Among You Secret Children

by Jeff Kamen

  It lay below them like a smouldering invocation of lamplight, with smoke-shrouded glimmers pulsing murkily behind the high surrounding walls. Moth stared down upon it with fearful longing, for it seemed as though the streets ran molten down there, bubbling like the aisles of a diabolical foundry. Out beyond the harbour walls he saw the faint lights of fishing boats, pale flecks afloat on the sea’s black glittering. Whilst he and Paget stood studying this scene, Kol came trotting up towards them from the pollution of the lower road.

  ‘Remember, child,’ Paget was whispering, ‘not all men sleep at night. Nor for that matter are all men indeed men. Take heed of this, for the Fraternity has enemies of every nature and its mark is clearly upon us now. In both word and deed we must learn to conceal ourselves from their eyes. We must use every cunning, do you hear?’

  Moth nodded at him, watching as Kol came into view, raising a lantern. ‘Did you see him, Kol?’ he said. ‘D-Did you get the herbs?’

  ‘Quiet, child,’ Paget hissed, ‘did I not want you thus? Invisible keepers abound. They watch us, they inform, they spy on us and sell our secrets. Our Fraternity loves silence at all times, and we must be covetous of it.’

  ‘We’re in,’ Kol panted. ‘Done it. Bastard robbed me though.’

  Paget leant forward vulture-like, beaming. ‘Indeed, and how soon the fertile embrashe of commersh becomes a tushle of clawsh.’ He tapped his mouth. ‘In vast summary — well done, Kol.’

  ‘Alright, let’s go.’

  ‘A very moment if you please, for a question emanates.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Where, pray, does our parcel enter this domain?’

  ‘Near the harbour. He’s gone to get some chains or something.’

  Paget went forward from the cart, clicking his nails. ‘… Or something?’

  ‘Well how the fuck do I know what —’

  ‘Or something? Mr Kol, if the Cage returns to the earth with more than a jolt more than a little knock more than a gilded whisper, I can assure you I will press my case for justice to the squishing limits.’

  Moth went weakly forward. ‘Paget?’ he croaked. ‘I know what you said, but I need my herbs. Ask him. I don’t feel well.’

  ‘Child, I will tell you one last time. Learn to seal your mouth this night or you will discover the meaning of splendid anger from the highest places.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake. We ready or what?’

  ‘We are ready, Mr Kol, the moment you can guarantee its safety.’

  ‘We’ll be fine. It’s all paid for.’

  Paget stood with his hands on his bony hips and exhaled. The lamplight dipped and fluttered. In the distance there arose the faint scream of gulls.

  ‘Very well, Mr Kol,’ he said. ‘Then let us proceed.’

  They trundled the cart downhill, keeping to a path running parallel to the dim panoply of camplights where the vagrants lived, and from where clouds of steam and smoke came wafting amidst a taut seething of stridulations. Insects tore wildly around the night, drawn to the flames and dung and cooking smells.

  From here they altered course, turning towards the sea, passing over rough stones and cratered open ground where the cart leapt and crashed about and where Paget stalked forward hissing and gesturing furiously as he guided them towards flatter terrain ahead. Soon the stench of the camps diminished and the city walls began to rear. Paget led them thereafter to the unsettled line of the shore, and before long the sand underfoot grew wet, slippery with black weeds. They were forced to haul the cart along with ever greater force in order to advance, and at times all three had to gather behind a wheel to prise it free of muck. They went on through one shallow creek after another, through pools afloat with fish carcasses and human sewerage. In the lamplight they saw the stained rags of clothes and anonymous lumps choked with bladderwrack and on several occasions there was a scurrying at the light’s dim perimeter as hordes of vermin fled from them with devilish backturned eyes. On they went, Paget raging and kicking at the rats and the other two heaving their way through a thick and stinking sludge and Moth scarcely able to breathe in it. He bound his face with cloth and heaved at the rough wooden tongue in his grip and did all he could to drag the cart along.

  Shortly afterwards, they stopped to rest. Moth stood wheezing, and when he looked out, it seemed the waves had retreated a long way along the curving harbour walls. He tried not to imagine them returning. After consulting waspishly with Kol, Paget led them across another field of draining rockpools clogged with excrement and rotting junk. By now, the walls they sought to overcome stood darkly before them, tall stone vaults crowned with an aura of tarnished bronze. The cart lurched from side to side but they held fast and managed to haul it through thin streams running from various gridded outlets along the base of the fortifications, a place where on other nights the effluent of storm drains might spew out with a roar, but on this night ran at a sulphurous trickle. ‘Damn you, Kol,’ Paget snapped, as the cart nearly overturned again, ‘what manner of brainless houndling would have us yank to buggery the very thing which ...’

  He fell quiet at the sound of a shrill whistle. They halted, looking up. A lone figure was leaning out through the crenellations, waving its arms. Moments later a dark coil of rope dropped down the walls, the tail striking the ground with a splash.

  ‘Haste, gentlemen, haste!’ Paget cried excitedly, and they hurried on with the wheels clattering across the worn apron extending from the base of the walls and stationed the cart where the rope had landed. They wedged large stones under the wheels, then set about unloading their cargo, unstrapping the glider first in order to get to the Cage. As items of luggage were pulled away to make room for the operation, Paget handed Moth the rope’s end and ordered him to climb up and pass it through the ring.

  ‘Ah ... what ring?’

  ‘At the top, damn it. Kol, help him, and take these damnable bundles away.’

  Kol came forward muttering and helped to clear the area of obstructions. Moth climbed up, and using a crate to stand upon, he reached to the top of the wrapped structure and groped between the drapes until he felt it, right at the apex. The ring was large and heavy, made of iron, and he fed the rope through and fastened a knot and pulled it tight. A rich stale odour reminiscent of faeces and urine was wafting through the dusty material, and as he fastened a second knot he had to fight not to gag. ‘Are ... are you sure there’s no enemy inside it?’ he panted.

  ‘Enemy? What wittering is this?’

  ‘There’s a smell,’ he croaked. ‘It-it smells nasty. Is it … is it okay?’

  ‘Nonsense, child. To the connoisseur, all smells are exotic. The nose is the very home of ecstasy. The holiest of holies.’

  ‘But it stinks, it’s like …’

  ‘Kid’s right,’ muttered Kol. ‘We should’ve changed the tr—’

  ‘That will do, thank you, Mr Kol. The child is referring to our location, that is all. Our cargo is a thing of monumental value, not to be mistaken for a common lavatory.’

  Covering his face, Moth turned and began to climb down.

  ‘Now where’s he going?’

  ‘Boy? What do you do?’

  ‘I’ve finished, Paget. It’s all tied up.’

  ‘But you need to test it, boy! Don’t let them pull it away without testing it!’

  Scrambling back up again, he tugged at the rope until Paget was satisfied. Soon afterwards the rope tautened. They saw the slack being taken up by three or four figures leaning out of the shadows.

  ‘Down, boy, down. Quickly. Leave them to their work.’

  As he jumped to the ground, he saw the structure leaning at an angle. Already they were lifting it. A foul black gruel trickled sluggishly from one corner and then it swung away from the cart and ascended dripping, rotating slowly as it went.

  High above them the figures sawed furiously back and forth and the structure rose high into the night. As it came in contact with the walls it grated a couple of times, and then the figures pulling at
the rope seemed to steady it, using poles and hooks to guide it through the final stages of its journey. A minute later, it was tipped at an angle against the sill of the wall and then it disappeared.

  Paget clasped his hands. ‘The Cage has risen,’ he said in a hushed tone, and in silence they loaded the glider along with their other parcels and began to pull the cart back across the wasteland.

  Eventually they came in prospect of the city gates, the crown of the external archway painted with a lone white star. Having paid already, Kol went ahead of them, and they watched as he approached the torchlit entrance. Following with the cart, they could see the profiles of sentries behind heavy black gates of wrought iron. ‘Remember, child,’ Paget whispered, ‘it takes little to become a stranger in this world, but equally very little to get noticed. Go forth with your lips sealed and precious herbs await you.’

  The sentries observed their approach with ambivalent interest. They carried swords at their belts and some held their weapons unsheathed. Seated on benches along the flickering inner walls were other recruits, talking and drinking together, sharpening blades. There was a squeak of grinding metals, and as the outer gates were drawn open, a crop-haired woman and two unshaven men came forward signalling for them to wait where they were.

  ‘Dressmakers,’ Paget hissed. ‘Costumiers. Say nothing unseamly.’

  With Paget handling the questions, they paid and went through. Gripping a tongue apiece, they pulled the cart between the dim and torchlit walls of a tunnelled archway. The sentries came and went as they progressed and Paget whispered caution all the while. Then the inner gates were closed behind them and they were trundling over straw-covered ground with a view of low shuttered shopfronts where people sat playing cards in the febrile light of candles and lanterns. The smell of choking summer drains and boiled vegetables was thick in the air and Moth looked about with his face still heavily wrapped, marvelling at the runic depths of the streets.

  Kol stepped out of the shadows with a wary grin.

  They halted the cart and Paget nodded stiffly. ‘Well, man, well?’ he said. ‘Is everything in order?’

  ‘Seems alright. Anyone following?’

  Paget checked over his shoulder. The tall framed gates stood shut and the handful of sentries camped on the benches were sitting sleepily. He turned back again, scanning windows and doorways. ‘Which way?’ he said.

  ‘Down here,’ said Kol, leading them away to the shadows. Ahead, a dishevelled figure appeared, coughing, and following him down an unlit street, they ventured deep inside the smoky labyrinth.

  Chapter 75 — The Merchants

  The hills gave way to a chain of lakes where grey dust and lonely winds passed through and little else. Here the seas washed all the way to the road in places, leaving lean bridges and crooked isthmuses of land their only means of continuance much of the way along.

  They parted ways with their mule in the yard of a young farrier who as part of the trade supplied them with a strong young pony. He patched up their wheels so well that they passed through his gate with the cart close to bouncing on its padded felloes and Jaala having to hold the skittish creature back with firm words and tweaks of the reins until it seemed to understand what she wanted from it. Radjík was firmer still with the pony when it was her turn, but when they stopped she spent all her time talking to it, stroking it lovingly, walking it up and down to accustom it to her presence.

  A week went by. The rising land was hot and very dry and often they’d see scrub fires glowing in the hills that burned all night through, the world hanging ethereally in the grey dissolve come morning. The few homesteads they saw were whitewashed and many stood empty and derelict. Various forms of cactus studded the ridges, standing against the dawn like lobed antennae. In one place, where great stands of red-topped cacti grew, they passed a colony of troglodytes who stared out from their caves and waved armed bows at them and hollered as they passed, although none fired a shot.

  The days passed slowly in these southern lands, and between the hill settlements they came to on occasion they found little but rugged wilderness. They trundled over the dry bones of people or beasts unrecognisable to them, passing thickets of a vicious white gorse that would pierce their feet like knives, shred their skin to tatters, were they to walk astray. On they continued, often on foot as they negotiated dangerous cracks and holes, heading deeper into the land’s vast silence.

  Sometimes oncoming vehicles would appear out of nothing, out of sheets of quaking void. Whip-like, tall wheels aquiver; strange objects that warped and floated and hung above the burning road until they seemed to loom out from the space around them, sucking back their shadows. In a long rattle and kick of dust the occasional hand or a wrapped head would appear, and then the vehicles would be gone, the women carrying with them the noise of the travellers’ departing and with it the dry click of hooves, the arid creak of wood and iron.

  And always the stillness would return.

  The map indicated a run of settlements ahead, and they were looking forward to building up their supplies and meeting with other people; only to be disappointed. The new terrain as they entered it was unpromising. They drove past ashen slopes and crumbling fields where the empty watercourses lay split like slabs of onyx. Where fine ash drifted over the pitted concrete beds of who knew what perished structures, the dust rolling through like smoke. Everywhere appeared deserted. They could stop in the road for hours and see no other life form, see nothing stir.

  Now and then they would head for a house or village they’d seen from the road, but often upon arrival they’d discover them to be abandoned, whole communities fallen to destruction. The few people they came across told them directly, or implied with their gestures, that the earth held nothing to sustain them now, the younger generation having sought new lives for themselves in Durs, or in other settlements to the north. Some said the best days had long passed. They rarely saw children out here, and a kind of weary sadness hung over the land, as if aware it lay unwanted now, no longer loved by history.

  It seemed to Jaala that the thin strand of life along the coast had already broken, and that the homesteads they were calling at were no more than dry tendrils snapping with distance from the swollen pod of the city. Nothing here was fertile, nothing here able to perpetuate itself beyond the moment. Searching for a well in one such derelict outpost, she stood alone in drapes of cloth and looked about the empty square. Nothing, just bleached walls and windblown doorways. On a rooftop a few crows alighted. She went on, spotting a low brickwork turret. A dusty board of hide covered the top, weighted down by stones. She lifted it, and in those rheumy depths there rasped the leaves of a shrub which had rooted there in the damp and which had died. She saw a scaly head retracting; a lizard’s.

  She wandered round to the little cemetery to check for clues as to what had happened, but the headstones were without dates or explanation. Only names were carved there: Eva, Alexi, Moritz. She looked in at some doorways she’d missed before, then returned to the cart, where Radjík was sitting with the map spread across her lap. ‘Nothin?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing.’

  Radjík nodded.

  They set off again, and late in the day went walking along a deserted shore. One of many such abandoned gulfs in that region, as if the world was theirs alone, a place born of a song that was not of man, but what had given rise to him, a primal song of grit and crystalline hardship and burning solitude. They kicked idly through the shallows, the dark hot sands, then stopped for a while to look around themselves, the only living things among that epoch’s remains. Finding in the grit crescents of plastic and glass. Colours of pearl and copper and roasted cochineal. Aqueous blues. They watched the currents tussle out at sea, where a series of huge funnels stood rusting, eaten with holes and patched white with salt. They looked like giant seashells.

  They watched them without speaking. As if silence was the only proper condition there. Beyond the caustic rim of land, the sea lay incandescent and sk
y-filled and without horizon.

  They drove on again at daybreak, travelling deeper into their lives. The high pinnacle of summer extending through the hours like one long suspended headnote. They stopped more often now. Eating beans, drinking stalky tea. Radjík would usually sit with her reading exercises, or whittle wood, Jaala often pausing to watch her, the father’s skill apparent in those hands as the girl scraped and carved and the little figures took on a life of their own. Then she’d return to her writing, making notes in a trance-like whir of cicadas; their tense monotony. All things subject to that endless heat.

  Writing of the other women’s lives, their histories and what she’d learned from them; writing of the land’s dereliction she’d witnessed; of a people rootless and long weary. Grasping. Their dreams dead in their eyes. Drifters from the dying hinterlands come to find they were one more group of many displaced by ruin and drought.

  Writing of a love that had died before its time; and of how in all deaths there was a haunting, just as the winds haunted the skies. She thought perhaps this was just the way of things, for in a world where sentience might be born of molten rock, what might be born of the creatures that had sprung from it? Creatures for whom thought was a mere plaything, a means to wild and uncharted ends.

  In the still heat and quiet she watched the geckoes dart, climbing with their tiny transparent hands. Hands like her child’s, so tiny and cold and innocent. Hands of a martyr.

  Peace, she wrote, peace before everything, even before reason.

  She willed deep stores of it to fill her like a sea.

  ~O~

  Coming down from the deserted backcountry they noticed smoke in the trees, and followed it to find wagons pulled up alongside a village trough.

  As they drew up, they saw snatches of cloaks disappearing beneath a large floating canopy tied as a shelter between the wagonroofs and the trees. An old woman in local dress beckoned to them in a friendly manner and Jaala smiled back. ‘Don’t forget the skins,’ she said to Radjík, and took a couple herself as she got down. They’d not seen such a gathering of people in some time, and were surprised and pleased to find not just the usual kind of roadcrew mixing with the inhabitants, but a few women and a handful of children as well. On approaching them Jaala stopped, but it was not at the sight of them, intriguing though they were in their tall hats and flowing robes, but at something she’d noticed above the cooking smells: a smell that held her spellbound, unable to think straight as the scratchy images rolled across her mind. A smell that sent her drifting to a land of ancient summers, the life of a girl turned woman turned leader, forever running underground ...