Notes from the Burning Age

by Claire North

Footsteps moved above us. I heard the click of the gun and closed my eyes. It was simple to think that Georg had shot me, when he fired – the sound was so loud, the hot press of blood across my face and neck so immediate, that in that moment I concluded that, though I was dying, I would feel no pain. The Medj had been right all along; this was easy. Then hands caught me, picked me up, and though I felt nothing from having been shot I felt a great deal of pain everywhere else, and that didn’t seem to make much sense, so I opened my eyes and saw Lah’s body on the floor, one eye rolled all the way back from where the bullet in their skull had torn something apart. The blood had crawled up Georg’s trousers and boots, but no further. He brushed down his thighs with one hand unconsciously, handed the revolver back to one of his men, nodded, still breathing fast and shallow, as if this were the logical conclusion of an inevitable plan. Then he spun on his heel and walked away, as I kicked and screamed and screamed and screamed after him.

  They left me in that place. I don’t know how long. Perhaps a few hours; perhaps a few days. There was no light, save for a tiny line at the bottom of the locked door. I huddled in a corner as far from Lah’s body as I could, shaking, mind in a loop.

  Here, close your eyes.

  Now they die.

  Now they die.

  Now they die.

  Now they die.

  Enough. Open your eyes. Think of something else. Here in the dark, what else will you imagine? Find a prayer, find your breath. Here, exhale, close your eyes.

  And now they die.

  Now they die.

  Now they die.

  Now they die.

  Reason says that this is a physical reaction, an emotional reaction, trauma.

  Breathe through it.

  You are the kakuy. You are a living spirit. You are part of this world, and this world breathes within you.

  Don’t let go.

  Don’t be afraid.

  So breathe.

  Breathe.

  Breathe.

  I curled up in the dark, and could not remember how it felt to breathe.

  Someone left food, water by the door, and it turned out I wanted to eat.

  I thought Lah’s body would start to smell, but it did not.

  Perhaps the cold.

  The darkness.

  The isolation.

  I imagined flies, maggots, but this was a sterile, buried place.

  Someone left more food, more water by the door, and it turned out I wanted to live.

  I fumbled on hands and knees until my fingers found sticky blood, then fumbled a little bit more until I found the corner of Lah’s robes. Slowly, their body grown heavy with death, I unrolled Lah from the rolls of fabric, until they just wore their trousers and shirt below. I shook the robes out, folded them by fumbled touch, drew them over Lah’s head and neck, tucking them gently round their body as you might wrap a basket of apples for the market. This done, I knelt down and mumbled the prayers for the dead. Some sentences I heard myself say. Others I did not, the words repeated and stumbled through again, again, and now again, as I lost the tangle of this moment or the memory of the last.

  From death, life. In the temple we learned the process of decay, were invited to honour it, to marvel at nature’s process. Over the first few days, the internal organs of a corpse will begin to decompose. Without oxygen to keep the cells alive, carbon dioxide builds up in their last figurative respiratory gasps. The carbon dioxide creates an acidic atmosphere within the body, causing cell membranes to rupture. Enzymes are then released which start eating these cells from the inside out. The skin loosens, even as the muscles grow stiff. A few days later, the gases released by cell consumption and the bacteria that are now thriving within the corpse will cause bloating, resulting in the body expanding up to twice its normal size. Insects move in, happily gnawing away, and the stench of this stage of decomposition is the classic vomit inducer that sends people scurrying for the gutter.

  Eventually, what’s left of the body liquefies. At first, this is through the nose, mouth, anus; any hole that fluid can run freely from. Maggots move in, until there is nothing left but bone and hair. Any artificial joints, piercings, inorganic implants also remain, nuzzled clean by nature.

  The remains feed the creatures that are then fed upon by another. Plants take root in soil grown rich with the bacteria that feasted on your blood; bugs waddle away, fat on fluid, to be caught by birds that are then preyed upon by the larger bird that is then preyed upon by the predatory cat that is hunted by the wolf. On the earth, there is only one ocean, which becomes rain, which becomes blood, which returns again to the sea. There is only one breath, which becomes the hurricane, which spins across the peak of the mountain and returns again to the forest.

  And now they live.

  And now they die.

  Now they die.

  Now they die.

  Now they die.

  At some point, the darkness was broken by the door opening. Two women I didn’t recognise stood in the light; puffed short sleeves, big, waist-clinching belts. One turned away the moment the air from the cell hit her, an audible retch breaking up from the back of her throat, hands over her mouth. I had not noticed the room begin to stink. The other put one hand on her hip, pushing her whole frame a little to the side like a tree struck by a boulder, folded her other hand on top as if bandaging her whole frame in place, and barked: “Kadri Tarrad? Come with us, please.”

  I crawled to my feet and followed them, having no idea what else I could possibly do.

  There was a bathhouse behind the kitchen. Two great round tubs were already filled – one with hot water, the other with cold. When the women removed the lids that covered the hotter tub, steam rolled up like a living lizard, tonguing the air. Towels were slung over the hot pipes. A yellow sponge and bar of soap smelling of oil and lavender were deposited on the blue-tiled lip. I stripped out of my clothes as the women watched. The fabric had grown stiff, bent like card from the blood that had dried in every seam. Black grime beneath my nails was flecked with clotted scarlet, and purple bruises spotted my arms, ribs, back, knuckles, some no bigger than a finger’s gouge, some a violet eruption spread from the impact of a fist. I walked up the warm, tiled steps to the bath, climbed carefully over the side, sank down, knees to chest, until the water was at my chin.

  “Lean forward!” barked the older woman, and I obeyed. She grabbed the sponge, held it under the water until it was hot and malleable, rubbed soap into it, then into me. Her fingers rolled round the backs of my ears and into the spirals; ran through the roots of my hair like a garden fork pulling at soil. At some point, her retching companion joined quietly in the corner of the room, hands folded, head down. “Fetch the clothes!” snapped the elder woman, pulling out a short-haired brush to dig into my nails like she was scouring for gold in the desert. The young woman left; the young woman returned, carrying a folded-up bundle of clean dark grey clothes, without shoes, and a flask of cold water.

  “Drink!”

  I drank.

  “Cold bath!”

  I crawled, the pain of every bruise now transformed into something sluggish, universal and soft, out of the hot tub and into the cold, gasping as the water ran over me, watching a thin, oily sheen of residual soap and scrubby skin slither across the top of the water.

  “Out!”

  I climbed out, wrapping myself slowly in the hot towels provided as the woman tugged a comb through my hair, a scowl at every knot as if each was a personal slight. Then I changed into the clean clothes provided, long sleeves and straight trousers, my bare toes curling into the tiles below while the bloody bathwater gurgled away to the greywater tanks. The women seemed satisfied with the final result.

  “Follow me!”

  I followed, through cool corridor and across courtyard where the vegetables vines ran up wall and trellis, under an arch of old stone and down a side alley where the rainwater butts bulged beneath the downpipes and green moss grew hungry around slowly leaking barrels. My fe
et were dark with the gathered dirt of the walk, and that was good; that felt like a kind of safety. Then through a door guarded by a Brotherhood man, into the back of a great villa, a thing of half-restored old-world masonry and new solar glass walls, timber frames and half-lifted roof canopies to let in the cooler breeze during hottest days.

  The sound of crockery and pipes, the smell of cumin and pepper, chilli and starchy rice hit my nose, and then we were in a kitchen, long tables down the middle of the floor, hot stoves blasting beneath white lights, dazzling bright, voices competing with pots and pans and the hiss of oil, water running and fans spinning. Rows of men and women wearing aprons stood each at their assigned station, chopping, peeling, carving, dicing, grinding, skinning, braising, boiling. Few glanced my way as I was led to a small corner office where a man lounged, feet up on a desk, reading, and another dressed in Brotherhood black stood stiffly by the door.

  “Colas.” The woman managed to keep a little of her imperious formality down for the man as she waved me through the door. “This one’s for you.”

  The man called Colas looked up from his inkstone, lips curling with evident displeasure as he took me in. A half-crown of white hair ran from behind his left ear to his right, circling a great bald skull above. He sported thin-rimmed spectacles whose round shape perfectly matched the twin bulbs of his cleft chin when his bright lips moved. He wore an old-fashioned white shirt, a pair of dark brown shorts that stopped just above his knees and long green socks that stopped just below them. Swinging his legs down from the desk with exaggerated slowness, he rose to his feet, which revealed that he was little more than five feet tall, and king of his domain. Yet even kings were sometimes forced to do things they didn’t like. “Where’s his shoes?” he asked.

  “No shoes.”

  “I’ve got standards, you know. Hygiene.”

  “No shoes.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “No name.”

  “I’ve got to call him something.”

  “Pick something, then.”

  He thought about it for a moment, but a moment was all the interest he could spare. “He looks like a Pityr. Hey, Pityr – ever worked in a kitchen before?”

  “I did breakfast service at the temple for a few months.”

  He rolled his eyes and, with exaggerated slowness, indicated first himself, then the Brotherhood man who stood to attention by the door. “Me Colas. Me boss. This Qathir. He shoot you if you run, yes?”

  I gave Qathir a longer, more speculative look. “He hasn’t got a gun, only a stick.”

  “I can beat you to death too,” offered Qathir with a shrug.

  “I’m just wondering why he doesn’t have a gun.”

  “Point is,” snapped Colas, hands flicking up, “you do what I say, yes?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Not you guess so, you do – you do so, yes?”

  “Okay.”

  His eyes narrowed, and for the first time he looked as if he was trying to see something of me, myself, rather than the barefoot intruder shoved into his domain. Whatever he found behind my bruised eyes, he wasn’t impressed. “I don’t like you, Pityr.”

  I shrugged.

  “Shrug again, and Qathir will shoot you – and don’t say anything about a gun!”

  I stood silent, waiting. For a moment, Colas rocked from toe to heel, as if he couldn’t quite tell whether it was more majestic to retaliate against perceived insolence or to turn the other cheek. Then, with another twitch of his hands as if he were flicking up a window blind, he barked, “Yes, this way, yes!”

  Qathir smiled thinly, gestured with rolling politeness towards the door. I followed Colas; Qathir followed me. By the time I caught up with the diminutive lord of the kitchen, he was already talking. “… there is always something and if there isn’t something, find something! You will also mop the floors, clean the stoves, and do anything else you are told to by anyone who tells you to do it, yes? Yes!”

  I stared at the twin sinks before me, one side already heaving with dirty plates and cutlery.

  “Well?” His dignity, already threatened by this whole situation, seemed on the verge of deserting him altogether.

  “All right,” I replied, fighting the urge to shrug again. “If you say so.”

  So began my tenure in the kitchens of Georg Mestri, unsung leader of the glorious human revolution. At 6 a.m. every day, my world began with a poke in the ribs from Qathir or one of the other guards assigned to stand watch over me. I would be dressed and in the kitchen, warming the ovens and stoves, by 6.30 a.m. and would not leave that place until 10 at night; later, if the dignitaries upstairs had guests to entertain. The others in the kitchen paid me almost no attention, except to occasionally shout, Pityr! I need the celery! – or Pityr! I need the big pan now!

  Of my four rotating watchers, it was Makris who first cracked and borrowed a stool from I knew not where to perch on throughout his long vigil, rather than tire his legs standing over me as I washed, scrubbed, scoured and mopped through the broiling heat of the kitchen. Sometimes Colas came over to find fault in my work, but usually he left me alone, finding it easier to be a king if he was not reminded of this unwelcome imposition in his domain. Only once did one of the cooks bother to speak to me; she was new, unfamiliar with the ways of this place.

  “Hey, Pityr – why don’t you have any shoes?”

  Qathir, sat a few feet behind as I tied off the cornbags of food waste for the biomass vats, grinned, chewing down on an apple and waiting to hear my reply. He was going to grow fat in this job, a paunch already pushing against the buttons of his shirt, cheeks rounding out as if flushed from the heat.

  “I don’t have any shoes because I’m a political prisoner,” I explained politely. “If I have shoes, it is more likely that I will try to run away.”

  “Really? No kidding.”

  “Really.”

  “Huh. I guess… that makes sense, now I think about it. Hey, is that legal? I mean… you know. You working here and being a political prisoner and that?”

  “I don’t know. I imagine the laws have been changed, now that we’re at war.”

  “I guess you’re right. Hey, thanks.”

  “No worries.”

  She smiled awkwardly, waved a chopping knife at me with the slow waggle of one not quite sure what to make of the last twenty seconds of her life, and went back to chopping a squash.

  Qathir leant a little closer to me as I pressed the bags of waste together into the sealed bin that would go to biomass. “She likes you,” he grinned.

  “I doubt that very much.”

  “Maybe she’ll help you escape?”

  “I doubt that absolutely.”

  “You’re not very imaginative, are you?”

  I hesitated, squeezing the lid down on the last of the bags, head on one side. “You know, that was what Georg thought, before I stabbed him in the leg.”

  Every four days, I was given half an hour to wash top-to-toe, and when the days were slow and even Colas couldn’t think of a task for me to run, I huddled in a corner of the kitchen and slept instantly, profoundly, until Qathir or one of the other watchers kicked my shins and barked, “Job’s in!”

  In that way, my life continued. I did not know the day, heard no news, did not speak unless spoken to, did not pray, did not rest, and, to my complete and continuing bewilderment, was not shot in the head.

  That last omission was the one I found most interesting.

  Chapter 45

  One morning, a box of fruits was delivered to the kitchen. I padded outside, the hot summer air damp with the promise of autumn, and pulling back the tarp that covered the boxes, saw thin green-grey mould smeared across the rind of shrivelled oranges; brown rot sunk into the crisp surface of the onions and maggot holes poking in and out of the thin-skinned peaches, from which sugars oozed like blood.

  “What in the name of sun’s fire is this?” roared Colas, as we dug through the finger-splattering, bug-craw
ling delivery in search of something edible. “What am I meant to do with this crap?”

  There was a smell on the air: hot coal and diesel, unfamiliar to the city. That night, it rained so hard that I was dragged from my bed not two hours after I’d crawled into it to lay sandbags around the kitchen door against the deluge running from the overflowing drains. In the morning, in every vegetable box and hanging garden of the yard, mushrooms had grown, brilliant orange threaded with white gills and a purple drop on top or white inverted umbrellas; they sprouted at the feet of every wall and from the trunks of the bending fruit trees, scythes of bruised grey fungus, hanging off the bark like sunhats.

  “Can we eat them?” Colas demanded, as Hang, his second in command, peered under the top of the speckled crop.

  “Poisonous,” he replied. “No good.”

  “Pityr! Clear them!”

  I looked round this strange new landscape of fungus, bare toes bending into sodden soil. “Mushrooms are just the flower,” I heard myself say. “The roots go deep.”

  Colas spun on me, a flush of anger in his face, but to my surprise Makris shuffled a little closer to me, muttering: “I’ll give him a hand.”

  We worked in silence, tugging soft fungus by its base and snapping off the dusty discs for the biomass wells. When I curled my toes, water rose from beneath them, and, for the first time in what might have been months, I shivered in the drizzle-grey cold.

  A few days after that, the meat of the freshly slaughtered lamb came, blackened with disease, wriggling with worms. Someone gagged at the sight of it; there was no question that it would fall to me to dispose of the needlessly slaughtered flesh.

  As I washed my hands clean, the woman who still had not learned to refrain from speaking to the condemned casually manoeuvred herself close to where I worked, her attention fully on the eggy sauce she beat in the bowl before her. Without glancing my way, she murmured: “Are the kakuy angry?”

  I kept my eyes down, away from hers. “Pissed, I would imagine.”

  “Is this their punishment?”

  “Hard to say. Doctrinally it’s always suited Temple to be a little vague about these things.”