The House of Storms

by Ian R. MacLeod

  He could crouch here for ever, or he could beat at that window and beg to be let in. Silus would give a snaky smile, and he and his Bonny Boy, who really had grown, would finally be reunited, but Klade now understood that that wasn’t what happened to the lad in the song. For the Bonny Boy grew because he was buried in a hole like the ones he and Marion had dug yesterday, and all Klade needed to do to be the same was to wait for the roots and the worms to have their fill of him. He could think of far worse things than turning into flowers and leaves. Like the changed look in people’s eyes whenever they saw him. Like the terrified gasps and squirms of Marion Price beneath him yesterday. Or being with Silus, and yet never quite being with him at all. Just as he had never quite been with Ida, or with Fay, or even with the Ironmasters as they beat their metal hands and sang their jolly songs. Just as he had never been or belonged with anyone or anything either inside or outside Einfell.

  The trees, the rain, the voices, the candlelight, flickered across the teeming gardens. Moving out from his patch of shadow, then further around the house, Klade came to a space of lawn where forgotten washing still dripped, and entered the house through the servants’ quarters, and picked his way past mould-flowering frames, and felt for stairways, and headed down.

  It grew dark. No longer the hiss of the storm, but the deeper moan of the restless salt water which had long surged below Invercombe filled his ears. On hands and knees, then on his belly in the wet blackness, he wormed his way amid the groaning stone. It was difficult work. Dangerous, as well. Not that danger mattered to him, but these passages were teetering on collapse, and with them would go the entire headland, the gardens, the house. Another day, another few hours, and he would have left it too late. But, glistening in shifting blotches before his eyes, a little light began to come. This, as far as he could tell, was something resembling the direction his father had led him a few days before, even if the stones tilted and echoed into spaces he couldn’t comprehend. For a moment, the slippery ceiling both in front and behind him seemed to press irresistibly down, and Klade was certain that he really would be buried, but then, with a sideways shift which the very push of the land seemed to be urging upon him, he was standing near-upright in a corridor, and light and the sound of waves and the feel of the salt air showed him the way.

  Here, in this small chamber in the cliffs, nothing had changed. Klade, washed and stripped of his rotting clothes by his struggles amid the grasping rocks, gazed at the alcove. Two glass vials still glowed and flickered. They pulsed with the heave of the sea. His father had talked about power and money when he had shown him these things. That, and something about a thumb eater, and a life ahead for Klade which he’d known even then that he’d never be able to live. He lifted a vial. He felt the charge of its light, the roar of its song. For this was aether, brought here from far away in the days before he was even born, when Marion Price and Ralph Meynell had briefly imagined they loved each other, and the sad old creature people called Old Alice had done things which no one seemed able to forgive. For this was aether, and this moment was his.

  Some resistance to the stopper, then it was open, and the vial brimmed dark and sang out to him as he lifted it to his lips. Klade’s hand trembled in a final moment’s human uncertainty. Then he drank, and all he saw was light, all he heard was song.

  XX

  BRISTOL BONEYARD, ON A SPRING MORNING in the first year of this new and still nameless Age, was a surprisingly beautiful place. As Marion walked up between the larger memorials, the faces and voices of those whom they had been built to commemorate no longer called out to her, and the crushed fragments of marble of the white path were silent. The spells which had been infused into the stones had faded, and their resurrection was no one’s priority, least of all the Chosen, and perhaps not even the grieving families which had once had them cast at such expense. But this seemed to her, as Bristol murmured and smoked below in all its varieties of life, to be no bad thing. It was time the dead were left buried; time for those still living to be allowed to live.

  The small monument lay amid a field which, neglected as well, had become a sweep of high grass and flowers. It was of plain black marble, and not particularly well cut or engraved, for stonemasons, like every other variety of guildsperson, were having to relearn their trade. But its rough unevenness seemed appropriate, and her fingers, as they traced the chipped engraving, liked the cool finality of the stone.

  Here lie the bodies of

  Sally Price

  Who lived and died before this Age

  And her father

  Bill Price

  ‘Dad’—a proud shoreman

  Then, in slightly smaller and even rougher script:

  Here also lies Marion Price

  The faintly flattened track which lay between the wavering bluebells and seedheads told her that others had come this way. Perhaps they were the fellow followers, or soldiers or riverfolk Marion Price had once tended, or those who had read about her in the Western papers and brought one of the cheap amulets which bore her face. But there were few enough of them, and Marion felt no particular alarm at the thought that she might be discovered here, and less still that she would be recognised, or that anyone now would really care.

  Straightening up, she scanned the meadow this graveyard had become. The reason life grew so wildly and well here, she realised, was due to the number of times this earth had been turned over to accommodate the dead of the war. England’s soil had been especially well-fertilised in recent years, as she supposed Noll would have sardonically pointed out, although the thought no longer struck her as sad, or poignant, or even humorous. It was just the way the world was.

  People had grown almost as tired of Marion Price, and of the recent war with which she would always be associated, as she had herself. They were grateful to put aside such things, and the songs which went with them, and to believe that she had died in the shift of powers which had brought about this exhausted peace. Even for her, the memories of what had happened at Invercombe were confused, although she could never forget the blood of those two dead telegraphers, or the changed note of the song. Now, when people talked about the end of the war, the sudden collapse of power and technology seemed part of an inevitable drift towards peace. The Great Guilds of East and West, it was said, had already been sending out tentative feelers that winter, and the powers of mainland Europe had lost interest in the battle being fought in their backyard, and the prospect of further years of war seemed intolerable. But, Marion reminded herself, it had also seemed intolerable then. Yet the war had gone on.

  Slowly, her lengthening pepper-and-salt hair tied back, and the warm breeze flapping at her loose brown clothes, she headed back down the faint path towards the grainy city. The smells of Bristol’s smokes, its sounds, were entirely different this spring. The trams hung useless on their rusting gantries, whilst, according to a recent letter from Ralph, those in London were pulled by horses, and looked even more ridiculous. And yet their movement, all of this world’s slow resurrection, was heartening. Food was still in short supply and of poor quality, but it was obtainable, and the water pipes and the sewerage processing, at least in the cities, just about functioned during some times of each day. People had worked to bring these things about in a way that they had rarely worked before.

  Marion left the lower reaches of the Boneyard, and entered the streets of Bristol. If anything, they were even louder and busier than before, although now with processes of rebuilding and the rickety hammerings of the few patched and nurtured engines which had now been persuaded to work without the cossetings of aether. Many of the buildings, as their structures were unpicked back to their keyplates, were encased in rickety scaffolding, and buckets of rubble were being hauled whilst bonfires burned and smoke and grit hazed the morning air. Everywhere, there was work. All that was missing, the changed essential key which she still believed the pulling of that lever in the folly at Invercombe had brought about, was the familiar ululating chants of guild
smen’s songs.

  Past the Dings, and the gulls were still circling over the Avon, and Upmeet Market teemed and stank as it always had. This being Bristol, as well, there were faces of every shade, accents of every hue, and disbelieving curses in a dozen dialects at the ridiculous prices which were being quoted. Many of the fine bottles of wine, Marion noticed as the stallholder smiled back at her and tapped his nose, bore no labels. Quite how the shaky public services got their share of all this private enterprise was a mystery, but then she supposed that that had always been the way in the West. And here was a bearpit where an old ravener from the war was billed as tonight’s big attraction, and a few early dollymops were parading their low-cut wares up and down the Sty, and beyond that the massed spars of ships in Saint Mary’s Quay waited for a shift in the tide and a change in the wind now that their weathertops were impotent. But, as Marion could tell from her old shoregirl instincts and the thinly gathering clouds, a good breeze would come by this afternoon.

  Noll still worked at the Bristol Infirmary, and she knew that she owed him a visit. But, as with Ralph, she much preferred writing and receiving letters to meeting people face to face. She liked the spongy softness of the pulpy recycled paper and the sooty ink, and the slowness of each envelope’s journey, and the vague thought it might not arrive at all. Funnily enough after the rampant unpredictability of war, uncertainty was one thing which she and all the other citizens of England had had to remain used to in this strange new peace. Uncertainty, indeed, was one of the words Noll was now toying with as he set about the task of bringing the lost and refound theory of Habitual Adaptation to public acceptance, although it seemed to Marion that the words would eventually find their place to describe some quite different phenomenon in this new Age. And she remembered as well what Alice Meynell had said about love in their last coherent conversation. She was left now with the uneasy thought that the greatgrandmistress had been some ultimate expression of what humans could become if they submitted solely to the forces she and Ralph had once sought to define. But something had been missing, a lost fragment of the equation which had spread and darkened until all that was left was greed. To Alice, a final leap into the pure power and intelligence of the reckoning engines had probably seemed inevitable, but to Marion that fatal jump which she had made last winter from the glass balcony of her crazed and creaking guildhouse seemed yet more inescapable.

  What had been missing in Alice Meynell, Marion thought as she turned into the great buildings of Boreal Avenue, was the human spirit which drove this city, even though its fountains no longer played down the tiered front of the Hall of Wheelwrights. It was the same spirit which gave Ralph and Noll pleasure in their correspondence about a theory within which their own burgeoning friendship could never be entirely explained. For Noll, who now claimed a senior professorship in the tentative reorderings of Bristol’s university, the study of life was a career, whilst for Ralph it remained a hobby to which, now as ever, he was unable to devote the time he would have wished. But that seemed right to Marion as well, for Ralph, who was now often credited as the first senior guildsperson to seek peace, remained head of what was still being termed the Great Guild of Telegraphers—even though the telephone system didn’t work. Undeniably, the juggling act of keeping the suddenly distant bits of England in contact was important work. He wrote frequently of coming up to Bristol, but the journey now took the best part of two days, and he was anxious not to risk his health, nor to be away from his family. Marion, writing back, told him to rest, and that Flora and Gussie were the most important work of all.

  At the far end of Boreal Avenue, the great building which had once been called the Halls of the Merchant Venturers rose above the smoke and soot. Always an extraordinary edifice, it had become even more extraordinary now. The coralstone which had reached its final froths and filigrees sixty years before had started to regrow. The building was now hatted, spired and mushroomed with new turrets and flooded with huge, near-translucent veins, which glowed and pulsed at night across this lantern-lit city like the beating of a huge heart. Some people found what they now called the House of the Chosen sinister in its dizzily shifting configurations, but Marion thought it beautiful. If it reminded her of anything at all, it was of a massively barnacled rock. In London, the old green ziggurat of Westminster Great Park had undergone a similar, although probably entirely different, transformation under Silus’s command, and was said by Ralph to be even more incredible. But he was a Londoner; he would say that.

  There were fencings across what had once been a major thoroughfare, and the humans who patrolled there carried examples of that rare thing in this new Age: working guns. Here as in many cities, there had been riots and ill-organised attempts at stormings, and the walls nearby were scrawled with obscenities about the fairies, the goblins, the devils, although Marion noticed that only untainted stone glowed on the final flourishes of the edifice itself, and she felt a questioning resistance which would have made her hesitate to come closer to this place even without the guard’s half-levelled gun.

  ‘Any relation?’ he asked after glancing down at the scrap of paper she’d presented.

  She shook her head. ‘There are lots of Prices.’

  Those who passed by along Boreal Avenue quickened their step or made the signs of their old guilds as they saw the guard shrug and let her through into the House of the Chosen. The building’s main arch, partly that of the old structure she remembered visiting when she’d come here to argue about yet another blockage in medical supplies, had grown into a gravity-defying rainbow of stone. The Chosen, she thought, know how to impress us humans. Amongst the many things they are not, is stupid—or naive.

  The light changed. The city faded. Was that a huge crystal bird moving overhead? But it was only one of Bristol’s old trams hanging on the rail which had once entered this building, or the jewelled ornament which the tram had become. And it was moving once again with smooth purpose, although Marion had no idea how, or why, or to where.

  She knew something of these changed halls. But each time she’d come was different. The lights, the shapes, the colours, were as restless in their movements as those who dwelt here, and the House of the Chosen really did feel like a pumping heart to her now that she was inside it, and was borne along its marvellous arteries. She saw figures, and the mis-shapes of figures. There was so much glass, or some other kind of veiling, that it was difficult to be sure. Once, the monstrous shape she saw looming towards her began to hesitate just as she did, and she was confronted with a distorted reflection of herself. Through fairground rises and turns, past seeming natural caverns and odd glimpses of the old halls—busts, portraits, a porter’s trolley—she suddenly found herself inside what was recognisably one of the old meeting rooms of the Merchant Venturers’ Halls. She remembered these panelled walls, and her impotent frustration as the men before her blandly refused to accept her plans. Nearly the same old Bristol still lay beyond the window, although the cathedral’s main tower was now somewhat tilted, and the long table before her was dusty and empty, and the panelling had dampened and warped, and the parquet clattered loosely as she walked across it towards the hunched figure of her son. She imagined that Klade had chosen this place partly as reassurance, and also a memory, and perhaps as a point about the shift of roles, and maybe also as a joke, and no doubt also for other many reasons, for the ways of the Chosen are never the ways of ordinary mankind.

  ‘It’s a beautiful morning. Spring really is here …’

  … is here …

  Marion paused. Each time she came here, she told herself that she had become used to the combined sense of her son talking through his barely altered voice, yet also directly into her head. But the feeling was both intimate and strange, and it always took a moment to adjust.

  ‘Funny,’ she said, ‘how we see the same changes of the season every year, and yet we’re still surprised by them.’

  It’s part of what we are.

  ‘Yes.’ She smiled,
relaxing just a little. ‘It is, isn’t it? All of us.’

  Klade, now that her eyes had adjusted to the room’s dulled gleams, still looked a little like the lad of old. That, she supposed, must always have been the hardest thing for the families who had once bravely come to the place they used to call Einfell to visit their changed relatives. That, and to know that they knew what you saw, and understood what you were thinking. As dark as Silus was light, Klade’s flesh seemed partly sea-wet stone and partly the greyed skin of the wary lad she had first encountered beside the followers’ bonfires. His eyes, for all that they had hollowed, deepened, widened, still made her think of Ralph.

  And what have you been doing?’

  … doing?

  ‘This and that,’ she said. ‘Writing letters.’

  Finding out the names of those two dead telegraphers …

  ‘That as well.’ Their families now possessed much of the money Marion had carelessly accumulated from the pamphlets which had once poured out in her name, although they would never know where it had come from.

  Marion and Klade talked for a while of the Price family. Brave and unjudging as always, Owen had come to this House of the Chosen last shifterm before he set sail for Spain. So, after much fussing and hesitation, had Denise. She even claimed she liked it here—after all, she was entirely used to wandering within other people’s dreams. But Mam, who now lived in the small shoreside cottage in Luttrell Marion had bought for her, had only ever been to Bristol once, and that was to take Sally to the Boneyard. Frail as she was, she was unlikely to ever come to this city again.