Feast and Famine

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “When?”

  The haggard head shook slightly. “I can’t remember.”

  “Who are you?” the Toad pressed as a metal hand fell on his shoulder. “What’s your name?”

  “I…” The artificer’s face, burned and gaunt, was nonetheless that of a lost child. “I… don’t know.”

  “The examination is over, master,” the fluting voice of the construct stated. The Toad turned in its grip and looked up into its expressionless mask. There was no chance of defying that.

  “Yes,” he said weakly. “You can return to your laboratory.”

  “Yes,” the artificer agreed, sounding more enthusiastic. “My laboratory, yes… I am very close to a breakthrough…” As if he had simply forgotten the Toad’s existence, he sought out the door and wandered off. The grip of the construct tightened slightly.

  I had to push the matter, didn’t I, the Toad thought.

  “He’s ill, you know,” he said softly. “Perhaps dying.”

  The construct remained terribly still.

  “They… Someone did terrible things to him,” the Toad prompted.

  “Can you help him?” Despite everything that logic could hold against it, the artificial voice held a trace of despair.

  “I don’t know. I’d guess that you’ve been doing your best...?” It was frustrating to venture into a conversation without the slightest feedback: no expression, no body language, no reliable inflections. For all he knew the Toad might be condemning himself to death with every word.

  “I was taught little,” the construct stated. “Can you help him?”

  “Perhaps. Not much. When someone’s been broken that thoroughly, it simply holds matters off for a while.” The Toad took his heart in both hands and added, “I’ll want a few answers.”

  The construct’s head tilted for the first time to look directly at him as a human being would. Caught within the sightless stare of that man-made concentration the Toad felt simultaneously frightened and ashamed that he should so barter his services.

  “Answers?” the automaton’s voice said flatly, but the Toad detected the hint of an evasion.

  “He didn’t build you,” he said outright, and continued without waiting for a reply. “I know artificers. I was born to one. That laboratory never produced anything, let alone… you.”

  Silence.

  “I need to know. How did he come here? How did you come here? What’s going on?” The Toad shrugged off the mechanical grip and stomped off a few paces, feeling an uncharacteristic wash of anger pass through him and away. “Who is he?”

  “He is my master,” the construct replied.

  “But not your creator.” The Toad wheeled about and faced it again, his mind fortified with the memory of a line of crosses. “I can at least prolong his life with my art, but tell me why I should.”

  “Because…” There was a long silence. The construct remained motionless and the faint sound of its mechanisms reached the Toad’s ears. “Because…”

  “Because…?”

  Something within it shifted with a sharp tick. “Because I need him,” the construct said.

  Human eyes searched a bronze face for meaning, fruitlessly. The Toad decided that it was his turn to remain cryptically silent. You need him, he thought. He needs me. Speak. The construct turned laboriously away from him. There was a heaviness in its movements that might be wear and tear, or something more ephemeral. “You cannot understand,” it said, voice turned low.

  “You do me a disservice,” the Toad said. “Try me.”

  “My creator…” It seemed to be having difficulty speaking. “My creator built me to serve him.”

  Silence began to inch back into the room and the Toad took it upon himself to keep the narrative flowing. “And then he passed on?”

  “He… moved on,” the construct said firmly. “He had a dream. He left me here.” It walked slowly to one small window and faced the night. Whether it was affectation, a compulsion from within, or whether the construct gained something from the experience was any man’s guess.

  “What about your master?” the Toad pressed. “The man you call your master. He doesn’t seem particularly… masterful.”

  Still turned away from him the construct tilted its head back. Pale moonlight silvered its face. “I do not count days here,” it said. “I have not kept the time for so long. I was constructed to serve. I maintained the laboratory and the building, and myself to the best of my capacity.”

  “Then your current master arrived,” the Toad filled in.

  “He had been used poorly. I detected him from the window. When I brought him in there was little of him. Just a body and a voice.” The construct was struggling for concepts and the Toad tried to help it,

  “He was mad?”

  “There was not enough left of him to be mad,” it said. “He was… empty.”

  “I begin to understand.” The Toad approached it slowly. “You took him in.”

  “I…” The construct’s voice halted abruptly, and then took up again. “I needed a master, even if he was not the master who had made me. I needed someone to exist for.”

  “You turned him into your master. Or you turned him into someone who potters around in a lab and thinks that he’s an artificer. You took someone broken and you… rebuilt him in your master’s image.” The Toad was right at the construct’s shoulder now. It removed its attention from the window and could not escape him.

  “I needed a master,” it said, voice just a metallic whisper. “I was just making use of the materials the world gave me. How could it be wrong?”

  The Toad said nothing for a long time, digesting the situation and considering that a machine had just spoken to him of right and wrong. He had no idea what philosophy an artefact could piece together in long years of solitude. Perhaps it would be more valid than many human ones. Certainly it would be more valid than Haves Tyrell’s.

  “Your master… your creator,” he said, because he felt that he had to know. “His name was Vans Serten, wasn’t it?” He felt the presence of greatness about him, manifested in the machine he was speaking to.

  “He never told me his name. He was simply my master,” the construct said, and in that sentence was perhaps its final victory over the man that had forced its story from it.

  The Toad nodded tiredly. “Let me see your master, your new master, again,” he told it. “I will exercise my skills. I’ll see what I can do for him. I can’t promise miracles. I can’t even promise healing. I’ll do what I can.”

  After all, he told himself, I’m not even certain this man is Haves Tyrell. Even if he is, there’s not enough left of the man I once saw on which to wreak the vengeance of a nation. There’s barely enough to satisfy the dreams of a machine.

  *

  Thenard healed slowly and waited impatiently, but it was well over a week before the Toad was back in town. When the healer reached his bedside he was desperate for any kind of news.

  “So what’s going on, Toady?” he demanded. “Spill it. What quarter’s the wind at? Did you find him?”

  The Toad had thought long and hard over what to tell Thenard, wrestling with his conscience both ways.

  “Haves Tyrell wasn’t in that house,” he said, with some truth. “All I found was an old servant, and an artificial man.”

  * * *

  Long, long ago in the mists of time there was a little magazine called Xenos. It published SF and Fantasy stories, and also evaluations of those stories written by the readership (and I always had the impression that the set of readers and the set of writers had a considerable overlap). Xenos is no more, but my very earliest published writing (paid for in exposure only) was a handful of short stories that appeared there back in the early and mid-nineties. Even then I was looking at a legacy, although I wouldn’t actually get a bean for all of my writing for another ten years and more: several of the stories featured a common character, a travelling healer called the Toad who stands out amongst fantasy protagonists
in that he was a pacifist who solved all his problems with talk, common sense and the offer of healing skills. I should really revisit his adventures some day, but, until I do, here is the best of them from the Xenos years.

  The Roar of the Crowd

  Iseld dreamt of the travelling players a week before they arrived. She saw them stalking bright as salt-fire in full costume along the road to Passendean, decked out in all the colours of peacocks, and with a peacock’s arch pride and stiff formality. In her dreams they were magnificent, true nobility beyond the petty ambitions of the local lord or his distant master the King. Their faces showed it, cut sharp and aquiline from the stones of history. She remembered every detail when she awoke.

  Three times that week the players crossed her dreams, smiling disdainfully. The gilt-spun edges of their cloaks stopped just short of the dusty ground and the ferrules of their canes and sword-sticks left no mark. They began to invade her thoughts even during daylight as she worked the vast machines, the tallow vats and the candle-minter, packed shoulder to shoulder with a hundred other girls. Passendean was built around the factory, a wretched, starved body to its pounding heart. The nod or frown of Thomas Vender, the owner, was a writ more solid than the sealed commands of either the King or the feared and reviled Emperor.

  Within the factory there was no real light, merely a dull grey suggestion of form and the closed red murmurings of the furnaces. The place that gave candles to half the known world, and to both sides in the war, lived in perpetual twilight through two grinding ten-hour shifts parted only by the four-hour midnight gap when the engineers, Vender’s rough-handed elite, serviced the machines and scraped the vats. It was no place for the theatre.

  Yet they would come. As Iseld’s hands passed carefully over the chattering teeth of the wick-looms – like stroking a restless, ill-tempered dog – the idea came to her of men and women in hats and caps of blue and green and cloth of gold. They would crest the rise above Passendean and survey the town, with the factory a fire-blackened beetle at its centre. She could almost picture their expressions of disgust. They would still come, she knew. The lure of an audience would bring them.

  They arrived just after she finished her downside shift that lagged from two in the morning until midday. The hatchet-faced book-keeper noted her hours, expressionless save the fossilised scowl that had gripped her when the machines took her arm. Feeling worn down by a week of constant anticipation, Iseld dragged herself up the steps from the pit in which the tallow-vats seethed and steamed, clawing her way out of the heavy, greasy air as the next shift filed in, devoid of enthusiasm. The job paid little, but Iseld needed little, so she got by. No husband put bread on her table, nor took a hand to her in his cups, as the bruises of other girls testified to. She had grown up neither chased nor chasing, waiting for some prince who never came, and her adolescence had stepped out while she was not looking, letting her know only by its absence that it would not be back.

  On her way out she passed the half-open door to the new wing, and saw Thomas Vender himself in conference with the white-coated scientists the King had sent a month ago. She didn’t want to know what it was they cooked and boiled and refined in those sterile halls. The girls who went to work there were paid more, but got sick often. Two had died. Vender had upped the wages by the width of a gnat’s wing and had not been short of volunteers.

  When Iseld stepped out into a noon sun dwindled by the distances of early April, the players were just entering the town. She saw their wagon down Hopkin Street and her heart sank. It was limed with dust, and beneath that was gaudy painting – old reds and faded oranges peeling and flaking in the wind. The wind was up, too, and blowing from the enemy’s south, and the actors were knuckled down before it as though fighting for every step they took into Passendean. Their hats were broad-brimmed but as brown as the trail, and their cloaks were patched and threadbare and shorn of the finery and colour that Iseld had spent so long imagining. Their faces were the faces of any tradesmen and working women, tinkers and cobblers and casual labourers. Iseld waited at the factory gates as they approached, feeling abruptly cheated. Some flame of gold and peacock blue had been snuffed thoughtlessly out when these shuffling vagrants hit Hopkin Street. Only when they passed her did the lead player turn his head to glance at her. His face might have been carved from softwood with swift and angular strokes. For the briefest second all the colour of the theatre, the clowns and the heroines and the glorious, hunched poses of the villains, sparked in his deep-set eyes. There was no truth in that look, but truth was a grim, cheap currency in Passendean.

  After they passed, and only then, did she notice Lansdowne across the street, tall and lopsided as a broken statue she had seen once, that a mob had pulled down. Lansdowne, younger than her father, older than her eldest brother, had been in the wars – a local nonentity become a war hero on his return two months ago with his wound and his medal. Everyone wanted to talk to Lansdowne of the Lancers, defier of the Emperor and carrier of Passendean’s honour, except…

  Except that he was not a Lancer at all, just a supply sergeant. Except that the carrier of Passendean’s honour took no joy in anything in Passendean, denied a chance to be the humble man he had been and unwilling to be the man they wanted him to be. Except that Lansdowne, whom everyone wanted to talk to, did not want to talk to anyone. When the war was mentioned, something vital retreated from his eyes and made a home for itself deep inside his head, where it could not be touched.

  That vital spark was out in force today, as he stared after the players. It lit his lean face like candle-light. Only when they drew in their wagon at the wayhouse did he look away from them, and when that fierce illumination passed over Iseld’s face she almost felt the heat of it. Then he registered her, and the same weathered mask was up between them. He nodded to her cordially and then turned and made his halting way down Sautern Street, each step correcting for the knee that no longer bent.

  *

  He was there again in the market square when the players, now fed and watered, set up their stage. The wagon, in all the ghosts of its glory, had unfolded into a structure festooned with torch brackets and drapes. Racks of painted flats depicted scenes from the court of the emperors a thousand years ago to mystical islands lost in tropical seas. Tomas Vender was the first to be handed one of the flyers that an actress was gamely grinding out on a hand-turned press. As the town looked on, ready to follow his lead in anything, he stared down at the printed paper.

  “‘The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene indivisible or poem unlimited’,” he read. “Very original.”

  The best-dressed of the actors, a little bespectacled man with sculpted hair and a dark, foreign look to his face, bowed elegantly. “But true,” he claimed, and named himself as Timoti de Venezi, manager and proprietor of the October Players.

  Vender, who had met grander and more eloquent men in his time, was unimpressed. “It’s April,” he noted,

  “In October we play to the court,” de Venezi countered. “For the lag of the year we tour the provinces,” the last said with only the smallest wrinkle to his nose.

  Vender glanced at the folk of Passendean and judged them to be desirous of a theatrical performance. So informed, he allowed his lips to curl into such a fine imitation of a smile that some of the actors took notes. “What you will, then,” he told the players at large. “It has been long enough since we have had an entertainment, what with the war and all. Play out what dramas you have in your repertoire.” He glanced back once and only then did Iseld see, some ten yards away, one of the factory scientists. “Only be sure,” Vender continued, “That there is no offence in any of it. We are the king’s loyal subjects and will not stand for treason.” Tomas Vender, who had never been anyone’s loyal subject, pitched his voice to carry to the man. The scientist’s grey, slab-like face stood abandoned as the mind behind it th
ought of other things.

  “I hope that we will offer no treason, sir,” de Venezi said, but Vender was already striding towards the factory. The little man’s face lit up and he flashed a startlingly white smile across his audience. “Our first showing will be an uncut performance of that legendary tale, ‘The Tragical History of Simion the Garden Born,’ with none other than the renowned Richard Burbage in the title role and Sidney Lord Essex as Scotos, the King of Night. We will be playing within four hours, and then again by torchlight at midnight for your next shift.” He had been doing his homework, Iseld thought. As de Venezi reeled off prices and concessions she looked at the crowd and saw Lansdowne there. His mournful countenance had something in it that she would not have guessed at. The great war hero wanted to be fooled and taken from himself more than anyone.

  One of the actors had started a puppet show for the children. The others were working on the stage or simply standing about. They looked ordinary, smoking pipes or studying scripts. As she had seen them before, they were birds of drab plumage, but every so often there would be a gesture or an expression that would flash that old fire. A hand would pass across a belt and draw an invisible sword that glittered in the sun. A tired face would tilt at a certain angle and catch light thrown from a golden age a hundred years before.

  “Can I help you, girl?” Iseld started as a hand touched her shoulder like a moth. The tall actor with the angular face was looking down on her.

  “I just – I was just looking,” she managed, and she was afraid, suddenly and for no reason. He was just a tall, lanky figure in a cloak that had seen too much darning, but there was a grandeur hidden away in the shadows of his eyes and the lines about his mouth that emperors would kill for.

  “You’re a patron of the arts?” he asked her. His voice was humorous, but there was a king in it trying to make himself heard.

  “I’m – I’m just a factory girl,” she stammered.

  “One can be both,” Beyond the wagon a small circle of children were snickering at the puppets, but most of the adults had gone about their business, clutching playbills and flyers. Lansdowne alone was left, staring at the manikins as they squeaked and gibbered and struck each other, as though he was trying to divine from them the secrets of the universe.