by Felix Gilman
The alley stank of animals, coal dust, piss, rot.
His whole arm was numb.
He needed help.
He stood, shakily. There were five, six, seven unmarked doors in the alley’s brick walls. Some of them were painted in peeling red, others in peeling green; all were rusty underneath. Rubbish and slops and ordure were heaped beside each one. He staggered to the closest door and hammered on it with his unwounded hand.
There was no answer and finally Arjun gave up and moved onto the next. When he rested his head against it he heard faint music, as if from a great distance. When he banged on it the music came to an abrupt halt.
The reeking alley wind caught the echo of the shouting in the meeting hall. Something about work and clean living; about enemies and spies; about the Mountain.
A muffled voice from behind the door shouted go away, leave—a woman’s voice?—leave us alone. He kept hammering.
When the door suddenly opened Arjun nearly fell forward into the muzzle of the shotgun the woman inside was holding. He sort of slumped sideways in the doorway.
She had very green and troubled eyes.
Tucking the shotgun under her other arm, she helped Arjun stand, and led him through the door and into the room beyond. Arjun hit his head on a low shelf and she murmured an automatic apology; he stumbled over a pile of leather-bound books on the floor and she did it again. She directed him with some firmness to a musty armchair in the corner. She sat across from him with the shotgun ready to hand.
The room was half lit with candles and hazy with dust. Every inch of space was lined with books and scrolls. His first thought was that it was a scholar’s library; his second—having taken account of the little signs and tags on every shelf, and the big brass cash register on the table beside him—was that it was a bookshop.
A pair of yellow feline eyes regarded him distrustfully from under a low shelf.
The woman was quite young, and quite small, which made Arjun realize that he himself was quite small, and slight.
The gun in her lap was absurdly too large for her. She balanced it on her knees. Her dark hair was in ringlets that struck Arjun—he had no idea why—as old-fashioned.
She asked him what he wanted, and he laughed, because the answer was so obvious, or so impossible, depending on how one approached the question. He held up his gory hand to show her his most immediate and practical concern.
She leaned a little closer to see. She gasped oh dear. Her hand rose to her mouth—she wore a number of plain silver rings—and the gun slipped off her lap and hit the floor with a significant thud. It did not go off. The woman scrabbled on the floor for it, and hefted it again into her lap. Arjun had not moved; could not have moved had he wanted to. She flushed a little and put the gun aside.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought you might be … Never mind. You know. What machine, then?”
“I’m sorry?”
“What machine was it? I suppose it doesn’t matter.”
“Please,” he said. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean your accident. Where did you work?”
“Oh. I don’t know. No machine. It was a bite.”
“A bitei”
“Yes,” he said. “An animal. Please, do you have bandages or ointments? Its bite may be venomous. Or infected. I will try to pay you for them.”
“An animal? A dog?”
“No. I don’t know.” Arjun held his bad hand stiff and throbbing against his chest, and rummaged in his pockets with his good hand. He removed a fold of green and blue notes, clipped together with a gold pin, and some coins of various sizes and shapes with a mess of heads and weapons and birds and animals and flags and numbers stamped on them. He held them out to her. Her green eyes flicked to them for only a second, and she shrugged.
“I don’t know what all that is. Is it money? It’s not money from around here. It’ll only get you into trouble. The pin’s nice. If you have a pin like that you don’t work in the factories. Unless you stole it, I suppose.”
“I do not think I am a thief. Please. My name is Arjun. I do not know where I am. If I have no money that’s good here I can work.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I know what you are. I know where you came from. This close to the Mountain? You’re not the first ghost to come wandering.” She came over and held his wrist. He closed his eyes in agony as she pulled at his makeshift bandages. “Poor thing,” she said. “Poor lonely thing.” It felt as though she was crushing his hand in a vise; he assumed she was only tightening the cloth. He did not cry out. He recalled that he had a gift for silence.
She carefully lowered the injured limb and rested it in his lap. He couldn’t bear to look at it. Instead Arjun watched her walk across the room and tug with both her hands at a long thin rope that hung down the wall from a hole in the ceiling. Outside in the street a quiet bell sounded. The woman went and waited by the street-front door. She bit at her thumbnail and looked out through bottle-glass windows into the night.
Arjun’s eyes were closed when the door opened, and cold air blew in—he’d not realized how warm the shop was until the cold air woke him. He’d been dreaming of a dark river, of being pursued …
He tried to sit up and a woman gently pushed him down again. She leaned close over him and looked into his eyes as if inspecting them for hidden fractures.
Arjun studied her, too. It was—was it?—a different woman. The same green eyes, the same olive skin, the same dark hair—but this woman wore her hair longer and tied back, and was thicker set. Where the woman he’d first met had been thin, slight, nervous, this woman was fleshy, and solid, and her two heavy breasts rose in front of his face as she stood; and then Arjun saw that the woman he’d first met was hovering a few feet away, chewing again on her thumbnail. The first woman wore a simple black skirt and shirt, and jewelry; the newcomer wore brown, and her hands were plain. Were they sisters?
It was very important to not become confused among persons and reflections and echoes, Arjun recalled.
The newcomer said, “I’m Marta. Marta Low.”
The first woman chimed in, “I’m Ruth. Ruth Low. I should have said. Sorry. This is my shop.”
“All right, Ruth,” Marta said. “I’m here now. I’ll take care of him. Go on, put the kettle on. Take this and crush it up. It’s all right, Ruth.” Marta squatted in front of Arjun again. “So who are you, then?”
“My name is Arjun, Marta.”
“You’re not from around here.”
“No. Please.”
“You were attacked.”
“I think so,” he said. “It seems unlikely now.”
“Anyone chasing you? Don’t get strange. I mean the police. I mean the Know-Nothings. I mean bosses’ men. Real things, real people. Anyone like that?”
“There were some men. I was asleep in the alley outside for a long time and if they did not find me then, then I think they are not chasing me anymore.”
“Did you give them cause?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you say anything to them? Anything strange, anything mad? Any of that I-Am-Come-Down-from-the-Mountain-to-Tell-You stuff?”
“I said nothing. I found myself in a dark room and I ran away.”
“Are you from the War?”
“What War?”
“I don’t know. A lot of you say that. I don’t know what War you mean. Where are you from?”
“I do not know.”
“What was it like?”
“I do not recall.”
“Did you find what you were looking for?”
“I do not recall.”
“Poor ghost. Thanks, Ruth, there’s a love.”
Marta took a clay mug from Ruth’s hands. The black liquid in it smelled of aniseed, swirled thickly with broken leaves, gave off heavy fumes—she lifted it to Arjun’s mouth, and he let her, passively, thinking sometimes I am passive, then—fumes that numbed his head and darkened his vision.
Arjun woke in the darkness of an attic full of moonlit clutter, under sagging rafters. He sat up simply to determine that he was not bound down. The experiment was a success; he lay back again, somewhat relieved.
The Lows were apparently kind to stray cats, some of which had made their toilet in the attic’s musty corners.
His numb left hand was bound in bandages that were grey and worn, but smelled freshly of soap and lye. It was extraordinary good fortune to have stumbled across any doctoring of any sort whatsoever; on the other hand it was poor luck to have been maimed by a talking lizard, unless this was a very strange part of the city. Arjun was not sure yet whether he was a lucky or an unlucky man.
Ruth had thought he might be a thief. He was, Arjun thought, slight, and wiry, and silent; he might have been a good thief. He had a number of scars; perhaps he’d been a soldier—a bandit? Arjun thought not. No, he thought that he was an ordinary man, and those possibilities seemed too strange, too fabulous, too picaresque. They made him smile.
I Am Come Down from the Mountain to Tell You. Perhaps he was a holy man. Perhaps he was a priest. That might explain the sense he had, floating at the edge of his memories, of some profound but indescribable need. That might explain why he looked at the city around him and thought: this world is not real.
He was quite sure he’d been a musician. He held up his right hand—his good hand—and flexed his fingers. They made silent memory-notes.
Arjun held up his left hand. Under the bandages, he still had his index, his middle, his thumb. A good enough tool for most employment, but worthless for a musician—mute. Numbness spread down his aching arm and gripped his heart. He knew that he had lost something, something irreplaceable; he could not be sure how much.
He heard the two women coming up the stairs.
They called you a ghost.
They were sisters. There was a third, they said—at least Ruth began to say it, and Marta shushed her. This was on the third day of Arjun’s recovery, and he was clear in his head, and the pain in his phantom fingers was manageable; but he was tired, and weak, and did not press the matter.
The silence was broken by an ugly bird that settled on the sill outside the attic’s half-open window, and pressed its lumpy head through the crack. Its feathers were like dirty grey rags and its yellow eyes were strangely human. Its misshapen claws—there were bright rags torn from someone’s red dress stuck in them—appeared to be fumbling with dim intelligence to reach round the pane and unbolt the latch. “Faaakyu,” it sang. “Oi.”
Marta banged the glass against its head with an old book and it dropped away dazed into the alley.
“Horrible thing,” Marta said.
“What was it?”
“Just a bird. Don’t they have birds where you’re from?”
“Yes. Of course. It just reminded me of something.”
“Thunners, they call them. Nasty breed. Or Thunders. Or Thunderers.”
“Because of the noise they make,” Ruth said.
“Because they won’t stop fucking shouting,” Marta agreed.
“Oh.”
Marta bolted the window and turned back to Arjun. “You’re looking better, anyway. You can start thinking how to pay us, yeah?” And she squeezed her sister’s shoulder and briskly left the room.
Another bird landed on the sill, and peered through the window with a resentful yellow eye. Arjun decided to ignore it.
The attic was stuffed to the rafters with furniture and boxes and books; unsold stock. Arjun lay on an ancient sofa. Ruth sat beside him. The cushions were grey and hard. There was, however, a blanket, which was relatively clean. There’d been food—potatoes, cabbage, and carrots—no meat. The house was cold. These sisters were not poor—not by the standards of some places in the city—but they were far from rich by the standards of all but the most desperate quarters. Names of places and times and parliaments and dukes and churches slipped through the shadows of Arjun’s mind, too many and too fast for him quite to grasp them.
“Ruth, you called me a ghost.”
“Sometimes people come wandering down the Mountain. We’re so close to it here. They’re like you. They don’t know who they are or where they’re from. They come and go. They don’t really belong here and they go, soon enough. We try to be kind to them when they’re here. There are more than enough people who’ll try to be cruel.”
“Tell me again, Ruth, where we are. I am still forgetful. Do you have a map?”
“Boxes and boxes of ‘em,” she laughed. “Are you buying?”
“Ruth, where are we?”
She went downstairs; she returned with her arms full. “All right. Here’s a few of Fosdyke and environs. There’s not much call for them.
Who needs maps to see where they already are? We’re stuck here in real life and that’s bad enough.”
“Thank you, Ruth.”
There was nothing there that Arjun recognized. This was a place where the streets were straight and square: a grid, a cage. For the most part they had numbers, not names, though a few were named for the factory complexes they bordered, or the Combines that owned them. Zones of authority were marked out—Holcroft Municipal Trust, Patagan Sewer & Piping, Woeck Oil, Carlyle Syndicated, Standard Auto. Where other ages of the city might have had parks, they had Undeveloped Area {Ownership Disputed) or Reclamation Zones— empty space penned in by the cage of streets. In a handful of spots the maps knotted, the ugly gridlike regularity was interrupted, the streets tangled like still-living things. Ruth’s finger picked out Carnyx Street—”That’s us. That’s where we are”—in the coils of one such area. But those places were so few, and everything around them was so coldly ordered; it made Arjun think that this part of the city had to be very, very old, and very tired. Condemned Area—Poisons. Condemned Area—Unknown. This Age of the city was very old; poisons and worse things accumulated.
The glass on the window was yellow-grey and streaked with soot. The sky looked sick. A shadow intruded on the lower-left quarter of the skyline, half obscured and half abstracted by distance and by greasy shameful clouds—a shadow that might have been the Mountain. It seemed too large to be contained by the window’s pathetic frame. It seemed to press past its bounds. Arjun lay back so that he couldn’t see it anymore.
Ruth sat again. “Tell me what you remember, Arjun. About where you’re from, I mean; about other places.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.” He gave up trying to recall and in the same instant a name came to him. “I remember a place called the Iron Rose.”
“It sounds beautiful.”
“I think it was a prison.”
“I’ve never heard of it, Arjun. Where was it? If I bring you up the maps we can look for it together.”
“Let me come down. I feel much better. I want to move and work.”
Ruth found Arjun some old clothes, to replace his bloody rags. Grey flannel trousers of a straight stove-pipe cut; a plain shirt, with patches; inelegant contraptions called suspenders, which Ruth had to help him fasten. Everything sagged on him like an empty sack, like an old man’s face; the original owner had been shorter than Arjun, but fatter.
Ruth put a hand to her mouth and laughed. “The Dad was a fat man, there’s no denying it. You look like a boy in his dad’s suit.”
“Oh. Am I young?”
Ruth lowered her hand. She seemed unsure what to say. She shrugged and waved her hand to say yes and no.
“Do you have a mirror?”
The Low sisters had two shops on Carnyx Street: Nos. 27 and 29. The establishments were connected by a bell rope. Arjun said it was a charming arrangement; Ruth shrugged.
Ruth kept shop in No. 27, where they sold a few books, but not many; Fosdyke’s factory workers were mostly illiterate. The bosses did not read. Their wives and daughters sometimes did, but they sent south for their reading matter and would not be seen on Carnyx Street, which was disreputable. Ruth sold a few picture books, most of which, to be honest, were illustrated sm
ut. She also sold music; in dusty sleeves along the walls were black discs, deeply grooved, which Ruth said could by their spinning, by codes engraved in them, cause music to be played, on certain rare machines that weren’t manufactured anymore. If you were an enthusiast—and those, too, weren’t being made much these days—you had to assemble them for yourself out of junk parts and stolen wire and love. Machines, Ruth said, had been Ivy’s business, before … well, she said she’d talk about that later, maybe.
But mostly Ruth sold maps. It had been one of the Dad’s numerous little businesses; and it had been his father’s before him, and somewhere way back in the family line had been travelers, explorers, peripatetic wanderers of the city, lodgers in odd boardinghouses, consummate fakers of dialects, connoisseurs of exotic omnibus passes and indecipherable street signs. Now there was nowhere to go; everywhere in the city was the same. Same machines, same streets, same houses, same factories, same owners. Now people bought the maps because they were little glimpses of other, better worlds; the Know-Nothings forbade their sale, but there was a steady, albeit small and cultish, demand.
Ruth sighed a lot as she spoke. She flitted from shelf to shelf looking for maps, dusty maps, brittle yellow maps, maps printed on hard cracked leather or carved into dark wood or woven into moth-eaten embroideries, muttering, “Iron Rose, Iron Rose. There’s a Rose Theater, here. There’s any number of Rose Streets. And here, this mark shows the Temple of the Seven Hundred Rose Petals. Isn’t that lovely? Were there temples where you’re from? They’re all gone, now. Ah, look here, where it says Territories of the Ivory Rose. I don’t know who that was. Do you?”
“I don’t.”
“Ivory Rose. Doesn’t that sound beautiful? I wonder if it was a woman. None of those people exist anymore. All of those places are gone, except on these old maps.”
“Do the people around here buy a lot of maps?”
“Some,” Ruth said.
“Not enough,” Marta said, appearing at the top of the stairs as if she were a sorcerer. (There was a connecting door on the second floor, between the stacks, that Arjun had not at first noticed.) “But we get by,” she said, hefting a small sack of vegetables for dinner. “We feed ourselves. The building is ours. We’ve always lived here. We answer to no one. We don’t have to toady to the bosses and we don’t have to wear ourselves out in any factory.”
