by Felix Gilman
“I failed to bring Ivy back to you,” he said. “The Know-Nothings took her. She was with Brace-Bel willingly, Ruth, and she did not want to come home. She wants never to come home again. She wants to escape from this Time. I’ve known others like her. She’ll never be happy until she finds the way—probably not even then.”
Brace-Bel snorted. “Ivy is worth ten of either of us.”
Ruth looked skeptically from Arjun to Brace-Bel.
“Brace-Bel will help us rescue Ivy,” Arjun said. “He and I have a deal. A man called Inspector Maury took her. Where would she be held?”
Ruth started. Silently she got up and walked to the counter. She brought back a copy of the Know-Nothings’ poster, announcing the destruction of the Museum, By Order of Inspector John Maury …
“He’s here,” she said. “Maybe Ivy’s with him? Why is he here, Arjun? What did you do?”
He read the poster over twice. “The Museum … ?”
I remember everything, Arjun told her—nearly everything.
She drew in her breath. Brace-Bel shook his head. Must we listen to your pious lament again?
He told her everything he could. Too much of it was still a jumble—fragments, glimpses, sudden moments of light and darkness. The kettle in the kitchen was on the boil, there was a smell of dust and rain in the air, and it seemed absurd to be talking about those things. The poster had panicked him deeply—there couldn’t be much time left. He still couldn’t say what had happened to him on the Mountain. “Maybe the Beast can, but …”
“I tried to think of a way to save it,” she said. At his surprised expression, she said, “I remember it, too. It was beautiful and mysterious and I can’t bear to see those bastards destroy it.” Arjun began to shake his head no, but she kept speaking: “But so fucking what? I did my best and I don’t even know where to start.” She gestured at her black clothes. “I went to meet the Black Masks. Ridiculous, right? Stupid boys. They’ll only get themselves killed if they try. Nothing here works the way it should. Marta was right.”
Brace-Bel drummed his fat fingers on the table. “That is the first sensible thing you’ve said, young lady.”
“Nothing here works right,” Arjun agreed. “Everything’s poisoned, and dies. But there are other places. I want to show you something. On the way back here I remembered something. Those ugly birds—those Thunders, you call them—where do they roost?”
Ruth had no idea—but Zeigler did.
They met him in an alley not far off the Square. The peculiar old man shook Arjun’s hand enthusiastically, held it a little too long, looked deeply into his eyes as if hoping to see reflected in them some of the sights Arjun had seen. He looked Brace-Bel up and down as though he was something fascinating but monstrous, like a great horned toad. “Oh my word, the things you two could tell me …”
He hugged Ruth. “Courage,” he said. “Courage—this, too, will pass.”
He’d spent the last four days sitting in the windblown Square outside the Museum—”documenting the atrocities.” He sheltered from the rain under an umbrella and scribbled sketches of the paintings and sculptures and weapons and altars and ornaments as they were dragged out and destroyed. He was a notably terrible artist—his angular black-inked cross-hatchings all looked roughly the same, blobs, whether they were of the sarcophagus of an ancient king or the preserved body of an extinct sloth. Twice, his notebook had been confiscated; once, one of the Know-Nothings slapped it from his hand and pissed on it, and he’d had to start again.
“The Thunders?” Zeigler said. “The birds? Really? Yes— actually—I’ve made a kind of study of them.”
He’d always believed that there was something unnatural and uncanny about the horrid birds. He’d always had a sense that there was something in their hideous song that was close almost to speech, and might if decoded describe whatever distant part of the city they’d come from. “An alien species,” he said. “Like an invasive weed.”
So he’d followed them and studied them; he’d mapped their aimless ragged flights and discovered their stinking and slovenly roosts. He’d even tried to catch one once, and they’d chased him shrieking and hooting all the way home, and battered against his windows and shat down his chimney all night: which was not natural behavior for birds, he’d always maintained. “They don’t belong here,” he said. “Am I right? Are they from your city?” His eyes gleamed at the prospect of having his suspicions confirmed.
“Yes and no,” Arjun said. “I don’t know how it works, exactly. Brace-Bel has theories about the essences of things, and what persists and what’s changed across Time. This city is hollow, full of cracks, riddled with secret veins. Things escape from their proper place—in particular weeds, birds, names, music, magic. At least in my experience. Things tangle oddly in the Metacontext. Everyone always forgets where they came from. I only know that I remember the birds when they were something better. I think maybe I can talk to them. I remembered who I am—why can’t they? I think maybe I can show you all something about magic.”
Aeigler came along, despite Arjun’s warnings that it would be dangerous. Why not? He wasn’t going to stop the man—it certainly wasn’t Arjun’s place to hold anyone back from indulging his obsessions.
Zeigler wore black. His jacket was worn, shiny, and too tight even over his skinny body. His white hair blew free in the morning’s gusts and squalls. He looked like a hank of pigeon feathers stuck in a drainpipe. He carried a notebook and pencil; he was full of unanswerable questions.
Ruth came, too, in trousers and buttoned jacket and a scarf the same deep green as her eyes. Her breath misted in the cold evening air. It occurred to Arjun that this was the first time he’d seen her outside the dust and shadows of the shop. (Was it really?) He smiled and she smiled back. The brassy sunset light became her. It was somehow unreal to see her in sunlight—an unreal evening. He felt suddenly nervous for her.
And Brace-Bel brought up the rear. The pockets of his overalls carried the last of Shay’s devices. He used his stick as a cane. The crystal atop it was camouflaged with a cloth tied round with string. He grumbled about his bad leg and his various illnesses. He held a handkerchief to his mouth and complained about the stench as they walked down by the canals, under the shadow of the gasometers and the waste reclamation plants; as they cut across an empty expanse of weeds and stones and then between the tanneries and the slaughterhouses. His spirits rose as they headed up Collier Hill, where the factories had closed ten years ago and now lay hunched and broken on the slopes of the Hill.
“It’s subsidence,” Zeigler said. “What ruined these factories— plain old subsidence. Twenty years ago these bloody great holes had opened in the earth. Overdigging. Shoddy foundations. Leaks of who-knows-what awful stuff. Some folk said that you could hear crying and moaning and this horrible cursing coming up from the shafts. I came as close as I dared. I camped for a night on the edge. I had my notebook ready. Never heard anything but echoes and wind and dripping water. Voices in the earth, folk said. Arjun, could that happen? Are there places where that happens?”
“Probably,” Arjun said. He was distracted.
As the sun set behind the crest of the hill the spare silhouettes of the factories looked like the skeletons of crucified giants—or so Brace-Bel said. Giants who had assailed the peak and been blasted back down; blood-red and black with the sunset and their own rust and filth. Scenes of ruination cheered him, he said. “In this time the choice is between monotony and disaster—I choose disaster!”
To Arjun’s eyes the flood of red light was a beautiful bright cymbal-clash, and those black silent structures were an orchestra waiting their cue. He felt the familiar rising of memory—some further fragments of that forgotten Music. He turned the memory this way and that and tested its weight. Meanwhile Brace-Bel loudly explained that punishment and the history of punishment was an area of his especial expertise, and crucifixion was …
“No homeless,” Ruth said. “No paperless. No squa
tters. Never seen any empty place in the city so empty. “
“The birds are territorial,” Zeigler said. “Vicious.”
“They used to be different,” Arjun said. “When they were boys and girls. I remember them. Always vicious but not so ugly.”
Ruth held his wrist. “Stop. Stop showing off.” He opened his mouth to object, but it was true—with his memory restored, with the world opened to him again, he’d felt flushed with strength, puffed up with superiority to the Low sisters’ shabby and belated world. He’d been cryptic—playing the magician.
“What are we doing here?” Ruth said.
“In the city where Brace-Bel comes from, there were children who called themselves the Thunderers. They were wild, and dangerous, and more than a little mad. Brutalized and brutal. But they were very beautiful. They flew, Ruth! Like birds. Ruth, I have a lot to tell you about the Gods. Zeigler, everything you suspect is true is true somewhere. They flew, and they loved bright things, and they couldn’t bear for anything to be caged. I called on them once to break a friend free from gaol. If they were here, they’d free the Beast, they’d free Ivy, there’d be nothing the Know-Nothings could do to stop them.”
He shrugged. “But they’re not here. These ugly little monsters are in their place. A cruel spirit rules this place, here in the shadow of the Mountain. But what if they could be made to remember, Ruth, what they might have been? What if… ?”
Ruth put a finger to his lips. She was looking over his shoulder, and her eyes were wide with fear. She said, “How long have they been watching us?”
Arjun looked around, and sighed. There was no way of answering that question. When it suited them the birds maintained a sullen bitter silence and slunk and shuffled stealthily in the shadows. Now the birds were all around them, grey and shapeless as rags or heaps of rubble, roosting on rusted girders and useless cranes, peering from holes in the walls and down from the gutters. Everything was streaked grey-yellow with their shit.
The birds began to scatter and regroup. The dirty air was full of wings and cries of alarm and hate. They gathered jealously around the heaps of rubble in which they’d hoarded their treasures of thread and silk and bright metal. Some of them landed with a thud in front of Arjun’s feet and hopped forward shouting. Others lifted their shiny keepsakes in their claws and took to the air, weaving nervously back and forth between empty towers and broken windows, looking for safe hiding places.
The birds gathered comfort from numbers and anger, and pressed in. They swept their heads left and right, slashing their beaks like little dull knives. Those uncannily near-human voices swore and taunted.
One of the birds darted past Brace-Bel’s head and scraped blood from his temple; he shook his stick after it and cursed it. The bird made a sound like vicious gurgling laughter and as it rejoined the rest of the mob the near-laughter spread. Brace-Bel swung his stick in the air.
“Don’t hit them. “ Ruth and Arjun at once. Zeigler turned to run but the path back downhill thronged with the birds, too; Ruth grabbed his skinny wrist and held him back.
Arjun stepped forward, arms open, palms up, and the throng closed around him.
“I remember you,” he said.
He looked back and saw Ruth’s green nervous eyes for a moment; then the birds swept across his vision and he was alone. Their wings and shouts beat out a mad rhythm. Feathers fell around him like ashes.
“You are much debased. I remember what you were.”
They wheeled and tessellated in complex chaotic patterns. Bird-forms combined and spun and fell apart around him like the shadow-shapes of a zoetrope, and he was stuck in the middle. They battered their wings against his face and their claws ripped at his shirt. They had not yet begun to use their beaks; perhaps they remembered him, too, on some dim level… He fought to keep his voice level and calm. He spoke as if soothing a child out of a tantrum.
“Brace-Bel believes that though we may undergo transformations across the Ages of the city, something of our essence persists. When I knew you before you could not bear to leave anything caged. You were breakers of prisons; you even saved Brace-Bel. Do you remember?”
They closed so thickly round him that he was in shadow. Sometimes daylight flashed through like lightning.
“Do you remember Silk?”
The thrashing of their wings was deafening, but they’d stopped shouting. The louder their wings the quieter his voice. They hovered and glared expectantly. What they were doing could not be listening, exactly, but …
“Brace-Bel reminded me of a music from the old city. A Music. Since I heard it I have recovered more and more of myself. Do you remember this song … ?”
Brace-Bel lay fetal. Ruth yanked at his collar. “You must have some weapon, Brace-Bel, you know magic, do something.”
In the next instant the birds lifted. They burst into the darkening air in all directions like dust vented from a chimney stack. They screamed and hooted as they rose. Was there a kind of music in it? Ruth wasn’t sure.
Arjun sat on the ground, surrounded by feathers, bloody from a dozen scratches, thickly beshitted. He had a blissful and beautiful and infuriating smile on his face.
He got to his feet slowly and stiffly.
“We have our weapon,” he said. “Our key.”
The birds circled overhead. They shrieked at each other as if confused and startled by some fabulous terrifying news.
“Then we’re ready,” she said. “I’ll tell the Masks.”
Better to strike at night, of course, but the Black Masks wouldn’t be ready until morning. Arjun and Ruth agreed that it would be madness to rely entirely on the birds, to assault the Museum without more mundane and predictable backup. “Anyway,” Arjun said, “it’ll be better in the morning. This should be done by morning light.”
When they went home, Marta was there. She shook her head. “This is insane.”
Ruth said, “Will you help?”
Marta sighed. “I’ll be here to clean up and hide you when the Know-Nothings come looking for their revenge.” And she shut herself up in her bedroom.
Zeigler went home to sleep—”more precisely, I think, to toss and turn and pace and wait.”
Brace-Bel went walking. “Night. Solitude. Cold winds. To prepare myself for death and focus my energies. I shall find myself a whore.”
And the grey birds that had followed Arjun home to circle and disturb Carnyx Street’s sky had settled into sleep when the sun set. They roosted on every roof. They curled into their grey wings like sleeping children. They gave the Street a gothic and gargoyle-haunted appearance. Arjun hoped they were dreaming and remembering.
And he spent the night in Ruth’s room, where she brought up one of Ivy’s rattling and dusty record players, those rare and precious artifacts, and played music, and she brought up a bottle of red wine, an extraordinary luxury in that part of the city. She was oddly shy and intense about it. She washed his bird-scratches; her fingers lingered on his face. “I never thought you’d come back,” she said.
Things were different now—she looked different to him. He was different. When he’d first seen her, he’d had no memories of himself. She’d been the first and only woman he’d ever known. The thin thread of his life had depended on her. He’d imagined her as a kind of Goddess—her and her sister—they’d loomed in his mind larger than the city.
Now he saw things with new eyes.
Now he realized how fragile she was. In fact she was very nearly as fragile and desperate as he was himself.
What absence, what loss denned her?
He realized that he knew almost nothing about her. Until now he hadn’t known what to ask.
She said, “… what?”
“I was thinking.”
“You had a strange smile.”
“Did I?”
“Yeah. You’re different, now, you know.”
“How?”
“Less like a ghost; more like a person.”
“Ah.” Maybe. He
still didn’t know what to ask.
She poured the wine and adjusted the music every so often. She seemed to feel this was how things were done. Maybe it was. Every possible way for men and women to interact was the way it was done somewhere in the city.
What kind of lives did people live here? What kind of life had she lived?
After everything he’d seen, what kind of man was he?
He started to tell her about his God, the music, the Mountain, his travels. Then he stopped. He felt ridiculous, out of place. They discussed the weather. Later he told her about his God anyway and she listened with what seemed like interest. He didn’t know what normal people talked about. There was a silence, which he found pleasant. They sat side by side on the bed, and moved closer. The music-machine required constant winding. They let it wind down. It hissed, scratched, stopped. The room was cold so they made love under musty woolen blankets. Made love—her words. Was that how things were described here? Outside a great and ridiculous weight of birds shuffled and scratched and shat on the roof, and pressed against the windows as if they wanted to be near, as if they were lonely and lost. They made a noise like rain.
The Know-Nothings started work before first light, as the first whistles blew. The Square was full of a cold fog that muffled the sound of boots stamping, men swearing, hammers crashing, glass smashing, and wood splintering. The dawn shift was low-ranking men who still had regular jobs to go to. They resented the work. They half-arsed it. Who’d have thought the old Museum had so much crap in it? They staggered under the unwieldy weight of a whole gallery of paintings—the moon, as seen over a dozen different skylines, blank or haunted by the faces of a dozen different Goddesses. They warmed their hands by the fire till it chased off the fog. A few cold and bored protesters from Carnyx Street watched them. One of the protesters knew two of the Know-Nothings from school and they shared cigarettes. The dawn shift could have been chased away bloodlessly—their hearts weren’t in it. But by the time Arjun and Ruth were awake, and Brace-Bel had been slapped from the hangover he’d somehow acquired, and the Black Masks had rolled up at the Low sisters’ door—five men, carrying a variety of guns, and three of them already half drunk—it was too late. Midmorning: the dawn shift had been replaced by harder men. Maury had come to take charge.
