Notes from the Burning Age

by Claire North

  “But if only a few had air conditioning? Only the select? Assuming equality seems the mistake here, not the technology itself.” I shrugged, and he nodded at nothing much, contemplating the rain. “Must be damned hot in those priest robes.”

  “Most Medj like to preach from the shade,” I replied, watching the water tumble in sheets from the gutter across the street, a miniature waterfall of reflected light. Tiny rivers bounced and wriggled towards the drains, carrying fallen leaves and the settled dust of summer away.

  “Memorise these,” Georg said, pushing a datastick into my hand.

  Loaded into my inkstone, it revealed a series of names and faces, some posed, others caught on an angle. I studied every feature, lay at night trying to imagine them alive, breathing and laughing, returned to work the next day to find a new suit of finest linen and spider silk on the back of my chair.

  “It’s a loan,” Georg said, with a smile in the corner of his mouth, as I stroked the translucent beetle-black of the sleeve. “Try not to spill wine on it.”

  That evening we attended a party in a restored villa a few blocks from the Assembly. Every detail had been paid to the recreation, from the wood-panelled walls to the paper books – with actual words printed in them – lining the walls. I ran my finger along the shelf, mouthing the ancient names of Hemmingveg, Jelinek, Attwood, Chang and Koates. I doubted the spines had ever been cracked, smelt the fresh glue in the bindings, wondered how much it had cost to have such extraordinary things made and who had translated them from their ancient texts. Double doors with handles of polished brass opened to reveal a long white table laden with duck, chicken, pork, beef, fish eggs and delicate slices of pink salmon on beds of ice, glasses of bubbling wine and fresh red lobster. I stared in amazement as people went to fill their plates, tried to work out the cost of getting such goods, of transporting so much refrigerated flesh from so far away. Then Georg was by my side and murmured, “Mind yourself,” and I closed my mouth and wondered what else he had seen in my eyes.

  “Her.” A tilt of his chin towards a woman, crystal glass spinning in a gloved hand.

  “Minister for Energy, Lerna Binks,” I replied.

  A half-nod; perhaps thanks for information he did not know, perhaps acknowledgement of a test completed.

  “Him.”

  “Head of northern section railways, Chiwocha Ckahad.”

  “What do you think of him?”

  “That he’s never eaten lobster before.”

  “Have you?”

  “No. I’ve never seen one.”

  “Then how can you judge?”

  I bit my lip, bowed my head. He raised his glass to salute someone of minimal importance who’d saluted him, breathed: “Stay close, always behind, and do not speak until spoken to.”

  I nodded and followed him deeper into the crowd.

  “… I mean the Assembly in Damasc is hardly functioning at all these days, it’s all just talk talk talk…”

  “Council laws, always just more Council laws, don’t do this, do do that, do you know I spend more time these days learning Council laws than I actually do running my business?”

  “Who do they even think they…”

  “What do you mean, ‘crack the shell’? Oh gosh that’s terribly… I mean, isn’t it…?”

  “Do we even need Council? Do we even need the other Provinces? Georg, help us out here, help me explain this to him, he’s so…”

  “Georg Mestri. I see you still know how to throw a party.”

  “Pav. I didn’t expect you to attend.”

  A moment of panic – I didn’t recognise this man with a shock of snow-white hair above a tiny almond face. His eyes were huge compared to his tiny hook nose and tight little smile, and though he was nearly a foot shorter than Georg, he managed to hold the little space he inhabited as though every other person in the room were some distant grandchild and he the progenitor of it all. He smiled at Georg and tipped his glass, which he held between his fingertips with his little finger out, as if trying to counter-balance all that weight of crystal, then glanced at me, eyebrow raised. “And this is…”

  “Kadri Tarrad, my assistant.”

  “That’s a very nice suit, Kadri.”

  “Thank you. It’s not mine.”

  Another flash of a smile, and then his attention was back where it belonged, burning straight into Georg’s eyes, and though the smile remained it was the grin of the shark that knows no other way to show its teeth. Georg adjusted his weight a little more evenly, a tiny tic in his body that prefaced battle, and I briefly felt relieved – he was as surprised to see this man called Pav as I was. “And how long are you gracing Vien with your presence?”

  “Not long. Back to see the old hearth, a few friends – you know how it is.”

  “Of course. I imagine Council keeps you busy.”

  “Even on Council we have the occasional holiday.”

  “Do you? I thought all the pronouncements, the new laws, the ‘don’t-do-this, don’t-do-thats’ that you people seem to endlessly impose on the Provinces would keep you up every day and every night.”

  “Our output is only proportional to your imagination. I had no idea how creative the Assembly of Maze could be in coming up with new ways to undermine their own democracy.”

  “A democracy controlled by Temple is hardly democracy, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “When I last checked, it seemed to me that the Vien Assembly had more influence over Temple than any Medj over a Minister. Didn’t I read that Antti Col managed to get a priest to bless his car?” Pav’s laugh was sharp as the glass he held, a tinkle of playing light, a flash of pointed teeth. It was gone so abruptly, listeners might have wondered if it was there at all. “How is Antti doing, Georg?”

  “Looking forward to the elections.”

  “Of course he is. I’m sure he’ll do very well.”

  “Tell me – do you still pray every morning for forgiveness, Pav? I heard you dress in a special gown and brush your teeth with charcoal – a malicious rumour, I’m sure.”

  “I pray every morning and every night, just to be safe, but alas, my favourite penitent robes don’t always fit in the travel bag. You know I respect you, don’t you?”

  “You have always been very clear about your sentiment.”

  “Council cannot stop the people of Maze electing Antti to the Assembly, if that’s what they want. But the Provinces were united with one purpose at their heart – that the kakuy must sleep. You can march up and down and throw these delightful parties and make all the noise you want. But if you wake the kakuy…”

  “Have you ever seen a kakuy?” Georg cut in, a little louder, eyes fixed on some different place. “No. Of course you haven’t. Neither has Jia, or any of her Council. Neither has anyone in Vien, except in paintings at Temple. So while it is absolutely lovely to see you here, of course – always welcome, please do try the lobster – let’s not base our discussions on a hypothetical, shall we?”

  Pav’s smile curled in tight for just a moment – just a moment – before he relaxed again, tipped the lip of his glass towards Georg in salute, drained the liquid down and turned away.

  “Who was that?” I asked in the soft, low-lit aftermath of the party. The cleaners were moving across the room, shoving half-chewed meat and bits of bone into compost bags for the biowells, the heat of bodies still sticky in the room.

  “Hum?” Georg stood by the window, sipping water, watching the night.

  “The man called Pav.”

  “Ah, yes. He was not invited.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Pav Krillovko. He used to be an Assembly member here, many years ago. A servant of Maze. Now he works in Budapesht as chief of staff for the Voice of Council herself, passing down pronouncements to all the Provinces as if he wasn’t once one of us. A waste. He was a good man, before Temple got to him.”

  “He appeared to threaten you without having the power to act on it.”

  A snort of laught
er. “Quite. That is the Council’s way, isn’t it? Their power rests on habit. We are habituated to obeying what they say without question, but if a Province chooses not to, to resist, then it turns out the Council is quite incapable of enforcing its pronouncements. Pav knows that. Interesting that he came here in person.”

  I opened my mouth to ask something more, to blurt out words, questions, and stopped myself. Georg rolled the glass between the palms of his hands as plates of wasted food were thrown into stinking bags for the biopits, and in the world outside even the prowling cats slumbered.

  “Good night, Georg,” I said.

  “Good night, Kadri,” he replied, without looking back.

  Chapter 10

  At the autumn festival, I went out of habit to the temple to give thanks for the gifts of the earth, for the heat of the sun and the cold of the rain. I bowed my head to the wind and was grateful for its touch, but other members of the Brotherhood tutted and shook their heads and said it was rank superstition. Human is the superior species, they intoned. Whether by accident or design, we had only ourselves to thank for our thriving.

  Later, I was invited to dine with some of the women of the party. I had almost never seen these mysterious figures, dressed primly in knee-length skirts and tight buttoned shirts. But even the Brotherhood felt it necessary for its members to rest on occasion, so I found myself kneeling at a long, low table decked with beans and lentils, fresh forest mushrooms and apple stew, next to a woman called Rilka. Her short black hair was cut to a line across her shoulders, and she sliced all her food into perfect, tiny morsels, before eating one at a time as if waiting for bitterness.

  “We are mothers,” she proclaimed. “We have forgotten what it was to be proud of that. You cannot be a real woman unless you give birth. Only then, real.”

  I did not think she had any children, and she did not look at her food as she nibbled it down.

  One night, returning to my room, I encountered on the stairs the self-same gentleman who had been so enthusiastic about removing my thumb from my hand. He saw me, recognised me, smiled. I moved my hands together automatically to bow as he passed by, but instead he held out his right hand, an archaic gesture from another era. I shook his hand awkwardly. He gripped far longer than the archives said he should, squeezed tight until my bones scraped and squelched against each other above my palm, grinned, patted me on the shoulder and let me go.

  The next day, I realised he had moved into the room next to mine. In the bathhouse, the others called him Klem, and he was an excellent gardener, tending to each leaf like a tailor to a regal gown. We sometimes smiled at each other in passing and never had a conversation.

  Chapter 11

  In my ninth month working for the Brotherhood, I met Antti Col. The leader of the Brotherhood should have been a charismatic demagogue, a handsome, striking man able to express the frustration of everyone who felt they wanted more, more, more. Instead, as he strode into Georg’s office in a flutter of evening blue and golden lapel pin, he was a diminutive weed next to Georg’s spring tree, with teeth like yellow fungi and a foul, ranting mouth.

  “Fuck the Assembly,” he proclaimed, flinging himself sideways across Georg’s winter-green couch. “Fuck the Provinces.”

  Georg poured him a drink as he ranted, decrying Jia, Voice of the Council, as a stupid little whore. The temples were run by ancient toads, outdated dens for paedophiles, and anyway the streets loved him, and had Georg read the latest reports from Budapesht?

  “I have,” murmured Georg. “Encouraging.”

  “Is that what you call it? Fucking cowards.”

  He drained the proffered drink, didn’t seem to enjoy it, waved his glass for a refill, which Georg provided. That too was guzzled, and as he laid the glass down, the angle of his arm drifted towards where I stood, silent in my corner, and for the first time his eyes met mine. “Who’s that?” he barked, sober and cold.

  “That is Kadri, my assistant.”

  “Why’s he just standing there?”

  “He’s waiting for instructions.”

  “Fuck off – there you go.”

  My eyes flickered to Georg, who half-nodded in confirmation. I gave a tiny bow from the waist and closed the double doors behind me on my way out.

  On the last day of autumn, I cycle up to the forest’s edge where the lumber merchants have sliced away the trees. All has been torn down and spat into machines – even the youngest saplings, the freshest growth. It was a pointless destruction, out of balance with the bargain we once struck with the kakuy. There is low thunder in the distance; tonight there will be lightning bright enough to punch through shutter, window, eyelid and sleep, a gasping awake as the heavens grumble in the fading heat.

  The Assembly voted to harvest more timber, more from the forests in the hills above, to fish the rivers harder, deeper, to let the factories drain poisons into the downstream gullies and inlets. At my little desk outside Georg’s office, I read the letters of protest from the other Provinces, the Assemblies of Bukarest and Budapesht, and from the Council itself.

  “Are they going to do anything about it?” Georg would ask.

  “Not that I can tell,” I replied.

  “Then it’s just a waste of words. They will want to buy the things we sell, sooner or later. They’ll come round. Temple won’t be able to stop them – it doesn’t know how.”

  “I was Temple. They will fight you.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t fear the inquisitors.”

  At the edge of the devastation is a black line where the still-living forest waits for its fate, leaves brushing together like lovers’ skin, roots tangled like claws into black, crawling soil. I watch the darkness and it watches back, and though I do not see the kakuy, I think that tonight he prowls beneath the moon in the form of the great black wolf, and I hear his voice howling and know that in this place nothing new will grow, as if the land were sown with salt.

  Three months later, I see Yue.

  Chapter 12

  And where has Yue been, these twenty-odd years?

  Why, she has been in Bukarest, studying, learning, working to become the best.

  And then?

  She has gone to Budapesht, to work for the Council, bringing the Provinces together in one Grand Assembly, doing so well, our Yue, doing so well.

  Sometimes she returns to Tinics, at the spring and harvest festivals.

  Then she only came back for spring.

  Then she did not come back at all.

  Mama Taaq spun spider silk from her tree and stirred the fish tanks at the top of the stream and said well, well. She’s doing… so well. In time, even the nosiest of neighbours stopped asking about it.

  And now?

  Why, she is walking in Jia’s delegation as it arrives at Vien’s central station, a few people behind the Voice of Council herself. She is deputy to Krima vaMiyani, who everyone knows is a spy who pretends she’s got an interest in culture and telecommunications. She is smiling politely to Antoni Witt, who is already eyeing up the heresies of Maze and muttering about extraordinary actions and desperate times – comments Antti Col has been quick to pick up on as provocative, dangerous. Council serves the Provinces, he snaps; it does not command them.

  She is grown up, and having grown up there is nothing of the fire in her any more. She burned from the inside out, and now there are only cool palms pressed together in polite bow; ice smile and stone gaze. She does not see me – or if she does, she does not make the connection between my face, pressed into the shadows, and the boy who once stood with her by the kakuy tree.

  She arrives two weeks after Assembly elections in which the Brotherhood wins the majority of seats in the Vien Assembly. She is here, officially, as part of the Council’s overall responsibility to visit the Provinces and engage with the cities, Assemblies and temples.

  They are here, unofficially, because the election put Antti Col in the Chief Minister’s seat, and Antti Col is a humanist and a heretic.

 
“Fair reward for fair work!” he chants from the podium in the square. “Recognition of human difference, of the power of our diversity – that there are those born with talent, intelligence, strength, that men and women not the same, that we have our own unique parts to play in the balance of the world! A human balance! A human world!”

  Georg does not stand on the podium. It is not his place.

  When the speech is done, everyone applauds, except Jia, her followers and Yue.

  Antti met Jia at the Assembly building, a vast converted pre-burning-era palace that had at one time held princes and kings, then dinosaurs and skeletons of great beasts. It now held restored statues of ancient gods and nude boys holding spears, and cases boasting a range of anthropological specimens from the history of Maze, from the first clay figures carved in mud to the gold cigarette bowls and restored combustion engines of the Burning Age, each adorned with little plaques explaining the traditions and beliefs of the time.

  Antti brought Jia there as a power play, the Council forced to come and pay homage at the upstart’s place of work, forced to climb the steps up to the great doors beneath the domed roof and flying flags, forced to wait her turn to see the newly appointed master of the Province, forced to smile when finally let in by a pasty demagogue.

  I had never seen Jia in person before. I had voted for her in Council elections several times, and the general view of the Lyvodian Assembly was that she was a decent administrator, keeping the Provinces vaguely united through a mixture of tact and legalism. She was older than I expected, her straight black hair turning grey and swept up into a high, stiff topknot. She walked slow and stiff-backed through the halls, but when she sat, her spine would curve down in a little arch, as if the effort of erection were too much to be sustained. Her eyes were tiny in the almond folds of her long, pinched face, but whenever a camera was near she’d tilt her chin up to force her gaze down, creating the impression of a wider, more trustworthy stare. She bowed a little to any stranger who bowed to her, hands pressed together; bowed more to Assembly members, and noted but did not respond when delegates from the Brotherhood barely bowed at her in reply, their disrespect and disdain visible in every curl of their lips or sideways remark.