Notes from the Burning Age

by Claire North

  Georg howled with pain. I had not known that statues could scream; I did not think he was made of the same stuff as the kin of sky and earth. The blade went so deep that when he jerked his leg away the knife went with it, tearing through thick, red muscle to hang down like a hook stuck in a butcher’s joint. He collapsed onto the floor, clutching at his thigh, encasing the leg in his giant hands but not touching the protruding wood or metal, as if moving fingers near it would just make the pain more real. I scrambled away on slithering paws, pressed myself into the wall, hauled down breath, felt for the first time something hot trickling across my belly, ignored it, fumbled in the drawer of the wooden counter by the door with its faux-modern art sculptures and little pot of scented, tasteful leaves, staining it all with crimson. Found the keys to Georg’s car – the emergency set he kept for when his driver was sick or his patience was low – crawled over his flailing legs as he rolled and rocked on the ground, face popping with the effort of holding back another roar of anguish. Slipping through the door into the icy street, I felt the cold of it as a blessing – thank you kakuy of the winds, thank you kakuy of the snow, I thought your touch was only darkness but tonight it is blessing, thank you, thank you. Saw a light turn on in a window opposite; another a little further down the street. Georg’s howls would wake the whole neighbourhood. I staggered onto hands and knees, scarlet on white snow, crawled onto my feet, tried to run, and in the end managed a reasonable lurch round the corner, to the waiting car.

  Chapter 22

  I had only ever driven a car three times before. Once, when the postier in Tinics let me sit in the driver’s seat and carefully press the accelerator on a very straight, very empty bit of road. Twice more in the temple in Bukarest, when Nadira sat me down and said: “There are so few of these things around that you don’t need to know much about them, but we should probably make sure you’ve got the basics.”

  The battery was at 50% charge, having been plugged in late after a long day on the road. The driver’s seat was set uncomfortably too far back, reclined almost to a snoozing position, and I didn’t have time or space in my thoughts to work out how to change it. I tried the pedals, muttering their half-remembered functions under my breath, fumbled with the keys, dropped them, swore, rummaged in the dark around my feet, tried again, the cold of the night now mixing hard with the nauseating heat of blood and pain running through my body.

  It took me three tries to get it right and crawl out into the street. The steering was strange at first, each corner taken with the caution of a mouse snuffling for cheese in a cat sanctuary. But in the dead hours of the night, so long as I avoided the main avenues and thoroughfares of the city, the only people I might startle were pedestrians ambling home hand-in-gloved-hand through the settled snow, late-night revellers or the occasional delivery man unloading his crates for the morning market. Once Georg reported the car stolen, it would become an instant liability, the telegram flashed from town to town. That should take at least forty minutes, maybe longer if I’d severed his femoral artery. If I’d severed his femoral artery, he would be dead already. I didn’t think I’d killed him. I didn’t know.

  Ten kilometres out of the city, I pulled over on the side of the road to find my shirt glued to my body with blood. A slash from collarbone to the bottom of my ribs had opened the skin across my chest; not deep, but long and wide enough that the cloth was now saturated with blood, oozing like water through a sodden sponge. I felt dizzy looking at it, too sick to drive, but I pushed the car to the edge of a village whose name I should have known and couldn’t remember, driving it at last into a ditch on the edge of a stream of muddy, stinking water that ran down to the Ube. It would be discovered in a few hours, a few days at most. I still felt satisfied dumping it, a terrible, un-priestly surge of wasteful glee.

  Swaying through a village in the dead hours of the night. Snow is starting to fall. Catch it on your tongue; thick, clustered globules of frozen white. If you hold out your sleeve and let it settle, you can see each individual flake, until finally, if you stay still long enough, there isn’t enough warmth left to melt even the lightest clumps, and your arm begins to sag beneath the weight of frozen night. There are only a few streetlights in this place, enough to give the shape of the curving central street. It is the kind of town where each hearth minds the other’s business, considering it impolite to pry into the affairs of neighbours behind their high paper and resin walls. The server office is open only four hours a day, five days a week. The temple is padlocked shut. Even the midnight foxes are slumbering tonight, no yellow eyes flashing in the dark, no paw prints pressed into the settled earth.

  There is a clinic, which reminds people with a polite notice outside that the prescription system is changing and will no longer be free. It is shut, but a window at the side breaks easily enough, strewing thin micro-fibres of solar wiring amongst the shattered glass. I crawl through into the chill, dank dark, follow the walls with my hands until I find a switch, coax a little light from the overhead bulbs, poorly fed by temperamental winds. I have no time for proper medical attention, but slather clotting agent and press pads into the most egregious injuries, discard my bloody shirt in a yellow bin and pull on a beige nurse’s shirt from a pile of fresh washing behind the reception desk. It will not withstand the cold, and now the spinning in my skull is turning the edges of the world blacker than even winter night.

  I wonder where Nadira is. If she is dead, free, taken.

  I wonder if I should go back and do not.

  The safe house is twenty minutes from the centre of the village, down a mud path obscured beneath banks of billowed white. I get turned around once, twice, trying to find it. The cold is starting to feel warm before I spot its walls, light out, gate locked shut. The key is hidden in a hollow beloved of nesting blackbirds; I fumble through crystallised worms and the remnants of ancient cracked egg before finding it. My hands shake too much to get it into the lock. In the end, I turn my whole body to the side, tipping my weight against the timber for support, twisting with elbows locked to my ribs for some rigidity until the tumblers turn. Then in; courtyard with its frozen-over pond beneath the silver ash. The solar panels are covered with snow; the pipes have frozen. The keeper of the house has not checked in on this place for at least a week, held back perhaps by weather or sheer winter-dark inertia. But there are wood pellets in the stove and a lighter which clicks into tiny flaming life when pressed between my blue palms. As the fire catches, I drag every pillow and blanket I can find into a pile at its feet and bury myself like a bear, muffling against the pain as blood returns to icy limbs.

  Winter’s dawn is low, blinding, slices of white that catch the gentle dance of dust particles in the air. It comes in on sharp angles through the window above the sink, moving fast over bamboo bowls and empty pans, a cup turned upside down, closed cupboards and bare timber floors. It catches the flash of tatty colour from the piled pillows I’ve dragged around me; faded ochre and time-drained emerald, dry cobalt and wilting yellow. It takes a while to wake me, having to push through an inordinate amount of blanket and tangled reluctance before my brain registers the day. When it does, I forget for a moment where I am and think that this is what it will be like when I am old, and mad, and every day is a new form of being born, without a parent to love you. Then the pain kicks back in, and the odds of living so long suddenly fade, and being an old codger causing trouble in some patient hearth doesn’t seem so bad after all. The pellets in the stove have nearly all burned down, leaving a thin residue of still-warm ash at its base which I am tempted to rub my hands in for that final glimmer of heat.

  Outside, a crow hollers indignantly at a peer, or an interloper, or some intruder to its peaceful realm. Wings beat; a mob forming, chasing, hounding – then peace again.

  Ploughed fields hidden beneath snow catch the wind as it spins across crystals, disturbed only by the tiny footprints of a hopping bird and the larger footprints of the predatory fox that hunted it in the night.


  Somewhere overhead, a buzzard seeks to catch a meagre updraught, and the light through the window fades in and out like flashing code as thin clouds race across its surface. It is a good morning for snowball battles followed by hot drinks; for knocking down icicles and clearing the road for the postier and the cargo truck, for the ambulance and the schoolmaster who lives on the frozen river and every year misses one day – and one day only – when the ice is too thin to walk upon but too thick to push his boat through.

  There is a little blood on the blankets I’ve wrapped myself in; presumably my blood. I do not dare remove my bandages, but crawl through the unkind chill of the world beyond my soft fortress to the cupboards, rummage through until I find the first aid kit. The clotting agents and healing gels within are of a slightly higher quality than most hearths would possess, one of the few acknowledgements in the place of its more clandestine nature. There is medical glue for sealing shut any gaping wounds, macrophages in a vial with various obscure antibiotic purposes listed on the side along with the instruction “shake well – use immediately after opening”. I use what I can, drink as much water as I dare, find a bag of dried fruit, munch it down without noticing the flavour.

  Officially, the hearth doesn’t have a telephone, and it’s a brisk walk to the nearest office. But there is a short-wave radio hidden beneath one of the floorboards upstairs. I set it to transmit a distress call every fifty minutes, no more than a ten-second burst, a maximum of six times. Any more and using it will become too dangerous, too easy to track, and I must move on. The bed has a blanket adorned with rose petals and images of happy rabbits. I steal it for my downstairs tangle, drag it into the kitchen to settle before the last heat of the fire, to wait.

  The wind-up clock by the door ticks away the hours towards noon, now running on, now stuck in a minute that lasts for ever. I have done everything protocol said I should: retreated to a set location in the event of emergency for extraction, sent a distress call, waited.

  The sun turns across the floor, vanishes briefly behind the trees, reappears again in little spikes of dust-dappling illumination, vanishes again behind clouds, stays shrouded. I doze, then jerk awake, then doze again. When I open my eyes, it has started to snow again, and it is impossible to tell whether it is clouded afternoon or failing evening. I check the clock, and it is evening, and no one has come, and I am alone in the safe house.

  Here.

  Sitting for a little while looking at the clock.

  Here.

  There are protocols, of course, for this kind of situation. They are loosely worded, make things sound simpler than they are: Evade capture. Get out alive. What they lack in detail, they make up for with stark motivation.

  I wait three hours longer than the protocol says I should, which is probably a standard psychological response to being abandoned, and no one comes.

  Chapter 23

  I decided to move a little after 8 p.m. There was no reason to it, save that I had by that time sat in the thickening cold and dark, by myself, feeling miserable to no avail, for nearly a day. At some point, the paralysing terror of what might come met with the hard reality of how uncomfortable my present situation was, and the balance tipped into action. I pulled the emergency supplies from the pantry – torch, money, maps, inkstone. Blank documents were kept in a box behind the bathhouse, sealed in biopolymer. I filled in a few false details, stamped them, hoped for the best. I dragged myself out of my bloody, meagre clothes and into a dusty, dew-tainted shirt and jacket from the cupboard upstairs. I pulled on hat, gloves, scarf, oversized boots padded with three layers of sock, shovelled the snow away from the door of the bicycle shed, pulled out the least tatty-looking bike from within, turned on the headlamp, loaded up the panniers with food, water and first aid supplies, put a compass in my pocket and turned towards what I hoped was the nearest road heading south-east, towards Slava. On a good day, a fast cyclist could cover the distance between Vien and Slava in less than ten hours. But that was before Maze was declared heretical and the roads filled up with glowering men. Officially, the borders weren’t yet closed and you could still cross with documentation and a bit of patience – but I found it hard to imagine Georg had not flashed my face to every post on the road. If he lived.

  Just before midnight, I locked the gate behind me, returned the key to its hollow in the tree and set out into the dark.

  The first hour – exhausting, drained by cold, just pushing the bicycle in search of a road clear enough to pedal down.

  The next hour – frustrating, skidding, breathless, the road decent enough to cycle down but cased with patches of swerving ice that twice send me slithering sideways into the padded dunes of white that frame the path.

  The hour after that – arriving at a village. I check its name and discover that, far from having travelled sixty kilometres already, I have made it a little less than twelve. I drink water and eat dried fish to stave off a wave of dizziness, but that just replaces the heat in my brain with gentle churning in my belly. My chest throbs along the torn line of flesh, the pain starting as an almost welcome fire that grows and grows until it is needles in my eyes, pounding in my brain.

  Eventually I reach the main road that flanks the north side of the Ube River, flat and clear and fast. These are the small hours of the electric cargo truck and the heavy cargo bike making goods runs through the night. Even the bicyclesarais that appear every forty minutes or so have turned down the lights by the reception doors and pulled the shutters tight. The batteries behind the courtyards are running on empty, emitting their last mournful, sluggish clicks as hot air discharges through slow-spinning turbines, fading, gone. The lights go out in the lanterns that frame the path. The smell of biovats from the sewage pumps behind the sarais makes passing cyclists flinch and turn away, eyes watering, noses running from the unexpected, unprocessed stink.

  I stop at a sarai – little more than a shuttered shrine, a few benches out of the wind and a water fountain – a few hours before dawn, astonished at how little distance I’ve covered, at how much my body hurts. A tired girl with sea-green eyes guards a counter selling a few hot vegetables rolled in egg wraps and warm bread. The sarai is near enough to the windfarms to have a little heat to offer from its stove, a little light to share in the nooks and crannies where half-slumbering travellers rest their heads.

  “Is the road clear to Marno?” I ask the girl, who doesn’t look up from her inkstone, shrugs. “I heard they were struggling to shift the snow.”

  “People are coming from there fine enough,” she replies, and there ends the conversation.

  I eat my food, take a palmful of painkillers in the shadow of the bathroom round back, refill my water bottle, wish there was somewhere more convenient I could lay my head, or that I could stick my legs up the wall to drain some of the sloshing blood from my swelling limbs. There is a dead drop behind the water vat. I check it and find no message, no fresh documents or words of comfort and support. I wait another hour anyway, huddling by the low stoves in blanket-swagged corners of the sarai, listen to the gossip, walk the perimeter of the sarai one more time, do not see Nadira, do not find aid.

  Sunrise is coming, a greying of the blackened sky in the east, a rolling down of shadows. I cannot stay here. I return to the half-light of the sarai courtyard, and there are the guardia. There are only two of them, wrapped in grey felt and woollen scarves, their bicycles resting against a wooden post from which the white lantern of the sarai sags, heavy with snow. They are not the elite of the roads, not speeding up and down in their swanky cars, spare batteries in the boot, sirens and flashing lights to clear the sluggish traffic. They are local boys, sent to do a local job, not expecting trouble, but perhaps hoping for it nonetheless, a little excitement to break the monotony of their lives.

  “Documents, documents!” calls the younger, with voice and eye corralling the weary gathered cyclists into a huddle beneath the light while her older colleague flicks through offered IDs.