Kathrin thought she understood.
“I need to be getting back home,” she said, trying to sound as if they had discussed nothing except the matter of the widow’s next delivery of provisions. “I am sorry about the other head.”
“There is no need to apologise. It was not your doing.”
“What will happen to you now, widow?”
“I’ll fade, slowly and gracefully. Perhaps I will see things through to the next winter. But I don’t expect to see another thaw.”
“Please. Take the bracelet back.”
“Kathrin, listen. It will make no difference to me now, whether you take it or not.”
“I’m not old enough for this. I’m only a girl from the Shield, a sledge-maker’s daughter.”
“What do you think I was when I found the flier? We were the same. I’ve seen your strength and courage.”
“I wasn’t strong today.”
“Yet you took the bridge, when you knew Garret would be on it. I have no doubt, Kathrin.”
She stood. “If I had not lost the other head … if Garret had not caught me … would you have given me these things?”
“I was minded to do it. If not today, it would have happened next time. But let us give Garret due credit. He helped me make up my mind.”
“He’s still out there,” Kathrin said.
“But he will know you will not be taking the bridge to get back home, even though that would save you paying the toll at Jarrow Ferry. He will content himself to wait until you cross his path again.”
Kathrin collected her one remaining bag and moved to the door.
“Yes.”
“I will see you again, in a month. Give my regards to your father.”
“I will.”
Widow Grayling opened the door. The sky was darkening to the east, in the direction of Jarrow Ferry. The dusk stars would appear shortly, and it would be dark within the hour. The crows were still wheeling, but more languidly now, preparing to roost. Though the Great Winter was easing, the evenings seemed as cold as ever, as if night was the final stronghold, the place where the winter had retreated when the inevitability of its defeat became apparent. Kathrin knew that she would be shivering long before she reached the tollgate at the crossing, miles down the river. She tugged down her hat in readiness for the journey and stepped onto the broken road in front of the widow’s cottage.
“You will take care now, Kathrin. Watch out for the janglies.”
“I will, Widow Grayling.”
The door closed behind her. She heard a bolt slide into place.
She was alone.
Kathrin set off, following the path she had used to climb up from the river. If it was arduous in daylight, it was steep and treacherous at dusk. As she descended she could see Twenty Arch Bridge from above, a thread of light across the shadowed ribbon of the river. Candles were being lit in the inns and houses that lined the bridge, tallow torches burning along the parapets. There was still light at the north end, where the sagging arch was being repaired. The obstruction caused by the dray had been cleared, and traffic was moving normally from bank to bank. She heard the calls of men and women, the barked orders of foremen, the braying of drunkards and slatterns, the regular creak and splash of the mill wheels turning under the arches.
Presently she reached a fork in the path and paused. To the right lay the quickest route down to the quayside road to Jarrow Ferry. To the left lay the easiest descent down to the bridge, the path that she had already climbed. Until that moment, her resolve had been clear. She would take the ferry, as she always did, as she was expected to do.
But now she reached a hand into her pocket and closed her fingers around the flier’s weapon. The shiver of contact was less shocking this time. The object already felt a part of her, as if she had carried it for years.
She drew it out. It gleamed in the twilight, shining where it had appeared dull before. Even if the widow had not told her of its nature, there would have been no doubt now. The object spoke its nature through her skin and bones, whispering to her on a level beneath language. It told her what it could do and how she could make it obey her. It told her to be careful of the power she now carried in her hand. She must scruple to use it wisely, for nothing like it now existed in the world. It was the power to smash walls. Power to smash bridges and towers and flying machines. Power to smash jangling men.
Power to smash ordinary men, if that was what she desired.
She had to know.
The last handful of crows gyred overhead. She raised the weapon to them and felt a sudden dizzying apprehension of their number and distance and position, each crow feeling distinct from its brethren, as if she could almost name them.
She selected one laggard bird. All the others faded from her attention, like players removing themselves from a stage. She came to know that last bird intimately. She could feel its wingbeats cutting the cold air. She could feel the soft thatch of its feathers, and the lacelike scaffolding of bone underneath. Within the cage of its chest she felt the tiny strong pulse of its heart, and she knew that she could make that heart freeze just by willing it.
The weapon seemed to urge her to do it. She came close. She came frighteningly close.
But the bird had done nothing to wrong her, and she spared it. She had no need to take a life to test this new gift, at least not an innocent one. The crow rejoined its brethren, something skittish and hurried in its flight, as if it had felt that coldness closing around its heart.
Kathrin returned the weapon to her pocket. She looked at the bridge again, measuring it once more with clinical eyes, eyes that were older and sadder this time, because she knew something that the people on the bridge could never know.
“I’m ready,” she said, aloud, into the night, for whoever might be listening.
Then resumed her descent.
Sanjeev and Robotwallah
IAN MCDONALD
Here’s another story by Ian McDonald, whose “Verthandi’s Ring” appears elsewhere in this anthology. In this one, he takes us to visit a vivid and evocative future India, where ancient customs and dazzlingly sophisticated high tech exist side by side, for the story of a boy’s troubled coming of age in a world where change accelerates day by day faster than anybody can keep up with—even those with the highest of high-tech toys to play with.
Every boy in the class ran at the cry. “Robotwar robotwar!” The teacher called after them, “Come here come here bad wicked things,” but she was only a Business-English aeai and by the time old Mrs. Mawji hobbled in from the juniors only the girls remained, sitting primly on the floor, eyes wide in disdain and hands up to tell tales and name names.
Sanjeev was not a fast runner; the other boys pulled ahead from him as he stopped among the dal bushes for puffs from his inhalers. He had to fight for position on the ridge that was the village’s high point, popular with chaperoned couples for its views over the river and the water plant at Murad. This day it was the inland view over the dal fields that held the attention. The men from the fields had been first up to the ridge; they stood, tools in hands, commanding all the best places. Sanjeev pushed between Mahesh and Ayanjit to the front.
“Where are they what’s happening what’s happening?”
“Soldiers over there by the trees.”
Sanjeev squinted where Ayanjit was pointing, but he could see nothing but yellow dust and heat shiver.
“Are they coming to Ahraura?”
“Delhi wouldn’t bother with a piss hole like Ahraura,” said another man whose face Sanjeev knew—as he knew every face in Ahraura—if not his name. “It’s Murad they’re after. If they take that out, Varanasi will have to make a deal.”
“Where are the robots? I want to see the robots.”
Then he cursed himself for his stupidity, for anyone with eyes could see where the robots were. A great cloud of dust was moving down the north road and over it a flock of birds milled in eerie silence. Through the dust Sanjeev caught sunlig
ht flashes of armour, clawed booted feet lifting, antennae bouncing, insect heads bobbing, weapon pods glinting. Then he and everyone else up on the high place felt the ridge begin to tremble to the march of the robots.
A cry from down the line. Four, six, ten, twelve flashes of light from the copse; streaks of white smoke. The flock of birds whirled up into an arrowhead and aimed itself at trees. Airdrones, Sanjeev realised, and, in the same thought, missiles! As the missiles reached their targets the cloud of dust exploded in a hammer of gunfire and firecracker flashes. It was all over before the sound reached the watchers. The robots burst unscathed from their cocoon of dust in a thundering run. “Cavalry charge!” Sanjeev shouted, his voice joining with the cheering of the men of Ahraura. Now hill and village quaked to the running iron feet. The wood broke into a fury of gunfire; the airdrones rose up and circled the copse like a storm. Missiles smoked away from the charging robots; Sanjeev watched weapon housings open and gun pods swing into position.
The cheering died as the edge of the wood exploded in a wall of flame. Then the robots opened up with their guns and the hush became awed silence. The burning woodland was swept away in the storm of gunfire; leaves, branches, trunks shredded into splinters. The robots stalked around the perimeter of the small copse for ten minutes, firing constantly as the drones circled over their heads. Nothing came out.
A voice down the line started shouting, “Jai Bharat! Jai Bharat!” but no one took it up and the man soon stopped. But there was another voice, hectoring and badgering, the voice of schoolmistress Mawji labouring up the path with a lathi cane.
“Get down from there, you stupid stupid men! Get to your families; you’ll kill yourselves.”
Everyone looked for the story on the evening news, but bigger, flashier things were happening in Allahabad and Mirzapur; a handful of contras eliminated in an unplace like Ahraura did not rate a line. But that night Sanjeev became Number One Robot Fan. He cut out pictures from the papers and those pro-Bharat propaganda mags that survived Ahraura’s omnivorous cows. He avidly watched J- and C-anime where andro-sexy kids crewed titanic battle droids until sister Priya rolled her eyes and his mother whispered to the priest that she was worried about her son’s sexuality. He pulled gigabytes of pictures from the World Web and memorised manufacturers and models and serial numbers, weapon loads and options mounts, rates of fire and maximum speeds. He saved up the pin money he made from helping old men with the computers the self-proclaimed Bharati government thought every village should have to buy a Japanese trump game, but no one would play him at it because he had learned all the details. When he tired of flat pictures, he cut up old cans with tin snips and brazed them together into model fighting machines: MIRACLE GHEE fast pursuit drones, TITAN DRENCH perimeter defense bots, a RED COLA riot-control robot.
Those same old men, when he came round to set up their accounts and assign their passwords, would ask him, “Hey! You know a bit about these things; what’s going on with all this Bharat and Awadh stuff? What was wrong with plain old India anyway? And when are we going to get cricket back on the satellite?”
For all his robot wisdom, Sanjeev did not know. The news breathlessly raced on with the movements of politicians and breakaway leaders, but everyone had long ago lost all clear memory of how the conflict had begun. Naxalites in Bihar, an overmighty Delhi, those bloody Muslims demanding their own laws again? The old men did not expect him to answer; they just liked to complain and took a withered pleasure in showing the smart boy that he did not know everything.
“Well, as long as that’s the last we see of them,” they would say when Sanjeev replied with the specs of a Raytheon 380 Rudra I-war airdrone or an Akhu scout mecha and how much much better they were than any human fighter. Their general opinion was that the Battle of Vora’s Wood—already growing back—was all the War of Separation Ahraura would see.
It was not. The men did return. They came by night, walking slowly through the fields, their weapons easily sloped in their hands. Those that met them said they had offered them no hostility, merely raised their assault rifles and shooed them away. They walked through the entire village, through every field and garden, up every gali and yard, past every byre and corral. In the morning their boot prints covered every centimetre of Ahraura. Nothing taken, nothing touched. “What was that about?” the people asked. “What did they want?”
They learned two days later when the crops began to blacken and wither in the fields and the animals, down to the last pi-dog, sickened and died.
Sanjeev would start running when their car turned into Umbrella Street. It was an easy car to spot, a big military Hummer that they had pimped Kali-black and red with after-FX flames that seemed to flicker as it drove past you. But it was an easier car to hear: everyone knew the thud thud thud of Desi metal that grew guitars and screaming vocals when they wound down the window to order food, food to go. And Sanjeev would be there: “What can I get you sirs?” He had become a good runner since coming to Varanasi. Everything had changed since Ahraura died.
The last thing Ahraura ever did was make that line in the news. It had been the first to suffer a new attack. Plaguewalkers was the popular name; the popular image was dark men in chameleon camouflage walking slowly through the crops, hands outstretched as if to bless, but sowing disease and blight. It was a strategy of desperation: deny the separatists as much as they could, and only ever partially effective; after the few first attacks plaguewalkers were shot on sight.
But they killed Ahraura and when the last cow died and the wind whipped the crumbled leaves and the dust into yellow clouds the people could put it off no longer. By car and pickup, phatphat and country bus, they went to the city, and though they had all sworn to hold together, family by family they drifted apart in Varanasi’s ten million and Ahraura finally died.
Sanjeev’s father rented an apartment on the top floor of a block on Umbrella Street and put his savings into a beer-and-pizza stall. Pizza pizza, that is what they want in the city, not Samosas or tiddy-hoppers or rasgullahs. And beer, Kingfisher and Godfather and Bangla. Sanjeev’s mother did light sewing and gave lessons in deportment and Sanskrit, for she had learned that language as part of her devotions. Grandmother Bharti and little sister Priya cleaned offices in the new shining Varanasi that rose in glass and chrome beyond the huddled peeling houses of old Kashi. Sanjeev helped out at the stall under the rows of tall neon umbrellas, useless against rain and sun both but magnetic to the party people, the night people, the badmashes and fashion-girlis, that gave the street its name. It was there that he had first seen the robotwallahs.
It had been love at first sight the night that Sanjeev saw them stepping down Umbrella Street in their slashy Ts and bare sexy arms with Krishna bangles and henna tats, cool, cool boots with metal in all the hot places and hair spiked and gelled like one of those J-anime shows. The merchants of Umbrella Street edged away from them, turned a shoulder. They had a cruel reputation. Later Sanjeev was to see them overturn the stall of a pakora man who had irritated them, eve-tease a woman in a business sari who had looked askance at them, smash up the phatphat of a taxi driver who had thrown them out for drunkenness, but that first night they were stardust and Sanjeev wanted to be them with a want so pure and aching and impossible it was tearful joy. They were soldiers, teen warriors, robotwallahs. Only the dumbest and cheapest machines could be trusted to run themselves; the big fighting bots carried human jockeys behind their aeai systems. Teenage boys possessed the best combination of reflex speed and viciousness, amped up with fistfuls of combat drugs.
“Pizza pizza pizza!” Sanjeev shouted, running up to them. “We got pizza, every kind of pizza, and beer, Kingfisher beer, Godfather beer, Bangla beer, all kinds of beer.”
They stopped. They turned. They looked. Then they turned away. One looked back as his brothers moved. He was tall and very thin from the drugs, fidgety and scratchy, his bad skin ill concealed with makeup. Sanjeev thought him a street god.
“What kind of pi
zza?”
“Tikka tandoori murgh beef lamb kebab kofta tomato spinach.”
“Let’s see your kofta.”
Sanjeev presented the drooping wedge of meatball-studded pizza in both hands. The robotwallah took a kofta between thumb and forefinger. It drew a sagging string of cheese to his mouth, which he deftly snapped.
“Yeah, that’s all right. Give me four of those.”
“We got beer we got Kingfisher beer we got Godfather beer we got Bangla beer—”
“Don’t push it.”
Now he ran up alongside the big slow-moving car they had bought as soon as they were old enough to drive. Sanjeev had never thought it incongruous that they could send battle robots racing across the country on scouting expeditions or marching behind heavy tanks, but the law would not permit them so much as a moped on the public streets of Varanasi.
“So did you kill anyone today?” he called in through the open window, clinging on to the door handle as he jogged through the choked street.
“Kunda Khadar, down by the river, chasing out spies and surveyors,” said bad-skin boy, the one who had first spoken to Sanjeev. He called himself Rai. They all had made-up J-anime names. “Someone’s got to keep those bastard Awadhi dam wallahs uncomfortable.”
A black plastic Kali swung from the rearview mirror, red tongued, yellow eyed. The skulls garlanded around her neck had costume sapphires for eyes. Sanjeev took the order, sprinted back through the press to his father’s clay tandoor oven. The order was ready by the time the Kali Hummer made its second cruise. Sanjeev slid the boxes to Rai. He slid back the filthy, wadded Government of Bharat scrip rupees and, as Sanjeev fished out his change from his belt bag, the tip: a little plastic zip bag of battle drugs. Sanjeev sold them in the galis and courtyards behind Umbrella Street. Schoolkids were his best customers; they went through them by the fistful when they were cramming for exams. Ahraura had been all the school Sanjeev ever wanted to see. Who needed it when you had the world and the Web in your palmer? The little shining capsules in black and yellow, purple and sky blue, were the Rajghatta’s respectability. The pills held them above the slum.
The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Page 51
