by Claire North
He waited for me, studying the intricacies of my soul, and when I was a metre from him, gestured at me to sit.
I sat, first on my haunches, then cross-legged as he did, and for a while we remained there, studying the nuances of each other’s soul. Sometimes he spoke, the easy truth on his lips, a thing that might have been compulsion or might simply have been the habit of his trade. But his native speech was not English, and he had no particular interest in my language, so he poured out the truth of my nature in a chatty, impenetrable tongue as I listened to the truth of his heart beneath the sounds.
The truth of his heart was much like the truth of any man. There were things he regretted, prides he clung to, resentments he harboured and that did him no good. He had been lonely for a while, after his mother died, and then he had decided that human company was overrated anyway, and was now almost entirely incapable of meaningful human interaction, other than speaking the truth. He offended many people greatly when he spoke, and didn’t care. Truth had no need for tact. He sometimes ate poorly, sometimes ate well, had stolen in the past to survive, wasn’t sure if he believed in the power of the Rainbow Serpent, thought that many ngangkari were bumbling idiots out to have a comfortable life, though he’d met a few who definitely had a certain something about them he had to respect. Truth had worn away most absolutes from him like sand grazing down skin, leaving only the walking, the rising and setting of the sun, new experiences and old paths, and the choices he made today.
He was not impressed by me; he was not unimpressed either. His initial fascination at meeting me was quickly tempered by the realisation that I too was human, with a human beating heart, and now there was only the truth of who we were, sitting in this place, watching each other’s souls. Anything more – like or dislike, fear or hatred – struck him as a monumental waste of time. Only this moment, and this truth, mattered.
And then it was done.
He stood with a nod, having gleaned from me all he desired, and I stood too, and half bowed awkwardly, not sure what thanks I could give to a man whose language and culture I did not know, and he understood the gesture, and smiled a dazzling grin, and turned away, and kept on walking.
Four days later, I reached Perth, and looked at the wide sea and the iron ships of the great white men, and remembered a thing in my soul that I thought had been lost when Margot fell in New York: let it burn.
Let the world burn, so that the truth may come.
Let it all burn.
Jarli had seen that in me, and through him I had seen it reflected in myself. And it was good.
I had just enough savings from my medical work to pay for passage to Singapore, and by the time the creaking timbered vessel set out, a relic of a bygone day crewed by rogues and smugglers, Langa was only a few hours behind, and I stood with my face to the wind and sang out the truth of men’s hearts, and found it, for a few moments, glorious, sacred and free.
Chapter 60
From Australia I headed north, and for the first time in a long while I did not fear my shadow.
I travelled at a leisurely pace, and everywhere we made harbour I proffered up my medical services for a reasonable fee, and found plenty of patients willing to be told the truth of their condition. Not that they had been sinful, and that was why their husband died; not that the blood of a cow or the scales of a fish or a dip in sacred salts might cure them, but that this was their predicament and perhaps they might die, and perhaps they might live, and that was the truth of the matter. In places where the young ate the powdered skulls of their ancestors served with pig and fish; in grand mansions where crystals could heal you of the blackening of your blood; in the bazaars where nothing was so special as cinnamon bark and the blood of a crocodile, I spoke truth, and even where it was not well received, for the most part it was believed. Some, of course, some always run from the truth, to opium and quackery, to a promise of an impossible cure at the cost of all they have. But now that I was remembering how it felt to be a truth-speaker again, my words rang in the hearts of men, a welcome and familiar song, even if it was a lament.
And for the first time in a long while, I found myself with a destination.
I forged new papers, new names. I became the Frenchman I met in Guangdong, stealing his name and story to bluff my way into the parlours of wealthy men. I was the American arms dealer come to Tokyo to offer the latest in high-calibre rifles; the British diplomat stricken with malaria, yearning for quinine, whose brow I wiped at the height of his fever in Rangoon. I dined them, treated them, listened to the truth of their hearts, stole their names and through this means bluffed and bartered my way into courthouse, palace and colonial manor. Theft came easily to me, and there was not a trick I could not call, not a gambler I could not outmanoeuvre with Langa at my back. But most of all, I travelled to gather information, picking at the secrets that I had not been able to pull apart when I simply ran away.
I headed west, sweeping through northern India in a haze of lies, double-dealing and quiet, cordial larceny, changing my identity every other day. It was a gamble, but if the Nineteen were coming for me then I would give them a chase worth the name. Langa gave me the truth men wanted to hear, let me play the drunken fool or the wily politician without a blink, drawing the hearts of others into my own. For a little while I loved my shadow, and whispered to him in the night that finally I was working in his service.
In India, I had my first real success.
Chapter 61
Sights seen through a stranger’s eyes.
In Delhi, what British architecture there was had been put in piecemeal, as if unsure of its own footing; yet every palace abutted onto a rookery of crooked buildings that leant on each other like a line of dominoes about to fall. In some streets, brilliant colour burst out in greens, reds, purples, yellows and oranges, in sacks of saffron, turmeric and indigo brought to trade; fruits of every size and shape, tough shining skins and rich, dripping juices that crystallised in the hairs of thieving monkeys. In others, the only colour was dusty bark-grey. Grey dust beneath the grey toes of the grey old men who watched and tutted and found nothing that pleased them. Grey walls of grey houses; grey seeping into the rags that passed for clothes for the children who grew old there. Grey that had not seen rain for a very long time.
A Parsi businessman in a quiet hotel stands before the mirror every night and recites, “She stood upon the balustraded balcony, inexplicably mimicking him hiccuping, while amicably welcoming him in.”
He’s edging a little closer to sounding like he went to Eton. When he does, perhaps then he’ll be treated with respect.
A mission school where the children sat in blue sailor uniforms and recited the names of Tudor kings and the odes of Shakespeare; a widowed wife sees through the open window a devout Hindu man, who can contract and expand each muscle across his abdomen like he’s shaking out a bedsheet. She recites a quick prayer, and does not look away.
Endless plains of unbroken yellow; forests vanishing into busy, howling, chittering darkness, where at night the elephants played and the monkeys fought for yellow fruits. Buffalo bored of cracked fields; a stone bearing ancient laws of wise kings, which even the British hadn’t dared tear down.
Wise men, sitting naked on a rock, hair and beard become their new clothes, who the people tolerated and occasionally revered, despite the fact that their wisdom was rarely to the point on matters of the monsoon, animal husbandry, the price of tea or the cultivation of jute. One man, who has loved both men and women, declares that love is the key, and the British tell him to wear clothes and be civilised, the fool!
“I know the truth of all men’s hearts,” I explained. “I am followed by a shadow that kills the ones I love. Do you know anything about this?”
The wise men upon their stones considered this a while, conferred among each other, nodded at some ideas, rejected others, then one delivered their verdict.
“Have you tried fresh air and vigorous walking?”
And finally, at the end of it all
, Saira, one last time.
Chapter 62
I… Langa is… there are things that are…
Sister Ellis, you have been… kind. The truth of your heart is nothing to be ashamed of. It is not the job of a truth-speaker to pass judgement, but you have judged yourself and found yourself wanting. Please know that you are… you are normal. Normal in your fears, your shame, your anxiety, your goodness and your pain. You are wholly yourself, wholly true, you are…
So I ask you, do not let Albert speak for a little while. There are questions he could ask that I would be compelled to answer, Langa is so near now it is hard to… to keep the truth from being… If he asks I will answer, and if he does, I will kill him.
I will kill him.
Do you understand?
Well then.
I knew where to find Saira. I had spent enough time looking into the truth of her heart to know where she would be. On the edge of the Thar Desert there is a range of red-rock caves where the widows go. Please don’t ask me where, it is… it is hard to… As they near the end of their lives, the widows who have grown too tired to outrun their shadow set out into the dunes of the desert, walking from cave to cave, oasis to oasis, until finally they are too weak to walk any more. There they fall; there their shadow comes. They think that by ending their days in this place, the shadow will take pity on them and spare any they might still love, having neither life, love nor death to catch in its darkness as it approaches, only the endless dust.
Saira had gone to the caves, not for death, but for wisdom. The secrets of her order were scratched with nail and daubed in blood in the furthest shadows of the darkest places, ancient tales from the oldest times. Here the women learnt the intricacies of their curse, but now, of course, there were almost no women left. This new century was taking them away, binding them in new laws and new ways, just as readily as Albert was pulling out their brains.
She had escaped his reach only through the grace of her shadow. It had finally become a blessing, the friend she had been told for so long it was meant to be; a gift of the gods. I had betrayed her at Hideo’s feet, but she was smarter than the British, and knew how to hide. It was only a day away from her when I found her, sitting on a yellow rock beneath the thorny marwar tree, wrapped in rags and bone. I took a long time to reach her across the cracked, rocky earth. She watched me all the way, now smiling, now frowning, until finally I stood before her in a tiny sliver of barely-shade beneath the burning sky.
She had grown old beyond her years. Time had stripped hope from her heart, and left with it merely duty and the winding road.
For a while she regarded me, as I watched her, and our shadows came towards us across the baking sand. She knew all that I had done, and in her heart I saw the faces of the truths she had told and the shadows she had thrown, and knew that she despised herself too, despised everything she had become, and in this regard we were peculiarly united.
Then she held out a hand, and I took it, and without a word she led me into the shadows of the cave.
I think there will be no more truth-speakers in India now.
Too many fell, and the world changed.
The widows are gone, but their secrets live. In the caves on the edge of the desert, in the deepest, darkest corners where only the shadows remain, scratched into stone are the written truths of their order. The secret stories of the temples; the hidden histories of the women who died. The names of the shadows that followed them, and the journeys they travelled. Equations to track how long you have until the shadow touches you; precepts to learn how to keep your heart true in the face of the truths of other men. Stories of when the shadow came too near, and how a woman ran. Instructions. How to run. How to speak. How to protect a loved one. How to die in the desert. How to cast the curse upon another.
Saira taught me, knowing precisely what it was I would do with this knowing.
I thanked her with my heart, and we walked a while beneath the stars until the truth was on the edge of our lips, trying to break free. We climbed to the highest ridge and squinted across the desert, and she thought she saw her child moving through the blackness, but she imagined it, for it was far too dark to see, and I thought I saw Langa against the horizon, and this was also most probably a lie.
And finally, when the truth was unbearable against my lips, I asked my question and she replied.
Sometimes you need someone you love to tell you the truth of your heart.
When it was done, I held her close for a little while more, before she turned her face into the desert, and walked until the darkness consumed her.
Chapter 63
There will be no more truth-speakers in India.
Of Saira’s order, she knew of three who had been taken by the British. One had died on the operating table. Two were still living. I found the first in Delhi, following Saira’s suspicions. She was chained to a clean white mattress in a well-ventilated room in a house without ornament or flourish, guarded by men in civilian dress and a housekeeper with no tongue. The widow was unconscious, which was a blessing, drugged, a hollow in her skull. I planned my approach for three days, letting Langa drift nearer all the time. I listened to the hearts of her guards, the secret desires of her warders and keepers. I watched as they dragged shackled men to the door of the prison where they kept her, and waited the few hours it took for them to be pulled outside again, weeping and broken, their hearts plucked out, their confessions wrapped in wax cylinders beneath a warden’s arm.
A local outbreak of cholera gave me my excuse to knock on the door, all business and professionalism. I had the right papers and the right knowledge, passed myself off as a military doctor, knowing precisely what part I needed to play to appeal to the hearts of these men, knowing when they doubted me and when they believed that I spoke the truth, letting Langa guide my tongue, letting Saira’s knowledge guide my heart.
“It’s when your faeces become liquid, with an integrity that is not dissimilar from saliva – that’s when you know you’re really in for it!” I chirruped, and there questions about my business ceased.
I was watched by four men as I examined this broken woman, her shadow spinning in and out of her sleeping form. Her shadow was a teenage girl, head cracked and twisted to one side, and I felt for a while as if she watched me while I worked, this blackened ghost, knowing what I intended. I took the widow’s pulse, examined her one good eye, cleaned the weeping sores on her back, tested the reflexes in her knees and arms, and at last administered what I assured them was a vaccine, and was in fact a lethal dose of heroin, and on my way out ordered her keepers to boil everything twice and eat no raw vegetables until the epidemic was over.
Chapter 64
I am a murderer.
That is the truth of it.
Sister Ellis has seen this, many times. The man who lies screaming, screaming, screaming. The gas took his sight, but he can still feel the blisters, big as an orange, full of yellow pus, rupturing across his body. The poison will kill him, not in a day, not in two, but in a week perhaps, and the only thing that will stop his pain is if his heart gives out. This is truth. This is the inescapable truth that we all know, and the doctors turn their faces away and wonder which of their number will do what needs to be done and end this man’s torment. Someone else, of course. It must be someone else. We are not murderers. Nor are we kind.
The lieutenant lies dumb in his bed. He will never walk again. For the rest of his life he will constantly dribble a slow flow of pee out of what is left of his groin into cotton sheets, the acid turning the blasted skin to a red, raw flame. The loss of his sexual organs will change his body, his voice, his relationship with his fellows in ways that are both predictable and entirely unique. On some days he wishes he was dead; on others he resolves to live. He switches between these two states as fast as a butterfly’s wings. Perhaps now it is merciful to kill him. Perhaps now it is murder. Tomorrow he may beg to die. The day after he may rejoice in his loved ones. Each second is a new universe;
each minute is a new truth.
The doctor’s code is not perfect. Sometimes the harms you choose between are so damnable as to be indistinguishable from torment.
I travelled the world, looking for and murdering Albert’s truth-speakers wherever they were chained. It was harder after India, of course. There are only so many times a doctor with my features can bluff his way into a station of the Nineteen. After I killed the second widow, the Nineteen responded with a full-scale manhunt across the city and surrounding states, but the telegrams were too slow to beat the trains, and I was on the boat for Aden within a day.
I had to be careful.
I made money at the poker tables when Langa was near, reading every hand of my opponent like it was my own. Sometimes, when waiting for him to catch up, I played at doctor. I wandered the slums on the edges of the cities, and for a few shillings or a pennyworth of rice bandaged the sores on an old woman’s feet, or set the broken bone of a child who fell while running to the factory, avoiding high society and the claws of the Nineteen until my shadow was near again. It felt good. It felt like the right kind of fire.
Then, when Langa arrived, I trimmed my beard and scrubbed my shoes, and sat behind my newspaper at the clubs where the British went to lament their burdens, and listened to their hearts, and followed the interesting ones home, and listened to their dreams, until there was no shadow that I could not unpick. I came close to calamity many times, and did things I am ashamed of to survive. I did things that were… that are…
I am a murderer. That is also true.
In Cairo, following the heart of a man come to Egypt to escape an unhappy marriage and an even more unhappy mother – who still had no qualms about making her displeasure known with five letters a week, to which he only occasionally replied – I found my way to another of the Nineteen’s truth stations. The woman chained inside it was called Patigul, but her guards didn’t know that. They called her missus – “Missus wants feeding missus wants cleaning missus wants wants wants!” I spent a little too long gathering information, and Langa came too near too fast, a burble of truth spluttering from my lips, which I dispelled with a train ride to Suez. There I waited until he was almost on top of me, before rushing back to Cairo by the last train across a black desert squashed by an infinity of stars, dust and rock encasing the train as it squeaked and rattled towards the glow of the city.
