redRobe

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  The only vaguely attractive thing about the Inn was the wide-hipped, heavy-breasted woman kneeling by the fireplace and she was thirty-five if she was a day. Her face was hidden now and her long hair was tied away under a grey scarf, but from what he’d seen her legs were lean and muscled and he could tell that her arms were strong.

  The innkeeper grunted something that sent the woman scuttling from the room, leaving her pan where it was.

  ‘Full and closed ...' The bearded man said. Somewhere upstairs a door slammed heavily and the man scowled.

  ‘Looks empty to me,’ Axl said, feeling better already. ‘And you’ve got a welcome lamp burning over the door. . . Besides…’ he deftly loosened the pocket on his coat, pulled out his hunting knife and wiped the blade on his hip, even through it was clean. ‘I don’t take up much space and I won’t be staying long.’

  ‘Where you headed?’

  Axl shrugged. ‘Passing through. You know, looking up old friends.’

  ‘Well, you won’t find them here,’ said the man firmly.

  ‘Here!’ Axl sounded amused. ‘No, you’re right, I doubt if there’s much of interest in Cocheforet.’ He looked through a window at mud-splattered chickens pecking at pebbles in the street outside, then cast an amused glance round the squalid bar, dismissing it. ‘How many live in this valley, fifteen, twenty?’

  ‘Thirty,’ said the innkeeper, ‘forty, fifty.’ He was drunk.

  ‘Petty thieves, cell sweepings,’ said Axl dismissively, ‘I’m looking for real ‘fugees.’

  ‘Real!’ The barkeeper sounded outraged. ‘Round here we’re…’

  ‘Having tea,’ the woman said from the doorway, sounding firm. Brown eyes looked steadily into Axl’s face as she thrust a steaming wooden bowl into his hand.

  ‘Drink it,’ she said, ‘it’ll help you warm up. Then I’ll show you the attic’ Her voice was neutral. ‘The room’s not much, but round here nothing is, except maybe…’ The woman stopped, then shrugged. ‘You’ll hear about it anyway. There’s an empty monastery across the valley but it’s not safe. Houses that grow like plants…’ She grunted and spat into the dead fireplace, before turning towards the door to the stairs. ‘Some of the houses on Samsara brick themselves up with the inhabitants inside if they don’t like you.’

  Less than thirty years. That was how long Samsara had been functioning and already it had its own legends, its own dark myths. Axl smiled.

  * * * *

  ‘That monastery. . .’ Axl asked looking out of his attic window, but the woman cut him off before he could even ask the question.

  ‘It’s deserted,’ she told him firmly, ‘and dangerous. Understand?’

  Yeah, he understood.

  The attic had polycrete walls, roughly plastered, and a roof made from bamboo laid over rafters and lashed into place with sisal. The bamboo had been skimmed over with mud, and rough red tiles put on top of that. It was just enough to keep out the drizzle but it didn’t stand a chance against the wind.

  Cold ashes filled the fireplace, turned to paste by droplets that pattered down the inside of its cracked chimney breast.

  ‘It’s what we’ve got,’ the woman said shortly.

  ‘No problem,’ said Axl, ‘but I’ll need a fire.’ His gaze flicked round the empty room. ‘Plus a mattress and blankets.’ He could see from the sour expression on her face that the woman regarded all three as unnecessary.

  ‘You got money?’

  Axl gave a slight nod. He didn’t offer her any. The silver thalers were tucked deep in his coat pocket along with Dr Jane’s map. He had a 128Gb memory chip, a lump of unimprinted bioClay and a tiny spherical hard drive hidden in his boot heel, all wrapped round with fooler loops. The usual glass-beads-for-the-natives shit the Vatican still bought into.

  ‘You pay my husband, you understand?’

  She did the work, the drunk took the money. Axl nodded, he’d been there before.

  ‘The room’s okay?’ She asked it like she almost cared.

  ‘Yeah,’ he assured her. ‘The room’s fine.’ And it was, if Axl ignored the fact it had no light, no glass to the window and was reached by a ladder from the landing below. But he’d slept in shittier places. Hell, he’d grown up in a far worse place, only he didn’t talk about that.

  ‘You got somewhere I can wash?’

  The woman twisted her fingers behind the shutter closing off the window and pulled it open. ‘Down there,’ she said, pointing to a patch of mud. ‘There’s that pump out front.’

  ‘I was thinking of hot water.’

  ‘It’ll cost you.’

  Axl sighed. ‘I know, pay your husband…’

  A strange look crossed her face. ‘No,’ she said, meeting his eye. ‘Pay me.’ Needless to say the woman didn’t have change. No one ever did in situations like this. From Argentina to North Greenland, she’d have been surprised at the number of people in out of the way places who hadn’t got change when needed. Or maybe she wouldn’t. There was something knowing in her brown eyes that said this wasn’t where she thought she belonged.

  But then this wasn’t actually where anyone belonged, Axl reminded himself, no one got here unless they were fleeing somewhere else.

  'I'll take that bath now,’ he told her.

  ‘No,’ she shook her head. ‘You wait an hour, until the kitchen is ... until Leon, my husband, is…’ the woman shrugged in irritation. ‘You wait, and it’s not exactly a bath. How much yak dung do you think we have for fires?’

  * * * *

  ‘Strip,’ she ordered and Axl did, dropping his shirt and trousers onto the dirt floor.

  She’d fed him already, thukpa, a thin noodle soup with lumps of lamb floating in the salty liquid. And then insisted he finish a bowl of cold dumplings stuffed with radish.

  He’d left the grey coat with his money in its pockets upstairs. That seemed safest and anyway Axl was alone in the inn with her and he had no intention of letting her out of his sight.

  ‘How hot?’ The woman had a huge iron kettle in her hand and was standing next to a tub that rose slightly at one end, so it looked like a crib for an oversized child.

  ‘Hot as you can,’ Axl said and stepped out of a pair of dirt-grey Calvins. She looked him over without shame.

  ‘I’m Ketzia,’ she announced suddenly. For a moment Axl was worried she was going to try to shake hands. ‘They messed you over bad ...'

  Axl grunted and gave a half shrug. He was proud of the shrug. ‘No worse than anyone else.’

  Her brown eyes were counting up his wounds, looking at bruises and putting dates to those scars. He’d met the type before. Women who couldn’t make conversation, looked twenty-five before they hit fifteen and had two kids before they hit twenty, but who could remove bullets using just a knife and their fingers and stitch shut a machete wound using thread from a sewing basket.

  You found them among the poor on the edge of every war zone and disaster area. Living there because that was where no one else wanted to live. His mother had been one of them, apparently. Not that he’d known her. She’d been dead three years by the time the Cardinal had her tracked down for him.

  ‘Who did it?’

  Good question. Axl let the silence stretch thin between them, wondering if she’d break it. She didn’t. Instead, Ketzia filled her vast kettle from a bucket and put it back on the embers. She finally left the tiny kitchen carrying the empty bucket.

  Somewhere out front the pump clanked and then she was back.

  ‘Get in,’ Ketzia said, nodding at the half-filled bath, ‘you don’t want someone to see you.’ She grinned sourly. ‘So,’ she said, ‘how good’s that eye of yours?’

  ‘You’re a woman,’ Axl told her, ‘long hair in a braid, long skirt, that’s it... It doesn’t do fine detail, it doesn’t do night sight and it only manages black and white. Oh yeah, and everything’s flat, like you get on a cheap screen…’

  ‘You’ve got enough money to buy a real one?’

  ‘Out here?’ />
  Ketzia nodded but she was agreeing the idea was silly. ‘The Savonarolas didn’t leave you much nerve, right?’ It was a statement not a question. Her voice made it obvious she figured Axl knew that already, first-hand. ‘And they got you for doing that Ishie stuff ...' She paused. ‘You can imagine what the bastards core out if you’re a prostitute or a rent boy.’

  He could, imagine it that was. The Savonarolas weren’t original. Most of what their death squads had made their own in the atrocity stakes wasn’t even new. Merely updated from outrages first committed in the Balkans or the North African littoral. Places like the outskirts of M’Dina where the Mufti had been fighting a vicious, fifty-year campaign against the Jihad fundamentalists, and losing.

  Five minutes later Ketzia was bored with watching Axl scrub half-heartedly at the wounds on his face. So she took the cloth from him, almost gently. And leaning back in the tub, Axl shut his eye and concentrated on feeling her heavy breasts as they brushed lightly against his shoulder through her blouse. She smelt of sweat, but he only knew that because he’d finally stopped stinking himself. And her movements were soft and surprisingly deft as she used a cloth to lift recent blood from the half-healed scar on his forehead.

  Everytime Ketzia reached a new gash, she stopped to move her fingers softly round the edges. At first Axl figured she was feeling for swelling, but what Ketzia was really doing was checking the wounds were real, that it really was a SQUID scar, that what looked like a spike plug in the back of his skull was just that. . .

  The woman was running a none-too-discreet check routine on his injuries and Axl was passing with flying colours. Hell, he wasn’t just passing, he’d passed. He knew that because her callused fingers were slowing, her touch getting ever more soft as her makeshift flannel soaped gently down his gut towards the waterline where there wasn’t a scar in sight.

  Despite the cold that howled under the kitchen door and the metal edge of the tub digging into his back, Axl was suddenly tumescent and getting harder by the second. Grinning, the woman dipped her cloth into the water and squeezed slow droplets onto the swollen head of his penis. As moves went it seemed positively inventive for someone whose sex life looked like it was confined to once on Saturdays when beardface was drunk.

  Axl groaned and she grinned again, a wide knowing smile at odds with her drab, washed-out clothes… And then the front door opened and shut and Ketzia was gone, out of the back without pausing to say anything at all. Though she hesitated long enough to shut the door.

  ‘What the ...'

  What indeed. Axl kept his legs hugged up to his chest, like he always took a bath with his chin resting on his knees. ‘I was dirty,’ he told the innkeeper. ‘Okay? And I’ve already told your wife I’ll pay for the dung on the fire.’

  ‘It’s a thaler,’ stated the man.

  ‘For a tub of water?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He had his fists clenched on his hips and it was obvious that Leon was furious, but it was equally obvious he had no real idea at what.

  ‘Okay,’ said Axl calmly, ‘but I’ll need a towel.’

  ‘You’ll need a…’

  ‘For a thaler,’ said Axl, ‘I want a towel.’

  The innkeeper didn’t even bother to go to the door, just stood in the middle of the kitchen and screamed ‘Ketzia’. The only answer he got was silence.

  ‘Where is she?’

  Axl shrugged. ‘How the fuck would I know?’

  Footsteps, when they finally approached, came through the bar at the front and stopped carefully at the kitchen door.

  ‘You decent?’ There was a brisk knocking and then the woman stuck her head round the door.

  ‘Well… ?’ Ketzia stopped and looked at the innkeeper. ‘Didn’t know you were back,’ she said to her husband, not sounding too pleased.

  Leon flushed. ‘Our guest wants a towel.’ He put heavy emphasis on the second word, as if the idea of anyone wanting to stay at his inn was somehow ridiculous.

  ‘Probably does. If he plans to dry himself,’ said the woman.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Swimming Towards the Light

  ‘ Budvar,’ Axl demanded, but only because he knew Leon couldn’t possibly provide bottled beer. Couldn’t provide a decent shave either, obviously enough, because Cocheforet didn’t run to generators and the Braun disposable Axl had stolen from Dr Jane’s surgery didn’t work on daylight, it needed a feed.

  Which was tough, because Cocheforet didn’t run to that either. The better Axl felt inside himself the worse his temper got. Almost as if the constant headache had acted as a filter against the world in which he’d found himself.

  No razor, no newsfeed and no new eyes, but worst of all no hope of finding any of them anywhere ... It was like stumbling back two centuries. Except it wasn’t. What it was really like was going below Third World.

  Standing at the zinc, Axl stared slowly round at Leon’s filthy bar and the silent, three-man crowd of even filthier customers and wondered for the first time what he was doing, other than saving his own life. Mind you, he knew what they were doing. Waiting for him to leave the room.

  As for Samsara itself… Well, the best you could say was that it was economically self-sufficient. Not importing food or technology from Earth meant no commercial ties, and no commercial ties meant no metaNational leverage. Economic blockade might have replaced the gunboat kind nine times out of ten, but even the guys on Capitol Hill weren’t stupid enough to try that one on Tsongkhapa, not when there were no essentials that Samsara needed.

  In the end Axl settled for some kind of fermented barley mess called chang that came out of a big copper pot, looked like molasses mixed with water and tasted of rained-out bonfires. It was what the three men sat silently in the corner were drinking too. Only they all used long wooden straws and drank straight from a smaller pot that a dark-haired Tibetan boy had carried over to their table. The boy didn’t seem to have a name. Leon just called him you.

  The behaviour of the other customers ran the full gamut from A to B and back again. From staring into the chang to glaring at Axl with undisguised suspicion as he tossed three years of therapy and two twelve-point plans straight down his gullet in choking gulps of thin, yeast-sour ditch water. It was five years since he’d last touched alcohol and, given what the chang tasted like, not a day of it had been wasted.

  He was really getting on their wick and the only problem was he had less than no idea why. If he had, he might have been able to work on it a bit more. Make push come to shove, because that’s what it had to do. Axl didn’t have time to blend it, become accepted, put up the usual smokescreen.

  Outside in the street a door slammed loudly and everyone in the bar tried not to look at each other, but that was okay because Axl was busy looking at all of them. No one looked back.

  ‘Rotten night,’ said Axl, nodding towards the noise. There was no reply to that either, but Axl was starting to enjoy filling the sullen silences. His words were slurred far more than four small bowls of chang warranted, especially as one of those was still soaking into the earthen floor at his feet.

  On the other side of the inn wall, wind was ripping needles from thin pines while hail thudded into the wet ground like endless shot. In all the newsfeeds he’d seen about Samsara none had mentioned that the weather was buggered. Mind you, he hadn’t seen many and those he had always concentrated on Vajrayana and life in that city.

  Samsara was silly season stuff. Every time the Jihad in North Africa declared a brief peace or the Russian Tsar who was holed up at Yekaterinburg summoned Marshal Sukarov to play wargames instead of letting the marshal lead his troops from what could loosely be called the Sino-Russian war front, given it was fought by proxies and much of it was information-based anyway—every time Cy Sat ran out of hard news they sent some photogenic, freelance Ishie off to Samsara to record her impressions.

  Mostly these were of the Vajrayana’s quaint, wonderful and why can’t we manage this on Earth variety. But maybe, Axl decid
ed, that was because in reality the wheelworld was freezing, with fucked weather and villages full of traumatised basket cases with killer PTS. Somehow that side of the experiment didn’t make it to the screen.

  He couldn’t imagine why.

  ‘Another beer,’ Axl demanded, banging down his wooden bowl so that what was left slopped across the table before dripping slowly onto the floor. Behind his bar, Leon scowled into his beard but told the boy to take Axl a fresh bowl anyway. The bowl was small, hand-lathed from oak and decorated with five poor-quality cracked turquoises. The boy carried it like it was the most precious thing he’d ever seen.

  ‘Your room’s ready,’ Leon said pointedly.

  ‘But I’m not,’ said Axl as he slammed the new bowl back onto the table, spilling some more. ‘I’m going for a walk…’

  And you’re welcome to come after me, he told the three men in his head, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Fingers touched the brass hilt of his hunting knife where its bare blade was surgically taped to his side, handle down for ease of use.

  * * * *

  Outside was bitter, which wasn’t a surprise: nor was the wind that drove along the valley into Axl’s face, though the night air was so cold it took him a few seconds to catch his breath, and longer still for his eye to adjust to the darkness. What would have surprised Axl, if he hadn’t just been sitting in the inn listening carefully to the noises outside, was the figure frozen animal-still between the stables and an open-ended shed beyond. If in doubt freeze, but not when you’re alone on open ground. Someone should have told the person that. Mind you, someone should have told him that all those years ago, not left him to find out for himself.

  Axl didn’t hurry after the ghost figure. Mainly because hurrying wasn’t something he’d been taught. When he ran it was hard and fast, accelerating like an animal and preferably wired up on cooking sulphate. The rest of the time he walked slowly, head up and shoulders loose. As stances went, it didn’t say look at me, but it didn’t say walk through me either. It said, here’s a man going about his business, let’s leave it that way…