I think about those mad things, their howls and their cries. ‘It was a dreadful sight. And I have seen many dreadful things.’
Anne snorts again, spits again into that brown surge beneath. ‘You ever think about going in them?’
‘That’s not my decision.’
‘Don’t be a fool,’ Anne snaps. ‘It’s always your decision. That’s the grand Decision, and it’s not one that’ll be offered to me. Damn boys club, with your boys rules. I hear over east they don’t just have Day Boys, but Girls as well.’
‘You think you’d be a good Day Girl?’
Anne shakes her head. ‘I’d be better than that. Put the lot of you to shame,’ she says, and then with a smirk—and Dain’s right, smiles have a sting to them—she’s jumped off the bridge. I feel my mouth gape as she drops into that brown. And all I can think about is that log, and it hitting her, or hurting her. I’ve no choice but to follow. She might strike her head, she might drown or be lost, and I’d be the one that would get the trouble of it. And I would likely die myself, and I’d want it too. Like I’d pushed her. Like I could ever push her. Why is it that I’m always following? But I do, I jump and I hit the cold water, breath knocked out of me, and I scramble-swim up, feeling out for her. Like she’d be near me anyway, the current’s not moving that way.
Anne’s already at the shore by the time I surface, lying flat against the river sand, and I swim to her, mouth snarling. The water’s cool against my body, but the swimming’s a strain: I’m out of practice. I feel a rising panic that for all I’ve seen and done, it’ll be this river that’ll have me. I breathe faster, and faster. But there’s a calm I can find if I want it, if I’m lucky enough: and I find it. Current’s taken me a way, but I start for the bank. I take it slow and reach the shore, quite a distance from where Anne is lying.
I get out of that water, gasping and spitting, and make the slow walk towards her, passing beneath the bridge, looking around in case of trolls. Nothing, of course, but it’d be just my luck if there was. I push through tall grass, and she’s there, stretched on the sand. And I think about how beautiful she is, just lying there, and something pulls in my throat like an ache, like a cry, like a silence more full than any sound. And I put a finger to my lips as if to catch it, but you can’t catch that.
I’m about to speak when Anne laughs.
‘I thought I was going to have to jump in and rescue you there,’ she says.
‘Just a stitch.’
Anne’s eyes widen, all a-mock. ‘A stitch, you say. And you a Day Boy and all.’
‘Yes and it—’
‘You’re a good friend,’ Anne says.
‘The best,’ I say, and she looks at me with those eyes of hers. Full of quick thought and cutting edges when she wants them to be, but now they’re sad.
‘I’m frightened for you, Mark.’
‘Nothing to be frightened of,’ I say. But we know it’s a lie. We know there’s plenty to be scared of in this world, and not all of it is my Master’s kind.
The winds are cool now, no more of those furnace breaths, these have shivers in them. And the sky is so clear, just the leanest streaks of cloud amongst all the blue.
‘Don’t you change,’ Anne says. Her lips touch mine. Just the scantest of kisses. There’s a rattling roar in my head, and when it’s gone so is she, and all I can hear is her laughter, and the river finding rocks around the bend. I don’t give chase, I’m too shocked by it. I drop to the sand, my feet pointing at the brown water, and my eyes to that autumn-blue sky. The kiss still a heat on my lips. It floored me far worse than anything Dougie ever threw.
But how come I’m smiling?
Then I think about the music. I forgot to tell her about the music.
When I’m mostly dry I find the Culverts’ place, and mark the door with the circle and seven. And there’s yard work to be done, and I’m quick to doing it in the cooling afternoon. Rake the leaves, straighten the back fence.
Dain’s stirring when I come in, but he doesn’t call for me. He moves through the house, a presence obvious, a pressure in the air. But he keeps from me, and I keep from him.
Dinner’s over with quick, and the cleaning of the kitchen, and I really have no idea what time it is. My head’s full of a different sort of rhythm.
‘This damn book, this endless book,’ Dain shouts, and I smile until he calls me into his study. He has one hand over a sheaf of papers, ink staining his fingers. And I feel like it’s the us of old.
‘You’ll finish it,’ I say, almost like I believe it.
Dain laughs. ‘There are those that scribble more furiously than me, writing words that no one sees. In these everlasting selves we’ve become, we’ve lost the wit, the inclination to produce work enduring, instead we are that work entire. We are the Imperatives, and it seems that is enough.’
He pauses from his pontificating. ‘Boy. You smell of the river and you smell of that girl. Must you always disappoint me?’
I open my mouth to speak, but he silences me with a gesture. ‘I’m not angry, not tonight,’ he says. ‘You came up against two unstoppable forces, rivers and girls. I’ve no answers for that, other than to express my disappointment; you know my and Mary’s wishes on the matter. Must you always make things so difficult for yourself, Mark?’
I hang my head. I’ve no answer in me, though I wish I did.
And all I can think of is that kiss.
‘Boy,’ Dain says. ‘You disappointed me. I went to the city to plead for your position, and to keep you on here for another year. Instead, you brought shame to me. Instead of continuity, there is to be a new Day Boy within the week.’
And that hits me almost as hard as that kiss. ‘Egan said I was to train him.’
Dain nods. ‘His name is Thom. You will have a few months and then your tenure will be done. Dav had longer, but you were younger, and untrained, not like those Crèche boys. And I had more influence even back then.’
‘I will not let you down,’ I say.
‘Of course you won’t.’ That he sounds like he means it brings a tear to my eye. I wipe it away, before I start snuffling properly.
‘I saw Dav when I visited the Council,’ I say. ‘Dav half-changed in the belly of the mountain.’
‘I know,’ Dain says. ‘I am sorry you were a witness to that. I am sorry for all that happened. But it is done. The path to Mastery demands a long time in hunger’s wilderness, a long dark time. You don’t make steel with a gentle touch. But it is a hard thing to see.’
When I look up, he’s gone. Out into the night. And the pages are scattered on the table.
That book that doesn’t want to be written; that book he’s been writing since I’ve known him.
I pick up the pages and read but there’s little about them to pull me in. Mainly dates and figures.
1988, Inception.
1997, the Glaring (a rigorous intercept).
2002, the Great Crash.
I can’t make anything of it. The last page I put upon the table, and on it is written:
Don’t read my things, boy.
So I don’t.
They all have their yearnings. Their artistries. Their obsessions. Egan’s tall house with its deep basement has a yard full of sculptures, half-finished. Curious beasts, expressions empty, that make him yell in frustration. Kast has a garden that he tends, but anything that grows in it is the Parson boys’ doing. ‘He don’t have the touch,’ they say. Tennyson’s equations cover a great blackboard in his house that stretches along the rear walls. Twitch says he works and works at it, but his proofs are proof of sense. And Sobel, I don’t know what he does, but he keeps it hidden. Sobel doesn’t like mockery.
They’ve all the time in the world for their passions, and have found themselves at passion’s end.
Maybe the blood is all that truly fascinates them now.
Maybe all those Masters are fooling themselves, playing at Great Works, when they’ve no great work in them.
SOBEL THE GOOD SOLDIER THAT WENT BAD
Dougie tells this story like it was a book or a play. There’s noises and motions, crashing and fire. He’s one that isn’t given to pride except when it’s his Master. There’s more of Dougie in this story than you would think, or less. I know he thinks himself a soldier. But he don’t have it in him, not really. There’s a weakness in his heart. He’s covered it with cunning but he’d turn and run. Sobel wouldn’t pick a boy other than one like that. He knows a soldier is a service and a threat, and Sobel doesn’t want any threats.
There was great battles in those Before days.
All them engines of war. Turning, grinding down, and it don’t matter which way they face, there was plenty to do the dying for them. Always was in those last days before these calmer ones.
Trenches laid out ragged across the ruined earth. Forces directed this way and that, but there was no forward motion, only a quickening retreat. The world was shrinking, in all ways. There were jets and rockets, and secret stations in the sky. But they fell into the wells of gravity like stars, the heavens broke them, and new monsters walked the earth. New, or so old and forgotten they might as well been new. Everything old is new again, they say. So it doesn’t matter which you side with.
There were protocols.
And when the engines fail, there is always the soldiers. Men and women (yes, the women fought too, don’t be so shocked). Bodies to hurl against the dark frenzy of a world given over to change.
And there he was, in those trenches. He fought with the best of them. He saved many lives, before he was swayed, before he started taking them. Says there’s a certain heroism in giving in. Sobel was always too big for the resistance. He fought when it could fit him, and when it couldn’t anymore, he shed it like a skin. Oh, they say there was none like him.
Weren’t no cages then, just the open spaces of the battlefield and a quick shifting of loyalties, a following of new imperatives. You know how it is. When he became…what he is, he returned to the HQ.
Gave his final briefing. That’s what he did: and it was written in their blood.
There was no resistance after that, in truth there scarcely was before.
Soldiers finish things that they never get to start. He knew that, he has that deepest in him, that finishing drive.
Sobel was a soldier. And he finished them.
And now he is here.
Some soldiers are let to pasture because they deserve it. Some soldiers are let to pasture because they are feared.
You can decide which my Master was.
CHAPTER 25
DAIN’S LEFT ME a note. Certain has need of you.
Certain’s farm is just out of town, down past the river and over Handly Bridge. I cross that thinking of Anne. She’d be in school, I guess. I been there once—on Master’s business—looks to be a boring place, all that laying of pencil to paper, all those maps. I prefer Dain’s telling of the world. He says, I get to see it as it is, that the school’s story isn’t right. Blinkered, is the way he puts it.
Certain’s pottering in his shed when I reach it. Petri runs out to greet me, barking until I scratch her between the ears.
He comes out of that shed, favouring his good leg, and wiping dirt from his face. ‘You ready to work hard?’
I nod, and he smiles. ‘Well, you think you are.’
And that’s what we do beneath that autumn Sun, and there’s no let-up in neither. There’s fences need fixing to keep out the deer and the roos, cattle to tend, and Certain teaches me patiently. He’s gentle with the beasts when he needs to be, firm when that’s needed too, and Petri’s always there, alert.
‘You get a good dog,’ Certain says, ‘And the world runs easier. First few years, when I tried my hand at this, I tried it alone, and I tried it awful.’ He wipes his face with his sleeve; gives me a long look and it’s judgmental and generous at once. ‘It’s a hard thing, leaving them. A lot don’t make it. A lot feel the guilt, or the power lacking behind them, and it makes them cruel. Or weird, and those don’t last long, they walk out of town and they never come back. Some fear the night. Lie in bed waiting, and it’s worse for them, because they’ve never known just what that’s like.’
‘What about you?’
Certain gestures at the land about us. ‘I work my acres, I live as good a life as I can, and I feel all that stuff too, but I try to forget it. Put the past where it belongs.’
He shows me how to fix a fence, how to put the posts in true and return tension to a wire.
And we talk of simple things, not the Council or the Masters, not my other Day Boys, but ordinary town gossip. Certain’s got his heart set on Mary, I can see it, the way he talks of her. I don’t talk about Anne, but he manages to make me blush when he mentions her and I know I don’t need to.
Not just the town we talk about, but the land. It’s got its severities, but it can give up splendours. The north field’s black earth, nearly dark as my fingers, is fertile and good for growing wheat. The southern field’s red earth, clay and hard working, needs constant correction; we’re at it with gypsum to break it down a bit. He’s got a few head of cattle, a couple dozen sheep. And all of them demand different things depending on the time of the year.
Most of the time, though, we work in silence: and it’s comfortable. There’s no need to fill it with myself. There’s no need for boasts or anger. The work is its own talk. And I like it.
‘You could come work with me,’ he says at last, when we’re packing up. ‘Dain says he can clear it with the Council. I can spare you a lot of the big mistakes.’ He grimaces. ‘And the drink, too.’
I feel my belly drop. ‘I guess this means Dain’s made up his mind,’ I say. ‘About me.’
Certain sighs. ‘Dain’ll change his resolution a half-dozen times between now and then. It’s no gift, what he’d give you is pain—you seen them cages didn’t you, boy? In the belly of the mountain. I saw them once myself. It’s slow and it’s painful, for those chosen ones, and not all of them that enter come out right.
‘There was a madness to those firs
t ones, and they’ve contained it somewhat, but it’s still there. Think long upon it, if you’re ever offered that. I seen it, what it can do, a mate of mine—Day Boy like you are, and I was—he got the Change, grabbed it with both hands and all, and it drove him to such madness that they had to put him down like a dog.’ Certain scratches Petri’s head. ‘But not before he came back into town, all rolling eyes and screams, strong with the blood and the hunger. Took three of them to hold him down.
‘I was there when he died in his cage, watching as the Sun split the horizon. He didn’t scream, he laughed, he caught my eye and he laughed, and flesh burned from his bones, and he laughed.’
Certain shakes his head: takes a long draught of his water.
‘Why’d he come back?’
‘We’d been mates. Close. He’d wanted to share. Them Masters are sentimental folk. Drink your drink, boy, you’ve a long ride home.’ He scratches his head, and for a moment he isn’t staring at his land, but some moment long past and painful. He takes a breath, and smiles at me, eyes crinkling. ‘You think about it. My offer.’
‘I will,’ I say. I drink the last of that cider and get on my bike.
I’ll think on it, but there’s a while to go yet.
I take a detour. Ride to the edge of town, where the road turns ragged, boiling with grass, all rising crusts of tar and concrete, and the old signs sag and sing in the wind. You’re Leaving Midfield, says one.
I wonder what that might be like, to leave and not come back.
There’s plenty out there, towns and the like, and other cities (maybe) but there’s haunts and ghouls too, and cold children, and all sorts of damned things. I shiver a little, then I turn my bike around and ride back into town and take the longest streets home.
Said I’d think about it, but I already have an answer.
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