Stamping Butterflies

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  “Something’s changed,” said Tris.

  “No,” Luca said. “Everything’s changed. Take a look around you.”

  The sun was beating down on the snow and a billion diamonds of light flickered in its brightness. The whole thing looking like nothing so much as a crust of solidified foam.

  “This is good, right?” Tris asked.

  “Well.” The Baron shrugged. “It’s certainly different.”

  In the end the plateau didn’t so much finish as fall away into a slope that got steeper and steeper until suddenly it stopped being a slope. This happened at a point where the crust over which they walked slipped over the horizon and vanished altogether from sight.

  “Walk backwards,” Luca suggested. “You’ll find it easier if you know where you’ve come from.” Gripping his sticks, Luca strode to the start of the steepness, turned to face Tris and then stepped back, jamming both thorn sticks deep into the snow. He would like to believe that what he hit was earth, but chances were it was compacted snow, ice or bare rock because the ends of his sticks slid slightly.

  “And dig deep,” he added.

  Tris did as she was told, turning as Luca had done and stepping back, feeling for a foothold that seemed further away than it ought to be. Her sticks slipped a little and then locked into place.

  “If you feel yourself slip,” said Luca, “ram both sticks into the snow and keep hold.” The twine from his trap was gone, lost along the way, and this was irritating because he’d have liked Tris’s sticks to be lashed to her wrists and he lacked the strength to tear fresh strips from his cloak. Tris had almost no idea how tired Luca was and he hoped to keep it that way.

  Afternoon slid into evening, the high cirrus having cleared to reveal the silver shimmer of a sky filled with worlds around the distant sun, as if some insane mosaicist had decorated the inside of a globe with tiny tesserae and then not bothered to fill in between the tiles.

  “So many worlds,” Tris said.

  Luca smiled.

  Somewhere stacked in the back of her brain, Tris had Doc Joyce’s breakdown of how and why. Obviously not the deep physics, the stuff that allowed each tesserae to retain its position within the globe while replicating gravity and retaining a workable atmosphere. All who claimed to understand this lied, their explanations quick and dirty hack around what little was left of preZP physics.

  She learnt quickly, Tris was proud of this fact. Unfortunately the speed at which Tris assimilated ideas was something her grandmother never quite seemed to grasp. Her childhood refrain, You just never learn, do you?, being so far from the truth that Tris had seen little merit in pointing out that actually she learnt everything until there was nothing left to learn.

  When Tris finally ran out of facts at home she went searching. No one ever thought to ask why and, if they had, Tris probably wouldn’t have been able to answer. But the vanishing acts had grown in length, from missed afternoons through whole days to nights when she didn’t come home and weeks that went by in a blur of cheap drugs, cheaper sex and bad conversation.

  Translated, this meant reflex accelerators, fear inhibitors and a wide range of near opiates. Not to mention turning tricks against the wall at the back of Schwarzschilds for some tourist tom too blitzed to notice that Tris held him between her thighs instead of inside her.

  The queens were cleaner, less animal, usually.

  Many of those who put Tris up against a wall talked to her first, about their worlds and what made them come to one of the lowest levels of the Rip, a place most guides suggested they avoid. And once she even extracted a snatch of conversation from a gene splicer so silent even Doc Joyce had long since assumed the man was mute.

  “Stop,” said Luca and hands gripped her hips, halting Tris. “We’re here.”

  Tris wanted to ask, where? There were so many things Luca assumed she knew when for most of this trip she’d merely been guessing. He was getting older and more tired, less happy to have her around. It was a look Tris knew well. One she’d seen each evening as a small child in the face of her mother, when the woman realized another day was gone and Tris’s father had not returned. That, in all probability, he never would and she was left with a small child, a leaking shack and a mother-in-law who’d retreated into a world of her own.

  And then one night, instead of looking resigned, Tris’s mother had collected together the few things she actually owned and left. Tris wasn’t even surprised.

  “Keep staring ahead,” said Luca. “You can’t afford to turn round and you mustn’t look down. Keep the moment close. And let everything else go.”

  Tris knew exactly what he meant. At least she hoped she did. “We’re going to jump, right?”

  “Not quite,” said Luca, reaching into his satchel. For once the conditions were on their side. A whole strip of snow along the lip of the drop had slipped, exposing naked rock. This enabled Luca to find a flaw into which to ram the first of four steel pegs he produced from his bag.

  “I’m going first,” Luca told Tris. “And you’re going to follow…The problem is I’ve only got a handful of these.” He nodded to the spike. “So you’re going to have to collect them as you go.”

  “How?”

  “Easy,” said Luca. “Just twist the top.”

  So Tris did, only too aware of the sheer drop towards which she shuffled, edging backwards so slowly she barely moved. Tris found the spike by dropping to a crouch and reaching behind her, fingers closing on cold metal.

  It was stuck fast in the rock.

  “Twist the top,” Luca said again.

  And Tris felt the spike slide free.

  “We had hundreds once,” said Luca, “thousands, maybe more.” He sounded tired, old beyond his wish. “They were for building.”

  “You brought them with you?”

  “It’s possible,” Luca admitted.

  Holding the narrow spike in one hand, Tris twisted the top with her other.

  “It’s broken,” she said.

  Luca shook his head. Whatever was meant to happen took place at a level invisible to human eyes.

  “It’s working,” he promised her.

  She held a fortune in her hand, Tris realized, while another three fortunes lay at her feet. Doc Joyce would have restrung her entire body and thrown in new bones and buckytubes for her brain for one chance to work out what the spikes did and how.

  Even fake tek was worth something. Certainly enough for the Doc to manufacture idiot-looking artifacts that tourists bought time and again, just in case they turned out to be real.

  Tris grinned.

  “What?” Luca said.

  “Nothing that matters.” Glancing back at the plateau, Tris was bemused both by the distance and the breath-catching beauty of a landscape she and Luca had crossed without really noticing. She was tired now. Almost as tired as Luca and the Baron was so tired that at times he seemed almost transparent.

  “Focus,” Luca said crossly. He nodded to the spike still gripped in her fingers. “And put that back.”

  Tris did, twisting the top to lock the spike in place.

  “Right,” said Luca. “Empty your head of everything but locating the next spike, reaching for it with one foot and letting the spike take your weight. You’ll be roped to me and I’ll be fixed to the cliff face with this.” Luca pulled a final piece of climbing equipment from his bag. This spike had an eye at the top through which a rope could pass.

  “One last thing,” said the Baron. “You don’t move until I tell you.”

  Tris understood that bit.

  “A little to the right.” Luca was doing his best not to sound worried. “Left a bit. That’s it. The next spike’s below your foot.”

  They’d been hanging on the edge of the drop for almost fifteen minutes and hardly made any progress at all. In fact, the lip over which they’d climbed was barely out of Tris’s reach. All Tris had to do to follow Luca was remove the first and original spike, tuck it into her waistband and shift her weight so she
could hang from a second spike, while using one foot to feel for a third that Luca had already fixed into the cliff.

  “I know where it is,” said Tris.

  “Then use it.”

  Darkness was coming in faster than either had expected and Luca was running out of reassuring clichés about the first step being the most difficult, things getting easier, it just being a matter of practice…

  “I thought you did this all the time in the Rip,” Luca said, irritation winning out over tact.

  “That’s jumping,” said Tris. “It’s different.”

  Give her a rope long enough and she’d have been halfway down the cliff before Luca had finished fixing his wretched spikes.

  “You must have climbed on Rip,” said Luca.

  “Of course I did,” Tris said. “That was up, though. This is down…” All the same she twisted the spike, slid it from the rock and pushed it into the waistband of her thin trousers. She was climbing in her rope sandals, Luca having insisted that this would be better than bare toes.

  “Well done,” said Luca.

  “Yeah,” Tris said, “and you can fuck off too.” But she said it too quietly for Luca to hear.

  CHAPTER 50

  Marrakech, Summer 1977

  Several years before she died Malika told Moz a fairy tale. It was the summer she turned nine and Malika told it without once looking at Moz, her eyes fixed on a distant line of clouds.

  Moz told the story to Jake and Celia as they all drove north in the VW campervan, the earth beyond their windows turning from red to yellow and finally to brown as they travelled the two hundred kilometres that took them to Casablanca and three seats on an Air Maroc caravelle to Tangiers, where a ferry to Alicante waited for them.

  It was a flat road and mostly straight, dotted occasionally with spindly cedar, larch and imported eucalyptus and it cut through the Middle Atlas, a mountain range so scrawny and underfed by the time the mountains met the Marrakech–Casablanca road that it barely merited the name.

  The fields along either side of the road were hedged with prickly pear and occasionally stone, the plots broken into smaller and smaller fragments as farms passed from fathers to sons and parcels of land were divided time and again.

  At this point Jake still intended to buy a house in Spain, although he changed his mind shortly after docking at Alicante when three gun-toting, green-cloaked members of the Guarda Civile, having ordered everyone out of the car he’d just bought, emptied Jake’s luggage onto the road, dismantled the seats and ripped the spare tyre from its wheel.

  A body search followed for each of them.

  That was when Celia announced she was going back to Cheyne Walk as soon as possible and Jake decided he might try Amsterdam instead. They had a short and bitter argument about who had responsibility for Moz.

  Jake lost.

  Moz told them Malika’s story when the VW was an hour outside Marrakech and Jake and Celia were still talking to each other. He told it because he hated them and because he knew they would not understand. The story began on the sixteenth day of Jumaada al Thamy in the year 1375 AH, which Jake and Celia knew as 1956.

  On that day, Monday 30 January, in a square near Bab Doukkala, three Arab stallholders poured petrol through the broken window of a racing-green Studebaker, the 1954 model. They were watched by a heavily veiled woman chewing on a dried fig and a small boy who hopped from leg to leg with excitement.

  Waving the boy and his grandmother away from the car, the eldest of the three men pulled a brass lighter from his jellaba pocket and lit a petrol-soaked rag he’d already tied to a stone, tossing the stone high in the air, so the rag flamed like a comet on its way down.

  So huge was the explosion that the small boy tipped backwards and suddenly found himself sitting in the dirt. For a second his bottom lip quivered and then he began to clap.

  At the other end of Derb Ali, in what had once been stables, a young Berber shouldered open a locked door. He did this as quietly as he could. Something of a rarity for Driss Mahmud, a man who liked to make his presence felt.

  Sultan Mohammed V had returned from French-imposed exile to declare himself King. On the morning in question, at 11.30, his old enemy Thami al Glaoui, eagle of Telouet, the black panther and mountain gazelle, the last great lord of the Atlas and Pasha of Marrakech, had died, having made profession of his faith.

  He was seventy-eight years of age, feared and revered in equal measure. A hero to many and a traitor to more. And with his final breath withered not only the Glaoui’s life, but the protection his reputation gave to those who had served him.

  “Hide me.” Driss Mahmud’s voice was jagged with fear, although one had to know the man to realize this.

  “Where?”

  He could hear contempt in Maria’s question, which was the first time she’d ever dared reveal such an emotion to his face. Her mother had been an esclave in the Glaoui kasbah as had her grandmother before that. The girl’s father was unknown, a man who’d given his unclaimed daughter little to remember him by but pale skin and green eyes.

  This room had been Driss Mahmud’s present to Maria. Not really his to give but that seldom mattered to the servants of Si Thami al Glaoui. All Driss had done was order a café to give up its storeroom and the girl had been living there ever since.

  She was fat with child, her breasts sore against the thin cotton of a cheap dress. Her head was bare, her hair untied and her forehead sweaty. Darkness was approaching but it brought only a shift in the sounds of the city. It was a bad night to be found with a servant of the old Pasha.

  “Hide me here,” said the man. “Say you’ve got a customer.”

  Maria slapped him then.

  And when she finally picked herself off the dirt floor, wiping blood from her lips, it was to walk past him to the storeroom door. “I don’t do that anymore,” she said, pulling aside the curtain.

  A single step brought Driss close, so close Maria could feel his breath on the nape of her neck and a sharpness against her skin. Everyone knew that Driss Mahmud carried a knife and on a night like this he might well be carrying his gun.

  Except there had never been another night like this.

  “In here,” Maria shouted, and would have shouted again but for the sudden hand over her mouth to ensure silence.

  “I should kill you,” Driss said.

  You should have killed me months back…The thought came and went, more wish than thought. Maria wasn’t good at considering her own emotions. Most of the time the girl found it hard to believe that what she felt might matter.

  Once, in the time of the big war, a fat foreigner had sat in a rattan chair on the terrace of the Pasha’s kasbah and said something that made the Pasha roar with laughter. They’d both been looking at a small girl scooping ice into a bowl when he spoke.

  “You.” The Pasha’s voice was low, surprisingly soft. And Maria realized she’d never dared listen to his voice before. “What’s your name?”

  She gave her mother’s village, her grandfather’s name and his job as one of the Pasha’s herdsmen. Maria wasn’t sure how else to answer. All of this the Pasha related to the foreigner in the stranger’s language.

  “So,” said the foreigner, “call her Mimi.” Or so one of the dancing girls reported afterwards.

  The Pasha stared at him.

  “Her hands,” explained the fat man. “They’re frozen.”

  “What was it you asked?” said the Pasha. “How much do I pay them?” He turned to the girl. “How much do you get paid?” he said.

  Maria looked at him, her eyes wide.

  The fat man in the rattan chair dragged on his cigar, blew out a cloud of smoke and turned to the Pasha. Whatever he said about her silence made the Pasha frown.

  “You.” He nodded to the girl. “Why do you work for me?”

  She had no answer to that either.

  When the Pasha glanced at Maria again it was to wave her away. So Malika’s mother picked up her bucket, which was actu
ally silver and made in Paris, covered it with a white linen napkin as she’d been taught and crept from the terrace.

  The next time anyone noticed her it was to offer her to a German industrialist. She was twelve.

  A month later Driss was told to deliver her to a brothel in the Medina. It was unlikely the Pasha even knew or cared that she was gone. Between the kasbah and the brothel, Driss stopped once to push her into a bricked-up archway, raise her dress and turn her to face the wall.

  Now he stood behind her again. In the room which he’d found for her. And though his life was in danger and the Medina full of men after people like him, Driss Mahmud paused for long enough to force one hand inside Maria’s dress and grip a swollen breast, twisting hard.

  “You won’t forget me,” he said.

  And as fear and a full bladder emptied themselves down Maria’s bare leg, Driss went, knife out in front of him, running at a half crouch like some wounded animal.

  “Here,” Maria shouted to no one in particular. “Over here.”

  A motorbike beam lit the night and bounced wildly off the alley walls. The owner left its engine running to keep the beam bright. “Where?”

  “Over there,” shouted Maria, and pointed towards a shadow which hugged a far wall, moving at a jagged run. “He’s one.”

  As the stolen 500cc Norton lurched forward, a second hunter sprinted from a side passage and swung himself onto the bike behind its rider. He carried a curved sword in one hand.

  “After him.”

  The order was unnecessary. The single-cylinder machine was already skidding down the alley, its headlight picking out Driss Mahmud. A blip of the throttle, a single slash and the antique blade had opened up the running man’s shoulder.

  “Go round again,” shouted the man with the sword and the bike slid to a halt.

  It might not be the worst cut their victim had taken, but there would be others and the wounded man understood this. The most intelligent thing he could do was anger his attackers so badly they killed him outright.

  “Fatah!”

  He was many things, Driss Mahmud. A coward was not one of them. Holding his knife in his one good hand, he watched the 500cc Norton turn in the alley and blinked as its headlight caught him in its beam.