Notes from the Burning Age

by Claire North

  I did not see it coming.

  What I saw, instead, was Antti look towards Ull and smile, a strange smile as if to say, sorry friend – sorry that we are at odds – but no hard feelings? I saw Ull nod once in reply, as if he too were regretful over some hidden thing, and then they both were standing on the pier that reached out towards the water, some ten metres apart, Antti nearest the water, about to step onto his skiff; Ull waiting his turn, for there were only so many people who could comfortably fit at the end of that narrow path with the boats bobbing unevenly all around.

  The bomb was under the pier, and it detonated a little late, as if the finger that pressed the remote had been hoping for the two of them to be nearer, was eyeing up the perfect moment and, when it didn’t come, went with the best opportunity they had.

  It was not a very big bomb. At first I thought it was a terrible accident on a ship, a crash or something running aground. The shockwave of it, from where I stood, was enough that I felt it run through my gut and down my trembling knees, but it did not knock me down or send me scurrying for shelter. There was no fire, simply a black cloud rising rapidly up, spinning at its billowing top, and then rain. First it rained salt water and wet sand, then it rained shattered timber, then it rained bits of pebble and stone, and then it rained ruined parts of human. Most people who were caught in the blast were indistinct enough that the falling tatters of clothes and flesh were unrecognisable, merely driftwood of crimson and black, no more animate than the splattering mud torn up from the shore. The sound of debris falling made a strange, quiet percussion. The acrid acid of the explosive itself was a subtle aftertaste, noticeable only when the adrenaline wore off, a sticky bile in the top of the mouth that water wouldn’t wash away.

  The first person to scream was one of Antti’s guards, blasted out into the water and still, incredibly, alive. He did not scream long. He drowned some eight metres from shore, limbs torn and unable to breathe, gasping in shallow, frigid water. Of the four other survivors, only one had the capacity to groan, to roil and twist his head and gasp for medicine, medicine, please in mercy’s name. I ran to help, like an idiot, oblivious to the danger of another blast, saw a leg bouncing against the shoreline like driftwood, saw a crimson slick like oil dispersing in the salt, and a round-eyed fish turned belly up from where it had perhaps been nestling in the shadow of the now-shattered pier. The first body I reached was that of Ull, still alive, bloody and eyes open and still alive, bleeding from belly, chest, arm, head, leg, one foot just gone, and I knelt by his side and realised I had no idea where to begin, nothing to offer to injuries so catastrophic, so seemingly fatal, so I held his hand and shouted medic, medic, someone get a medic, help me! A woman staggered blindly past, hair a matted shroud, blood flowing from her ruptured ears, trying to form words and unable to get her tongue to shape the sounds. Medic, I roared, medic!

  Ull’s eyes started to close, and I thought perhaps I should keep him awake, keep him conscious, but didn’t know why, didn’t know what good it would do, shook him anyway, snarled, stay awake, stay awake, you’re safe, you’re going to be all right, you’re going to be safe. Medic! Why doesn’t the medic come?

  Merthe was the first to arrive, slipping and sliding down sand and shingle. Did she know how to save anyone’s life? I doubted it, but at least her soldiers had bandages, press here, hold that, do this, would it matter, didn’t know, but something, please help, I don’t know if he’s still breathing, help me!

  The medics came next, running with bags hanging off every limb. I was still holding Ull’s hand when they pronounced him dead, ten minutes later. Farii, uninjured, stood behind and wept. I had not known she had tears in her. Merthe looked pale as the floating fish on the foaming sea. They found Antti’s torso, arm and leg a few minutes later, bouncing up against the sinking side of his blasted skiff like wet paper. I sat, sodden and bloody, at the water’s edge, and shook and trembled and waved away anyone who tried to approach me. In the end, Merthe put a hand on my shoulder and said simply: “We’re done here. You’re done,” and didn’t let go until I stood up and turned away from the sea.

  Then I saw him.

  Georg stood, leaning on his walking stick, at the top of the beach, the sun to his back, no hat on his head, looking down on us all. At that distance, I could not see if his eyes met mine, but I felt it, as sure as this heart beats in my chest, before he nodded once and turned away.

  Six days later, the war began in earnest.

  Jia was universally blamed for Antti’s death.

  A crude assassination, everyone said.

  Kun Mi was appointed Chief Minister of Maze in Antti’s place. It was a perfectly sensible appointment – an apparent moderate, who could appeal to the masses.

  Magyarzag declared immediate neutrality, citing provocation by Council against the independence of the Provinces. It was, Jia said, an act of surrender by any other name. Council evacuated Budapesht. Papers were still burning in their buckets when the soldiers came; hard drives smashed, their parts scattered across the floor.

  Farii was appointed Chief Minister of Lyvodia, and led the mourners through the forest to the highest peak, where Ull’s body was offered to sky and earth.

  “He was cut down by treachery,” she said. “He was betrayed by his own.”

  The Medj sang their songs for the dead as the mourners filed along the winding path between the unlit lanterns. I stayed until the melody at last gave out and the clothes were cut away from old Ull’s body and the soil packed thin around him, so that the creatures of the forest may feast and his bones may return to the soil from which he came. The Medj bowed, gave their thanks, and for a moment I raised my head, wondering if the kakuy would come, if the moon would smile on its departed child, if the stars would dance a little brighter or the darkness bend in to acknowledge the fallen at its feet.

  I followed the Medj down the path, guided by headtorch and stumbling memory, and returned to Bukarest.

  A telegram was waiting for me at the temple.

  COME BEOGRAD. SAVE YOURSELF.

  It was not signed, and was from Yue.

  I left it in the recycling vats for the novices to pulp down again.

  Old Lah sat cross-legged on their pillow and said: “We must hold to who we are. We are the children of sky and earth. When people forget that, we must remember. It will not be thankful work. It will not be glorious or easy, and sometimes it will not be kind. But it is what we are.”

  The younger priests nodded and said they understood, and did not understand at all and wondered why we were not taking up arms, grabbing hunting rifles and knives and preparing to defend all that we were. What good are pacifists, they whispered, if all we do is die?

  I threw myself into getting the last of the archives out of the temple. Most had already been secreted away, smuggled by bicycle and train to Provinces where their knowledge might be preserved, but a few remained. We hid them in panniers stuffed with boiled eggs and scrap metal, tucked them into freshly settled clay and wrapped them in resins from the vats, disguising them as crude objects or worthless icons, opening the windows of the temple wide to wash away the smells of our chemical concoctions while in the courtyard outside the Medj burned the most pungent incense they could and held their hands up to the sky and called for harmony amongst mankind, harmony upon the earth.

  Maze’s army was at Budapesht within three days of the neutrality declaration. Within five, they had control of the Ube all the way to Mohacks. Jia wasn’t even trying to stop them, the reporters said. She knew she couldn’t hold them until the mountains at Beograd – and besides, Magyarzag’s neutrality made it questionable whether she could even legally attempt to defend the Province. She would have to wait, the pundits said, until the troops spilled south into Anatalia, into a land that was actually willing to fight.

  “Will they come to Bukarest?” asked a man, hands pressed together as he bowed before Lah. “Will Farii fight? Will they burn the temple?”

  “Temples can be r
ebuilt,” replied the old Medj, which comforted precisely no one at all.

  After evening prayers, I sat down before them and said: “We should send the novices away. I can forge the document, and know routes through the mountains. We can get the first group out tonight.”

  Lah sighed, half-closed their eyes as they considered this proposition, then, smiling, said: “It is useful for the pious to keep the occasional scallywag around, isn’t it?” They chuckled again at a joke only they found funny, and then as casual as a pun added: “You should go too. I can’t imagine the Brotherhood will be pleased to see you, when they come to Bukarest.”

  I shook my head. “We get the novices out first, and the last of the hard drives. You are very good at calming aphorisms for an anxious supplicant, Lah, but with respect you are terrible at cover stories.”

  “I also know how not to be a hero. Don’t be a hero, Ven. It’ll only feel good for a little while.”

  The next day, Farii formally declared Lyvodia’s mutual defensive alliance with Maze.

  “We will fight for what is right,” she said. “We will fight for independence from Council tyranny. I believe in the people.” Then she bowed at the hip, nose almost brushing knee, to Kun Mi as the first tank rolled into Bukarest. Georg stood behind her, as the Assembly of my home welcomed them in.

  Chapter 38

  A city under occupation.

  It is not called occupation, of course. It is called “alliance”. Farii has allied Lyvodia with Maze. These are welcome guests, these men in boots come to our town. We are delighted to be part of their noble crusade.

  Come, drink; drink with us.

  You seem quiet, you in your halls and hearths.

  Drink and toast, like the few men and women who are smart enough to sense opportunity; drink! There is food and wine aplenty, and will be more yet to come, for we will be the winners; your leaders have chosen wisely. You do not need to hide supplies in the cold rooms behind the hearth, you do not need to get on your bicycles to go visit long-neglected cousins in far-flung places.

  Forget the kakuy, forget the mountains and the rain. Humanity has always been its own best and only friend.

  The temples stayed open – no bonfires as in Maze – but messages were delivered to every door, an eleven-point list of things that the Medj could and could not say. No political sermons. No talk of heresy. Functions were to be limited to blessings and prayers for happy births and prosperity.

  “I had no idea we had power over pregnancy,” Lah exclaimed, squinting at the list over the bridge of their nose. “I feel quite irresponsible!”

  The arrests were quiet. Opposition leaders politely confined to quarters, for their own protection. Journalists invited to take some time away from work, offices closed. A few senior figures urged into quick retirement. Unwanted vagrants, disruptors and renegades taken for trial, charges pending. The charges would be pending as long as they needed to be; there was a war after all, and we all had to prioritise. The guardia were supplemented in the streets by soldiers of Maze. They did not threaten or extort, did not punch strangers or whistle at women. They were simply there, lounging in the middle of the great old causeways, leaning up against pine trees or sitting, knees wide, toes turned out, on the black benches on the edges of the parks, watching.

  Farii went on the radio and said: “During this time of emergency, it is more important than ever to honour our brothers and sisters from Maze. This world belongs to us. To the people, to all mankind. We can shape a great destiny.”

  The train station was closed, and patrols checked the documents of anyone coming and going down the great highways of the city. A man with an inkstone into which he made short, sharp notes came to inspect the temple.

  “Not many novices here,” he mused, as Lah politely showed him round.

  “On study trips,” they explained cordially. “We like to send our novices into the community.”

  The man ran a finger along the edge of a kakuy stone, as if looking for dust, and, finding none, made another little note.

  “Where are your hard drives?”

  “In cold storage below.”

  “And what do they contain?”

  “Erotic literature of the Burning Age, anthropology of the early modern period, and a complete history of anarchic comedy with a specialisation in the style known as ‘laughter track’. It is a form of humour, you see, where the laughter is artificially added in, and you do not necessarily need to have traditional modes of comedy such as ‘jokes’. Very interesting.”

  If the man was angry, surprised, disappointed, he did not show it. He made another, impossibly tiny, note.

  “You have solar power?”

  “Yes, and a little biomass.”

  “How much do you generate?”

  “I will find out from our groundskeeper. Of course, we have always pooled resources with the community grid.”

  “That will end. Resources cannot be wasted on superstition. We must think of the future.”

  “We in fact generate more than our requirements, so really…”

  “Resources cannot be wasted,” he repeated, as if Lah had spoken some ancient, impossible tongue. “Humanity is all.”

  “As you say,” Lah murmured, bowing again with a harmless little smile. “Would you care to see our collection of artefacts from the Burning Age? We have some astonishing items on the history of penis enlargement.”

  Even this man, face like the bottom of a saucepan, winced at the beatific innocence of Lah’s smile.

  At night, I did not sleep in the temple but cycled to a hearth on the edge of an old part of the city, where once the slabs of the great burning had stood in brown concrete, hard lines and overhanging squares stacked as if by a lazy child. Time had reclaimed this place, and now only a few signs of the past remained in the odd chunk of ancient wall into which new resin had been pasted. In a hearth overlooking a flower garden bright with the new buds of spring lived a community of twelve or thirteen ranging from an old woman with no teeth, whose lower jaw in its resting state nearly abutted the tip of her nose, to a newborn baby and a group of three children, who had nothing but questions about this new world and longed to defy the rules freshly set down, now that we were at war. But even children could sense that perhaps this was not the time for mischief, that they would have to find some other way to have adventures from within the confines of their home.

  Pinned to the side of the door of this hearth was a tiny box containing, they told me, a piece of sacred text from a holy book, and from the sunset of fifth day to the sunset of sixth they would not cook nor handle money, for their God had declared it a day of rest, and their God was most interested in human affairs.

  “Come, come,” said a woman with skin of deepest burnt caramel and a mole on her chin. “Close the door behind you.”

  They did not head to the temple to pray, though neither did they deny the existence of the kakuy. “Angels,” said one, though perhaps sometimes they were devils too – either way, spirits sent by a singular, almighty power.

  “If you don’t go to the temple, why are you sheltering me?” I asked.

  “Our people have survived thousands of years,” came the answer, and that seemed to be enough, all the explanation that was needed. “Here, you are too skinny – you must eat!”

  Lying on my mattress on the floor in a little storage room tucked high above the hearth, I heard the prayers being sung to their God. Sometimes He answered, they said. Sometimes He was angry and did not come to their aid. One day, these struggles too would end, and there would be life eternal.

  Three weeks after Kun Mi, Georg and the forces of Maze moved into the city, the first soldiers came to the temple to arrest me. Finding me gone, they shoved Lah around a little, without much enthusiasm, and in an act of purest spite shot holes into one of the compression batteries, releasing the stored-up air in a long, cold hiss. Lah tutted and sighed and said they’d have to ask someone to help them fix that, and when the soldiers were gone
I emerged from my hiding place with the last of the novices and their precious bundles of heretical hard drives, and announced that we were stepping up plans and would leave that night.

  The novices swallowed their fear, bowed in acknowledgement. “Don’t do that,” I snapped. “You are a midwife and a plumber. Don’t bow.”

  They nodded, awkward with informality. Their heads had already been shaven in preparation for taking their final vows, giving up their past lives, their worldly affiliations. A few weeks of growth was beginning to give one of them some thin fluff of faded brown-grey across the muted surface of her skull, but the other’s remained stubbornly smooth.

  “Time for you to go too,” Lah murmured, arms folded within their sleeves, limb impossible to distinguish from fold of grey. “You’re a danger to whoever protects you.”

  I smiled, teeth and no heart, nodded once, beckoned the novices to follow me. “You,” I snapped, indicating the man with the pristine skull. “Let’s learn about wigs.”

  That last night, I stood beside the temple bell and did not pray. It was an ancient thing, forged from the slag of some forgotten war, some final gasp of conflict dug out of the desert of the Burning Age. Some people called it ugly in its mismatched rings of alloy spun together in the furnace flame, but the note was clear and carried across the water to the answering shrines of the city. Lah stood beside me, contemplating the hollow dome.

  “Did they teach you the rituals and the bells?” they asked at last. “Or do inquisitors skip that part?”