltshirist upon the Wireless.”

  She spoke with derision that Hana only recognised from the voice of that wretched Israeline doctor: wherever he might be, for he seemed not to have come into capture. Perhaps he had abandoned her.

  “What information?” Radigis asked, still speaking with eager kindness.

  Hajar sighed again. “I have spoke all this to your Secure Guardians—”

  “Speak it to me,” said Radigis, “for I will listen.”

  “Speak it to me,” Hana corrected, “for I am your mother, and I must know what has befallen you.”

  Hajar only shrugged. “Speak it to the wind, for all the good it will do. I say again: I left to rid Benjon Silverstein of a terrible thinking parasite which had stole his body, in the belief that it would quit him and return him to his right self.”

  She spoke as if by rote: it was plain to see the story had been told many times.

  “The means by which the parasite agreed to leave required that we entered the Gated Continent in search of an arthropod. We were then captured by spiders, rescued by a scorpion, brought north with the intention of return to Albion but taken up by a city of sky-dwellers in mix of arthropod and man both, who believe the ground to be eating those who dwell upon it—”

  Here Hana heard as distinct as a slap the snigger that passed between the Secure Guardians behind her, and herself suppressed a sigh at this wild nonsense tale. It was evident that whatever had befallen Hajar and wherever she had been, she was not inclined to speak of it at all before these men.

  “—We at first believed them mad,” Hajar said, and Hana knew she had been laughed at often, for there was blunt nothingness in her voice, and it raised not pitch or level. “But after a great storm blew us from one end of the world to another, we came upon a land which bore the marks of such an eating, and there met with men who conveyed to us that this was what had occurred. We were attacked by vast birds, who… killed our accomplice from the city… and left us stranded on this foreign shore.”

  Hajar took a breath, seeming troubled, and went on, as if reciting not so much an adventure of wild and unparalleled scope, but rather a list of figures which she had been obliged to give so many times before that she wished them engraved upon her face.

  “We stole then a boat, which was navigated to the north by Benjon, who despite having no knowledge of sail himself bore within the parasite the knowledge of a prior host, who had then been a sailor. The parasite had also taken, and killed, Hugo Waldren—”

  She was interrupted by a tut and a hiss from the Secure Guardians. It was evident that these two specific Guardians had heard her tale before, for they did not gasp as Hana gasped, and as Radigis gasped. It was just as evident that they disliked this detail of the tale even on the manyeth hearing.

  “Why not go on,” sneered one, “tell your mother that you think Hugo Waldren a bugger who loved a Moor-man.”

  “Why don’t you go fuck yourself?” Hajar rejoined, taking Hana much by surprise and rocking her upon her feet, though her daughter’s voice was quite level and without feeling. “And gain the wit to know when you hear the truth, you foolish little man.”

  “Hajar,” said Radigis, affecting calm. “Please go on, ignore these men.”

  “Would that I could,” said Hajar with some venom, “but they have a grand love of placing their hands where they have no business in placing them.”

  “They shall pay for it,” Hana promised her, keeping the cold rage from her voice least the Secure Guardians hear.

  “Then,” Hajar said, seeming unconvinced but with aught else to say, “we came across the ocean – filled with vast beast from shore to shore, all one being, though it never gave note to our vessel at all – and to the southern shore of the Gated Continent.” She did not note Hana’s incredulity, only went on: “We must have been somewhere east of the Tea Lands, though where I can only guess. Upon landing, the parasite that had the use of Benjon’s body demanded a fresh body be bought, and our, our scorpion companion went him into the tangle and brought back a great mantid –”

  “A what?” Radigis asked.

  “A mantis,” said Hana, recalling. “They have vast cousins, then.”

  She knew them only from the painted plates in the books of her youth, but remembered the false-pious attitude of them, their pleading posture, and the account of their merciless hunting.

  “The parasite,” said Hajar, closing her eyes – her voice weakened, then, and Hana perceived it shook, “took its lea
ve of Benjon and left only skin behind. It took to the body of the mantis. Our companion believed it was too dangerous a thing to be allowed to roam in that form – and I believe him to be right, and I believe there to be others of this kind, though how we shall know them is a question that still troubles me now – and he, he took to fighting the possessed mantid.”

  She sighed again, and cast her gaze to the stones.

  “He failed, and was killed.”

  “Your companion?” Radigis said.

  “A scorpion,” said Hajar. “We were told they are held in contempt by the arthropods about them, but this contempt is groundless.” She spoke with such ferocity that her rage near served to obscure the snickering of the Secure Guardians.

  “How then, when your protector was killed, came you to the ocean by Groat?” Radigis asked, as if he believed her every word.

  Hana tried then to catch his eye, to be certain whether he humoured her daughter or had only run mad himself, but his all was focussed upon Hajar’s battered face and naked skull. He gazed on her as if she were not a scraped and sullied prisoner but rather some queen of great renown.

  “We were then captured by Mantid Women,” Hajar said, addressing herself once more to the wall opposite, “and carried for many days at great speed within a net, from one tribe of their kind to another. By this means we crossed forest, mountain, plain, and high desert, where the Mantid Women among them hunted, killed, and ate a lone scorpion; this –” she said, looking at last to Hana, “– is the like of an Albionman hunting and eating a Moor, mark you.”

  “And very tasty you’d be too,” spat one of the Secure Guardians, while the other laughed. “Like dried fish served in shit.”

  “And then?” Radigis prompted, seeming to touch but not touching Hajar’s hands. He was now stooped so entire into a crouch that his head lay below hers and looked up as in supplication.