by Patrick Ness
“Morning,” I say back.
He’s not quite looking at me, older than me but shy of me anyway. He puts a feedbag on Angharrad and another on Juliet’s Joy, Mr Morgan’s horse who the Mayor took now that Morpeth’s gone, a bossy mare who snarls at everything that passes by.
Submit! she says to the soldier.
“Submit yerself,” I hear him mumble. I chuckle cuz that’s what I say to her, too.
I stroke Angharrad’s flank, retying her blanket so she’ll be warm enough. Boy colt, she says. Boy colt.
She still ain’t right. She barely raises her head no more and I ain’t even tried to ride her since we got back into the city. But she’s talking again at least. And her Noise has stopped screaming.
Screaming about war.
I close my eyes.
(I am the Circle and the Circle is me, I think, light as a feather–)
(cuz you can silence yer Noise for yerself, too–)
(silence the screaming, silence the dying–)
(silence all that you saw that you don’t wanna see again–)
(and that hum still in the background, felt rather than heard–)
“You think something’s gonna happen soon?” the soldier asks.
I open my eyes. “If nothing ain’t happening,” I say, “nobody ain’t dying.”
He nods and looks away. “James,” he says, and thru his Noise I can see he’s telling me his name with a kinda hopeful friendliness, from someone whose friends are all dead.
“Todd,” I say.
He catches my eye for a second and then looks behind me and dashes away to whatever his next job is.
Cuz the Mayor’s coming outta his tent.
“Good morning, Todd,” he says, stretching his arms.
“What’s good about it?”
He just smiles his stupid smile. “I know waiting is difficult. Especially under the threat of a river that would drown us.”
“Why don’t we just leave then?” I say. “Viola told me once there were old settlements at the ocean, we could regroup there and–”
“Because this is my city, Todd,” he says, pouring himself a cup of coffee from the fire. “And leaving it would mean they win. It’s how this game is played. They won’t release the river because we’ll fire more missiles. And so everyone will find another way to fight the war.”
“They ain’t yer missiles.”
“But they’re Viola’s,” he says, grinning at me. “And we’ve seen what she’ll do to protect you.”
“Mr President?” It’s Mr Tate, coming off night patrol and walking over to the campfire with an old man I ain’t seen before. “A representative is requesting an audience.”
“A representative?” the Mayor says, looking fake impressed.
“Yes, sir,” says the old man, holding his hat in his hands and not knowing exactly where to look. “From the town.”
Me and the Mayor automatically look at the buildings that surround the square and the streets that spoke off around it. The town’s been deserted since the first Spackle attack. But look now. Down the main road past the ruins of the cathedral, there’s a line of people in the distance, older, mostly, but one or two younger women, one of ’em holding a kid.
“We don’t really know what’s happening,” says the old man. “We heard the explosions from the battle and we ran–”
“War is what’s happening,” the Mayor says. “The defining event for all of our futures is what’s happening.”
“Well, yes,” says the old man. “But then the river dried up–”
“And now you’re wondering if the town might be the safest place after all,” asks the Mayor. “What might your name be, representative?”
“Shaw,” says the old man.
“Well, Mr Shaw,” says the Mayor, “these are desperate hours, where your town and your army need you.”
Mr Shaw’s eyes dart nervously from me to Mr Tate to the Mayor. “We’re certainly ready to support our brave men in battle,” he says, twisting the hat in his hands.
The Mayor nods, almost in encouragement. “But there’s no electricity, is there? Not since the town was abandoned. No heat. No way to cook food.”
“No, sir,” Mr Shaw says.
The Mayor’s silent for a second. “I’ll tell you what, Mr Shaw,” he says. “I’ll have some of my men restart the power station, see if we can’t get the lights on in at least part of the city.”
Mr Shaw looks astonished. I know how he feels. “Thank you, Mr President,” he says. “I only meant to ask if it was okay to–”
“No, no,” says the Mayor. “Why are we fighting this war if not for you? Now when that’s accomplished, I wonder if I may count on your help and the help of the other townsfolk to provide vital supplies to the front line? I’m talking food, mainly, but help rationing water, too. We’re all in this together, Mr Shaw, and an army is as nothing without support behind it.”
“Uh, of course, Mr President.” Mr Shaw is so surprised he can barely get his words out. “Thank you.”
“Captain Tate?” the Mayor says. “Will you send a team of engineers to accompany Mr Shaw and see if we can keep the people we’re protecting from freezing to death?”
I look at the Mayor in amazement as Mr Tate leads Mr Shaw away.
“How can you give ’em heating when all we’ve got is campfires?” I ask. “How can you spare the men?”
“Because, Todd,” he says. “There’s more than one battle being fought here.” He looks down the road as Mr Shaw returns to the other townsfolk with the good news. “And I intend to win them all.”
{VIOLA}
“Right,” Mistress Lawson says, bandaging my arm again. “We know the band is meant to grow into the skin of the animal wearing it and bind it permanently, and that if we take it off, the chemicals in it will prevent us from being able to stop the bleeding. But if you leave the band alone, it’s also supposed to heal and that’s not what’s happening to you.”
I’m on the bed in the healing room of the scout ship, a place where I’ve spent way more time than I’d like since getting back from seeing Todd. Mistress Lawson’s remedies are keeping the infection from getting worse, but that’s all they’re doing. I’m still feverish, and the band on my arm still burns, burns enough to keep me coming back to this bed.
As if it hadn’t been a hard enough couple of days as it was.
My welcome back to the hilltop surprised me. It was getting dark when I rode in, but lights from the campfires let people from the Answer see me coming.
And they cheered.
People I know like Magnus and Mistress Nadari and Ivan came over to pat Acorn’s flanks and say things like, “That’ll show ’em!” and “Well done!” They thought firing the missile was the best possible choice we could have made. Even Simone told me to try not to worry.
Lee did, too.
“They’ll just keep coming if we don’t show them we can fight back,” he said that night, sitting next to me on a tree stump as we ate our dinner.
I looked over at him, his shaggy blond hair touching the collar of his coat, his big blue eyes reflected in the moons-light, the softness of the skin at the base of his neck–
Anyway.
“They might keep coming worse now, though,” I said, a bit too loud.
“You had to do it. You had to do it for your Todd.”
And in his Noise, I could see that he wanted to put his arm around me.
But he didn’t.
Bradley, on the other hand, wouldn’t even speak to me. He didn’t have to. Selfish girl and the lives of thousands and let a child drag us into war and all kinds of even ruder things in his Noise lashed at me every time I got near him.
“I’m just angry,” he said. “I’m sorry you have to hear it.”
But he didn’t say he was sorry for thinking it and then he spent the entire next day briefing the convoy on what happened. And avoiding me.
I was in bed more of that day than I wanted to be anyway, so
much that I wasn’t able to talk to Mistress Coyle at all. Simone went out to try and catch her and ended up spending the day helping her arrange search parties for sources of water, sorting out inventories of food, and setting up a place for that many people to use the toilet, which involved a set of chemical incinerators from the scout ship that were supposed to be used for the first settlers.
That’s Mistress Coyle for you. Taking whatever advantage she can get.
And then that night the fever got worse yet again, and so here I am still this morning, when there’s so much work to be done, so much I have to do to try and set the world right.
“You shouldn’t be wasting all this time on me, Mistress Lawson,” I say. “I chose to have this band put on. I knew it was a risk and if–”
“If it’s happening to you,” she says, “what about all the women out there still hiding who didn’t have a choice?”
I blink. “You don’t think–?”
VIOLA, I hear, out in the corridor. Viola MISSILE Viola SIMONE stupid Noise–
Bradley pokes his head into the room. “I think you’d better come out here,” he says. “Both of you.”
I sit up in the bed, feeling so dizzy I have to wait before I stand. By the time I’m able to get up, Bradley’s already leading Mistress Lawson out of the room.
“They started coming up the hill about an hour ago,” he’s saying to her. “Twos and threes at first, but now . . .”
“Who did?” I ask, following them outside and down the ramp, joining Lee, Simone and Mistress Coyle at the bottom. I look out across the hilltop.
Which now has three times as many people as it did yesterday. Ragged-looking groups of all ages, some still wearing the night clothes they were in when the Spackle first attacked.
“Do any of them need medical attention?” Mistress Lawson asks, not waiting for a reply before she heads off towards the largest batch of newcomers.
“Why are they coming here?” I ask.
“I’ve been talking to some of them,” Lee says. “People don’t know whether it’s safer to have the scout ship protect them or stay in town and have the army do it.” He looks over at Mistress Coyle. “When they heard the Answer was here, that made up some of their minds.”
“Which way?” I say, frowning.
“There’s got to be five hundred people here,” Simone says. “We don’t have anything like that kind of supply of food or water.”
“The Answer does in the short term,” Mistress Coyle says, “but you can bet there’ll be more coming.” She turns to Bradley and Simone. “I’m going to need your help.”
As if you’d have to ask, Bradley’s Noise rattles. “The convoy agrees that our primary mission is humanitarian,” he says. He looks over at me and Simone, and his Noise rattles some more.
Mistress Coyle nods. “We should probably have a talk about the best way to do that. I’ll get the mistresses together and–”
“And we’ll include it with a talk about how to sign a new truce with the Spackle,” I say.
“That’s a thorny issue, my girl. You can’t just wander in and ask for peace.”
“And you can’t just sit back and wait for more war either.” I can tell from Bradley’s Noise he’s listening to me. “We have to find a way to make this world work together.”
“Ideals, my girl,” she says. “Always easier to believe in than live.”
“But if you don’t at least try to live them,” Bradley says, “then there’s no point in living at all.”
Mistress Coyle looks at him slyly. “Which is another ideal in itself.”
“Excuse me,” a woman says, approaching the ship. She looks nervously over all of us before settling her eyes on Mistress Coyle. “You’re the healer, aren’t you?”
“I am,” Mistress Coyle replies.
“She’s a healer,” I say. “One of many.”
“Can you help me?” the woman says.
And she pulls up her sleeve to reveal a band so infected it’s clear even to me that she’s already lost her arm.
[TODD]
“They kept coming through the night,” Viola says to me thru the comm. “There’s three times as many here now.”
“Same here,” I say.
It’s just before dawn, the day after Mr Shaw spoke to the Mayor, the day after townsfolk started showing up on Viola’s hill, too, and more keep popping up everywhere. Tho it’s mostly men in town and mostly women up on the hill. Not all, but mostly.
“So the Mayor gets what he wants,” Viola sighs, and even on the small screen I can see how pale she still looks. “Men and women separated.”
“You all right?” I ask.
“I’m okay,” she says a bit too quick. “I’ll call you later, Todd. Busy day ahead.”
We hang up and I come outta my tent and find the Mayor already waiting for me with two cups of coffee. He holds one out. After a second, I take it. We both stand there drinking, trying to get some warmth inside of us as the sky gets pinker. Even at this hour, there are some lights on where the Mayor’s men got power running into some of the bigger buildings so the townsfolk could gather in warmth.
The Mayor’s eyes are on the Spackle hilltop, like always, still in the dark half of the sky, still hiding an unseen army behind itself. And I realize that just right now, just for these few minutes while the Mayor’s army sleeps, you can hear something besides their sleeping ROAR, something faint and in the distance.
The Spackle got a ROAR, too.
“Their voice,” the Mayor says. “And I really do think it’s one big voice, evolved to fit this world perfectly, connecting them all.” He sips his coffee. “You can hear it sometimes on quiet nights. All those individuals, speaking as one. Like the voice of this whole world, right inside your head.”
He keeps staring at the hill in a kinda spooky way, so I ask, “Yer spies ain’t heard ’em planning nothing?”
He takes another drink but don’t answer me.
“They can’t get close, can they?” I say. “Else they’ll hear our plans.”
“That’s the nub of it, Todd.”
“Mr O’Hare and Mr Tate don’t got Noise.”
“I’m already down two captains,” he says. “I can’t spare any more.”
“Well, you didn’t really burn all the cure, did you? Just give it to yer spies.”
He don’t say nothing.
“You didn’t,” I say, then I realize. “You did.”
He still don’t say nothing.
“Why?” I ask, looking round at the soldiers nearby. The ROAR is already getting louder now as they wake. “The Spackle can sure hear us. You coulda had an advantage–”
“I have other advantages,” he says. “Besides, there may be another among us soon who could be most useful in regards to spying.”
I frown. “I ain’t never gonna work for you,” I say. “Not never.”
“You already have worked for me, dear boy,” he says. “For several months, if I remember correctly.”
I can feel my temper rising right up but I stop cuz James has come over with the morning feedbag for Angharrad. “I’ll take it,” I say, setting down my coffee. He hands me the bag and I loop it gently round Angharrad’s head.
Boy colt? she asks.
“It’s okay,” I say, into her ears, stroking ’em with my fingers. “Eat, girl.” It takes another minute but then I start seeing her jaws work as she takes the first bites. “Attagirl,” I say.
James is still there, staring at me blankly, his hands still up from when he gave me the bag. “Thanks, James,” I say.
He still stands there, staring, not blinking, hands still up.
“I said, thanks.”
And then I hear it.
It’s hard to catch in the ROAR of everyone else’s Noise, even James’s, which is thinking about how he used to live upriver with his pa and his brother and how he joined the army when it marched past cuz it was either that or die fighting and now here he is, in a war with the Spackle, but
he’s happy now, happy to be fighting, happy to be serving the President–
“Aren’t you, soldier?” says the Mayor, taking another sip of his coffee.
“I am,” James says, still not blinking. “Very happy.”
Cuz underneath it all lies the little vibrating buzz of the Mayor’s Noise, seeping into James’s, twining round it like a snake, pushing it into a shape that ain’t too disagreeable to James but still ain’t quite his own.
“You may go,” the Mayor says.
“Thank you, sir,” James blinks, dropping his hands. He gives me a funny little smile and then walks back into the thick of the camp.
“You can’t,” I say to the Mayor. “Not all of ’em. You said you just started being able to control people. That’s what you said.”
He don’t answer, just turns back up to the hill.
I stare at him, figuring it out some more. “But yer getting stronger,” I say. “And if they’re cured–”
“The cure turned out to mask everything,” he says. “It made them, shall we say, harder to reach. You need a lever to work a man. And Noise turns out to be a very good one.”
I look round us again. “But you don’t have to,” I say. “They’re already following you.”
“Well, yes, Todd, but that doesn’t mean they’re not open to suggestion. It can’t have escaped your attention how quickly they follow my orders in battle.”
“Yer working up to controlling a whole army,” I say. “A whole world.”
“You make it sound so sinister.” He smiles that smile. “I’d only ever use it for the good of us all.
And then there’s a sound behind us, fast footsteps. It’s Mr O’Hare, outta breath, his face blazing.
“They’ve attacked our spies,” he pants at the Mayor. “Only one man each returned from north and south. Obviously left so they could tell us what happened. The Spackle slaughtered the rest.”
The Mayor grimaces and turns back to the hilltop. “So,” he says. “That’s how they’re playing the game.”
“What’s that sposed to mean?” I say.
“Attacks from the northern road and the southern hills,” he says. “The first steps towards the inevitable.”
