Unconquered Countries-Four Novellas

by Geoff Ryman

  “Forget your priests,” they told Third. “The priests can’t help you, they just sit on their yellow backsides.” They burbled a mocking imitation of a holy chant. “Pieces of God. Pieces of God. Pieces of money.” They wheeled drunkenly away, like a straggly white worm.

  Very suddenly, Third was alone in the middle of the wide avenue. She heard the sound of wind move across the cobbles. She knew, with the sensation of claws sinking into her back, that she would not be able to mourn. There was no way left for her to mourn. It had been taken away. She looked up at the sky. How nice it would be, she thought, to be a balloon and simply drift away, to somewhere else.

  “Hi!” piped a shrill little voice. It was an advertisement, standing suddenly in front of her. “I’m the Coca-Cola girl!” It thrust a glass of fizzing soft drink up toward her.

  “No thank you. Go away,” said Third.

  Advertisements came alive at night, and were allowed to climb down from their signs. They were slightly flattened, like cartoon figures, with sharp creases along the edges of the arms and legs and heads. This one was a little girl, with pigtails, and wide Mickey Mouse eyes, and a red gingham dress, and three-fingered hands. She broke into a song.

  Coca-Cola gives you life

  Gives you hope

  Gives you strength

  To carry through the day!

  Third turned and walked quickly away from her. The advertisement was programmed to sing, to someone, and there was no one else. She followed Third down the steep slope of the avenue, skipping. Her shiny black shoes went pop-pop-pop on the cobbles because they were suction cups. Third covered her ears, and began to run. The advertisement ran with her, dancing. “Busy people like you like Coke because it gives them instant energy to face the brisk life of the city,” the advertisement pleaded, wishing perhaps it was able to say something else. “One glass of Coke gives you all the major vitamins and minerals, including C and the B group so necessary to cope with stress. Stay healthy! Stay happy! Drink Coke!”

  “Go away!” shouted Third.

  The advertisement staggered back a step. Then she began to sing again. “…gives you life / Gives you hope / Gives you strength…”

  Give me my husband, thought Third. There was scaffolding, unassembled, beside a building. Third picked up a length of pipe and spun round and smashed the advertisement as hard as she could.

  She hit it on the shoulder. The arm broke off. It was full of red, rather dry meat, and did not bleed. Third squawked in horror at how easily it broke apart. The thing kept on singing “…gives you life…” Third hit it again and again, to make it quiet, to stop it singing, to knock it away from her. Its skirt slipped off and the naked little legs kept on dancing with nothing above them. The slightly flattened head lay on the ground, its cheeks still the color of peaches, and it was still singing. Third kicked it, and it spun around and around like a plate, skittering down the hill. Third could hear the sound of the wind again, hollow. She drew in shaky breaths, feeling ill, and finally wanted to go home.

  She had to walk back across the Old City, and through the heaps. She knew each heap by name—the Scarecrow, or the Fist Raised Toward Heaven. It was the time of the dogs. They barked, wild and unchecked, as she climbed up and over the roofs of other people’s houses, toward her own. Once she was inside it, it turned its light on, and there it was, bare and gray and streaked and smelling of fungus. She groaned and fell facedown on the bed.

  She heard the sound of many children playing and a band playing the Prince’s song. Oh, she thought gratefully, oh, I’m falling asleep. As soon as she thought that, she was wide awake, with the iron knowledge that Crow was dead. Crow, she thought, I’m sorry I cannot mourn. It must be a terrible thing to lie unmourned. You must wander unsatisfied. She lay unmoving for a very long time, eyes open. Perhaps this is what it is like to be dead, she thought. Outside a cat was mewling, caught in a trap. People ate them now. Then Third remembered. There was one thing Crow had asked her to do.

  She lit a candle and took out her wedding coat. It was lumpy, misshapen, made of scraps, unfinished. She saw that now. Everything in her life had been like that. She knelt and cut open the floor of her room, and the house shivered in pain, and she lifted up the lip of flesh. The hollow in the floor began, immediately, to seep moisture. She wrapped the coat in a plastic garbage bag, so that it would not be stained, and she laid it in the hole, smoothing it down so that it would not wrinkle. She managed to squeeze a tear out of herself, like liquor from an unripe wound, and she closed the flesh over the coat, and covered that with matting. It would heal shut.

  Then Third stood up and walked, dazed, out of her house, she did not know where. Direction chose her.

  She found herself at the edge of the main temple square. The umbrella pines rose and fell like waves around her. The bleachers were there, for the horse races, but where the stage had been, there were only blowing bits of paper and a patch of white ash. Lights bobbed idly about it. It was guarded. Third was turning to go, when she heard, within the wind, the sound of a cry.

  The cry was small and plaintive and sweet. It sounded like Third felt, as if something had been lost. It was coming from under the trees nearby, a whistling that rose up at the end, like a question, like no other noise Third had heard before. She ducked under the branches. There was something on the ground, a bundle, and the light caught it. It was a bird that was making the noise, its feathers puffed out in the wind, a young bird. She knelt beside it, her throat clenching like a fist. The bird was a crow.

  “Crow!” she said and picked it up and finally, gently, softly, the tears came, in an easy film down her face. She rocked with it, back and forth. “Crow. Crow. Crow.”

  Suddenly the lights were harsh in her eyes, and she turned away.

  “What are you doing here?” demanded one voice.

  “Why are you crying?” demanded another.

  They were Neighbors. Third could only see their shadows behind the lights.

  “I am crying because of this bird. It had been blown from its nest. It is so small.”

  “You are not supposed to be here. Get out.”

  Third stood up, and bowed to them, and ran. She held the bird to her face and breathed on it. A crow was an omen of death, but a crow that sings was something more. There is a bird singing. He had said that.

  Weeping, consoled, Third was sure that Nourisher of the East had found his way back to her.

  PART FOUR

  THE CROW THAT WARBLED

  The Crow That Warbled grew into a great, ragged-feathered beast, with gray-green scaly legs and claws, and a beak that seemed too large and heavy for its head. It was too big to be kept in a cage; there were perches in all the corners of the room, and linen cloths under its feed tray, and a sand box. In one corner of the room was a shrine, with paper flowers that Third had made from cigarette boxes. In frames made of twisted wire were drawings she had made of the Dead: her mother who had starved; her first sister who was withered; her second sister who sat dead and undiscovered for half a day in an airport window. There was a drawing, too, of Nourisher of the East, looking as plump and healthy as the Prince.

  Third had never been told where the funeral was. She was not, after all, the next of kin. She did not know where Nourisher of the East had been cremated, or where the ashes were. When she visited his aunt, the people in the next house smiled and said she was not at home. The fifth time she came they said, still smiling, “In all fairness, we ought to tell you that, for you, she will never be at home.”

  “Tell her,” Third replied, “that all she has is ashes. I have the soul.”

  She had the Crow That Warbled. She called it Husband. She bathed it regularly in the cleanest water she could find, and dried it in white cloths, laughing and teasing, and it would tilt its head, as if wondering if she were mad, and that would make her laugh more.

  She set it free, over the heaps, from her high window. The Crow That Warbled would hover, high, in the same place for ten or fifte
en minutes at a time, and it would sing, and the songs it sang were the songs of the People. Third knew it was a spirit then. How else would it know to sing the morning song at dawn, or the feast songs, or the songs for the Dead? The poor people, in their dangerously shifting heaps of housing, all looked up toward it. They understood the miracle. The wild children who lived like animals in packs under bridges, crept out of the shadows to listen. Old women would hum along with the songs, rocking on slippery mushroom steps, remembering. When it was tired, the Crow would flutter down among them and look pointedly at the rice in their bowls. They would chuckle and give Crow some, for they knew it was a ghost, and it was utmost politeness to feed a ghost. They would duck and bow at its arrival, their clasped hands high over their heads in respect. But the Crow always returned to Third. The People would look up at her window then, and wave. She was mistress of the miracle. And Third, for the first time, smiled back.

  It was strangers who didn’t like the Crow, people who wore the clothes of the Big Country and carried lacquered canes, people who were lost and panicked in the heaps. The Crow would drop on them to say hello, for it thought it was human. It would come singing the song of hospitality, a black Crow, bringer of Death. The strangers would scuttle away, quietly, pursued, holding on to their hats, afraid to run or shout, because that would mean they thought they would die if the Crow touched them, and City People were not supposed to be superstitious. They believed, nonetheless, and would try to swipe at Crow with their canes. The people of the heaps would point at them and laugh. They would follow in a crowd to see the end of the comedy. The strangers would think they were being chased by the poor. Their faces said that all their most anxious fantasies seemed to be coming true.

  People started coming to Third for cures. She found that by laying hands on them, she could send them away at least thinking they were better. She began to grow herbs in window boxes for remedies. People gave her messages for dead relatives, for the Crow to carry. They bowed to her, hands high over their heads, and called her Widow.

  Third had to wear spectacles now. A doctor at the hospital, to which she kept returning, got her a job at his brother’s factory. She peered down a microscope, watching crystals grow. The work ruined her eyes.

  The crystals were sliced continually as they grew, and Third had to make sure that the pattern on each slice was the same, like rock candy. She found it difficult to keep count of how many she inspected. The machine presented them in groups of ten, and all she had to do was remember how many groups. This confused her.

  “I never learned my figures,” she said, smiling behind pebble spectacles. “I am very ignorant.” There was no shame in admitting this to an educated man.

  “Just make a mark with this pencil, one for each group,” said her supervisor, who blamed the war.

  She kept track of her change in the market by remembering the color of the coin. Then the money was devalued, and everyone began to use paper. So she began to remember the faces on the paper instead. She couldn’t read the names of the faces, so she gave them the names of people in her old village, and kept their titles. One was the landowner, one was the doctor, one kept the seed grain. That way, she had a rough idea of what she was owed.

  Then they changed it all around by saying that the value of each note was now what it would be if it had an extra zero on the end of its number. They could not afford to reprint their money.

  The day this happened, Third stood weeping in the market, shaking the one note in change she had received from a market dealer. When he looked worn, bored, anything other than guilty or caught out, she became hysterical. She was not even shouting words, just tones of anger. All her money for the week was gone. An older gentleman took her arm, and whispered to her, calmly, trying to make her understand that the money was worth more now. Many people gathered around, to try to explain. They could not all be thieves. Third was mollified in the end. She left with her one note.

  But she did not understand. She felt betrayed, as if nothing would ever make sense again. She went home and asked the Crow. The Crow was silent, but it seemed to be a significant silence. The answer was not here, he seemed to say. It lay elsewhere. Everything that made sense was going elsewhere.

  So she lived. In the evenings, she sewed, jabbing her fingers with the needle because she couldn’t see. The Crow perched beside her, and seemed to watch with interest.

  She collected old advertisements. Her babies, she called them. Some of them might have been. They were old, about to die. She hung them on the wall, faded green, rusty red. When she fell asleep, over her sewing, on the floor, they came alive. Their skin was peeling off, and they could no longer sing except in worn, whispering voices. The Crow would try to teach them new songs, but they shook their heads. That was beyond them. They danced around Third as she slept, in the moonlit room, like dreams. In the morning, they would be back on their signs, frozen still and silent.

  Third even began to get to know her house. It had not been imprinted to care about who lived in it, but Third dusted its corners, and swept away its old itchy skin, and talked to it until it came to know her and the rhythm of her tread. She knew when it slept, and sat still herself then, to let it rest. Friends told her that it grew fretful and sighed when she was not there, in the market, at work.

  There was always work, at the factory, in the heaps, at her quilting: work as the pot bubbled on the stove in the home Third would have made for her husband, work, until, after only two or three years, she became stolid and drab, her skin toughened somehow and polished-looking like old leather. People called her Old Woman. She was twenty-seven years old, but Third did not know that. She and numbers were permanently estranged. So if people called her old and treated her with some extra consideration, that was fine. She elbowed her way through the stalls, singing the old songs in a loud shrill voice, pulling a squeaking wooden wagon behind her, a small bowlegged woman in spectacles and a very faded cotton shirt. She counted faces instead of numbers. Everywhere she went, she expounded the miracle of the Crow That Warbled.

  “He goes back to the Land of the Dead, to where everything is as it should be, as it was, where the People still are Unconquered,” she said.

  The People of Saprang Song could hear the war, its dull roar, its high-pitched hum, but the battles never seemed to reach the Divine Lotus, as if the city were charmed. Over it, over the heaps of the People in them, the Crow That Warbled hovered, singing the old songs.

  PART FIVE

  NO HARM CAN COME

  The rebels won. The news was spread by the packs of ragged orphans who lived wild. They ran through the heaps, and were for once admitted without qualm into the rooms of the People. Outside Saprang Song, in the burned paddies, the army of the Neighbors and their servants had been destroyed.

  The City People celebrated. They built bonfires in the squares and in the narrow passageways between the heaps. They banged on pans to make something like music, and blew through paper on combs. The rebels were the People, like themselves; the People had won. They hung their white sheets out of their windows as a sign of victory. They gathered under Third’s window and called for the Crow That Warbled. It hopped excitedly among them, from shoulder to shoulder. They bowed to it, laughing with toothless mouths. They sang with it. They grew drunken and bold, heaping up the banners of the Neighbors on the fire, wrapping themselves in white to jump over the flames. “Unconquered, Unconquered, Unconquered,” they chanted, hopping up and down in unison. This was not an old song, or an old dance. Third didn’t like it. She slipped away unnoticed to her bed.

  Almost everyone but Third slept late the next morning. Daylight came and there were none of the usual sounds of the heaps.

  Third was awakened instead by the sound of things falling. She heard laughter, loud. She got up, and stumbled bleary-eyed to her window.

  She saw pots and plastic buckets cascading down the side of the lower heaps, and two men wearing nothing but their underpants dancing round and round a rice barrel. T
hey chanted like children, “All fall down.” Mr. Chiu, a Chinese immigrant, had opened up his house as a tiny shop. He stood outside it now, still in his nightshirt, distraught, biting his thumbnail. The shop was being ransacked. Third ducked low behind her window.

  The men tipped the barrel over, and Mr. Chiu cried, “Gentlemen! Gentlemen!,” and the rice fell with a hissing sound. The men staggered back from it, laughing. They were soldiers, soldiers for the Neighbors addled on battle drugs, traitor People who had taken off their traitor uniforms in order to pass as patriots. All of this will stop, thought Third, with a sudden jab of military feeling, now that the Neighbors have gone. One of them wheeled around and pointed his fingers at the jars in Mr. Chiu’s window, and the plastic containers burst into flame, belching out black smoke. Mr. Chiu gave a little scream and scurried into his house to push the burning jars out of his window with his bare hands. The soldiers plumped down on the rooftop, and woozily began to pull on shirts and trousers. Their feet caught in the cuffs, and they set each other off on fresh bursts of hacking, senseless laughter. The clothes were Mr. Chiu’s own.

  This will not be a day to be out on the streets, Third thought. “Crow, today we will stay inside. Until everything is settled, and the Neighbors are gone.” Crow seemed to understand. With cowboy cries, the soldiers pushed themselves off down the slopes, tobogganing on their asses, bumping at each level. One of them waved Mrs. Chiu’s most private garments over his head. Mr. Chiu stumbled out through the smoke, weeping, cursing, under the white celebratory linen that was now turning black.

  There is no food in the house, Third suddenly remembered. Worse. There is no water. Mrs. Chiu was trying to coax her husband back inside. He shouted up at the towers, cursing the People, the harm they had brought him, cursing them for not helping, and he flung a tin up toward them.