Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  Syfax stared. All he could do at first was stare. And they stared back, some in terror, some in misery, and even a few in hope. “You don’t have any food at all?” He asked softly, his eye locking momentarily with those of a little girl clinging to her mother’s neck.

  “Enough for tomorrow, maybe.” It was a young woman who answered, short and slight, with close cropped hair. She rose to her feet beside the Calm Man and handed him a small boy, whom he held close to his chest. “We didn’t have much to sell for money for food in Port Chellah. It’s been slow going. We’ve been walking for two days now. I don’t know how much farther it is to the border.”

  Two days? It’s only taken me twelve hours to get here from Chellah. Syfax tried to speak, but an ache seized his throat and the words stuck. How far to the eastern border beyond the Atlas Mountains? Five or six days for a healthy man, but for this bunch? Two weeks? More? “Far. It’s a long way still from here.”

  The woman nodded. “We’ll make it.”

  No, Syfax thought, you won’t. “Maybe you don’t have to go that far. Maybe you can find better work in Arafez. Or even back in Meknes. You could be farmers right here in Marrakesh, if that’s what you want. You don’t have to leave the country to find work.”

  “Yes, we do.” The woman reached back to hold her man’s hand. “This place is killing us. All of us. We can’t do this anymore. We can’t be here anymore. Even if we could be fishers and farmers, our children would end up in the factories some day, somehow. They’ll run off to the city to get rich, and they’ll die in some accident, alone, forgotten. We’ve seen it happen to our friends, to their children. It doesn’t matter what we do, what we say. Sooner or later, the city kills everyone.”

  The major scanned the crowd of faces in the darkness, dappled by the deeper shadows of the leaves waving in the wind overhead. He said, “There’s always the army. The army was good to me.” They began to groan and mutter. “No, listen to me. My father worked the docks in Tingis all his life. We had nothing, but when I joined the army I got everything I needed. A home, a job, a future. You could have that, your children could have that.” His words were drowned in more muttering and vague curses against the army, and they battered about old stories of military experiments, expeditions lost deep in the Europan wastes, men and women slaughtered on the Songhai hills alone and forgotten because war had not been officially declared. “Well, I’m sorry you feel that way,” Syfax said to no one in particular. “But for your children’s sake, I’m asking you, don’t try to reach the border. Not on foot. It’s too far.”

  “So you say.” Angry Man was awake and alert, wiping the blood from his face and leaning against a tree. “Why should we believe you?”

  “Because I don’t want these kids to starve to death, you fucking idiot.” The words made the ache in his throat even worse as he glanced about at those children scattered around him, huddled in the dark forest. “Because there has to be some other way, a better way, for all of you. Think about it. You can’t get to Numidia on grit and will power. You need food and water. With no food you’ll be dead in a week, and with no water you’ll be dead in half that time. If you step up the pace you’ll get to Arafez tomorrow. I hear they’ve got plenty to give folks who’ve lost their jobs and their homes. The temples will give you food. You can stay there a few weeks at least, work on the road crews or the rail crews, and save up some food. And better shoes. You have to try. For the kids.”

  The young woman looked sharply at the little boy clinging to his father’s chest. “Maybe.”

  Syfax took a long, deep breath, wondering what else there was to say. He couldn’t think. His muscles were sore and a few dozen fresh bruises all over his body were starting to throb. His eyelids were growing heavy and the long road to Arafez still lay before him. “I need to go. I won’t send any police looking for you. Just don’t try to rob anyone. And think about Arafez. It’s only a little way up the road. You can get what you need there.”

  A few voices muttered and a few heads nodded. Syfax took several steps, backing away from the grim congregation in the dark grove. As he passed a short woman holding hands with two tiny girls, he had a sudden urge to grab the children and carry them all the way to the city himself, to put them into the hands of someone, anyone, who could feed them. And their mother. And their friends. If there had only been one or two, he would have done it without discussion, without even thinking. But forty?

  Long years on the Songhai border had taught him not to play the numbers game. Not to calculate. Not to weigh two evils against each other. Just do your duty. He trudged past the two tiny girls and found his horse where he left her at the edge of the road. He mounted, gave one last look at the trees hiding two score beggars and starving children, and he rode away.

  Chapter 28

  Taziri awoke with a gasp, her heart racing and her face dripping with sweat. The nightmare vanished before she could remember what it was, leaving her sitting in the dark massaging her fingers and scratching idly at the edges of the brace on her left arm and hand. The room still lay in deep shadows, striped by a few thin rays of lamplight that slipped around the curtains from the street in front of the bed-and-breakfast. The world was still dead asleep except for a few lonely voices echoing in the square outside.

  She crept out of bed and pulled the curtain back to watch three young men around a bench beneath the light of a lamppost. Two were sprawled with arms and legs thrown over the bench’s back. The third fellow had one foot up on the seat and he leaned forward as he talked to his half-conscious friends.

  Their voices, but not their words, echoed up to the window and Taziri had to settle for guessing at whether they were more happy or shocked at whatever it was that their friend was telling them. The two sleepers perked up, sat up straight, and began asking questions. The conversation grew louder, though no more intelligible for Taziri. A moment later, all three of them dashed away from the square.

  What are they up to? I never ran around the city in the dead of night at that age. There was barely time to sleep back then, between school and work. Kids these days.

  She wanted to fall back into bed, but it was the wrong bed. The right bed was far away, across miles and miles of empty plains and patchwork farmland, high on a hill above the harbor, in a little house just like all the other houses next to it. Except it was hers. Hers and Yuba’s. This was the second night, she realized. The second night she should have had with him and was now missing. And she was here, in an inn with a handful of strangers while Isoke lay dying or dead in some hospital, while Yuba slept alone, while Menna sat up in her crib babbling instead of sleeping.

  Their absence gnawed at her like a starving dog. With her head still half numb with sleep, she pulled on her clothes and slipped downstairs and out to the cold, empty street. She knew Arafez well enough and figured she knew where to go. She could find the walled airfield easily and a few other obvious landmarks, particularly buildings with bell towers and uncommonly large windmills perched on their roofs. There were only a few such sentinels rising above the roofline and she set out for the nearest one, hoping for a little luck.

  She crossed three large intersections before finding the closest building with a windmill, only to see that it was an electrician’s shop. Professional curiosity drew her gaze toward the window, but her feet carried her off down another road toward another, farther windmill spinning in the starlight. This too appeared to be a shop, though she could not guess what the name or the logo on the sign meant. Something fashionable, she guessed.

  As she wandered the streets with one eye on the shadowed machines rattling overhead, she became vaguely aware of some signs of life around her. She heard the patter of running feet a few streets away, and voices shouting, though she could not understand them. There would follow a long silence and then she would hear some other late night adventurers running nearby and calling into the night.

  The third windmill that she found sat on an empty warehouse roof, but the fourth one, n
early an hour’s walk from the inn, creaked atop a telegraph office and Taziri shuffled inside, out of the cold night breeze. A sleepy-eyed clerk squinted up at her from behind a book, his bushy white eyebrows waggling slightly. “Good evening. Or morning, I guess. What can I do for you?”

  “I’d like to send a telegram.”

  He nodded and pulled out a pad. “Address?”

  She told him the street name and number in Tingis, suddenly realizing how rarely she ever uttered them since there were no telegraph offices outside the country where she and Isoke usually flew. The words felt so alien compared to the familiar home they marked.

  “Message?”

  She wanted to say something strong, poetic, romantic, memorable, but her brains were tired and frozen. “Everything is fine. Sleeping in Arafez. Still helping marshals. Please check Isoke in hospital. Be home soon as able. Miss you. Love you both.”

  The clerk read it back to her and the words sounded hollow and wooden and wrong, but they were all she could think of. She paid him and watched him tap out the words one letter at a time on the little telegraph mounted on the table behind the counter. Then she stood there as he went back to his book and she stared at the telegraph, half hoping a reply would come clacking back through at any moment. But it sat very still and silent, and with her hands buried in her jacket pockets she shuffled back toward the door.

  “Seems like a lot of kids are out running around tonight.” She glanced back at the clerk.

  He didn’t look up. “I know. I’ve been hearing them at it all night. Some went by a few minutes ago. I think they said something about a fight. Seems like there’s a fight every night, somewhere or other.”

  “Oh.” Taziri stared through the glass at the dark buildings across the way, and then she stepped outside to begin the long walk back to bed, but before she had moved out of the light of the telegraph office’s front windows she stopped short. There were several young men standing in the middle of the street less than twenty yards up the road. They were talking. Laughing, yelling, pushing each other. Taziri felt her gut tighten.

  One of the youths shouted, “Hey!”

  There were no streetlights nearby and she could not really see them, but Taziri knew they were yelling at her. “Hey yourself.”

  “Hey, you, give me some money. Come on, I want to send a telegram.” The youths laughed and started coming forward. “Hey, seriously, give me some money. Come on, just a little, so we can get something to drink.”

  “I don’t think so. It’s late. Why don’t you all head home for the night?” Taziri rolled her fingers into sweaty fists in her pockets. Her left hand only made half a fist and the metal plate across her palm was freezing.

  “Nah, I don’t think we want to go home.” The young men spread out a little as they came closer, their empty hands dangling at their sides. They were all barefoot and dressed in loose clothes that dangled and flapped from their knobby shoulders and hips. “There’s some big fight down in the next district. We’re going to go take a look. You should come.”

  “No thanks.” Taziri buried the urge to start walking, to disappear into the darkness, to put distance between herself and them. She thought of the old man sitting in the very well lit office just behind her and wondered if he could see her. “You go on without me.”

  “Okay, okay, but give us some money. Come on. You’re like, a firefighter, right? Government job. Big money. Come on, help us out.” He held out an open hand.

  Taziri felt a sharp little shove from another one standing to her right, a little push to her shoulder, and she looked over to see a leering, sleepy-eyed skeleton of a boy edging closer to her. They were all edging closer, all grinning slightly. “Back off. Go on, get out of here.” Taziri backed up to the telegraph office’s door and grabbed the handle behind her back. They kept coming forward, and then the heavy one to the left lunged at her.

  Taziri jerked the door open so that the youth’s hand collided with the heavy wood, and as the young man recoiled and swore, Taziri slipped back inside and locked the door.

  “What are you doing? Don’t bring them in here!” The man at the desk was fumbling at a locked cabinet behind the telegraph machine. “This is expensive equipment. I can’t have a bunch of drunks breaking in and wrecking everything!”

  “Drunks?” Taziri stared out the window at youths, who were now arguing loudly and shoving each other just outside the door. A body crashed into the door. Twice. “There’s no alcohol in Marrakesh!”

  “Just because it’s illegal doesn’t mean it’s not here, miss. Hellan wine, Songhai rum, Espani ale. My God, where have you been?” He yanked the cabinet open and began shoving his papers and tools into it. When the cabinet was full, he locked it and stood up. “So now what? Are they leaving?”

  “Not exactly.” Taziri looked back at the shadowy figures in the street and grimaced. “Get back!”

  “Why?”

  A hail of muddy cobblestones crashed through the two large windows at the front of the office, spraying glass shards across the room. From her position behind the solid oak door, Taziri didn’t feel a thing, but she heard the old man gasp and hiss, leaving her to wonder if he was injured or only startled. He had ducked behind his desk out of sight. With the windows gone, the shouting from the street became louder and clearer.

  “Get out of here!” Taziri hollered as she looked around the office for something, anything that looked like a weapon. Instead she saw paper, pencils, a cash register bolted to a table, and a handful of flimsy looking chairs. And the telegraph. She dashed to the back of the office and moved behind the telegraph as the first two youths climbed over the gaping sills into the room.

  After digging through her jacket pockets, Taziri got a heavy leather glove on one hand and her utility knife in the other. She cut the wires screwed into the side of the telegraph and then pulled a small spool of bare wire from her inside jacket pocket.

  “What are you doing?” The old clerk drew back beside her, a short length of pipe in his hands. “You broke the telegraph!”

  The two ruffians paused to brush at the broken glass clinging to their clothes. Taziri raised an eyebrow at the clerk as she quickly twisted the telegraph’s leads onto her spare wire spool. “Where did that pipe come from?”

  “The cabinet. I keep it there, you know, just in case.”

  “Well, you won’t need it. Watch this!” She hurled the spool across the room at the closest youth. The wire spiraled through the air, drawing a coppery corkscrew as it flew, and the charged line fell across the young man’s arm. He shivered slightly and brushed the wire away.

  “What?” Taziri stared at the leads in her hand. “Why didn’t that work?”

  The old man groaned. “It’s a telegraph wire. It uses almost no current. You can’t shock a person with that. It’s the safest thing in the world.”

  Taziri frowned at the wire, the youths completely forgotten. “But I cut the…oh, wait a second.” She bent down to the plate in the wall where the wires emerged into the room. “Well, here’s your problem. There’s a resistor on the house current.” She grabbed the small black cylinder soldered to the plate and ripped it off.

  Screams filled the room, very brief nonsensical screams. Two men were shaking and spitting and falling to the floor stiff as boards just as a third one learned what it feels like to have a lead pipe swung up between his legs. The last two men still near the windows screamed a few obscenities of their own and leapt back out into the dark street.

  Taziri pulled the wires apart and glanced around. “See, that’s what was supposed to happen the first time.”

  The clerk managed a wry smile, but kept his pipe at the ready as he backed away from the men on the floor.

  Within a few minutes, the telegraph office was crowded with bleary-eyed neighbors helping to clean up and two police officers grappling with the three stunned youths. Taziri loitered in the back of the room just long enough to jam the resistor back into place where it stuck with only a slight wo
bble, and then she screwed the wires back into the telegraph with only a slight worry that she might have gotten them reversed in all the excitement. After giving a brief and anonymous statement to the police, she slipped out the front door and plunged into the cool night air.

  The city rose around her dark and still, unchanged by the violence at the telegraph office, oblivious to the small pocket of light and life around that one building. Taziri strode along with a charge in her step. She felt sharp and alive, all traces of weariness wiped away. She stared around at the windswept streets and shops and houses with eyes chilled by the night air, seeing everything with uncanny clarity.

  But the feeling faded. The longer she walked, the less she wanted to be out walking. She thought of bed, she thought of home, she thought of her little girl smiling her toothless smile. Her long strides grew shorter and slower, and she hunched down in her flight jacket, grateful for the weight and warmth of the leather and metal.

  She turned a corner from one empty street onto another and heard a small sound. An animal sound, somewhere just ahead and to one side. The street was empty, but she heard the sound again, nearer and clearer. A sob. A gasp. A whisper. A slap.

  Taziri jogged on up the road glancing every which way for the source of the noises, and she found it in a wide alley between two row houses. It was a side lane, half covered in flower pots and little garden statues arranged around the several house doors that opened onto this private space. And a few feet from where Taziri was standing, a man shoved a woman up against the wall, her sleeve torn and hanging on her elbow. He had one hand on her throat and the other wrapped around a dirty brick. Taziri heard her whisper, “Please, don’t.”

  In that instant, Taziri felt every shred of muscle in her body burning, her blood roared in her ears, and her brain boiled in adrenaline. She burst into a sprint and smashed her armored forearm into the man’s head. He stumbled back a step and let go of the woman, but not the brick. Taziri slipped her right arm up around the man’s neck and wrenched him farther away from the woman. Then she placed the cold metal of her arm brace against the other side of the man’s neck and squeezed. His right arm was trapped against her body, rendering the brick useless, but his left fist came around and connected with her shoulder, then her ribs, then her temple, but still she held on. With both arms twisted around the man’s throat, Taziri bore down with all her strength until the gasping, whimpering man began to flop about like a dying fish. He shuddered and fell limp.