“I’m surprised you know the slightest thing about my granddaughter. You being a nun, I mean.” Grizmare took the freshened glass. “I’ve always believed politics and religion should stay wholly separate. It’s rather like sour gin, best in layers so neither one curdles.”
“I wish the order was so innocent.” Grizmare prayerfully interlaced her hands. She sat down and admired the garden through the glass. “I’m afraid it is one of the reasons that I went into private service rather than civil. The Mother Superiors take your son’s laws as scripture. They have hardened the hearts of their orders, sent us out to Holy War. I opted for a different path.”
“One which led you directly into the employee of High Judge Titian. Ha!” Grizmare screwed up her old eyes and laughed and laughed until the tears squeezed out.
“It led me to you as well.” Lizabeth’s gaze didn’t wander from the garden. She got a small, nervous shake to her clasped hands.
Grizmare took a sip from her glass, hawkish in her intense way of studying the nun.
Lizabeth appeared to physically gather her wits again. She sat up straight and looked away from the garden. “But of course you miss your granddaughter, Grizmare. What a stupid thing for me to ask!” She smiled enigmatically and her well-bred eyes shone very green.
The gunner dominated the holding bay. Three huge steel arms pinned it mid-air, allowing workers access to the blue-black hull. With temperatures soaring out on the desert flats, the glass-sheet double doors were wide open.
Down in the bay, the air reeked of dust and glut oil. Kali didn’t know how the air smelt up on the wire-cage balconies reserved for the guard who kept watch; even blockers were excluded from those lofty heights. All she knew was it felt good to have escaped the repetitive task of stringing stone-wool in the factory. Bleek were nothing if not manipulative of prisoners’ skillsets, and while some Vary worked hard to keep their talents hidden, Kali’s were a matter of public record. She understood the principals of the concentric friction rings and biological generators, had lived for it once upon a time! The sting of hunger could almost be forgotten before such grand design!
“Cease! Cease!” called down a guard from one of the wire-cage balconies.
The workers left off as a party of guards entered the hold, headed up by Joltu and with five of the Gothendore Sisterhood in tow.
“Guess it’s time to bless the gunner before we break her open,” whispered the Vary male who had been set on as Kali’s assistant. He had a gappy smile and appeared more settled to his incarceration than most.
“I can’t abide their hocus-pocus,” she said under her breath.
“Titian’s daughter rejecting her national religion? You are brave, Lieutenant.” The male winked at her.
Kali didn’t answer as the parade of officers and sisters passed close by. She homed in on the officers’ faces – the shadow of stubble, moles on a cheek, cracked lips from the heat, a sweat stain at a shirt collar. The sisters stayed in the folds of their wimples.
Arriving at the gunner, Joltu ordered the prisoners to join hands in prayer while the sisters spoke their incantations. For the next few minutes, Lord Gothendore was beseeched, the sisters lifting their hands and forcing tears and wailing. After, they fell silent, rocking back and forth.
Joltu led the party out again. The order came to “Resume!” and work began again inside the hold.
Kali’s new helper leaned in. “Hi. I am Groff.” He shuffled his feet. “You don’t need to introduce yourself. It’s not like the camp is overrun with Bleek women forced to share our barracks.” She didn’t say anything and he went on unhindered. “You are a bio-engineer. It was your mother’s profession too, by all accounts.”
He joined her on a narrow platform and she started to crank the handle manually. The concertina lift stuttered into life and started to rise. “I take it you are my Second.” She panted as she worked; the handle was stiff and took effort to turn. Looking up, she was newly fascinated by the pocked diamantine skin of the craft.
Groff snorted. “I’m not sure what I am, Lieutenant. In my old life, I was a nurse, specialising in paediatrics and minor maxillofacial procedures. Now I make do with injecting green paste with dirty needles. On occasion, I bring the dead back to life. Ah, don’t look so cynical! The not-quite-dead then. Like the Speaker’s son. The guards made a mess of him. He’s walking now, though, and put to work at the quarry, poor bastard!” Groff took the screen plate she unbolted and handed down. He wiped a rag over the plate, cleaning off the dust kicked out by the giant rotator rings above.
“And is the Speaker’s son looking to step into his father’s shoes?” Kali focused on the hose and wires which had been protected by the plate. The bare cable was circumnavigated with positively charged ion bands.
“Doesn’t look that way.” Groff sounded sad. “I guess it can hurt a boy to grow up in his father’s shadow. Mohab has lost plenty – a mother and sisters to lungrot. I guess we must understand his reticence.”
Kali grunted. Lungrot made no distinction between rich and poor. Her mother had drowned in her own phlegm the same as the Speaker’s family, and her father’s father before that. The great Skyfall had released enough fine particles into the air to last a thousand years or longer.
“Maybe you could speak to Mohab?”
“What?” Kali glared down at her Second. The request was ludicrous!
Groff appeared entirely sincere. “You gave up your freedom for the Vary cause. You oppose our subordination.”
“You seriously expect me to hold any sway over the behaviour of a rebel?” Kali smashed her hands in amongst the guts beneath the bolt plate. She spoke through gritted teeth. “You ask this of me, daughter of High Judge Titian, an ex-Lieutenant in the National Guard? You expect me to support dissent, to encourage talk of resistance? Who do you think I am? A Vary whore in Bleek skin? No matter what political agenda I have championed in the past, I am a Bleek nationalist, born and bred. I am no confidante and I am no sweet-talker.”
She expected Groff to fall silent and instinctively lean away. Instead, he folded his arms and nodded slowly. “I’m asking too much, I know. It must be hard for you. Very hard.” He cocked his head and squinted up at her. “Your people don’t want you and you don’t want us. As the Speaker tells it, ‘Kali screams and her screams answer back’.”
“The Speaker should keep his fucking mouth shut before I help him meet his maker.”
“Ah, don’t you worry, Lieutenant. The Speaker’s end will come soon enough.” With a sigh, Groff returned to polishing the bolt plate. He sang as he worked. “Varber iubită, Louanne, Loua…”
Kali’s patience snapped. “Shut the fuck up!”
“No talking!” A beater dragged along the wire-mesh overhead.
Whispers died down all around the hull.
Kali went back to her wiring while Groff said under his breath, “If our songs affect you so, Lieutenant, you must learn to close your ears to them.” He fell silent and Kali did her best to forget that he was there.
Twelve
Grizmare leaned heavily on her cane as she walked. Her breath came in spurts, like the sprinkler valves on timers around the garden. It didn’t help that she had been woken by a tremor that morning. One moment she was a desert otter, running from a chef’s blade, the next she was blinking awake to find her bed shaking. And now, hours later, she was stiff and cranky with a pain between her eyes.
“Being old is shit!” she said aloud. Bones cracking. Hips sore. “Shit as Demonia’s own dung. Why’d I have to cart this rotten flesh around on claggy old bones!”
“You’re excessively tetchy today.” The countessa walked by her side, dressed in finery and accompanied by a personal drone shade that hummed overhead.
“Why in Gothendore’s name you couldn’t have brought that blasted machine with you to the Red Orchid, I don’t know! Making me sit in the sun all afternoon like drying leather.”
“It is a gift from my daughter.” Morantha gave a
delicate shudder. “Always eager to show off whatever new wonder she has dreamed up at Capital Hall!” Her surgical smile faltered. “I’m still divided about the value of a debutante working in a technical laboratory, even if it is the country’s finest!”
“Clever girl. Still young enough to use her intelligence and not grow fat on complacency.” Grizmare sniffed as she laboured to take each step. “I grew fat. Oh, tosh – I don’t mean physically! I never did eat enough to turn into one of those society dames with quadruple chins and bellies like giant turds. No, I’m talking about an organ like the brain, which should be wiry and well-used. My mind has gone flabby through lack of use. Sometimes I envy those young men and women put to work for the war effort. Oh, he’s a clever one, my son! Cunning enough to persuade even this country’s elite to sacrifice their own children to his cause!”
Morantha shooed her off the path. “Sit down, Grizmare. You’re getting delirious and shouldn’t be walking in this heat.”
“Not without one of those fancy shade drones, I shouldn’t!”
Grizmare was in enough pain to follow Morantha’s lead and they took a seat on a small stone bench in her favourite nook of the garden, beneath a giant moss vine that provided heavy shade. The drone hovered a foot or so clear of the vine.
Grizmare raised her eyes to the machine. “That thing’s wise enough not to entangle itself in the branches.”
“It is the gel frill. Senses the impact potential.” Morantha shrugged. “I do read, you know! Being born to privilege doesn’t preclude intellect.”
“Maybe you could explain that to Harriot!” Thinking about their ridiculous friend, Grizmare snorted and rested one hand atop the other on the handle of her cane. “Meanwhile, you can lend me the thing. I’ll send it out on a hunt for my son.”
“Still no word from High Judge Titian?” Morantha did the nun’s trick of staring out at the garden whenever she asked a difficult question.
“I think I represent his conscience,” said Grizmare, enlightening herself with the thought. “He sent Kali away. For that, I love him as a son and loathe him as a man.”
Morantha fell into silent contemplation. Wafts of her expensive perfume reached Grizmare’s nostrils. Ticklishly sweet and underpinned with age.
“You smell like church, Morantha.” Grizmare wrinkled her nose.
Morantha ignored the comment. Instead, she sat straight-backed, face beautifully carved. “Grizmare, you must be careful. You’ve always been loose-lipped. Coarse even, I know you won’t care me saying it. But if word gets out that High Judge Titian no longer has you under his protective wing…? There are assassins, spies, Resistance fighters who will take advantage.” She leaned in, scars silvery at her hairline. “Watch out for yourself, Grizmare.”
“And change the habits of a lifetime? I won’t be silenced.”
“You say that now and yet you have been. Silenced, I mean.” Morantha laid a hand lightly on Grizmare’s knee. “I wasn’t there, of course. I have never stepped foot in a courtroom my entire life and I intend to keep it that way. But as I understand it from the datestacks, you sat in the gallery for Kali’s entire trial, and at no point did you attempt to defend your granddaughter, or pour down abuse, or otherwise run amuck!” The countessa batted her false eyelashes. “Grizmare, I love your posturing, I always have. Few things delight me more than hearing you chew out a pompous waiter or arrogant young officer. But when it comes to more serious matters – state versus family – you need to know when to be quiet. If only the Vary would behave with such dignity!”
“Dignity? Huh. And how much did my son appreciate my dignity? I chose him over Kali and he instantly forgot me.”
“I believe you chose the nation rather than your son.”
Tears burned the corners of Grizmare’s eyes. She pictured Kali, seated at a distance through all those hours of evidence and hearsay. Throughout the entire trial the young woman had barely moved, as if she had already spilt every drop of her blood and turned to stone.
Shrugging off the memory, Grizmare fixated on the whirring drone. “Get your daughter to order me one of those bastards. The sun gets hotter every day. Soon there’ll be no place left to shelter.”
“Why do you wear the Perversionest brand?” The Lieutenant pointed to the neon symbol on Groff’s left cheek.
Groff shifted around. The sand mattress was unforgiving and faintly damp. “My full name is Groff de Rubon,” he said. “I am thirty-four years old. My father was third generation Bleekland Vary; he still had his family book, pages so old they’d crackle if you tried to turn them. The book told the story of my ancestors’ passage from Raestan. The only other evidence was a small wooden doll reputably carved by a Raestanese carpenter. My mother kept the doll on the kitchen dresser, between her Fire Night candlestick and the urn containing Grandmother de Rubon’s ashes. Legend has it my great great grandmother acquired the doll from a pauper who called by the house in need of alms. With the innocence of a child, she offered her mother’s string of raven pearls. So moved was the pauper by the outlandish gesture that he refused the pearls and asked for black bread instead. He carved the doll from a stick of wetwood by way of reward for the young girl’s kind gesture.” Groff shrugged. The memory of the doll and his mother’s kitchen was grainy, like photostats faded through long exposure to the sun.
He went on. “I was raised in Soagre, a mining town. You know it?”
The Lieutenant nodded. “North of Nilreb.”
Groff suspected that the Lieutenant remembered a whole lot about Soagre from her time in the National Guard but didn’t care to share. Just as well, he told himself. He didn’t want to know which of his neighbours she’d had executed.
Instead, he opted to tell her about the man he had loved. “His name was Ju. A nightclub singer, born and raised in Nilreb. We met one evening twelve years ago. I was a student nurse living in halls on the east side, near the universium.” Groff laughed softly. “I was a homely sort. Bread, my mother called me, meaning welcoming to the eye and always a comfort. My experience with sexuality was restricted to a neighbour’s daughter glimpsed naked through a bathroom window.” He remembered the girl. Angular where he had expected curves, the down where her thighs met at odds with her smooth skin. He had not felt as he knew he should. Instead, it was another six months before he visited a bathhouse and saw the beautiful young men walking naked through the corridors, their long lean limbs and taut buttocks unfolding his desire like an orchid blossoming.
“Ju and I met one Fire Night. The moon was rosy. Sort of eve my mother would have said had blood in it, which was why I very nearly didn’t go out. I’d developed a soft spot for a student named Glen and I wanted to stay in the dorm to see if I could talk to him. But my friends, Len and Ezra, would not hear of it. Fire Night is a time to fear Mama Sunstar and all those years ago when she opened up the throat of this world and rained down magma and ash. It is also the best excuse to drink, puke, and dance until your ears bled.” Groff smiled sadly. “At least that used to be the way of things.”
The lieutenant tucked her hands beneath her armpits. “It must be nice to celebrate something traditional. My father hijacked every celebration to toast his own greatness.”
Groff couldn’t help wondering what it had been like for Titian’s daughter growing up. Hers must have been a cosseted if formal existence. Unlike his own. “Len was a city boy. He’d found this place behind a big old temple covered with graffiti, the sort inked by Bleek Youth Guard. The nightclub was called The Golden Note and it was just the kind of dive students flock to. My friend Ezra was an artist at heart who’d been pushed into nursing by his overbearing father. He lapped up the place with, as I remember it, all these candles in jars, rickety chairs, and tiny lanterns strung up like jars of lava. There was a bar, of course, selling mezcals, tequilas, algae wine and clay cups of jalapeno aquavit hot enough to burn a hole in you. There was a stage too, with a tin piano and a big old Jalwest Indian playing ragtime tunes.”
The m
emories were sweet and sour. Tears pricked Groff’s eyes and he breathed in hard. “Ju was first up. He was the new boy – hadn’t paid his dues yet. So he got the cold slot when patrons were still trickling in and hadn’t soaked themselves silly in liquor. But when he got up on that stage? To me, he was ten types of glorious.” Groff nodded to himself. Wasn’t he just? He didn’t tell the Lieutenant about Ju’s lips, sticky and full. Or how, later that night, he sank himself in up to hilt between Ju’s buttocks and thrust and dragged at that tightly yielding embrace. He kept those memories close, polishing them over in his mind.
“He sang well. Old favourites from the cradle to the grave. Len thought he had Ju all sewn up. But Ju was wily. ‘No more city boys’, he told me when we put the lights out that night.”
“Where is he now?”
Groff swallowed. “The National Guard took him. He was caught leafleting for the Resistance.” Pain spread through him like a needle weaving in and out. “My hope is he died a long time ago.”
The Lieutenant was quiet a few moments, just a shape at the end of the bunk. Eventually, she sighed. “Sometimes I worry that with all the history which was lost during the Skyfall, we ended up going backwards.”
A kiss to the forehead. Lips at the nape of his neck. A hand skimming down to the hard peak, a crush of thigh beyond… Mohab kept these thoughts at the fore of his mind as the sun beat down. Anything to distract from the endless exhaustion of the work. All around, the air resonated with the hack of picks on rock and the crack of sledgehammers. Every so often, the trammel rumbled into action, its great cylinder rotating and steaming. The loud clinking noise signified the drop of rocks being screened by size. The panting of the prisoners who drove the crank wheel was lost to the sounds of quarrying basalt.
Mohab used a forearm to wipe the sweat from his eyes. Everything was salt – the crud at the corner of his mouth, the grease across his skin. The rock smoked with dust where it had been freshly cut.
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