And now? I ask.
She looks as if she might not answer. I hear it all the time.
~ * ~
When the barge has pushed into the mist and the decks above are silent, I seek out Nog and we sit midship, wedged under the dinghy tarps out of a sleeting headwind.
His foot is bound with filthy strips of rag, and festering. I want him to see Galley Ma, who’s dressed my wounds many times and has kinder hands and better medicines than Crake; but as far as Nog is down the Family’s pecking order he is still one of them, and spits Pacifist!
I don’t argue: she’s told me the story. I peer up at the soot flurries from a floating immolation bier, and change the subject.
Nog, can you tell where one city ends and the next begins!
They are all one now, the towns and cities laced together, he replies. But the old names have been given to the locks.
How far do the canals extend?
As far as there is land north and south, I’ve heard. But I’ve only sailed the central stretch, old New South Wales, between the steel ports. Those Families that ply the most northerly and southerly reaches — the Sardars, Presidents and Muftis — I’ve never seen.
I wonder what he knows of Kosciusko. And west?
Nothing. An indefinite mist.
He shifts position, lifting his bandaged foot with both hands as a foul smell wafts, and taps the dinghy at his back. My escape, he says, if ever I should want it. His rheumy eyes look past the cargo crane and fo’c’sle winches to the Gatling gun niched at the bow, then fix on me. This whole ship is radioactive. We are radioactive.
What’s that mean? I ask, although the answer makes no difference.
He considers. Soon we’ll be deader than dodos.
I don’t ask him about dodos. Those of us born into the Grey Zone know we are living a madness. That our world is dying, and the Families are getting from it what they can.
From somewhere aft there comes an angry shout, the landing thwack of leather, a shrill scream: ship’s boy Moth — forever picked on by the crew — being punished for some petty misdemeanour.
I think of Aggi. Don’t you ever wish . . . she used to say, arms crossed about a body lean like a sapling as she stared into the mist. I would follow her gaze to where ships’ lights floated in fuzzy strings and shore beacons blinked. No, I’d reply. And it was true. I had no spirit for adventure, no fire for any challenge other than my owner, whose dangerous changeability — the beckonings and dismissals — kept me hooked. But in truth there was no one more precious to me than Aggi, and I was often afraid for her. Wishing, I warned, will only bring you trouble. And trouble came, in the form of a Shogun who took a liking to her features and tried to spirit her off the ship. In the fight that ensued the Shogun was killed, and so was Aggi, caught between blades.
The feud between the two Families has lasted a full year, and each night since poor Aggi was tipped dead into the canal I have dreamt a ship of ghosts with her leaning from the prow, hair flying, and I its frail, deluded helmsman led by min-min lights across the marshlands to the snowy sides of Kosciusko.
Nog eases painfully out into the sleet and stumps off to prepare for docking. Left alone, I bring the razor blade from my boot across my forearm and feel the satisfaction as it beads a bright living red. Many things the captain will command and I will bear the marks of, but this I do entirely for myself.
The scars and being captain’s companion sets me apart. Aggi never cared, and the privilege of the latter made me fast friends with Nog; but from the ship’s boys there has always been a reticence, as if those two things laid between us have made an uncrossable divide.
~ * ~
My captain has me on the long chain so I can reach all parts of the cabin as I wish. Her back to me, she is taking inventory with her second in command: a new deal struck with the Rajas, a ship’s boy maimed in a recent act of carelessness. I wonder that she can’t see their third, seraphim-bright and leaning both elbows on the table.
Aggi winks.
The lieutenant tells the hard news to his commander last. The Viscounts have begun a new campaign of mutilation against the Mukhtahs, he says, and her shoulders lift for a breath then drop.
I thought that ended long ago, she responds low-tone, and both are silent a moment, remembering.
Before the Eastern Industry Alliance was forged, the Families — Dukes and Barons, Earls and Emirs, Viscounts, Rajas and Mukhtahs just some — were forever at war among themselves, and developed a taste for it. When they began to mutilate each others’ children in an effort to champion their own line, most were left barren.
My thoughts are on the captain. She had never let me see her unclothed, and instinctively, I had always known why.
Her second takes his leave and she stares awhile unseeing at the door, then leans down to the shackle on the chair leg and begins to haul me in.
~ * ~
Late afternoon we moor at South Head for a stoning. A bleeder has betrayed her Family and aborted their child. I doubt she meant to, but that’s immaterial.
The captain and I climb the path to a high, solitary place clotted with mist and strewn with rocks. The Emirs are gathered in a wide circle, their accused crouched before them in her burial shroud. We take our places at the back of the crowd, being invited guests and this not our Family’s trouble. As a signal comes from one, a scythe of arms is raised and the first volley flies. The woman screams once, twice, then on and on, a lacerating wail above the sick thudding of stones.
I wipe my sleeve across my eyes as if some dirt has lodged there. I can’t be seen to sympathise. I sneak a look at my Baron beside me, nothing to betray her thoughts — except, perhaps, the up-down-up of her Adam’s apple and the white press of her lips.
The woman topples to one side, silent now, a foot released from the bloody huddle in the pooling stain from cloth to dirt. For her at last it’s over, but in my belly something forlorn and wild is rising: a serrated ache that tears from my stitching to my heart. I want to turn my head and puke, but for my captain I must contain myself or be punished for shaming her Family. The broken body is picked off the ground and carried to a pit at the side of the field. There she is dropped — so small, no more than rags — and a little dirt kicked in.
The captain goes to thank the Emirs for being included on their guest list, and to say she will be sure to return the favour when the Barons next have a hanging. Then we leave along the well-trod track back to our ship moored with others in the lock below.
Ma says the Barons dress like last century’s South Sea pirates; the other Families have quite different styles. We, their bonded, are generally attired in the cast-offs, and can tell on sight to which Family each belongs. And so it is with their punishments, which have become signature: stoning is popular with the Emirs and Mukhtahs, while the Barons favour hanging or decapitation, which at least is quick. The Rajas go for immolation, and the Viscounts and Dukes prefer public floggings where the agony is drawn out for hours. I often wonder how they find so many to punish. Are the canal cities still so chock-full of dissenters? Or is it that the Iron Families have found — like me — a cathartic pleasure in the ministry of pain?
~ * ~
Mornings I am sent to help Galley Ma. Of Torres Strait stock (home swept away long ago) she is large-boned and reassuring, queen of her kitchen. This morning she is both hands in the soy dough, squeezing it with soothing repetition. The progeny of pacifists, like her, used to have their left hand — the hand of darkness — sliced off; but Ma has two.
It was by Aditi’s grace, she says, that I was found to have a certain talent in the kitchen, and so kept both my hands.
Her forebears were among those who tried to keep the Iron Families from their trajectory to power. I ask again how she escaped the Kyoto Uprising, when all the rest were killed. She taps her nose, mysterious about her past. But once I overheard that she and the captain had agreements that went further back than my short life. And although she gladly takes the ro
le of stand-in for our own mothers, she seems perpetually ungendered: neither man nor woman, but something unnamed in-between.
As boys filter in from around the ship, she motions us closer. Those most recently bonded and still with keepsakes thumb failing palm screens that flicker with the likeness of their parents’ faces. I’d had one too, once; but it was tossed by Grake into the canal soon after I arrived onboard.
When we are settled — nine of us — around her workbench and fixed on her expectantly, she waves her arm towards the black socket of a porthole, and begins.
Today, let’s think of this as Venice, and us as gondoliers.
She describes that city of art built above canals, its floating white beauty trellised in light and eventually swallowed by the sea, and I peer out trying to imagine it as a barge girl floats past, his pale face illumined by the starboard navigation lights.
I gasp, and the other boys rush to look.
Veils drift, gossamer, about him; sequins dot his skin like tiny stars. I am reminded of the jellyfish that slop against the hull and levee walls at turn of tide.
Ma’s conversation takes a different tack.
It was the weathermen, she says, who envisaged this, our fogbound world, back when the skies still turned their daily blue and the sun kept us warm — so, of course, no one listened. The skies began to darken, bit by bit; but did any of us take special note the last day the red disc of the sun burnt unobscured above? Did we sear that hot image on our retinas so that afterward our memories could fill the lacuna in the sky?
She pauses a moment, a reservoir of sadness, then looks carefully around as if to record the geometry and colour of each of us. The inspection ends at Moth, fresh welts congealing above the collar of her shirt.
Ma slaps the dough aside to start on another piece. The day the landscape of our lives was set for change there should have been a warning sound: a siren, or a thunderclap. Instead the machinery of old divisions ratcheted soundlessly together as the Iron Families were united under one dominion. They have always paid heed to an angry and intolerant God, and so Kyoto was quelled by slaughter; but by far the worst of it was saved for the pacifists, who were an anathema to the Families’ way of doing business.
We boys sit hushed above the resting hum of the ship’s reactor and the faint clicking of the ion exchangers inching us along. The images of beauty — Venice, the sun reflecting off shiny cities edged with blue — chased away and we bereft, our minds turn to what else we’d lost.
Galley Ma takes pity on us and brings out her picture books. She lays them on her workbench and slowly turns the pages as we pore, goggle-eyed, over faded illustration plates.
Once, she says, you could dig in the soil and find a myriad creatures, or look to the sky and see the shapes of birds; but we lost them all — except the ferals — their frail perfection barely a memory now. We are left with fog and the structures of our own making: the canals and enough industry to build a hundred ships. But for what? What kind of future, here? Or perhaps the Families think to conquer other countries cleaner and more sane than ours.
Her tone carries a warning, but our thoughts are stuck on something else, another beauty.
Show us the thing, we implore, and then she brings out her most precious of all, a blue-green globe, and sets it spinning slowly on its stand.
Never forget, she tells us, one eye to the door, that the world is bigger than this fogbound stretch we sail, and although the Iron Families hold sway here, they may not elsewhere.
This is more than she has ever said, and we hold our breaths at the blasphemy of it as she stops the globe, her finger pressed to a fat familiar shape set amid the blue: Terra Obscura. Then she traces a floury line to a peaked contour near its eastern edge and whispers, Kosciusko.
~ * ~
The ship stinks, a slew of ferals being skinned on the aft deck. Their innards will go to Galley Ma; the rest is destined for the tannery at our next stop.
I am primly at the rail in my ship’s boy’s best, waiting for the captain. She is off to a Thirteen sale, and I am to go with her.
Watch your back, says Nog, sluicing the bloody deck with canal water.
I look at his tattooed arms working the thick-bristled broom, his bad leg dragging. We both know if he goes to Crake he’ll lose the leg, but likely it’s the only thing between him and creeping gangrene. I wonder if he’ll still be here when I return.
A dinghy is lowered, and then I row the captain and her lieutenant up a narrow course off the main canal between tall buildings sitting empty, their feet in water, to Market Place, a cloistered square filled with floating wooden piers.
Those who’ve recently turned of age have been brought here for auction. The city’s inhabitants shadow the arcades, hunched on all manner of boats to watch their offspring being handed into service. The money from each sale is generous — the proceeds from a bleeder will feed them for a year; but whenever one is taken by a Family with a reputation for unusual cruelty, a collective sigh goes up and gusts, a hollow wind, around the colonnades.
I ease the dinghy toward the main viewing platform, the Families’ designated bidders assembled in front. The thirteen-year-olds are gathered on a central raft, and being called one by one to the auctioneer’s stand. Some of them have already been marked by fate for certain occupations: pity help the gazelle-boned youths, eyes down so as not to catch the gaze of the barge owners, as if that might save them. The wide-hipped bleeders, so soft, so round, attract the greatest interest and fiercest bidding, their manifest fertility sought-after to carry a Family name.
Three years ago, when Aggi and I were brought here and bonded to my captain’s vessel while those at menarche were winnowed out and sent to do their duty, I too thanked Aditi that I never bled; because although bleeders are cosseted and want for nothing, they lead a far more captive life than ours.
With the dinghy nosed against the viewing platform, the captain takes her place among the bidders. I remain with the officer in the boat, trying not to look too hard into the cloisters.
Then one is led onto the auction stand that stops the breath in me. Arrestingly curvaceous, clearly a bleeder, my younger sibling Ina’s time has come. I wonder if this is why we are here today. I try to will it so, afraid of the other bidders, and slowly they drop away until there are only two: my captain and a Shogun. The square falls silent, aware of the feud between the Families. As the bid climbs I grip the oars and call silently, and Ina’s gaze seems to rest awhile in mine. Finally there is a lull in the bidding, my Baron’s the last, and I think she’s won; but just before hammer-fall the Shogun makes another bid so high that even the Families gasp. My captain, all done, gestures no more bids; but even at a distance I feel her taut and thunderous, and know it isn’t over. The Shogun, triumphant, steps along the pier and up to the auction stand to claim his prize. He draws his sword as if to offer us, his competition, a warrior’s salute, then turns and swings, slicing Ina through.
The crowd sucks in its shock then expels it with a roar. I scream my sibling’s name as the captain leaps into the dinghy shouting Row!! They are coming at us from all sides, an angry wave, their tethered lives’ tight leashes snapped, and the Shoguns are all blades out to fight. The other Families, caught unprepared, scramble to escape.
When we are away from the square in quieter waters and making for the ship, my captain speaks to her second.
They’ll rise against us for what we do. This thin control can’t last. The Families must change their ways.
The lieutenant, a Baron of only slightly lesser standing, answers just as grim. If the Families change their ways they will be slaughtered.
They stay silent for the rest of the trip, and I am left to row until my arms are numb and my sorrow has been ploughed into the foetid, oil-slicked water.
~ * ~
The Barons are celebrating. They have sailed a flotilla of powered rafts across the marshlands and conquered Kosciusko. The news of their success (the expedition undisclosed ‘t
il now) has diverted attention from the crackdowns in the Grey Zone and been relayed to the other Families — all of whom had secretly vied to get there first.
And other news has reached our ship. Halfway up they found a hidden enclave of pacifists, and torched it. The twelve they didn’t burn they brought back to punish.
My captain paces with heavy boots. Six to my bed, turn, six to the door: one for every pitiable prisoner. I stay quiet beneath the coverlet in case her agitation turns to anger and she lashes out.
If I had been chosen for that trip . . . she mutters, and I’m left to wonder what might have turned out differently if she had. I am reminded that even she bends her will to a higher authority: the Family’s inner circle, its most influential Barons.
When I get the chance I seek out Nog, always a source of information.
What will happen to them? I ask.
You’ll know soon enough, he says gruff and unforthcoming. Now move your mollycoddled arse and help.
The Year's Best Australian SF & Fantasy - vol 05 Page 13
