The Modern World

by Steph Swainston

  I rode the wind, lost in my thoughts. The Emperor remained an enigma to us all, even those Eszai who had known him longest. He was old before god stopped time affecting him, two thousand years ago in Hacilith. His centuries as sage to the ancient kings, then warrior against the Insects and finally as advisor for the Fourlands, have given him an understanding of people so profound it seems inhuman.

  San leaving the Castle signifies the end of the world. Everyone knows that myth. It has been embedded in the Empire since the Circle was founded. But it didn’t specify how the world was supposed to end, or the means of god’s return.

  There’s no evidence, one side of me said; you’ve studied it long enough and you know it’s no more than a fable. My other side replied: how long do we have? Days?

  CHAPTER 14

  I called the lancers of Rachiswater, the longbow men of Micawater, the swords of Peregrine. I called the famed cavalry of Eske. I called the Cathee axe men, the spears of Brandoch, the Litanee pikemen and Awndyn halberdiers. The brave Fescue shield fyrd I called, the Hacilith crossbow men, the horse archers of Ghallain. I called the General and Select Fyrd of every manor. The governors heard the emphasis in my voice and saw the panic in my eye, and took up their arms.

  By the time I returned from Carniss, the Select of Awia was already packed on the roads, marching under the manors’ colours. Ahead of them, great trebuchets and espringals were trundling from Lowespass Fortress, escorted by the hard-bitten troops of the garrison. The roads from the Avernwater workshops were clogged with flamethrower carts, and barrels of tar were en route from the Lacksheen tar pits. Every troop-carrying caravel in Diw and Cobalt weighed her anchor and stretched her sails.

  It was a full mobilisation. Two people from each family, male or female, from the ages of sixteen to fifty, must answer the call. I spoke to the governors, who spoke to their stewards, who spoke to their reeves; who spoke to farmhands and cottars, so that by the day following my visit, everyone had heard my news.

  In the city, desks were set up in factory halls and under awnings in the market place. People of every walk of life soaked from the streets towards them, frightened by the urgency of Aver-Falconet’s announcements. He sent couriers galloping out across Morenzia to the townships at the coast.

  As I glided over the Plains I saw queues of men mustering to the General Fyrd in manor hall courtyards, the porches of reeves’ houses and the village greens. Every man realised there was nothing for it but to join the queue and, at the front, sign your name and pick up a shield and sword or poleaxe from the mounds unloaded from the carts from Wrought. Or if you’re Select Fyrd, take down your heirloom breastplate and broadsword from the bedroom cupboard. A night’s work with sand and oil will restore it to service.

  The sheer number of people moving took my breath away. The storehouses of Wrought were turning out crates of weapons by the neat ten thousand into a seemingly endless coming-and-going of covered wagons. Horses and carts appeared singly from scattered farms, convened by the thousand to fill whole fields, then each rank decanted out onto the road. Anything could happen. Everything was happening! The scale of the effort astounded me. Carnival girls turned entrepreneurs walked up and down the long queues of traffic dammed up outside Shivel, selling food and drink.

  I have put all these people in motion myself! The power of my words filled me with exhilaration. I dropped from the sky onto a different manor each day, and people upwelled in my wake and channelled out to fill the highways all the way to Slake Cross.

  CHAPTER 15

  When I returned to Slake Cross, we gathered in the hall. The Insect flights had ceased but the valley was swarming with them. Rayne and Cyan had managed to ride through and had been here two weeks. I heard that Cyan was already antagonising her father and had offended nearly every Eszai.

  Lightning crouched down and held a wooden taper in the hearth. Shielding it with his cupped hand he crossed to the table and touched the taper to the rope wick of an oil lamp. He turned down the wick until the smoky flame stopped fluttering, then stubbed out the taper and sat down next to Tornado and myself.

  The yellow glow illuminated our faces and Tornado’s front as he hunched over a pint of beer with a glum expression. Wrenn paced up and down in the darkness between the table and the fireplace, more restless than a rat on a stove, his hand on his sword hilt. Nobody spoke. Cyan was sitting on the hearth step, reading one of Rayne’s books. She looked a lot healthier now. She was poking her thumb through a hole in her jumper, making a woollen glove, and paint was flaking from the designs on her riding boots.

  A heavy, insistent hammering came from outside; the Sapper was keeping soldiers working long into the night, building palisades to enclose the canvas city growing outside the town.

  The fire took some of the dampness out of the air. The first week of May had ended but the cold night rain still permeated everything. It flattened the grass on the moor and sent ripples down the dam’s overflow chute. Pools in the mud along the Lowespass Road deepened and coalesced. Many carts mired to the tops of their wheels were abandoned haphazardly on the verges.

  Frost had fallen asleep sitting at her table, her head down on a sheaf of calculations. Lightning went to her and put a hand under her rounded shoulder. He gently tipped her backwards, her head lolling. He caught her with his other hand in the small of her back, put his arm under her knees and lifted her up. He carried her to her camp bed and laid her down carefully.

  ‘Is she all right?’

  Lightning shook his head. ‘She’s been awake seventy-two hours.

  Every noise and shadow has her on her toes. She forgets that if you keep a bow strung all the time it will warp – and then when you need it, you won’t be able to use it. She is tillering the string of her mind so taut I wonder it hasn’t already snapped. Tell us the news, Comet.’

  I said, ‘The Imperial Fyrd are on their way and so are all the manors. I’ve never seen anything like it – a hundred and fifty thousand soldiers and nearly the same in auxiliaries. All the inns and camp clearings are full, they’re filling churches with straw sacks to sleep on. They strip the depots clean as they pass. It’s as if all the towns are moving – the roads are just like long, thin towns. When I tell the governors that San has left the Castle, they don’t give me any problems raising fyrd. I haven’t even had any resistance from Eske or Hacilith. I think that’s why San is coming – to demonstrate how important this is.’

  Tornado folded his arms. ‘When will the Emperor arrive?’

  ‘I saw his entourage this morning. They’re passing the troops already coming in on the Calamus Road. It’s taking them longer to get here than I expected because half of Awia and the Plainslands is ahead of them. At that rate they’ll take a couple more days.’

  Lightning said, ‘I have ensured billeting for the Imperial Fyrd. The quartermasters and armourers are checking our stocks, and we’re carting in more fodder as fast as we can.’

  The sleeves of Tornado’s leather jacket were pushed up to his elbows, so I could see the faded red sunburst tattoo under the hairs on his massive forearm. He said, ‘I’ll send troops to clear the way. There are too many Insects running around out there. I don’t like it. I don’t like it one bit. That Insect flight was not, like, natural. It creeps me out. We’re the Emperor’s bodyguard so I’ll go and take charge of the Imperial Fyrd. Half of them hardly ever leave the demesne. They’re like, only the Castle’s guard.’

  ‘They train very hard,’ said Lightning.

  ‘They only bloody parade! They never campaign together, at least not as a single division.’

  Lightning said, ‘Most of them are veteran Select. If they weren’t good they wouldn’t have got the job. But yes, I agree theirs is an honorary position and you should go out to meet San. He will have this hall as a centre of operations.’

  ‘Where will his private quarters be?’ I asked.

  ‘Your room.’

  ‘Oh, thanks.’

  ‘Well, you weren’t here
and we thought you wouldn’t mind … After all, you can sleep on a bookshelf.’

  I picked up a bottle and poured some wine, hoping it would ease my nerves. Wrenn paced around the table and said to the room in general, ‘The boss is coming. What have we done wrong?’

  ‘I wonder whose head is on the block first?’

  Wrenn pressed me: ‘Doesn’t San leaving the Castle mean the end of the world? I was taught he would leave to prepare the way for god. Is god returning? What will it do?’

  I had met with this question in every manor and it was really starting to annoy me. I said tiredly, ‘Shut the fuck up about god.’

  Lightning said, ‘Don’t swear in front of Cyan.’

  I glanced across to Cyan, who smiled innocently.

  Tornado spoke up: ‘I hope god returns. It’s what I’ve been waiting for all these years.’

  I gave a frustrated shriek and waved my hands in the air. ‘Hundreds of thousands of troops are coming and we have no space! Let’s concentrate!’

  Tornado ignored me and addressed Wrenn: ‘I know I’m prepared for god. To me it’s the whole point of being immortal – I get a ringside seat when it shows up. San knows everything I do is for the Castle so I’m damn sure he’ll give me a good report.’

  ‘God is an inhuman power,’ Lightning said quietly.

  ‘Still, I like to think it’ll be refreshed and in a good mood.’

  Lightning said, ‘Please can we keep to the point?’

  ‘This is the point!’

  He shook his head. ‘No, Tornado. In my experience stories are rarely as old as people say; and traditions are never as time-honoured as they like to believe. The idea that San never leaves the Castle originated about a hundred years after the Games. I don’t remember him announcing that he would never leave. Many opinions sprang up around that time; they became stories and then the centuries twisted them into legends. Please do not be distracted by myths of the world ending because the truth is much worse. We all know the original version deep down. Cyan, Wrenn; when San leaves the Castle it logically means the end of the Circle not the end of the world. We have failed him and he needs to take command again himself. I think – I fear – that he will disband the Circle.’

  ‘He took charge of the Imperial Fyrd just like a warrior,’ I said with wonder.

  ‘Yes. San the warrior is not so strange to me. I remember him leading the First Circle. I was introduced to him once, in the field at Murrelet, where Rachiswater is now. When I was a boy he would stop at the palace on his expeditions from the Castle to the front. Could we be redundant?’

  ‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘San asked for every fighter we can field. Who’ll lead them? He needs us more than ever.’

  ‘I cannot begin to predict what he plans.’

  Tornado said, ‘I still think god might appear.’

  ‘Well, you are from a more religious era,’ Lightning said airily.

  ‘And you’re full of bullshit!’

  ‘What will god look like?’ Wrenn asked Tornado.

  The giant man’s voice sparked with interest. ‘Dunno. I asked San to, like, describe it, but he wouldn’t. San says god made us, so it’s more powerful than us, so it can’t be Awian or human. It wouldn’t have made us anything like itself, either in looks or the extent of its power, because then we’d be able to rebel and of course god wouldn’t chance that. That’s why god is an “it”. Most books I’ve read say it can look like whatever it wants to. It, like, creates stuff. That’s what it does. So it can create forms for itself. If god was speaking to you, then I guess it might choose to look like an Awian.’

  ‘You’re making this worse,’ I complained.

  Wrenn glanced at Lightning for support. ‘Do you believe in god?’

  Lightning said, ‘I see no reason not to, because San does not lie. No one has ever given me a more convincing alternative. Besides, we are immortal. God must be behind it somewhere, or how could San have immortality to share?’

  Wrenn gave a great worried sigh. He unbuckled his belt and laid his sword on the table. He ran his fingers through his hair and set off pacing to the fireplace again.

  I was suddenly furious. I couldn’t believe we were talking about this crap! ‘Tornado, you’re wasting our time! Are we credulous Zascai? Are we Trisians, to be sitting here pontificating? Is this the Buncombe Beach Young Philosophers On The Brink Of Disaster Club?’

  ‘Don’t speak Plainslands,’ said Lightning. ‘I can’t follow you if you go that fast.’

  ‘Sorry. I’m just telling him that we’re in this together and god is not going to help us. Nothing is going to come and save us. We have no one to run crying to, nothing to rely on. We must stand on our own two feet. Can we just grow up, please? Why do you think San told me to muster everyone from Frass to Vertigo? The strength and resources in each of us is all we have!’

  ‘You used to believe,’ Tornado said. ‘I remember when you joined the Circle. You weren’t so cynical then.’

  I shrugged. When I was an apprentice in Hacilith I saw how seriously my seniors took the story. What other conclusion can a child draw from the sayings of adults? I grew more experienced and I realised that adults don’t have all the answers, and in many cases they’re even more credulous and confused than children. Then I saw the Shift, then I saw the Somatopolis, and I realised how truly alone we are – not only in this world, but in all of them.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I have no proof. But if we don’t know whether god is real, we can’t depend on it. If we can’t prove anything either way, and if we’ll never know the answer, we should shut up about it and do something more practical. Instead of talking we should save ourselves! God might return and make everyone immortal, or us mortal. It could alter and revoke the laws of physics at will and leave us with a terrifying disorder. God might already have come back – remember the posteventualist heresy? Maybe San is god, watching and chuckling to himself. Maybe the Insects are god; they appeared, didn’t they? Or maybe god intended them to be the next phase of creation, more perfect and far hardier than us men.’

  ‘Fuck that!’ Tornado thundered. He stood up, so I did too, but I foolhardily kept going: ‘San is coming to see something new to him, that’s all.’

  He patted me on the shoulders – and I sat down heavily on the bench.

  ‘Please!’ Lightning said.

  Tornado said simply, ‘If Jant picks holes in my belief, it will shine still brighter through them.’

  I sighed. ‘God coming back is nothing but a story. I’ve lived everywhere; I know a tale when I hear one. From Darkling to Hacilith to the Castle I’ve had to don and doff beliefs so many times I’ve realised stories are only ever about the people who make them up …’

  ‘Have you quite finished?’ said Lightning coldly.

  ‘I think he’s crazy,’ said Tornado.

  ‘No, I’m not crazy. I’ve just been around. Let me show you what I mean. Tales of god from different countries would seem as outlandish to you, as yours would to them.’

  ‘I have had my fill of outlandish countries,’ Lightning remarked quietly, stroking the scar on his palm.

  ‘You find Rhydanne strange, don’t you?’ I asked Tornado.

  ‘I find you strange,’ he said.

  ‘Rhydane think of god as looking like a Rhydanne.’

  He sniggered.

  I said, ‘Listen to the Rhydanne version. God the hunter made the world, the mountains, the plains, the sky; but it was empty of animals. So god made an animal to chase, and the animal she made was enormous, as if every single creature of the Fourlands, dumb and rational, had been joined together in one giant form. It had feathers and scales, skin and fur, hands, claws, wings and tails. It had hundreds of heads and thousands of eyes. It was both male and female. The beast sat on Scree Plateau and used the Plainslands as its footstool. Its heads towered above the peaks in the highest mountain clouds.

  ‘God chased the beast all over the Fourlands. She twirled her bolas, the stones of w
hich were as large as the glacial boulders on the slopes of Tarneilear, tied to leather strings as long and as wide as the Turbary Track. Eventually the creature tired and god caught up with it. She cast her bolas and brought it down on the summit of Great Fheadain.

  ‘God killed the beast and its blood flowed down the gullies of Fheadain and created the first waterfalls. Then god skinned it and carved up its flesh. She kindled a fire and placed the cuts of meat on flat stones near the hearth. The warmth of the fire brought all the pieces of meat to life. They jumped up and ran off, all over the Fourlands and became the people and animals of the world.

  ‘The Rhydanne were quickest; they ran away first, before the fire could cook them. The humans were closer to the fire, and got burnt, which is why they are not as pale as Rhydanne and they need a warmer climate. Some cuts of meat had stuck together – humans and eagles – so now we have Awians. The Rhydanne had already populated the mountains, so humans and Awians must perforce live in the lowlands. God saw this had happened accidentally and decided to get drunk. She drank and drank and eventually fell asleep. One day she will wake up, with the heaviest hangover of all time. Rhydanne live in dread of having to pacify her with more alcohol on that day, I can tell you –’

  ‘Jant …’ Lightning cut me off with a calm voice.

  Tornado said, ‘That’s the biggest load of rubbish I ever heard.’

  ‘Eilean told me it when I was small, back when I assumed Darkling valley was the whole world.’

  Cyan brushed her silky hair back with her jumper sleeve and turned up her face. Rather self-consciously, she said, ‘If god is coming back, wouldn’t San have told Jant?’

  ‘Maybe even San doesn’t know,’ Tornado said.

  ‘Why don’t you ask him?’

  Everybody looked at Tornado, who said, ‘Um, no … I can tell you haven’t, like, met the Emperor, girl.’