by Andy Graham
Rick let out a humourless chuckle. “You’ve never seen me with my family, Beth.”
Beth wiped her hands on her trousers. “I saw footage of you with Thryn and Rose at your father’s funeral.”
“You watched that?”
“I arranged that.”
“You did what?” Rick’s head snapped round.
“Sub-Colonel Chester did me a favour. Why do you think a staff sergeant with a penchant for answering back got buried in a war heroes’ cemetery with full military honours?” A tear splashed onto the paper envelope.
“For being a war hero!”
“No more than the next soldier.”
“You rigged my father’s funeral? Did you arrange for the posthumous medals, too?”
“No, that was the army. They insisted.”
“What are you talking about?”
Beth laid the envelope on the bench, scooting herself closer. She placed her hand on his thigh, squeezing his leg. “Think about it, Rick. Medals aren’t for those who died. What use is it to them? It’s to entice more people into the army. It’s the biggest propaganda coup in history, all the glitz and glamour. All the pomp and circumstance is designed to get more men and women to enlist to continue the war games. There was going to be a symbolic funeral anyway, I just made it your father’s.”
“You—” Rick raised a shaking finger.
“What?” she demanded. “You’re not happy he got the recognition he deserved?”
“Not like this.”
“Who do you think makes these choices in the first place? The Fates?”
Beth’s eyes flared, her lips set into a thin line. The stand off was broken by a soft tap on the van’s door. An arm was thrust through the door, fingers and thumb spread wide, a large watch on the wrist. Rick stared at the ticking hands, hearing the heavy pendulum of the grandfather clock in his home in Tear. He wondered if it had stopped when Private Marka and the others had died.
The hand disappeared, and Beth stood to pull the door shut. The buzz and clank of noise from outside faded. It left the sound of Rick’s and Beth’s breathing, quick and shallow. He grasped the shiny skin on his wrists. The words he wanted to shout at her stuck in his craw.
“I haven’t got long,” Beth whispered, “please listen.”
He nodded, and forced his jaw to relax.
“When I realised this revolution was actually going to happen, I panicked. I didn’t want to be on my own desert island, being promised heaven while trying to outlive hell. Not knowing which bridge I needed to cross, and which to burn. I was scared. And then I heard rumours that De Lette wanted to make an example of you. He was worried about your popularity. He thought that the rebellious streak that runs in your family was going to cause him problems. I convinced De Lette to allow me to bring you in. I vouched for your behaviour.”
“What about the Unsung, the attack in the alley?”
“I was told it was accidental, that an order that should have been cancelled wasn’t, but I believe that as much as I believe the sun accidentally rises every day. I thought I could keep you safe here, Rick, make you too useful to the government for them to want to lose you.”
“Now everyone loses me. Except for the slavers in the uranium mines.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t see that one coming,” Beth said. She twisted on the bench, took his hands in hers, and squeezed them. Her fingers were cold. “You have to believe me on this one, please.”
Rick pulled his hands free, placed a finger under her chin and forced her to meet his eyes. “De Lette said you called me here to win me back. As devious as he is, I think he’s too worried about being caught out to tell an outright lie.”
Beth grabbed his finger in her hands, clutching it to her chest. Tears welled up in her eyes. “I’m so sorry. Truly, I’m so sorry,” she said, choking back a sob.
XXXII - Wedding Burns
The tears burst from her eyes. They caught the dim light as they rolled down her cheeks. The sob became a low moan that cut through the air of the van. “I never wanted you to leave.”
Rick sat bolt upright, and wrenched his hand free. “You left me! You told me your career came first, that you couldn’t waste time on me or a family.”
“I meant it. That’s why I walked out, and posted you the engagement ring.” Beth pulled a tissue from her pocket and dabbed at her nose. “I thought I could do much more for the world by trying to change it from the top of the pyramid. I could never see myself making tiny vicarious changes through one or two children.”
“You build a wall one brick at a time, Beth.”
“It takes too long. I did what I needed to do. I’ve no time for the rabbit warren of conjecture and hypotheses: if I’d stayed with Rick, then blah blah blah. I will always do what I have to do to make the changes that need to be made.” She blinked back the tears. “But I miss you, and I miss what we could have had. And I wasn’t entirely honest with you about why I didn’t want children.”
“You bring this up now? Your speech about the hypocrisy of childhood, and now this?” he demanded, punching the metal grill covering the van walls.
“Please, Rick, hear me out.”
“OK, OK, OK.” Rick thrust his hand into his pocket, and wrapped his fingers around the damaged coin.
“I told you how I feel about kids. I couldn’t stand myself before I hit my teens. If I spend more than a minute in the company of any child, I want to throttle myself, beat myself over the head with whatever piece of cheap plastic crap they’re playing with. And as for my mother . . . ” She stopped, her breath catching in her throat. “You once told me your mother claimed that the tidier a family home, the more bored the children.”
Rick shook his head, rubbing the tense muscles running up the back of his neck. “That was my father. He revelled in the chaos of childhood, told my mother we’d be following rules for the rest of our lives, that we should enjoy the freedom now.”
“Our house was spotless,” Beth said. “My relationship with my mother was sterile. She would put toys away that we were still playing with. What kind of effect does that have on a developing brain? I’m long past the age that I can blame her for my actions, but I can still blame her for hers, for the upbringing she gave me. Something I swore I would never inflict on anyone else.”
Rick watched her speaking, his head tilted to one side. “Are you saying you walked out on me because you were worried about becoming your mother?”
“No. I was scared about my children turning into me. So I decided to never have them. And the reason I ran from you is that I could imagine having kids with you. I could see myself settling down, and watching the world burn through my kitchen curtains. That’s why I walked away.
“I thought I could make it up to you. I don’t care for Thryn or Rose, but I thought I could do right by you. I tried to help you, telling myself I was just doing an old friend a favour. I thought that for every string I pulled for you, I would right the wrongs that I, and the world, had thrown at you. Your father’s funeral was only part of it. I kept your wife out of the immigration camps. I suggested you be posted to Castle Anwen to get you out of the city when the rumours of the revolution got louder. Colonel Chester had assured me Anwen was a safe gig. It’s one of the few things she’s got wrong. I encouraged De Lette to promote you. I insisted on longer rehab for your shoulder to keep you in the capital, and then called you back here once I realised the revolution was going live. By that point I realised I wasn’t trying to protect you, I was trying to win you back. I never wanted you to leave, Rick. I loved you more than I could ever tell you. You made me whole, gave me what I never had from anyone. De Lette was right.”
As each sentence hit home, another of the skittles that his life had been balancing on over the last few months fell.
“I’m sorry, Rick, truly. I really didn’t think my help would send you to the mines.”
The mines. The gas. Rick coughed. Once.
Get it out of the system, and forget about
it.
He sunk his head into his hands, dragging his fingernails through the hair on his scalp. Fragments of images whirled through his head: Thryn, Rose, Stann, the dead girl from Castle Anwen. All dancing in Beth’s giant shadow, a woman pregnant with hope and desperation who had ensnared herself in her own puppet strings.
He heard a soft sound. A sound that smelt of paper and ink. A sound that he remembered echoing off wooden shelves, and burying itself in dusty carpets. Someone was laughing. He looked up at Beth to see her smiling back at him.
He was laughing.
Shaking his head, he picked the envelope off the floor, where it had fallen unnoticed, and handed it to her. “We’ve come a long way since we were caught rolling around under A for Anatomy, Beth.”
Beth wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “On the floor of Karth’s great library, just before it closed. It was one of my favourite places. We never did get to work our way through the alphabet.”
She opened the envelope she was clutching, and emptied a folded paper square onto her lap. She handed him the piece of paper. “Here, this is for you.”
His laughter faded into trembles, a hollow feeling opening up inside him. He unfolded the paper, his fingers tripping over themselves. “This is the picture from the wall of your office.”
Beth smiled. “Those simplistic children’s stories I told you about, my mother was full of them. Most were the banal good-guy-always-wins-gets-the-girl-and-sweeps-her-off-her-feet-type stories I mentioned. The reluctant teenage misfit who saves the world.” Her voice rose, the words coming more quickly. “My mother’s two favourite fairy tales were a boy who proved his manhood by pulling a sword from a stone, and a girl who proved her womanhood with a bruise caused by a pea buried under a stack of mattresses she had slept on. A man’s validity to rule based on strength; a woman’s by weakness. This is the crap that pollutes children’s minds from an early age.”
Rick traced his fingers around the bubble letters. “‘The pea is mightier than the sword,’” he read, finally understanding what the text meant. “I thought it was a spelling mistake.”
Beth smiled. “No, it was my twin’s idea. She wrote it down one day, and I did the picture. As ten-year-olds we found the sentence hilarious, repeated it so often that even my dad told us to shut up.”
Rick squeezed his eyes closed, wincing at all the memories of him shouting at Rose to find a new joke, to stop giggling every time someone said ‘bum’. He wished he could take back every harsh word, every curse and moment of irritation, and replace them with a kind word, a hug, or a smile.
“The more often you tell an adult a joke, the less funny it gets. The reverse applies to children.” Rick forced a smile. “It’s much worse with toddlers, trust me.”
Beth grunted her agreement, and waved her hand at the picture. “My mother didn’t get it, but then she doesn’t seem to understand anything not involving a cookbook, or articles with titles like ‘Seven Ways to Achieve an Unbelievable Whatever’, ‘The Must-Read Secret to Such and Such’, or ‘You’ll Never Believe What Happened When Blah Blah Blah.’” It’s infantilising, attention-baiting crap that feeds our insecurities, a form of insidious mental slavery that women are force-fed since birth.”
Rick cleared his throat. “Some of the men’s magazine aren’t much better.”
“That’s not my problem. You have enough muscle-headed heroes to fight your corner.” Beth took a deep breath, calming herself. “The picture still makes me smile when I think of it, of my sister, but it means so much more to me now. Everyone has their own reason to fight. I have mine. This is why I do what I must do.”
He tried to give the picture back to her, but she pushed it into his hands. “Take it. It won’t replace your family, or what I did, and didn’t do, but hopefully it’ll do something.”
Rick turned the paper over, tracing the letters with his finger. Random letters were capitalised, colourful lines tracing bubbles around the words. He folded the picture up along the precise lines she’d pressed into it, and placed it back on her lap. “Thank you, Beth, but this is your fight, your family.”
He pulled the coin out of his pocket, and held it up in front of her. “This is my fight,” he said. The raised skin on his wrists shone in the light.
Beth took his hands in hers. “Why did you do it? The wedding burns?”
Rick traced the coin over the shiny skin. “It’s an old tradition for Thryn’s people. The southern Somerians don’t do it anymore. You wrap your hands in a thin sheet of cloth, and someone sets fire to it. It’s only supposed to leave superficial marks, though some people deliberately let it burn for longer.” He shrugged, pressing a thumb into the shiny skin on the other wrist. “A measure of their devotion, I guess. Occasionally, couples make the mistake of wearing long sleeved shirts or billowing veils. So most ceremonies usually have at least one bucket of water hidden somewhere nearby. Highly decorated, of course, just in case it does need to make an appearance.”
“Why not just exchange rings?”
Rick looked up to see his own image staring back at him out of Beth’s blue eyes. The mole on her nose that she had once admitted to trying to slice off with a razor blade. The woman who had once been everything for him until a dark-eyed foreigner had turned his world, and his heart, upside down; and given him a daughter who had sent the same heart into a tailspin. One was his morning, one was his evening, two moons to his sun. His reason for breathing, his reason for digging.
“You can take a ring off.”
A metallic rap on the door, and the van was once more filled with artificial light. Captain Lacky informed them that the regular guards were on their way back. Beth thanked him and turned back to Rick. Tears streaked down her cheeks, catching the grey light inside the van.
“You know you’re. . .” Her voice cracked.
He pulled her close, folding his arms round her. She was more petite than his wife, seemed to take up less space. Odd that six years ago, she had fit the space between his arms just as perfectly as Thryn did now. He squeezed her shoulders, felt the heat of her skin on his, drank in the scent of her perfume, flowers singing on a dew-covered morning.
“Look after them, Beth,” he whispered into her hair. “Look after my daughter, Rose.”
XXXIII - The Gunpowder Tower
Edward De Lette kicked his feet against the floor. The swinging bench lurched into a lazy arc. Above him, black, dusty stone stretched into the warm sky. Gold-leaf-decorated spires and spikes glinted in the star light.
The tower he had appropriated had been one of the original gates to an early incarnation of the capital city, Aijlan. Not Aijlan-Karth anymore, just Aijlan. He regretted that having happened on his watch, but devolution was sometimes a necessary part of progress.
His new home straddled a road that led to one of the main squares in the city. Originally named after a long forgotten saint — the patron saint of superstition, the president had joked to a sniggering aide — it had been renamed the Gunpowder Tower.
Kegs of the stuff had been stored there in preparation for an attempt at sabotaging the Palaces of Democracy. An attempt that failed when one of the bombers had tried a small test to check the quality of the powder. Rumour had it that the compulsive smoker believed you could taste a powder’s quality. A sister rumour stated the man was both clumsy and forgetful. De Lette took it to mean that even evolution had a sense of humour. Once the rubble had been cleared out, and the tower basement scraped clean of plotters, a forward-thinking monarch had his builders construct a series of underground chambers and tunnels during the repairs. One of De Lette’s predecessors had upgraded them. Edward had deleted the records.
He liked the irony of living here. Hidden in the heart of the city in a building synonymous with a history of rebellion. The symmetry was ever sweeter, now that the square in front of him had become the de facto meeting place for the resistance’s demonstrations. The nightly face-offs, though largely peaceful, would usually dissolve when given the right pr
ompting. The Unsung were proving more useful than he had envisaged.
He scooped a mobile computer screen off the cushioned seat and thumbed it to life. A harsh glow flared around him, and he shielded his eyes with his drink. The light spilled though it, throwing amber shadows on the wall. Dabbing at the screen, he scrolled through the videos until he found the one he wanted.
A man was standing in front of a full-length mirror, half a hand gripping a wooden crutch. Unshaven, gaunt, and topless, he examined his torso. He twisted his neck round as he hopped in small circles. Violent purple circles and blue, baton-shaped bruises whipped around his body. He lathered a green ointment across ribs like piano keys, and grimaced. His eyes spasmed shut, his hand slipping off the crutch. The man crashed onto a dented, metal tube. His chest was heaving, and his lips turned blue. As the tube rocked to a standstill, De Lette realised it was a false leg.
He set the screen down. It was a fine night; he didn’t want to spoil it. He’d told the Unsung to get the information out of the ex-soldier any way needed. Their reports stated that the man — Taille, he thought his name was — had withstood the beatings, but had cracked when the Unsung had threatened his family. The soldiers had been a little more enthusiastic than he had wanted. He would have to have a word with someone about that. They needed to be more discrete. A bruise was still a bruise, no matter where it was.
De Lette rested his glass on his chest, trying to slurp the drink out of it like a dog. Revelling in the fact that he was alone. He swilled the alcohol around his mouth, letting it suck the moisture out of his tongue and gums. He swallowed, baring his teeth and sucking in the night air though them, feeling them chill.
A sound from the city filtered up from the streets. The police were out in force tonight. The resistance refused to lie down, refused to take the history they were being offered. He’d been standing on this balcony when he’d first heard them chanting his name. There had been an unexpected flush of pride, a prickle of hairs along the back of his neck. He had been surprised at how quickly the protesters had rallied behind the Unsung hidden amongst them; soldiers shouting for the reinstatement of the man who had un-instated himself. He’d taken the plaudits with a smug satisfaction, made a point of listening of an evening over a glass of fine Somerian whisky. He’d almost regretted not just retiring instead of staging his disappearance.
