The House of Storms

by Ian R. MacLeod

  Hunching around, he lifted his trunk’s lid and pushed clothes and letters aside. Musty in here. Musty everywhere. But here was his old canvas bag. He unpicked the laces from rusty eyeholes. Inside lay a loose sprawl of notebooks and reckoning engine punchcards, the elastic which had once bound them into neat blocks snapped into brittle worms. Ma-ri-on. Ma-ri-on. Wild, waving figures still fluttered inside his skull. Why on earth had anyone ever mistaken that bizarre creature in the engine pit for Marion Price? And had she really said lnvercombe? But faintly, beyond all the echoing odours of military life, there rose a lingering smell of salt. Sand still glittered in the seams of an old notebook’s bindings between the words and sketches within which he’d once tried to capture and explain the world. His fingers trapped and rolled a few precious grains. Sealight washed over him. He thought of lost days. Lost love. A lost child. Despite everything, he smiled.

  II

  WHAT WAS THE SONG? How did it go? Klade loved the mingled voices, the tramp-drag of feet and the thunder-rumble of wheels before the silence which came over everything was broken by the voices of the big guns, but some fragment of the song always seemed to escape him. Soldiers’ voices joined afterwards in unison around the campfires when the ash drifted and trembled, with the battle lost or won, and their voices grew and were joined on the wind by the moans of the raveners in their cages and the wounded in their long tents and by followers like Klade himself. They were happy and sad. They were brave and they were afraid.

  The trees they are growing high,

  And the woods grass is growing green

  And many’s the cold winter night

  My love and I have seen.

  Oh, my Bonny Boy is young, but he’s growing …

  Klade knew that verse perfectly, and it always filled him with a delicious sadness which made him forget about his own lost aches and hungers. But the other verses always escaped him. He knew that they grew sadder still, and he felt and shared that sadness, but he still didn’t understand quite why it was the saddest thing of all that the Bonny Boy was young and that he was growing, when surely that was a happy thing. But the song was about war—this war; wars in general—and Klade knew that such songs were often sad of their nature, when they weren’t about Marion Price, or angry or bawdy or just plain mad.

  The First Western Army was a huge beast. It sprawled along miles of hedge and roadside in the quiet dark of pre-dawn near a place in Worcestershire called Droitwich. It breathed and clanged and stank. Klade entertained no illusions about the significance to the First Western Army of followers such as himself; they were the ticks on the beast’s back, and would be squashed with the same grim relish with which he dealt with the creatures in his own clothes and hair. And the beast was especially agitated at this point in the weary cycle of moving and waiting as it ploughed across the English countryside. Clambering towards it, slow and fast, invisible as smoke yet huge as a city, was another, Eastern, army. It seemed ordained that the two great beasts were to meet here, amid these patches of stone and field and the bright, precious tracks of the rails which linked Portsmouth with Preston, although Klade couldn’t imagine that that was a particular journey many trains took these days.

  Klade stirred, feeling dew on his face. It was still dark, but he could just make out the shufflings of the other followers who had clustered around this spot. A gun somewhere went bang, but it was an overture to nothing, and Klade was still filled with weariness. A battle was coming, and he would have loved to sleep. He would have loved, as well, to remember how the Bonny Boy really grew… He remembered the shudder which, years ago now, had passed down the pylons over the hot cornfields as he stood by the fence at Einfell on the day he had lost Fay to the Shadow Ones. He remembered the pictures he’d seen soon afterwards in newspapers of that London building toppling aflame. He remembered, too, how the very texture of the paper had cheapened in what was called the current emergency, as, like the creased pages of his disintegrating maps, the landscape of England began separating. But he knew he was a Westerner, because that was where Einfell lay, and Silus had warned him that it would be unwise to say anything else.

  First hint of grey was seeping now into the sky. What came with it was the memory of the hazy spring day at Einfell when the trucks had come. Klade, now that supplies had grown scarce and hunger gnawed at his head and belly, had leapt along the rutted road, expecting some bounteous delivery of Cherry Cheer or Blackcurrant Dream, and he’d been disappointed to see that the men who stepped out of them were carrying guns, and dressed as soldiers, although they looked, as far as Klade could then judge the ways and feelings of Outsiders, as edgy and afraid as the tradesmen like Abner Brown who no longer came.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said, approaching them, I’m not really what you …’

  But already they were turning to Silus, their guns raised, and the soldier whose uniform was stuck with the most bits of brightness was shouting in a loud voice. The song grew agitated, and the woods rang with the lost voices of the Shadow Ones, and the Ironmasters howled at their forge, and the birds cluttered up in a dense cloud from Mr Crow. Even Silus, Klade could feel and tell, was filled with a dense, buzzy agitation.

  ‘That’s quite impossible!’ The words coming loose and slow around his bright grey lips. ‘I can’t allow …’

  But the soldier shook his head, for it seemed that all the Chosen were to step into the warm and metal-smelling back of one of the vans.

  ‘What about that one?’ another soldier asked, sniffing the barrel of his gun towards Klade. ‘What the hell’s he supposed to be?’

  Silus came to stand by Klade. ‘He’s nothing. He just happens to be here. He can be left alone …’

  ‘See your wrist, son.’

  Hesitating, Klade felt himself grabbed.

  ‘Nah. He’s coming as well.’

  ‘But—’

  But it seemed there were to be buts today. Nudged towards the van by the point of a gun, Klade saw that its greens and browns had been crudely painted over a sign. Perhaps it had once been Abner’s, and that made him feel almost happy. Then Ida was pulled, dragged, almost carried, from the Big House. And Mr Crow lost some of this feathers. Apart from their hands, the Ironmasters had to leave behind their tools. Blossom came last, gently shedding petals and weeping.

  ‘That them all?’

  Soon it was, apart from the Shadow Ones, and they were in a wild fury. Some of the soldiers were sent towards the woods, although the song was so piercing he was sure that even the soldiers standing in the yard heard it as well. The others came back with their guns lowered, shaking their heads.

  ‘No use to anyone, sir—barely nothing but rags of ghosts. Give you the bloody creeps even worse than this lot…’

  The rest of the Chosen were stuffed into the van and two soldiers, after some dispute, squatted with them, tenderly nursing the metal aches of their guns. Klade sat close. He breathed their fear-smell, and wanted to ask them about the war. He’d followed it himself as closely as he could through the odd newspaper he’d discovered clinging around Einfell’s firethorn fences. He’d rejoiced in the victories at Bicester and Swindon, and then again when the forces of Yorkshire met with them at Grantham. Even Klade, with his admittedly limited military knowledge, could see on what remained of his precious maps that the East stood no chance now that London and Preston were split apart. Western cannons were nearly within reach of the so-called capital. It would all be done and dusted by Christmas, and Klade had been looking forward to normality and Sweetness’ return. But that had been the Christmas before the one before last.

  ‘Westerner, are you?’ the soldier in the van had asked, looking Klade up and down.

  Klade said yes enthusiastically, but the solider spat between his legs. The van, crammed with sickness and song, took them to a puddled yard where they were unloaded and told to stop all the damn howling and gibbering and just form a line. There came an odd jingling, and Klade thought for a moment that the soldiers had brough
t with them the contents of the old displays in the Meeting Place, but these chains were new and bright, and there was some difficulty as Outsiders in brown coats tried to fit them around the limbs of the Chosen, many of whom were too oddly shaped.

  Unlike the ones he’d once played with in the Meeting House, these shackles now fitted Klade easily enough, although Silus, who was bleeding from a mis-hit steel rivet, was slurring again about how he should be let free. Still shouting and spitting and bleeding, he was taken away. Soon, only Klade and Ida were left in the yard. Although she was beautiful to him, Klade knew that there was something about the fissured arrangements of her face and the way she talked without using her mouth which made Outsiders more afraid of her than they were of most of the Chosen. And they’d dragged her here without her usual hooded cloak.

  He’s with me, was all she said as she offered the black boughs of her wrists to be shackled, and although there were many other moments when they might have been separated, Klade and Ida’s togetherness came to be accepted over the shifterms which followed as they were moved from place to place in the backs of cars and carriages and trains and wagons and vans.

  We should have known this would happen—these chains … She’d raise her thinning, trembling hands, although in fact the chains had long come off. This is the way our kind have always been treated. They’ll be branding us next with a cross and a C… Klade had seen such implements in the old displays, and knew what she meant, but that never happened either, and he told Ida through the long journeys and the cramped nights and the endless hours in factories that things weren’t so very bad, and would probably soon get better, just as soon as Christmas came and the West won the war and they got back to Einfell.

  With dismay, he followed news of the Battle of Royston, which even the Bristol Morning Post termed A Significant Setback, and then the Second Siege of Oxford, and the long forwards and backwards skirmishing of that crucial front between Leeds and York. Maps were precious now—something which, if any of his minders had happened to see him with such a thing, would have been instantly snatched away from him for the nosy little changeling freak that he was. But Klade still retained an image of the way this country looked. He knew that the Western forces which had met with those of Yorkshire at Grantham were now separate, and that London was much too far away to be reached by their avenging guns.

  The war, their journeys, settled into an uneasy rhythm. Never quite stopping, never quite starting. Never quite total defeat, nor entire victory. Always busy, always waiting. The jibes. The cold slops. The absence of Sweetness, which he knew from bruising experience his minders grew angry at the mere mention of. They often had to half-carry Ida, in her weary soundless sighs and the grind of her bones and the bleeding of her breaking flesh, through the doors of whatever office or factory she was being taken to. More and more, since she moaned and resisted him the least, this became Klade’s job. Upsadaisy … There we go… Then concrete floors. Offered cups of water in old tins. This was the Western War Effort, for Ida and Klade.

  He’d never known that Ida had worked in sugar mills before her flesh had changed, and it was usually to such industries that they were taken. The huge silos with their peeling names. Bolts and Kirtlings in Bristol. Fripp & Eddington elsewhere. Not that sugar was processed any more in such places, but its sticky smell lingered in the air; a lesser sweetness mingling with the salt-bitterness of the new chemical processes in ways which were achingly reminiscent of Sweetness for Klade. The sugar cane which now got through the French blockades was too precious to waste on mere food, just as cotton, which was equally scarce, would never be put to the trivial use of making cloth. They, and the pulp of trees and the grindings of mines and the efflorescence of stable walls, had all become part of the crucial business of making explosive. It was Ida’s job to sing to the vats as they churned and spewed and boiled, to place her ruined hands on hot rims and dodge swirling pulleys and listen to their mindless song and teach them and their masters how they might work more productively. These factories with their broken wheels and blocked chutes were so messily unlike the neat views Klade had once studied in newspaper adverts. Sometimes, filled as these places now were with explosive—and these were the worst visits of all—they’d simply blown up, and he and Ida had to wander through their ruins searching for precious amulets and boilerplates amid the bits of bodies.

  Ida was getting no better, and her minders often grew infuriated with her slowness and the slippery bleedings of her burnt-toffee skin. She told Klade that she’d always hated her work in the Confectioners’ Guild, and had only gone back to it when her Terry went to school because she and Stan had needed the money. Not that it mattered, not that anything mattered, and her song, even when she applied herself to the machines, grew weak and was threaded with pain. One morning, in a dim shed against the door of which their current minders had leaned the weight of a lawn roller to prevent their escape, Klade awoke. Yet another Christmas had gone, and it was spring again, and the West was as far away as ever from victory, which was infuriating, considering all the efforts he and Ida and everyone else had made. He listened to the bird-song, and enjoyed the absence of the ghosts of Ida’s pain which usually echoed in his limbs. He hoped there’d be windows in whatever car, wagon or carriage they were taken in today, and seats for them to sit on. He hoped they’d give them food as well as water for breakfast, and he hoped that lunch wouldn’t be just stale slops. But the song really did seem different today. It was faint—but it was filled nevertheless with an invigorating sense of release. He shuffled himself around the broken pot shards towards Ida to share this news. She was lumped against an uncomfortable collection of rakes, and Klade prodded and shook her for some time, puzzled by her songless stiffness, until he finally realised that she was dead.

  Klade knew that he had an hour before their minders came to shove and shout at them to get going. There’d be trouble, then; the minders always grew angry and unhappy if anything got broken—so how would they feel when they found Ida like this? His mind, as he shuffled around a spill of old deckchairs and Ida’s ruined face stared back at him, was filled by urgent, practical considerations and he began to push against the door. A crack slowly edged into light and birdsong. Klade kept pushing. Then, in a rush, the door was open and Klade was out. Klade was running. Klade was away.

  The sun was up now, there were spiderwebs of noise and light in this place called Droitwich, and Klade scrambled beneath a hedge just as a Western soldier came down the narrow decline, kicking aside sundry followers, telling them to get the hell out of this place. But the man’s heart wasn’t in it and the guns were already calling to each other. There were whistlings overhead, drifts of smoke, and the smell of new earth. Klade soon found himself alone, and the war-song was all about him now, in smells and spells and smoke. Hot, steaming air rose nearby from a crater which glowed about its edges with the festering brightness of residual heat and aether, and Klade wondered why he was ever drawn to such scenes after he’d escaped from that shed and what remained of Ida. Partly, he supposed, it was the song of battle. Partly, as well, it was the bittersweet smell of high explosive. He’d been drawn to its backwash, where there were near-deserted towns with larders and shops which still had the odd tin of Sweetness for him to hack open with shards of shell or stone. He’d come across his first followers romping in a graveyard and drinking hymnal wine. They hadn’t minded his lisping voice and odd accent. They’d laughed when he said he was from Einfell and one of the Chosen, even when he showed his unmarked left wrist. They’d offered him the brimming red chalice they’d been passing between them, and Klade’s head filled with visions and song. Even in the aching, retching aftermath, he’d been happy to join the followers; to share their belonging of not belonging.

  The followers didn’t really feast on the bodies of the fallen after the battle as some people claimed. Neither did they mutilate them—or at least very few did. They pilfered, it was true, and some claimed they were the son of the Elder flown
back down to Earth, or that they were Marion Price and could heal with their touch. Others, perhaps the commonest of all, were wives or mothers looking endlessly for husbands and sons. Some, even, were Chosen: Klade recognised the signs, although, and as was usually the way, most seemed not to notice themselves, and died or disappeared before the process of changing was properly done.

  Boom Boom.

  Klade ducked and turned. Things whistled around him. There was smoke everywhere. Men lay sprawled in the mud of battle. Maybe there would be ghostgas. For all that the soldiers feared it, Klade quite liked the changed visions it brought. A beast lumbered by; a ravener, twice man-height, tusked and bellowing. There was a smoky belch—a mine—and then there was only meat and no ravener at all.

  ‘Look look look look look …’

  Klade did the obvious thing, and looked. One of the other followers, her clothes tinkly bright, was scuttling up. He dimly recognised her, and submitted to the pull of her arms.

  ‘Look—you’ll get yourself killed.’ She drew him along a ditch into a more covered place. Klade peered out through the half-buried gap in a low wall. Something whistled over them, and a tree flew up, boiling and fizzing with sap. Its branches ignited.

  ‘Just wait here, shall we? Be nice and safe …’

  Klade wasn’t so sure, but he couldn’t be bothered to disagree. This not-botheringness was part of the song of battle. It was like the Bonny Boy; one of those verses he forgot when he wasn’t actually hearing it. His fellow follower settled herself down. In the stark light of the flaming tree, her attire looked particularly impressive, for she had adorned the greyish rags of her clothes with a large variety of insects. Anything from the tiny husks of the bugs Klade found stirring on his own body to the huge, clanky, colourful carapaces of dragonlice which infested the munitions camps. Some, indeed, Klade thought from their continued stirring as the flaming tree began to fade, might still be alive.