Notes from the Burning Age

by Claire North

  There is an option of running, of course. I haven’t been seen yet, pressing into the shadows towards the toilets, and the gentle glow of eastern light on the horizon is still not enough to pick me out against the ivory landscape. But running means heading away from my bicycle, the supplies and the road. It means going on foot into the fields and smothered floodplains, still injured, and trying to steal and bluff my way to safety. My false documents are in the pannier of my cycle bag. At some point, they were going to be tested; better now, I reason, with local boys not used to the hunt, than at a checkpoint staffed by professionals further down the road.

  I pull the papers from the bag, drag my jacket tighter around my aching bones, join the inspection queue.

  “What’s happening?” asks a woman in front of me.

  “Just routine,” is the answer.

  “This isn’t routine,” grumbles another, as his documents are held up to the older guardia’s torchlight.

  “Travel much, do you?” asks the younger, and though the man is almost certainly innocent of any crime, the surprise of being questioned so cows him. There was a time, not so many years ago, when he might have laughed and said yes, yes I do, I cycle every month to Budapesht and back, as a free man of the Provinces may. But Maze has been declared heretical, and the Brotherhood is leery of spies, traitors, saboteurs and anyone else for whom a five-day investigation in a cell without trial or access to legal aid may be considered a worthwhile deployment of energy – for the good of the state. Even if five days seem a short period of time for the vindication of being declared guilt-free, this travelling man may miss his son’s wedding, or his wife’s final hours of illness, or simply have to carry the shame of being incarcerated when he was meant to be at work, or come home to a family gone mad trying to find him, who thought he was dead, swallowed by the kakuy of the rising river. How quickly these things turn.

  I am third from last in the queue, and my lips are turning white with waiting. The younger guardia takes my documents, scans them, passes them to the elder.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Marno.”

  “Why?”

  “To see a friend.”

  “What’s your friend’s name?”

  “Licia Hahn, she’s a lawyer.”

  “Why are you visiting her?”

  “We haven’t seen each other for a long time. She’s just been through an unhappy affair.”

  “Where’d you come from?”

  “Vien.”

  “You’re travelling at a strange hour.”

  “I promised her I’d be there for lunch. She telegrammed me in the evening. It sounded like things had been very stressful.”

  “And you’re her valiant rescuer.”

  “I’m just helping out.”

  A nod; a grunt. She is not at all convinced by my heroic antics, by the aura of righteous yet faintly celibate determination I give off. She thinks I’m a useless manipulator, preying on a woman’s grief to get my own way. That’s not a crime, however – not yet. Sometimes you need to make a few errors of judgement, she concludes, in order to realise how much better off you’d be with someone else.

  She hands my documents back, barely glances at my face, doesn’t acknowledge me with another word. I smile and half-bow in gratitude and manage to hide the shaking of my hands.

  Half an hour from Marno, I spotted the first full guardia checkpoint. Traffic had slowed to a dead stop, bicycles and trucks alike. A barrier had been laid across the road and grey-coated figures moved in puffs of spinning air along its edges, opening bags and checking documents, peering under hats and into puffy, dry-eyed faces. Documents interested them less than features; some held papers in their black-gloved hands, and I could guess whose face might be printed on them.

  I slowed down some hundred metres from the back of the queue. I dismounted my bicycle, calm, casual, wheeled it to the side of the road, flipped it upside down and carefully dislodged the chain, mineral lubricants slithering sticky and brown into the weave of my gloves as I fumbled with it. A few cyclists pedalled by, saw me. One asked if I needed a hand, but I smiled and shook my head and said it was fine, taking my time as I fumbled with the dislodged part, in no rush to fix it. A post truck joined the waiting queue, half-obscuring me from the sight of the other end of the road. I slipped the chain back on, then made a show of inspecting my wheels for a puncture, spinning them round and round as I examined every pebble and shard of ice encased in the grip.

  “You all right, sky-kin?” called a friendly cyclist as she dismounted behind the post truck, already rummaging in her bags for her documents.

  “Fine, thank you,” I replied, bright as sunlight on snow. “Should have done better maintenance.”

  She smiled and nodded, and as the queue drifted towards the roadblock I flipped my bicycle over again, re-checked my panniers were sealed and, as if it had always been my intention and part of the plan, turned and cycled calmly off in the opposite direction, heart singing in my ears, the taste of vomit in my mouth. No one saw me; or if they did, no one saw a spy fleeing for his life.

  It took me nearly four hours to make the laborious crossing to the next major road towards Bukarest, cutting north through spinning clouds of wind-plucked snow to the minor, bumpy, icy road that slithered through Zamk. The telegram office also housed the server terminal and a small general store. A man with charcoal eyes watched me as I scribbled out my message on a yellow slip. Protocol had no definition for my current location, no coded secrets to send. I tried to find some loose way of communicating, some cry for help that someone – anyone – might understand.

  HEADING CHENECH, HOME FOR SISTER’S BIRTHDAY

  “Going a long way,” said the man, and since when did every telegram operator in every rural office read every telegram that passed beneath their fingers? Is this polite interest, absent rudeness, an interrogation? Is Georg inside his mind, as he is inside mine? I need to stop, sleep properly, check the glue binding the skin across my torso, drink, eat, stick my legs up a wall. Every time I get off my bicycle, it becomes harder and harder to get back on.

  “Family matters,” I mumbled, too slow, too late, a half-muttered excuse dredged from the back of my brain.

  He nodded and smiled. He is a good man, a kind man – family is everything to him, and he is pleased to see that others feel the same way. He is a bad man, a cruel man – he is giddy at the opportunity to turn in a traitor to the state, has my picture on his inkstone hidden beneath his desk, believes in the new Maze, in taking control and letting go of the past. Perhaps belief is not enough to make him cruel; very well, he kicks puppies too. I gave him the wan smile of the weary traveller as I slipped out the door into winter light.

  Skirting the edge of the mountains. Here, when the days grow hot, the children come and jump into the lakes and rivers that snake through the forest. They swim through silver waters, gasp at the icy melt from the peaks above, dip their toes and lounge on the shingle shores at the first touch of summer sun. In winter, their older peers trek up into the mountain to the little wooden huts that sit above the rusty cliffs where the waterfall flows, turning the roar of plunging foam to a background whisper as doors are closed, fires struck in stoves and thick blankets swung across weary shoulders.

  In the morning, the highest trees stand above valleys of frozen cloud, and when the wind blows you may sit upon a promontory and watch new fog form, twist, rise and dissolve, like a ghost’s fingers as it tries to crawl its way from the earth. Close your eyes and the sound of birds rises like the sun; open them again and in every nook of every rock you begin to see life spreading its fingers in tiny buds of yellow and purple, in unfolding lime and winter green. Georg says there is metal to be found in these parts, perhaps coal to burn. A few years ago, there was a mighty fire when someone struck a match above a certain patch of soft, lifeless ground and the pent-up gases of centuries of buried landfill finally burst open, killing the luckless fire-starter and sending a shock through the timber t
hat was heard as far away as the idling walkers on the mountain peaks.

  Here, set between the rising banks of darkening trees, a village, low timber hearths crowned with snow, steps cut in the side of the hill so that each hearth may look over its neighbour’s roof into the valley below, a warm light from within. A former church, centuries old, stands carefully preserved in the village square with notices explaining its historical significance, and twice-weekly tours operate between spring and autumn for visitors curious to have the iconography of martyred saints and bleeding sinners explained to them in language we now understand.

  On the edge of that town, where the windfarms spun and whistled in the settling wuther of the fading afternoon, another guardia outpost, two women pacing up and down with hands in pockets, puffing and huffing in the deepening cold. I saw no sign that my photo had yet reached them, but when I pedalled up and produced my documents, one leant in and examined my face as if she were a doctor looking for the first signs of cancer from a mole, or trying to spot the optic nerve through the inky black of my eyes.

  “Where’d you say you were going again?”

  “Volen, via Leviche.”

  “Where’d you come from?”

  “Slava.”

  “Why didn’t you take the train?”

  “I wanted to cycle. Trains bore me.”

  A nod; my excuse is as little noted as it is meaningful. Maybe it’s true; maybe it’s not. Her attention has already moved. “May I see your bags?”

  I open my bags, heart in my mouth. She shines a torch into my sacks, pokes around with the end of her finger gingerly as if expecting bear traps, nods once, turns the torch to my face again, sees me flinch, lowers it back to my chest. “I’ve just got to check these,” she says, taking my documents and heading towards the half-open door of the guardia post.

  “Of course,” I smile.

  I let her get all the way inside, count to ten, swing back on my bicycle and sprint for the road out of town. Someone must have been watching me from the window, because I hear a shout and the ringing of a bell seconds later, the pounding of feet on gravel, the scrape of tyres as someone lunges for their own bike. In this neck of the woods, the guardia will have maybe only one or two cars, and they will be out patrolling the bigger roads. My pursuers follow me on bicycle, but they are fresher than me, will be faster. Now is the time for recklessness, to take the risks that they will not. I plough out of the one-road village and into switchbacks heading for the river floor. It is faster to stay on the road than to cut across, but halfway down I see the beginning of a trail, a smaller muddy way leading up towards the windfarms, and turn onto it. My pursuers don’t bother to shout “Stop!” or “Surrender!” or anything of that ilk; they are too far behind and only just beginning to find their breath as they plunge after me onto the muddy trail heading towards the ridge above. Soon it becomes a little too narrow, the snow too thick to pedal through, so I dismount, grab my bags off the back and sling them over my shoulders, and, feet crunching, push forward. The snow turns our chase into a shuffling hopped pursuit, a sluggish churn through the black and white world. My lips are ice, my chest is fire. The forest offers an early night, turning the settling dusk to thicker black that pushes the shadows higher and deeper. The crows are squabbling overhead, oblivious to the disturbance below. A thick furred forest cat hisses, snarls and springs away from me as I approach, the path vanishing altogether now into the bony grasp of the underbrush. At the top of the ridge, I pause to glance back and can’t see my pursuers through branch and limb, but I can still hear them, snow compressed beneath boot, twigs tearing as fingers grasp for handholds on the scramble up.

  Turn, drop down the other side, and here now is sudden night, true and blanketing, as the hill itself cuts off the setting sun behind its ridge. The change is like plunging into an icy bath, and as I slither down my feet go out beneath me, and I catch myself on a trunk, and rise, and slip and slide again. I am leaving tracks in the snow, easy to follow, but there is nothing to be done. I scramble, leaning heavily to the side, parallel to the lip of the ridge, just a few feet below it, heaving from branch to branch, heading for the singing swish of the windfarm. The turbines here are old, the parts have spun too long, grown cracked and dry, clicking, clunking, whooshing against themselves. The wind is a dirge, a skeleton’s lament, but some ground has been cleared of snow, offering a path through the cables and transformers. For the first time, I run, my legs weighted stumps pounding heavy on the earth, my ears ringing. Now someone shouts, a lone voice behind me, and I wonder if perhaps one of the guardia has lost the other. I struggle to move faster, nearly over-tip, leaning forward as my feet refuse to offer anything more, weaving through the high columns of the farm, the smell of electricity and old resin thick on the air, then skid to a halt at a rope slung across a drop where the path stops at a cliff’s edge. Choices – left into darkness, right towards the village, back into the arms of the guardia or straight down. The drop is perhaps thirty metres into water of deep black flecked with the last mirrored grey of day. The water moves enough that ice has not yet formed on it, a deep bowl carved from a dozen little flowing trickles which in summer are a roaring tide. Though I might survive the fall, I do not think I will survive the hypothermia that will follow. Footsteps skid to a halt behind me, and of the two guardia who followed, only one has kept up in the gloom.

  She stops, realises she is alone, pulls her baton from her hip and raises a whistle to her mouth. I attack before she can make a sound, diving in to wrap my arms bear-hug across her chest, trying to take away the advantage of range that her unfolded stick gives her. The inquisition trained me how to fight, and no doubt the guardia trained her too, but in the moment neither of us remember more than a few physical habits, a shuffling of feet and a scrambling for targets, a panting through which hands flail loosely for eyes or throat, dig into anything soft or try to drive crack-snap into anything hard. There is more luck in this encounter than there is skill, and for a moment we tangle together beneath the turbines, gasping and hissing, feet slipping on icy mud, the moistures of our condensed breaths wet on each other’s cheeks and at each other’s necks, like dogs looking to bite. I manage to get a fist in her belly, but at the minimal distance between us all she does is grunt. Then she remembers that her stick has two ends and smashes the butt down into my shoulder. She is perhaps aiming for my head, but in the twist of arm and armpit can’t get the angle, so she strikes bone, then adjusts her feet, swinging me round with her as she moves, and hits again, and this time does better and catches the back of my skull. The blow is not yet enough to make me let go, a disorientating judder that runs down to my buckling knees; but a few more good whacks and I will be done. When she draws back to hit again, I drop like a drunkard, and the grip we have on each other pulls her down. My back smacks into the earth hard enough to crack teeth, but in the moment of confusion I wrap both my arms across her throat, squeezing and pulling her tight. She understands at once what is happening and kicks and scrambles and kicks again, driving her elbows into my ribs hard enough to bring galaxies across my eyes. I bite back a howl and try to hook one of her legs in mine, hear the stick fall from her grasp, pray to sky and earth that I have not killed her, pray that I did not fall for some cunning trick. Her thrashing slows; her body grows heavy on mine. I let go, perhaps a little earlier than my teachers would have wished, push her off me, roll to the other side, grab her stick, take deep breaths, kneel next to her, arm raised to strike, see that she is not moving.

  Slowly, I peel away a sodden glove, fumble at her neck for a pulse, find it and nearly choke back shame and gratitude. An apology springs to my lips, but it vanishes in the panting of my breath. She is already beginning to stir, head lolling this way and that, fingers clawing at snow. I grab my bag, turn towards the night and, before she can get her boots on the ground again, I run.

  Chapter 24

  Crawling through the midnight forest. The moon is hidden tonight. The cold has settled through every part
of me, turning bones to glass. One step wrong and I will break, snap apart from the inside out.

  Sometimes I hear voices and have imagined them.

  Sometimes I hear voices and they are real, search parties sweeping through the night. Then I crawl on hands and knees between the trees, feeling through darkness, twigs scratching at eyes, water melting through my trousers and beginning to re-freeze against blanched blue skin below.

  I imagine dogs and am terrified of them.

  I imagine drones, infrared cameras and whining blades, piloted over the blanketed dark. Against the snow I will be a scarlet bonfire, slithering through the night, a veritable demon; still, I fear dogs more.

  Once I stop and think I will cry, and realise that my legs refuse to walk. I sit on my haunches and shake and rock and know that the beginnings of hypothermia are on their way, and shake and rock again, until I hear a dog bark somewhere far, far away – or perhaps I do not – and the jolt of terror is enough to warm my fingers again.

  The blood that flows from a dozen scratches and the seeping tear in my chest is briefly warming. I think about picking scabs, about feeling the heat of my own body gracing the dead surface of my skin. Then I think about heat rushing away as from a furnace, and cold, dead metal, and how much the creatures of the forest will enjoy finding my corpse once the snows have melted and I am soft enough to eat. Then I scamper on, barely a kilometre, perhaps less, falling constantly into white, heart pounding, unable to escape the noise of it in my ears. I think I will die out here and am grateful that I will be eaten, honoured that my flesh will give back to the earth that carried me. Children of sky and earth, thank you for feeding me; let me feed you in return. The water of my blood was the same stuff that the dinosaurs drank; I have been oceans, I have rained upon the desert, I have circled the earth a thousand times and will do so again, when the last part of me is gone. I do not fear death so much as a life lived failing; I hope that the hypothermia will take away the pain of my bruised bones before the end.