by Alex Pheby
The feeling would not be shaken off.
When he saw the theatre, he went straight to it. He took it from where it was stored, unboxed its pieces and laid them out on the patterned oval rug that covered the boards in the centre of the room.
What was it then, if he was so clever? What was this thing, if the porcelain animals were no longer good enough for him? What kind of pleasures could be had from it, and for what kind of boy?
He took the flat sheets of wood, light, as if the tree they had been crafted from could itself only have been a fragile thing, easily snapped, and he laid them out gently before him. Their very lightness seemed to indicate their worth, as if only those who could treat things with care and a certain maturity would have been allowed to play with an object so delicate, and that the naivety of anyone younger would find no reward in whatever it was for.
There were twenty pieces or so. Like the porcelain animals, each piece had its own shape. Nathan took two, one for each hand, and even though they were much more complicated than the animals, the principle behind them was the same – they were fashioned in such a way that each joint had a pair, and when these pairs were brought together a whole could be constructed. The two pieces he had were the largest and they met at one corner only, one piece having a slot that a tab on the other fitted snugly into. Once put together they bore lines painted on the surface of each that ran together, joining to make a picture of a bay window, in relief, glass panes shining in an egg wash to make the inside of a house, richly decorated.
When his hands slipped into the pile of other pieces, they came back with pairs which made an obvious match, and when these two were joined they made a joint that could only fit just so, and here. Now, suddenly, things that had been so confusing were now almost obvious, and that feeling of dissatisfaction that had somehow hung in the air when he came in was now utterly gone. His hands moved in excitement across the wood until, as the pile of pieces dwindled, the staging of a merchant’s house was before him.
The excess bits and pieces were props, and he leapt up, suddenly remembering where he had seen tiny pots of enamel paint. They were in tins the lids of which could only be levered off with a flat edge. They held paint so bright that Nathan had been frightened to leave them open lest he knock them over and spill them, and so mark the carpet. This seemed now like a childish concern, a petty thing. Why should he knock things over – was he a clumsy idiot, knocking things over and regretting it? – He was not. Here were brushes, with only a handful of hairs on each, so thin and fine that when he put them to his tongue and wetted them they formed a point such that he could pick out the edging of a tiny picture frame or dot the pupils of a miniature eye. This is what the clay was for, he now understood, to make people – and the tiny swatches of cloth to make their clothes.
LVII
Nathan did not notice the sun that day, nor the next. He did not feel the need to wait for night, nor to worry at the passing of the day; instead he paid attention to the theatre, building a set almost without thinking, only to please that sense – not even a reality, only a feeling – that he was not alone, that there was someone other than him, but sharing in his pleasures, who might enjoy what it was that he was making, who might approve of it and of him, for making it.
The theatre in front of him, in tiny increments, became a wonderful thing, moment by moment. As long as he did not question himself it was easy. The whole confection came together as if by some natural law that he had never known before, something that governed such objects. By paying attention to this law he could be assured that what he was producing was right, even if there was no Bellows to tell him that it was or it wasn’t. It was as if the thing itself had rules, the activity of doing it. He felt, for the first time, as if this was something that he could give himself over to, something he could devote himself to: the following of these rules, inchoate and unwritten though they were, except in the generation of the thing itself. It was as if, in the recognition and following of these rules, he gained some authority over the world, knew something about it that others did not, felt attuned at last with something. This something was suddenly the most important thing there was – the only thing, and he wondered how, for all his life, he had lived without it.
When Bellows called him for dinner – the waft of stewed meat and boiled cabbage announcing him down the low corridor – there was a whole stage, proscenium, curtains and all, and the slots were there into which could be slid new scenes, trapdoors into and out of which things could pass, hiding and revealing. All he needed now was actors. That was something he would turn his mind to tomorrow.
Bellows took him into the dining room, where Cook was putting out their meals. ‘How does this evening find you, Nathan?’ Bellows asked. ‘Well, it seems to me. There is a whiff about you of something new – clear and strong.’
Bellows raised his nose, and for the first time, as he leaned across, Nathan saw his mouth, hidden between his high starched collars. As Bellows sniffed, his lips were pink even in the shadows, the colour gaining depth in its contrast against the linen. They parted to show his teeth, two blunt wedges that glistened in the place where a normal man’s neck is, long and sloping, like a ferret’s. ‘You are learning. I smell it. There is development, complexity, a movement from the boy towards the man – nothing gross, understand me, but a deepening of the faculties of discernment.’
Nathan looked down at his plate, almost as if he was embarrassed, but what was there to be embarrassed about?
Three perfectly round potatoes, faintly yellow as Bellows’s teeth were, rested together in the middle of a pool of gravy, and beside them were three cubes of meat, one mouthful each, and beside those three carrots, like the ones that the Fetch gave his horses, but shrunken down and suitable for a boy’s mouth. When Bellows stopped his sniffing, he turned his attention to his own plate where the same things had been put – only five where Nathan had three, and larger.
Bellows speared one of the carrots with his long fork and slipped it expertly through the gap in his collar. When he had chewed and swallowed, he spoke. ‘Today has been a good day. A day of small victories, but victories nonetheless. Tomorrow I will begin to teach you of the struggle, Nathan.’ Bellows returned his fork to the side of his plate and held his hands together, in the manner of someone about to deliver a sermon. ‘Where there is power, Nathan, there is conflict – such a thing is a tautology, for what is power, after all, but the power to overcome that which stands in one’s way? The Master would have you understand this in general and in particular. Tomorrow I will begin your instruction. You will hear of Malarkoi, and its Mistress. You will hear History, and Philosophy. And, in the end, you will hear strategy and tactics.’
Nathan placed one of the potatoes in his mouth, round as a conker, and when he bit it his teeth slid smoothly through its flesh. From the corner of his eye he thought that he saw, in a windowpane, a figure – a girl in blue, with feathers in her hair – but when he turned there was only his own face reflected.
‘You are not a normal boy, Nathan. You are not like the others. You understand this?’
Nathan nodded, although he was not sure why, and once he had chewed the food in his mouth he asked: ‘Where are the others?’
‘The others?’
‘The other boys the Fetch brings here. When I came, some were kept, and I was sent back. What happened to the ones who were kept?’
Bellows picked up his fork again. On one tine he speared meat and on the other a potato, and the both of them he dragged across the plate until they were wet and sticky. He lifted them off the plate and let the gravy drip back down, spinning them in place as he waited. ‘The other boys do what they do best – those jobs to which they are best suited. Even the Master’s generosity is not so great that it stretches to the provision of coin for no service. These boys earn their pennies in many ways.’
‘But where are they? I don’t see anyone else. I don’t hear them either.’
When the drips had dripp
ed, Bellows ate without fear of dirtying his collar. He chewed without speaking until it was polite for him to speak again. Nathan waited, pushing things from the left side of his plate to the right and back again.
‘The Master’s house has many rooms, and some of these are kept separate from the others. If there are women, or girls, they must be kept separate because their effluvia can disrupt the magics that order this place, every part having its own function. So it is also for boy children like yourself, Nathan. You have a great talent, and there is in you something that the Master would not have disturbed, not even in the tiniest way. There are boys at their work here in their hundreds, but none of them may be allowed to disturb you. There is a taint that the lower orders carry that must be worked against, as an open window allows a purifying breeze to clear a room of dust. But this effort in itself can cause a disturbance, as too strong a breeze might bring a chill to a cultivated orchid and so prevent it from flowering, and which explains why glasshouses are kept protected from the wind.’
‘But I don’t hear or see anything of them. Not at all.’
‘Are you sure? Perhaps you do not look closely enough, or far enough away. From your tower you have a unique vantage, one that the lower boys would envy you for – if they knew of it – for they only see that very small part of the Master’s majesty that concerns them, the rest being of neither consequence nor concern.’
Nathan turned to his meat and said no more about it, and Bellows left it there too.
As Bellows got up and took his plate to Cook, Nathan saw words glistening in the remnants of his gravy – ‘I am here.’ He blinked and they were gone. He cut up the last piece of meat, but now he didn’t have the appetite for it.
LVIII
The rain fell so hard that the water never ran off the glass completely but pooled where the lead held the panes together, casting shadows like a fisherman’s net on everything below. Here and there drips formed where the leading was not perfectly close, swelling and falling but never meeting the ground – they evaporated, hissing into steam an inch above the height of the highest bookcase.
Nathan watched while Bellows rooted around in a drawer for something. If a thing didn’t have a strong odour, it was relatively hard for Bellows to find, and judging by the time it was taking and the constant murmured and muttered curses, this thing might not have smelled at all. It left Bellows relying on his other atrophied senses – if he had eyes, they must have been very small, and, like his ears, obscured by his hat.
As the drops dripped ever more frequently, the air high up filled with mist, and the line that marked the space between where water was allowed and where it was forbidden from entering glowed a faint pink, like the lower part of a rainbow.
‘I have it!’ Bellows rose from the drawer, and in his hand there was a roll of paper: a scroll in faded brown, dry and white at the edges and flaking. He gripped one end of the roll and flicked it out with a flourish. It unravelled coming out flat. Before it could turn back in on itself, Bellows pinned it to the blackboard and smoothed it. ‘This,’ said Bellows, ‘is a map. Have you had experience of such a thing, Nathan?’
Nathan looked at it and shook his head.
On the paper someone had drawn an outline, irregular, as if they had traced around a rock, or a leaf, or something else with no reason to its shape. Inside there were words. Nathan could almost make them out, some of the larger ones, but he was unsure of his reading – they did not make sense, any of them – and he put it down to the distance.
Bellows picked up his rod, the thing he habitually used for indicating things or for enhancing his gesticulations, and with it pointed to a spot to the upper left of the paper. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is where we are. The great city of Mordew.’
Nathan watched.
‘What do you think of that, young man?’
He thought, but he wasn’t sure what it was he was supposed to be thinking about. ‘I don’t know.’
‘What do you not know?’
‘I don’t know what I think.’
‘Do you understand my meaning? This place, here, is where we are.’ Bellows rapped the rod at the same spot. ‘This place, on the map, is where Mordew may be found.’
Nathan looked around him. Wasn’t so much so obvious that it didn’t need saying? Of course they were here. Where else would they be? Where else could one be?
Bellows recognised his failure to understand by its smell and tried something else. ‘This map represents the world as it is, flattened and in miniature, and we are here.’
‘I know we are here.’
Bellows nodded. He turned back to the map, but then he seemed to be struck by an idea. He picked up the blackboard, which was one side of an easel, and carried it over to the largest window. Habitually the blinds were left down, so that Nathan would not be distracted by the sight of things to which he was not to pay attention, but now Bellows pulled the cord that made them rise. The rain-soaked north of Mordew was there, and past it the Sea Wall, and eventually the sea, grey-blue blurring into grey at the horizon.
Bellows took the board and laid it flat on the ground and beckoned Nathan over. Nathan came and Bellows took him by the shoulders and moved him so that he was standing on the map, directly over the spot where he had earlier been pointing. ‘This, child, is where we are. Now look, over towards the sea. Look as far as you can.’
Nathan looked, but the day was not clear – the world seemed to end just past the Sea Wall, as it always did, there being nothing to see, nothing to know, nothing at all past that great barrier that marked the end of all things. But then, as if Bellows had intended it to happen, there was a break in the cloud, not above the tower, where the rain fell as heavily as it ever had, but as far away as Nathan could see. A wedge of sunlight fell at an angle, illuminating the sea beneath it.
‘Put this to your eye.’ Bellows gave him a tube, an eyeglass, held it for him and reached over his shoulder to twist and turn the ends. At first there was nothing, less if anything than before, but then, and unmistakably, everything came into focus and the sea hit a line of rock and threw up distant glinting clouds of mist. It was not the Sea Wall but instead was more irregular, white snaking along and a line of green atop it all.
‘Can it come closer?’
Bellows elongated the tube and it came a little closer, enough for Nathan to recognise crashing waves against cliffs of white. A little to the left sand gathered in drifts. Nathan took hold of the tube, elongated it again. There, on the beach, was that a figure? In blue? No. There was nothing. ‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘It is another place, Nathan. Now look at your feet.’
Reluctantly, Nathan turned his eyes downward. Bellows knelt before him and traced a short line with his finger. ‘This is the line along which you were looking.’ Then he took his finger and traced again. ‘And this is the border of the country, the irregular edge of which you could see through the telescope. Do you understand now?’
Nathan moved his foot as if walking on the world itself. ‘Yes.’ He did.
There was a place beyond the Wall, beyond the slums and beyond the creep of the Glass Road as it curled ever up to this tower. There was a place beyond, and it was white and green.
He stepped off the map, his footprints left behind, and now he realised, for the first time, the scope of what might lie outside this place. Though Bellows had spoken of distant lands, here was a map, and there was more than he could take in with one glance, and the words? They were names. There was Mordew, and around it were others, hundreds of others, in small print and large print and in different hands. This was where the Merchant ships went, their red sails billowing as they left the Sea Wall Gate.
When Bellows took the board up from the ground Nathan almost reached out to stop him, but he was worried what Bellows would think.
Bellows stacked the easel back up and rubbed at the footprints on the map with this handkerchief. When it was tolerably clean, he went to close the blinds.
‘Do
n’t. Please.’
Bellows studied the boy carefully for a moment or two, and when he returned to the front of the library, the blinds were left open. He took his rod and rapped at the place where the word Mordew was written. ‘We are here. Do you see?’
Nathan nodded, but beside Mordew was more blue writing – ‘We are prisoners.’
‘Excellent,’ Bellows went on. ‘This body of water, across which we just looked, this is known as the Sleeve, named by the ancients for its shape, which is like that of the arm of a jacket. It separates us from this Island of the White Hills, named for the chalk from which it is formed.’ Bellows held up his own little piece of it, and Nathan nodded again. The writing was gone now. He took his locket in his hand. ‘Indeed,’ Bellows continued. ‘On this chalk, glaring at us from over the water, is piled the corrupt and moribund city of Malarkoi, no more than a cluster of tents and herds of livestock, within which, in her mystical and occult pyramid, the Mistress of Malarkoi secretes herself, scheming ceaselessly for the death of our Master, and for the destruction of Mordew.
‘These few inches on the map represent a similarly scant hundred miles, the body of water between stirred into restless action by the Mistress’s magic and pressed into service against us all. To compound her crime, she creates birds of fire and bids them weaken our defences. It is only the constant vigilance of the Master, the strength of his Sea Wall, and the endless industry of the Master’s machines that prevents us all from being washed away, that being the dearest wish of the Mistress.’
‘Does she wear a blue dress?’ Nathan said.
Bellows was stopped in his tracks by this. He raised his nose, twitched his nostrils, as if he could smell Nathan’s words into sense-making. ‘What an odd question.’ He directed his attention as closely at Nathan as he could, inhaled hard. Not finding whatever it was he sought, he raised his arms. ‘She is not known to wear blue – her melancholy induces her to dress in black.’
