The City's son st-1

by Tom Pollock

Chipboard hoardings were stretched across the end of a narrow lane off Ludgate Hill. Behind them, anonymous buildings had been torn down and a landslide of doors, window-ledges and unidentifiable hunks of concrete tumbled over the rim of the hoardings and sloped down into the alley: a natural ramp. Sweating despite the chill, Beth put her foot on the bottom — and hesitated.

  A tangle of old scaffolding gleamed at the top.

  And Beth stalled. She stared at the scaffolding, seeing it re-articulate into a snarling, snapping wolf in her mind’s eye. If Fil had been there, he would have goaded her to do it — or else it would have been him that needed the goading, and she would have had to have been brave to see him through.

  But he wasn’t there. It was just her.

  Beth shifted her weight, uneasily. Maybe there’s another way, she thought. Maybe the whole site isn’t surrounded, maybe I can sneak in…

  Out of nowhere, the idea hit her like a steel wall. An idea so strange to her it made her gasp. She could just walk away.

  Beth was appalled. She couldn’t believe she’d thought that, even for a second.

  But the voice inside her which suggested it lingered. After all, it whispered, vile and yet utterly convincing, she’d already risked so much. It wasn’t fair; she’d pushed her luck to the edge of the precipice and she’d found the home she’d been searching for. She shouldn’t have to risk it all again now.

  She remembered Gutterglass’ voice: Reach will rip you asunder.

  Death. The realisation came with cold clarity. That was the fear she had been fighting since she left the dump: she was afraid to die. She’d never been scared of it before, but dying had never felt as close and intimate as this before. She looked around at the streets that had become her home. Now she had something to lose, death terrified her.

  She set her back to Reach’s kingdom and took an experimental step, then another. As she started to walk out of the alley an odd relaxation trickled through her. Letting the fear win was kind of like pissing your pants: it came with shame and a mild horror at herself, but also a warm, numbing relief.

  The railing-spear clanged onto the cobbles by her feet.

  ‘Do more. Do more than just run.’ Jesus Christ, what a pretentious, patronising arse I must’ve sounded.

  As she reached the end of the alley, all the noise and colour of the main road broke over her. She looked left and right, peering into the flow of morning pedestrians preparing to throw herself back in. A slug of regret was lodged uncomfortably in her gut. Whatever I do in this instant I’ll carry it the rest of my life. She knew that was true.

  She lifted her foot off the tarmac, and made a decision.

  Then again, that’s likely to be about twenty minutes, so every cloud and all that She spun on her heel and started to run back up the alley.

  You’re an idiot, B, you know that? she told herself as she ran. You always had something to lose — someone — and you almost threw her away. She’s waiting for you behind that damned hoarding.

  She picked up speed and scooped up the spear without breaking stride.

  And now you’ve got someone else to lose. This is the only way to protect him.

  She remembered jumping into the Chemical Synod’s pool, the fear she’d felt then, and the spark of love for the boy who’d stood opposite her. She remembered the way she’d braced herself, tensing every muscle in her body until she almost vibrated, all so she could make him She thrust the iron-railing spear above her head. The concrete ramp reared up ahead of her. The scaffolding gleamed.

  Beth, he’d said, I’m proud A hand flashed out of a gap in the fallen bricks and snared her ankle.

  CHAPTER 45

  For a horrifying moment Beth flew, feeling the absence of gravity sickeningly in her stomach. Then she smacked hard into the concrete, three feet short of the ramp.

  ‘Argh!’ Her nose and lips felt puffy and stung. She rolled and came to her feet crouched, spear ready, poised for attack.

  ‘Sorry! Sorry!’ a familiar voice said, ‘but Tsarina was about to self-kill. Was first thing could think of.’ Hunks of brick and concrete tumbled off a dusty tarp, revealing a figure in a threadbare greatcoat who wiped away the grey camo make-up from his face as he sat up. He pulled his beanie hat from his pocket, crammed it onto his erratic hair and fixed Beth with a hopeful grin. ‘Sorry!’ he said again cheerfully.

  ‘Victor?’ It was one surprise too many. The last of Beth’s cool fell tinkling into fragments on the floor

  ‘Da.’

  ‘Where did-? How did-? How the hell did you get ahead of me? ’

  ‘Well, back in Volgagrad was-’

  ‘Don’t tell me you were on the Siberian Olympic sprint team; I won’t believe it. I know you can’t run as fast as I can, so how?’

  Victor looked embarrassed. ‘I take — you know — I take underground train.’

  ‘You took the tube?’ For some reason Beth found this deeply shocking.

  ‘Da, why not? I am old man now. Just because Tsarina go on foot-’

  ‘With what? You don’t have any money.’

  ‘Ticket collector, he from Old Country. He ask for ticket; I give him old Moscow greeting.’ He beamed.

  Beth stared out at him sceptically over folded arms.

  ‘An old Moscow greeting? Did this greeting involve wristlocks, groin punches, chokeholds or anything else you might have learned in the Soviet secret police?’

  ‘Old Moscow greeting,’ Victor repeated. His smiling face shone with sincerity. ‘We understand each other very well.’

  Beth stared at him, fury and fright swelling in her. She shook her head firmly. ‘No way. No way. The Thames’ll run with baboon sweat before I let this happen. Turn around, Victor, get out of here. This — it’s not your fight.’

  Was this how Fil had felt, all those times he’d told her to leave? This vertigo of affection and gratitude and the terrible knowledge that if this person you cared about got hurt, it would be your fault?

  ‘I’m not owing another one like that,’ she muttered. ‘I can’t. Go back, Victor.’

  The friendly grin retreated into Victor’s beard and Beth jumped back in shock as he spat at her feet. ‘ Not my fight? ’ he snarled. ‘Who are you, to say what is and not my fight? Kabul was my fight, and Tashkent, and Ossetia. You talk of owing? I owe!’ He thumped his chest. ‘I lost boys, shining boys, shattered to little pieces by the monster you hunt. I owe them all.’ He looked at her, his eyes full of a gutting disappointment. ‘And you too, remember? I said, “I make sure you no get too horribly killed.” Was no lie. I never lie.’

  Beth exhaled hard, ‘You don’t understand. People who follow me, they get hurt — hurt bad. They die.’

  Victor nodded solemnly. ‘I know. They die because you are bad general.’ He ignored the look Beth gave him and went on, ‘Is not to be shamed of. I am pretty bad general too, but even I can tell you, charging headlong into face of superior enemy is stupider than poking adder with your own nose.’ He looked pointedly at the ramp Beth had been about to run up. ‘Frontal assault: very bad strategy. We try in Afghanistan, only mujaheddin have landmines.’ He mimed an explosion with his hands. ‘Arms, legs, heads, kneecaps, blood everywhere, like whores on a vor.’

  He clapped an arm around Beth’s shoulders, expelling a cloud of dust from his coat. His anger had evaporated. Now his voice had a fatherly tone. ‘If, on other hand, we make reconnaissance, like good little Spetsnaz, if we arrive early and do camouflage, then we might see interesting things.’

  He squatted a couple of feet from the hoardings and gripped a slab of concrete. With a stream of heavily accented invective he dragged it aside, revealing a jagged hole in the ground leading down into darkness. ‘Like private back door, where wire zmeya drags bodies from; that kind of interesting.’ He sat and dangled his legs into the hole, kicking his feet like a small boy. The edges of his vast moustache twitched upwards as he regarded Beth fondly. ‘You are like granddaughter to me, so I tell you secret,’ he said. ‘I am
scared of dark — no, really, do not laugh. Dark and small places, since little boy. Back then I think Kobolds squat in the little places, to eat my little flesh.’

  His grin widened. ‘Who knows, maybe they still do.’ He gave himself a tiny push and dropped out of sight below the streets.

  Beth kissed her teeth. ‘Only a bloody Russian could think their fairy-tales were reassuring,’ she muttered, then seized the spear and dived into the darkness.

  CHAPTER 46

  ‘Pass the smokes, Timon.’

  Timon sighed. It was Al’s turn to sort out cigarettes, but the bronze gangster was so busy making a pathetic fuss over the wound in his arm — Blud, I think it’s infected. Blud, I think the tendon’s snapped. Blud, I think there’s some fang left in it — that it wasn’t worth arguing. There was nothing else to do in this drain of a street but smoke. Gutterglass had sent them here, to Bethnal Green, for ‘recuperation’, which just meant that there were more urgent claims on their mattresses in the landfill. Neither of them cared about that, but the inaction was embarrassing. They wanted back in the fight.

  Timon checked up and down the narrow lane to make sure no one was coming, then groaned and twisted, shedding limestone powder as he bent down to retrieve the half-smoked cigarettes a couple of kids had stamped out earlier. He tore a couple of small squares out of a discarded newspaper and poured the leftover tobacco out of the dog-ends into them, then furled the paper up tight: nicotine necromancy.

  Al dragged his bronze arm over Timon’s forehead and sparks flew. The reanimated cigarettes guttered and smouldered.

  ‘Cheers, blud.’

  As they smoked, Al regarded the wolf heads the Filia Viae had drawn on his friend’s skin. ‘We need to get you some more of those, son,’ he said after a while.

  Timon had turned away from the mouth of the alley when he’d bent down for the dog-ends, so the sweaty man who shoved his face right up to his limestone mask took him by surprise.

  ‘I know you’re in there!’ the man cried. ‘Where’s my daughter?’

  Timon eyed Al; there was a flicker of bronze and the fat man flew at the wall. Air sighed out of his lungs as he crumpled to the ground.

  ‘What’s yer problem, boy?’ Al demanded. ‘You lookin’ to a couple of statues for a beatin’?’

  The man croaked a couple of times before his voice came back, but when he spoke, he didn’t sound cowed. ‘Those pictures on you — a girl drew them, didn’t she? I need you to take me to her.’ His cheeks were hollow and grey bags hung under his wild eyes. ‘Please.

  ‘She’s my daughter.’

  It looked like someone had taken the contents of several statue gardens and dumped them in an industrial car park in Dalston. The air was vivid with London accents as the Pavement Priests chattered away their nerves.

  Timon and Al had taken pity on Paul. To make sure he could keep pace they covered just a few yards at time in their here-now-suddenly-there stop-motion-animation way of moving; they entertained themselves by striking poses with V-signs as they waited for him to catch up.

  Their trajectory through the nest of city streets curved east in response to rumour, like electrons bending around a magnet. The Filia Viae was no longer at Gutterglass’ landfill hospital, the gargoyles whispered. Stoneskins were massing, drainpipes gurgled, all of them, and some said that this was the surest sign yet that Mater Viae was returning. But there were other mutterings, from under manhole covers and around corners, that the Lady of the Streets’ honour guard had abandoned their absent mistress and rallied to their own purposes.

  ‘The stubborn little trollop’s not here,’ the granite-hooded monk said when they led Paul over to him. His hands flickered between a basin of dark red clay and back to the deep cracks in his stone armour as he sealed them. A bronze statue of a seventeenth-century nobleman complete with wig and doublet hardened off the ceramic with a blowtorch.

  ‘She asked me to sing the Treaty Song, then she buggered off — went to St Paul’s alone. Your daughter’s dead by now, I expect.’

  Paul returned the monk’s stare flatly. He wouldn’t accept that. It was an article of his faith now that his daughter was still alive: his doctrine of salvation. There had to be some way for him to make amends.

  Perhaps the old Pavement Priest recognised that in his eyes, because he snorted gently through stone nostrils. ‘I’m sorry, kid, I really am. I know where she went, and we’re going there too, but this is an all-out attack, not a rescue mission.’

  He paused, then added, ‘If it helps, that’s the way she wanted it.’ He blurred for an instant and then he was facing the other way, engaged in other business.

  ‘Then I want to fight,’ Paul said to his mica-threaded back.

  The monk released a startled laugh. ‘With what? You’ll be butchered like a ten-week calf.’

  ‘Do you care?’ Paul asked bluntly.

  ‘You know what? Now I can hear the family resemblance.’ Petris sounded amused for a moment, then the humour dropped out of his gravel voice. ‘Who am I, of all men, to stand between a man and his suicide?’ he muttered. He sounded deadly serious. ‘Obadiah!’ he called.

  Paul shuddered as the bronze nobleman slapped a handful of red clay onto his neck.

  ‘No soldier of mine goes into battle without a uniform,’ the monk said. ‘We march in thirty minutes. Keep up.’

  He paused as a thought occurred to him. ‘One question, Mr Soon-to-be-dead.’ Paul couldn’t mistake the note of envy in the monk’s voice. ‘ Why are you so determined to fight?’

  Paul reached into the basin of clay and slicked a double handful of the cool, heavy mud over his cheeks. When this bakes, he thought, it will preserve my face forever. He tried not to look as afraid as he felt. ‘Because this is Beth’s fight, and that’s what fathers do for their little girls,’ he said.

  CHAPTER 47

  Nothing to see but darkness, nothing to breathe but dust. Nothing to be but patient as the iron-eating rust.

  Huh, I should remember that. It’s the kind of thing Pen might like.

  Stone grazed Beth’s skin as she crawled through the tunnel. She kept colliding with the walls in the pitch-darkness, even though she was groping ahead with her fingertips. She’d insisted on being in the lead. Victor had grumbled but eventually deferred with a muttered ‘Ladies first’.

  In some places the walls were tight on her, tighter than a coffin, tight as a birth canal, and she had to thrust her arms ahead of her, wedge her elbows and undulate forward. The spear was strapped to her back, the metal so cold against her neck it almost blistered.

  Beth hated the close quarters, but more than that, the sheer deadness of the place troubled her: there was no energy, no life flowing where her bare skin touched the masonry. This neighbourhood had been broken, its vitality leached out. Cold fingers of panic crept up Beth’s throat, and she fought to keep calm. After so long immersed in the living city, being trapped in here felt like suffocating.

  In places the walls of the tunnel felt smooth, like glass, or — the idea came to her suddenly — burnt skin.

  Without the Great Fire, Gutterglass had said, we must improvise.

  She was touching Reach’s wounds from that first great immolation, ripped up and buried beneath later incarnations. These scars were more permanent than rock. She shivered at the intimacy.

  The darkness made everything closer, louder and sharper. The engines clattered on the surface above and Beth jumped as gravel sifted down from the ceiling. She swore at herself to keep calm.

  Judging by the constant stream of inventive obscenity floating up the tunnel from behind her, though, she was doing better than Victor. ‘By Virgin’s first missed period,’ he muttered, ‘is been seven years since I even sleep under roof. What in hell I am doing here?’ He fell silent for a moment, and then said, ‘Tsarina not judge me too harshly, niet? I am not normally so cowardish.’

  Beth reached behind her and felt a worn, gnarly hand grasp hers. ‘I know, Victor. I know. If it makes y
ou feel any better, I have a friend who hates little spaces too.’ Beth swallowed hard and looked ahead into the darkness. ‘And she’s as brave as they come.’

  The minutes faded away. The only way Beth could mark the time was her heartbeat, and that was too quick to be much use. She felt an urgent desire to talk, to blabber, What if we’re lost? What if we miss a turning in the dark? What if we’re trapped down here?

  She bit her lip so hard she tasted petrol and blood, determined not to speak, Giving voice to her own fears would only make Victor’s worse — but then she reached forward, and this time she couldn’t stop herself crying out.

  ‘Tsarina?’ Victor said uncertainly.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she whispered. She’d felt something in the rubble, a warmth and a thrum, like a pulse. It was alive. Now as she wormed her way forward, she could feel the kiss of the living concrete on her arms and neck and her belly, charging her skin with the city again. She laughed, shockingly loud in the dark: the pulse coming through the ground was faint, but to her it was like fresh air after drowning. She laid her head on the ground. She heard something, and froze.

  Was that crying?

  It was very faint, the vibrations carried through the stone from deeper underground. She strained to listen.

  There it was again: quiet crying, as though with pain, the kind of pain that you had endured for a long time but you still couldn’t get used to. There was another sound, too, the creaking of rock under terrible strain. The sounds were synchronised, and each groan of the rock drew a gasp and a whimper from the voice, as though someone was drawing painful breath against stone.

  Women in the Walls. Masonry Men.

  Unbidden, the image of the mangled human shapes at the Woolwich Demolition Fields sprang into her mind and her stomach lurched. She suddenly knew where the life she was sensing was coming from.

  She scrabbled at the unseen ground with her fingers, looking for a seam, slipping her nails into cracks until finally she found what she was looking for. She heaved, and a concrete slab jarred the tunnel as she cast it aside.