The Modern World

by Steph Swainston

  ‘Quie’! Look, Jant, you can help me. Gelsemium and salicin for her aches. Henbane for her tremors. Hamamelis for her bruising. Go and fetch me all these, and some cotton t’ dab in the ointmen’.’

  I did, and when Rayne was concentrating on Cyan, I also slipped the jar of worms into the pocket of my new coat.

  At length Rayne said, ‘I think she will take days t’ recover.’

  ‘She can’t stay here for days.’

  ‘No.’ Rayne glanced at a casement clock, then at the piles of packed equipment. ‘Especially no’ as my coach will be here within t’ hour, and I mus’ go t’ Slake Cross.’

  ‘Lightning did say to bring her to the front.’

  ‘Wha’, like tha’?’ We looked at Cyan dubiously. She lay quite still, slowly testing her relaxed body, trying to wake up without throwing up. ‘I wouldn’ wan’ t’ move her …’

  ‘Think of it as another leg of the Grand Tour.’

  ‘I’ll “Grand Tour” you! Bloody Awians.’

  If we left Cyan, she would go straight back to Galt with a story in her repertoire to add to her growing collection of cool credentials. Rayne seemed to realise this. ‘All righ’. I’ll take her.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘She migh’ benefi’ from some advice on t’ journey. I’ll make sure she’s well by t’ time she meets Ligh’ning.’

  ‘Don’t tell him,’ I said.

  Rayne pursed her smooth lips. ‘I can’ promise tha’.’

  A faint voice whispered from the direction of the box-bed. ‘Help …’

  ‘Oh, so you’ve found your voice. You are by far the most stupid girl who ever crossed paths with mine. Jook! Is that what you call it? What did you do it for? Did you think it was a laugh?’

  With her eyes shut, she asked quietly, ‘Is Sharny dead?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said angrily.

  ‘He is,’ she said, resigned. ‘He’s dead.’

  She turned over and slipped out of the bed onto weak legs, staggered, and I caught her. I knew she would be seeing the room as a single flat picture and the objects as shapes. She wouldn’t be able to distinguish their depths and the light would create confusing patches of bright and shade that would seem more real and significant than the objects themselves. I delineated a chair for her from the other shapes and made her sit down.

  Cyan slurred, ‘That trip …’

  ‘It’s over now.’ I spoke slowly and calmly to reassure her, although I knew she’d hear a scrambled version of my words, if she could hear me at all over the roar of her own pulse and breathing.

  ‘Pu’ her back in t’ bed,’ Rayne said.

  Cyan’s eyes cleared briefly to an avid violent look. ‘I had visions.’

  ‘It was real,’ I said.

  ‘Now is no’ t’ time,’ Rayne told me warningly.

  ‘I dreamed about you.’

  ‘I was there,’ I found myself saying. ‘I saw it too. Trust me; I used to live with this.’

  ‘No!’ She grabbed the nearest object on the dresser – a bamboo birdcage. Her thin fingers sank between the bars. She hefted the cage at an angle, spilling seed and water all over the floor, and the finches inside fluttered madly. She was about to throw it at me, but she gave a little sigh, her eyes rolled up and she toppled out of the chair in a faint, the birdcage still grasped in one hand.

  Rayne looked at me with a horrified expression.

  ‘I’ll put her in the coach,’ I said.

  I watched Rayne leave at full speed in a smart coach-and-four. She would change horses at Wichert in Shivel, Shivel town, Slaughterbridge in Eske, Eske town, Carse, Clobest in Micawater, the Rachis valley coaching inns at Merebrigg village, Oscen town, Spraint, Floret and Plow.

  I flew.

  CHAPTER 10

  On the second day I headed towards Awia, passing over the bleak hills of upper Fescue, where the Brome stream meets the Rill and the Foss and becomes the Moren River. Rayne should have reached the Shivel coach stop by now. I hoped Cyan still didn’t look two days dead when she arrives at Slake Cross or Rayne is going to have a hard time explaining it to Lightning. I just hope he doesn’t connect me with Cyan’s condition.

  The air was sluggish so I concentrated on its changing shapes as I flew past the quarries at Heshcam and Garron on the Brome stream. The Brome’s peaty water, the colour of beer, tumbled out of ghylls between rounded hills topped with millstone grit crags like pie crusts.

  Cyan needs to learn who she is. She’s as confusing as a shot of pure cat in fourth-day withdrawal. I just hope her experience has taught her not to take the stuff again.

  Tapering black chimneys poked up from a cleft between two hills. That’s my next landmark – Marram mining town. I flapped towards it tiredly, noticing my shadow on the hillside far to my right.

  Marram was tucked in a valley and the roofs and chimneys of the lead and stannary furnaces seemed to take up most of it. I came in very low over the surrounding grey-purple slag heaps. A massive lead crushing wheel turned slowly in an overshot sluice, around which spots of red and yellow were the woollen shawls, head scarves and wide trousers of women picking ore fragments from the machine’s trays.

  I flapped overhead and they all looked up, began shoving each other and pointing me out. The women seemed glad of a break; they started leering and catcalling. One or two had wings but most were human and they were all very raucous.

  One spread her arms and yelled, ‘Hey, Comet, where are you sleeping tonight?’

  ‘Wherever they leave me, lover!’

  They doubled up with laughter. God, I thought, I can tell this is Fescue.

  I couldn’t gain height and I flapped around low, making a complete fool of myself until I remembered the smelting furnaces. I circled the tall chimneys and went up like a kite on their updraught.

  The roofs of Marram began to spin under me; the smoke-stained houses built in close terraces, the steep narrow roads with ridged cobbles so horses could find purchase. At the edge of town I went over the long, bronze-green roofs of the communal latrines which, by law, all the townspeople had to use. Marram villagers save everything; even barrels of urine for use in alum extraction and the nightsoil to spread as fertiliser on their sparse oat fields.

  Higher on the rock face planks and girders shored up a five-metre-wide mine mouth. A dirty piebald pony walked round and round, tethered to a pump capstan at the pit head. The men were all underground already, rooting out copper, tin and lead. These Marram villagers were hollow-eyed and blue-toothed from shale dust and lead fumes, but they were wealthier than the farmers of the Plainslands. Everyone here could own his own house: Lord Governor Darne! Fescue keeps the trade for metals fair.

  I was covering distance extremely quickly now, about a hundred kilometres an hour, and in a straight line. On the twisting dirt track roads below, people take a day to travel as far as I can in thirty minutes. I passed into Awia and over Cushat Cote village on Micawater manor’s southern border. I flew past Cushat’s ‘naming court’ house, a courtroom where an Awian marriage judiciary meet. They settle disputes as to which of the two married couples’ families is the wealthier – a hot topic for status-obsessed featherbacks as the richest bequeaths its name to the children.

  The Circle broke.

  I blacked out – for a second – came to so quickly I was still gliding, fifty metres lower in a steep dive. The ground filled my vision. I straightened my flight, brought the horizon level, wondering what the fuck had happened.

  It had been the Circle, surely? The Circle had just stopped. One of my colleagues had died – I couldn’t tell which one. Or maybe – shit – maybe the Emperor has found out I’ve been in the Shift and that jolt was him dropping me from the Circle. Could I be mortal again?

  I held my arms out and looked at my hands. Could time be passing for me? I had no way of telling. I can’t feel the Circle like the most experienced Eszai sometimes do. I was shaking but I pulled on the air and began to ascend.

  The Circle broke.
>
  A second time. It reformed promptly and I spun out of my fall yet lower in the sky. I yelled, ‘What’s happening?’

  The Circle broke.

  With a slow sense of void so horribly vacant I screamed. I blanked out for a few seconds and found myself descending still lower. My wingtips touched treetops on each down beat.

  I gained height, bracing myself in trepidation of it happening again. Three times! Who’d been killed? Which of us – Lightning? Serein? Frost? The last one had died horribly slowly.

  What could injure three Eszai in close succession so badly that the Circle couldn’t hold them? In what circumstances could the skill and strength of three of my friends be useless? They were surrounded by troops and fortifications. Could it be a fyrd revolt?

  Perhaps I was lucky not to be there. I found myself sobbing, feeling light and drifting. A second of time had passed for me, for all of us, before San reformed the connections. It felt awful, much like the shock on hearing the news that someone you love has died – which is not fair considering that few Eszai love anyone apart from their spouses.

  I examined myself. Did I feel tired? Could anyone badly hurt be pulling on the Circle? I couldn’t tell.

  Shit, shit, shit. Another disaster at Slake Cross and I’m not there. The Emperor will have felt it and he’ll be expecting me to come and tell him why – and I don’t know! He’ll find out I wasn’t at the front!

  I was cold with rising panic but I forced myself to concentrate. I’m in deep trouble – and so is Lightning – assuming he’s still alive. I spoke aloud: ‘There’s no time to hesitate. I must reach Slake, find out what’s happening, then race back to the Castle and take San the news. I’ll have to outpace all the dispatch riders and reach the Castle before them, because if any beat me there and tell the Emperor I was absent, he’ll have my balls.’

  Where the fuck was I, anyway? I looked down on the valley. The oblique morning light cast a shadow of one valley side across the other and the stone buildings of Cushat Cote village at the bottom were still in darkness. The border of Awia. Having got my bearings, I turned sharply. I must steel myself to be prepared for anything. I beat my wings powerfully and flew my fastest towards Slake Cross.

  CHAPTER 11

  I came upon the baggage train along the Glean Road. It was decimated – nothing was moving down there.

  I descended and let the road stream along under me. It was solid with dismembered bodies of men and women, severed heads and limbs. Between the shafts of overturned carts lay the white or chestnut flanks of the hitched horses. Ragged green vegetables and leather-fletched crossbow bolts spilt from the barrels. Dead Insects lay among them, each two metres long. The devastation stretched into the distance along the road. If a swarm has reached this far, what’s happening at Slake?

  I skimmed over them – the horses and mules were no more than jumbles of bloody hide and entrails, a semi-digested green-shit stench. I could see no sign of the attack having come from any direction – the people lay in equal numbers on both verges as if they didn’t know which way to flee. Few were armed. Horses had bolted dragging their carts off the road; they lay on the grass further off, their black hooves raised and rigid.

  It didn’t make any sense. Where were the live Insects? Once they were out of danger they would always stop and feed but few bodies showed any signs of damage beyond the wounds that had killed them. It was as if a great force had swept through and torn them apart instantaneously.

  Here was one of the armoured wagons – steel plate riveted to its wooden sides – designed to be a temporary refuge in case of attack. The worst Insects could do was eat the wheels off and cause it to tumble to the ground. Its doors were firmly shut. As they had to be bolted from inside, somebody must be in there. I landed squarely beside it. On the ground the silence was terrifying. The pools of blood between the carts had dried to brown but the corpses still smelt salty, like fresh meat.

  I looked all around, drew my ice axe and banged the haft on the door. I called through an air hole, ‘Anyone in here?’

  ‘Just me,’ said a young man’s voice.

  ‘This is Comet. What happened?’

  ‘Comet!’ The voice degenerated into sobs. ‘Everything’s gone.’

  ‘Open the door. The Insects have left.’

  ‘No!’ screamed the man. ‘I’m not coming out! Leave me! Leave me here!’

  I peered through the air hole but could see only blackness. What would I do with one man crazy with terror in the middle of the Lowespass countryside? ‘OK,’ I said calmly, ‘I’ll fly to Slake and send lancers. They’ll get you out; you’ll be safe.’

  ‘Fly? Safe?’ The man started laughing with a horrible high-pitched tone.

  I took off and flew as high as I could trying to catch a first glimpse of the town. Beneath me, both sides of the road were ‘trap fields’ where iron traps had been set. Yellow signposts warned travellers not to leave the highway. The pressure of an Insect’s foot on the trigger plate will spring a trap shut and bite the claw off. Now I started to see them, maimed but still alive, moving slowly or spasming on the ground.

  I went over the valley head and the moorland pass dropped away – reddish spots were Insects roaming randomly on the slopes. I hastened on, frightened for my friends. This reminded me far too much of 1925.

  Slake Cross town sat in the distance, the lake beyond it. A massive misty funnel of black spots was rising high and thin in the air above the lake. It was drifting slightly with the breeze but twisting with a slowness unlike any whirlwind I’d seen. And there was scarcely a wind anyway. I couldn’t tell what it was; I stared at it until my eyes hurt. The great spiral towered over the lake and specks cascaded from it like water drops or debris. They rose and fell like soot specks coming off a fire, but they must be huge if I could see them at this distance.

  Below me another defence – a ‘field of holes’ – was full of struggling Insects. Pits had been dug close together over the whole valley floor. Each was two metres square and five deep, straight-sided, concrete-lined with sharp, tar-painted stakes fixed upright in the bottom. I looked directly down into them; some were half-full of Insects skewered on the stakes, in the base of others lone Insects raised their heads, convergent compound eyes glittering. They would try to dig their way out until they wore their claws to stubs.

  Further still and I was over the zigzag trenches running parallel with the river. The trenches were square-based, cut in chevrons, so that trapped Insects could be more easily dispatched as they slowed down to scurry round the corners. The trenches trimmed across my field of vision and Insects looking no bigger than ants scuttled up and down them, bristling.

  I approached, with a feeling of trepidation like facing the cold wind that precedes a storm. The swirling flurry in the sky was more than five hundred metres tall. The whole sky was mottled with specks bumbling around each other, some over the town, some now between it and me. I concentrated on these, and as I came nearer the space between them seemed to increase. From looking at lots of motes plastered against a blank grey sky I was soon aware of them as individuals hanging in the air. I picked one and closed in on it.

  The dot resolved into a dark crescent moving at my altitude with both points facing downwards. Closer still, I could see the crescent had three segments. It was bulky, not streamlined like a bird and I couldn’t understand what was keeping it up. Then it turned towards me and I saw its bulbous eyes. It was an Insect! An Insect flying!

  I yelled, pulled my wings closed and fell below it just as it swept over my head. Its buzzing nearly deafened me even above the sudden roar of the air stream as I went into freefall. I forced open my wings, looked around, saw I hadn’t fallen more than twenty metres, and performed a slow roll so I could look down the length of my body and see it behind me.

  A flying Insect?

  I couldn’t believe it was real! It was heading away and starting to turn. I could see its ten bronze-brown abdomen plates, its tail curved and hooked under like a
gigantic wasp. Its legs were bunched up under its body, the knee joints sticking out. Above its thorax was a continuous flickering – one, no two pairs of long translucent wings, beating so fast they blurred! They protruded from under its thorax’s first lamina, attached by a narrow joint that seemed flexible, like a hinge. What were these things?

  Another one underneath me altered its path, rising up diagonally, but I jinked to one side and it missed. I looked forward, realising what the rising funnel above the reservoir was – a flight of Insects. Thousands upon thousands of winged Insects.

  Their massed humming caused the sky to vibrate as if struck, resounding from all directions like the sound of flies on a corpse. It drowned out my own beats.

  I have fought ground-bound Insects for so long I was bewildered; I couldn’t believe they were doing something different. Are these the same animals? Insects have always had tiny wings. Where have they suddenly got long wings from? And why now? One struck my foot a glancing blow – I dived hastily.

  Below me, normal Insects swarmed over the whole valley bottom. They floated dead in the moat, scurried on the road, tore tents down and dragged them over the heather. Trebuchets stood abandoned. Warning beacons blazed on all the peel towers but I could see no other sign of life. A convoy of wagons by the town wall had been chained together to form a laager but every soldier inside the enclosure was dead. The Insects were raining down from above, bypassing our defences, overwhelming everything on the ground.

  Arrows pulsed out of the towers’ overhanging belfries and irregularly from the covered walkways along the walls of Slake Cross. I thought of Lightning – surely he must be alive, directing the archers? I had to find out what was going on.

  I passed over the town and towards the Insect flight. Like a single being, it threw off graceful wisps as myriads tumbled from the apex. Its base was russet with them ascending from their side of the lake.