Notes from the Burning Age

by Claire North

  I thought I saw the lights burning in a hilly shrine up an icy path and felt a momentary stab of fear – the soldiers would come, they would shut it down, beat the Medj who guarded this place – and then no. That was in Maze and Lyvodia, where Kun Mi was queen and Georg sat behind his mausoleum desk. Here, the Medj gave thanks to the kakuy of the hill and pine, without consequence.

  The truck took us as far as Safaan, a one-track town of red-roofed hearths overhung with heavy cypress trees. Bicycles were lined up outside the communal bathhouse, steam and the scent of thick, foaming white soap spinning from the upper pipes. Across the way, the lights were on in the bakery, flatbreads folding around spinach and nuts for the teenagers in ear-muffling hats and heavy gloves. One station guard huddled inside her office by the railway track, reading something on her inkstone, booted feet up and chin tucked.

  “Half an hour,” said Nkagosi, as I watched the truck drive away. “You must be hungry.”

  “Where are they taking Farii?”

  “There is a hospital twenty minutes from here. The ambulance will take her there first; then, if she is well enough to move, they will bring her on to Isdanbul. We will go ahead.” He waited for me to reply and, when I didn’t, bent his head bird-like towards me, as if wondering whether I too hadn’t been struck a little too hard by the sea. “Earth-kin?”

  Across the way from the station, the wooden gate of a small shrine stood open. A single white lantern hung outside it, swinging erratically in the wind. Nkagosi followed my gaze, let out a little breath, patted me on the shoulder. “I’ll get something to eat for the train. You take your time.”

  The shrine smelt of wet timber. Incense burned in the little ceramic holder. Three rooms clustered tight around a flagstone yard, barely large enough to hold the schoolchildren who came to sing songs and learn the mysteries of the ancient spirits, the great kakuy and the nitrogen cycle. The lights burned in only one window, which I took to be both the office and sleeping quarters of the resident Medj. Another room was raised up a few feet above the earth on wooden legs, open to the elements down one side, woven straw mats on the floor and the trunk of a living silver birch rising up through the middle. Its roots spread out beneath the building itself into the earth below, while its crown reached up through a round hole in the ceiling to plume its branches overhead. Around the hole in the floor through which it descended were offerings. There were a few bags of grain, and a lidded pot containing something that was still warm and smelt of pumpkin, clearly left by someone who knew the Medj’s tastes and was willing to occasionally indulge them. There was the shrine’s watering can, with a little note on it inviting visitors to water the tree that was at the building’s heart, and a scrawled reminder that this month’s theme was “renewal” and to please not feed Moonshine the cat. There were a few sticks of incense and bottles of scented oil, an old inkstone, perhaps loaded with suitably contemplative texts – or perhaps not; perhaps it was rich with the kind of scintillating fiction that an honourable Medj might feel a little self-conscious about downloading on their own account but would love to read when the lights were low and no one was looking. There was a woven bracelet of stones and beads, threaded with ancient plastic strings mined from the old landfill sites. A mirror of scrubbed bronze around which were pressed multicoloured shards of more plastic flakes, arranged in a mosaic of ancient and new. A packet of tea. A carved dog, tail wagging and face anthropomorphically split into a friendly grin. A little box of ancient rusted pieces of metal, oiled and scrubbed back into some sort of sacrificial state. Nuts and bolts, an old spoon, a collection of ancient lids in faded green and red. The nib of a pen, and the flaking remains of a circuit board, its use long since lost to time and decay.

  A cat meowed, brushing against my legs. I squatted down, held out my hand for him to sniff. “You must be Moonshine.” The overweight blue-grey feline contemplated my fingers, found no trace of anything worth licking on them, and, having got my attention, decided that was enough and slunk away. I watched him as he followed an easy familiar path of hop and jump until he was happily on top of the roof of the Medj’s small office, curling into a shadow near a hot pipe, a ring of melted snow around it revealing deep red tiles below.

  I turned back to the tree, tried to pray, couldn’t. I looked for old words, the familiar sounds of the temple, made it a few syllables, stopped. Felt eyes on the back of my neck. Georg would know if I prayed, of course. He’d always know.

  I thought of knocking on the office door, asking to see the priest who looked after this shrine. Maybe a cup of tea, a friendly conversation? In Tinics and Bukarest, the Medj had always been horrendous gossips, thrilling in the notion that the drinking of tea and sharing of biscuits could be considered, in its way, a religious duty. “Why I joined Temple!” Lah would say. “Tea, nice music, decent architecture!”

  “And the devotion of your life to awe, gratitude, compassion and respect?”

  “Yes yes yes – all that stuff too.”

  I put my hands together and managed the first few words of the prayer for the dead. We had sung it when we’d given Vae’s body to the earth and the sky. The tune had been different from the one chanted in Bukarest, which was itself deeper and simpler than the songs sung in Vien, before the temples burned. I tried to hold to Vae’s version, to catch at some loose memory of it, but the notes got tangled as I tried to fit word to note, so I stopped, and thought I was going to cry, and couldn’t quite believe it. What would Georg say? It would be unacceptable, immediate dismissal. There’s no time for such things; utter absurdity. Don’t you dare let go!

  Then Nkagosi was there, a small bag of hot pastries in his hands and a flask of something tucked under one arm, a precarious juggling act waiting to fall. He made a little sound that was the beginning of words, and when I turned he stopped himself and simply smiled. Perhaps the sea had washed something false from my face because he looked and seemed to see someone real. Not Pityr, scrubbing in the kitchens, nor Kadri Tarrad, beaten by Pontus to the chase. He looked at me with kindness, compassion, and for a moment I thought all the things I could not express and did not understand were suddenly present in him, and he had no qualms about naming them, feeling them, even if he didn’t know what it was that now burned inside his heart. His empathy was a slap of seawater in my mouth, and I turned away, staring at my feet, rubbed my face to scrunch away salt and fatigue, looked back up and blurted, “Right, yes. The train. Yes.”

  For a moment, I thought he’d ruin everything and say something thoughtful, or generous, or kind. When was the last time I had heard these sentiments from a stranger’s mouth? I would not be able to cope if he did; all my training had been for the opposite – I had no defences against compassion. But he smiled and said: “There’s spinach and cheese and nuts and pickles and cardamom tea.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Do you need…”

  “No. No – I mean… no. Thank you. Let’s… let’s get this done.”

  He nodded once more and walked in silence by my side to the train.

  Chapter 59

  I had never been to Isdanbul.

  We arrived at night, by the little four-coach train that wove down along the edge of the water into the city through clinging hill and tight-sliced cutting. The stations we stopped at were quiet: snatches of lone travellers framed in pools of light; a single guard waving us on our way. When the doors opened, I thought I smelt forest through the cold air, heard the steps of the kakuy waiting just outside the light, silver eyes gleaming in darkness, imagined I heard its call in the screeching of the brakes.

  Then Isdanbul rose around us, in clinging rows of pinpoint light huddled around the track. Gardens of vegetables and leafless winter fruit trees ran away from the line to the hearths and their low yellow lights, growing taller and thicker as we drew into the city. Little wind turbines whooshed busy on top of the highest blocks, and banks of batteries clunked and ticked and whirred in tight coppices of trees between the zig-zagging streets. We r
ode on bridges cut above the busiest roads of black pressed polypropylene mined from the ancient landfill sites, lined with market stalls and little cafes where the locals drank coffee so thick you could stand a spoon in it, and the cyclists swore and cursed and wove around each other to the jingling of bells and cries of “Move, idiot!” and reproofs of other locals who knew that there was no place for rudeness on their streets and would shout obscenities at you until you understood that fact.

  On the edges of the city, I saw regular blocks of buildings laid out in modular stacks, with space between each one like a moat so that when the earthquakes came, the whole thing might shake side to side and not fall, let alone fall on a neighbour. Wide boulevards with trees down the middle; lamps shining above the temple gates and signs at the local stations advertising student shows or concerts at a nearby venue. And yet, here: a knot of soldiers, coming home or returning to the front lines – it was hard to tell – their heads down and eyes up, as if they cannot quite believe that there is peace anywhere they go. Here: guardia on the station steps, watching all who pass by as if they might sniff out subversion like the scent of jasmine on the air. Here: a recruitment sign, defaced, and on one platform a Medj who stands stiff in grey, folded robes and looks lost and utterly alone.

  In the centre of the city, the old and new mixed together. Narrow streets ruled by fierce stray cats that curl and rub themselves round the legs of strangers and bite at those who do anything other than try to feed them. The domes of ancient mosques and the tight black stubs of hidden churches where the followers of the old faiths still come to pray, raising up their songs to some creator more benevolent, more caring than the kakuy – or at least, more willing to promise a heaven, as well as a hell.

  Some have been converted over the years, turned into community halls or repurposed as museums where you may inspect the ancient texts and artefacts of a long-lost age. Temple built its own premises elsewhere, nestling in between the ancient wooden abodes of centuries-old peoples who clung together through the great burning to build their city again from the fire, as it had been rebuilt so many times before. On the slopes beneath the cracked and teetering tower of Peara, a stepped complex of shrines and halls running up from the sea, where travellers could give thanks to every kakuy of sea and city, of sky and earth you could name. Above the grand bazaar, revellers huddled between the solar tiles, drinking throat-burning alcohol mixed with coffee and breaking bread to the sound of midnight bartering in the maze-tangled streets below. In the quiet streets that staggered and started down to the river, shutters were pulled down against the night and electric trucks groaned as they tried to scale the hills to the first-thing groceries, while cargo bicycles gave up altogether and unloaded in a messy tangle at the wide mouth of the bridge that linked one side of the horn to the other, men and women with sack barrows standing by, arms folded and eyebrows raised at the laziness of their pedalling colleagues.

  It was a city that made winter feel like summer, buzzing as the pollen-hunting bees, the sound of war nothing more than an edge to that hum that you thought you caught before some other noise knocked it away.

  And then, at the station, was Yue.

  She said: All this drama. One day we should just meet for lunch like normal people.

  I tried to think of something witty to say, but it had been so long since I opened my mouth to say anything human that nothing came out.

  I think she saw that dumbness in me, that mute place where words should have been. Then she held me, in full sight of everyone there, arms wrapped tight; and I held her too, and wondered who this person was who was so unafraid of showing affection, what had happened to Yue Taaq, servant of the Council.

  She held on, and I put my arms around her like she was a kitten with a broken bone, terrified of doing the wrong thing. And when it seemed fine, I held a little more tightly and then held her like she was real and this thing between us was true, and never wanted to let go; and there, for a while, we stayed.

  When she finally stepped back, she cleared her throat and there was a look in her eye that might have been happiness, or relief, or something else entirely, and I wondered for a moment if she’d finally forgiven me for the day Vae died, or if perhaps she’d forgiven me years ago and I’d just imagined that there had always been this broken thing between us, and never quite forgiven myself.

  There was still salt in my hair. She said: Come with me. You’re safe now. He can’t get you here. Come with me.

  Yue lived in a hearth a few streets up the hill from the hastily re-occupied Council chambers that pressed to the water’s edge. It was a place for civil servants from every department, she explained – quiet, most of the time, especially with the war – too much work for more than the lowest conversations around the table or in the bathhouse as they scrubbed each other’s backs and ran soap through their neighbours’ hair. Occasionally they partied, incredibly loud and incredibly drunk, and in the mornings after would wake, diagonal across their beds or the beds of their hearth-kin, and pad tip-toe across the hall to their own rooms, and find each other’s socks in their washing for weeks to come.

  The floors in the downstairs living quarters were pressed crimson earth, still smelling of fresh wax recently laid. The staircase was ancient stone, each step smoothed to a dip in the middle by centuries of footsteps. At the top, it opened to a high skylight, and banks of sage, tarragon, rosemary and mosquito-repellent marigold ran up the wall, padded with green moss. What building the stairs had once served, I couldn’t tell, for the corridors that split off from it were panelled wood and bamboo, pressed earth and thin solar glass; the new slid into the frame of the old like the mushroom sprouting from the fallen tree.

  Yue led me to a room that seemed to be for a guest: a double futon on the floor, folded; a low portable writing desk beneath a little lamp; a cushion to sit before it and fresh straw mats that still smelt of autumn rain. A sliding door opened to a balcony on which grew crocuses, tulips and mint; another, presumably to a wardrobe, stood closed on the opposite wall. On one shelf, I could see a solar torch, two ceramic soup bowls, two sets of cutlery, two white cups without handles – the fingerprints of the potter visible in the clay – and an unlit yellow beeswax candle. It all reminded me of a moderately priced guestroom in a bicyclesarai until Yue opened the wardrobe door to reveal clothes that could only be hers. There were only two types: long-sleeved, warm tops and trousers for winter, and short-sleeved tops and light trousers for summer. They had no marks on them or signs of character, and came in sky blue or dark blue. She had two pairs of shoes, apart from the thick winter boots she had left by the door of the hearth, which again conformed to the requirements of either sun or rain and were both dark brown. She had one scarf that shimmered like real silk, grown from the cocoon of the worm itself rather than woven in the bio-labs, dazzling yellow; a gift, perhaps – a token of someone else’s idea of her character – whether kept for good manners or fond memories, I couldn’t tell. It was a flash of incongruous vibrancy in the austere stiffness of her room.

  “I’ve asked them to give us the bathhouse for twenty minutes,” she said, pulling a towel from the top of the wardrobe. “Nkagosi has gone to fetch you clean clothes; he will return soon. I hope that is appropriate? That this… this is appropriate?”

  I mumbled some thanks, suddenly awkward, bumbling, too big for my skin and too small for this place. “I thought I would stay in a temple.”

  “Of course – of course. I can make that arrangement. Forgive me, I didn’t think. All of this is so… I wasn’t…”

  “But I’d rather stay here, if you’d have me.”

  She nodded once, chewing her bottom lip in a sudden, childish anxiety. Then she straightened up, gestured towards the door. I followed her downstairs, and then down again, to the hollowed-earth cellar where the hearth kept its bath. Damp footprints led away from the cold pool. There was the smell of soap, suds around the greywater drain, hot water ready in the communal tub. Yue dipped her fingers in it
as I undressed, testing the temperature, seemed satisfied, rolled up her sleeves and trouser hems and waited for me to climb in. I did so gingerly, not sure whether the touch of water would be a threat, a trauma, a memory of the sea, and instead gasped as the heat broke through every cut and tear, every salt-baked frozen inch of skin and bone, shuddering through me like a train over loose tracks.

  “Is it too hot?”

  “No. I just need a moment.”

  She nodded, and as I slowly sank deeper, she scooped up a bar of shampoo and rubbed it into my hair, digging hard with fingertips and occasionally giving an order – rinse – head back – head down – rinse – until every inch of my scalp was pummelled and new.

  When she was satisfied, she ordered me out of the tub and splashed warm, clean water over me before murmuring: “Cold tub?” I looked at it with trepidation, warmth still such an alien friend that the idea of losing it seemed suddenly unkind. She smiled, shook her head. “Next time.”

  She scrubbed me dry with the fat towel from upstairs, then examined my cracked, crimson hands, rubbed something waxy and smelling of spring into them, caressing the thin webbing between each finger and rolling her thumb into the creaking bones of my palms, all in silence, save the tick-tick-ticking of the pipes.

  Nkagosi had returned with clean clothes. They were cut in the same severe, brisk style as Yue’s own – from the very same market, perhaps – but were warm and smelt of vanilla freshness. I dressed while she cleaned the floor around the tub and pumped water from the greywater tanks into the thin pipes that fed the walls of herbs and moss that ran up the stairs. By the time we emerged, the hearth was sleeping, and even the midnight cats of the city had found some hot pipe to curl up by, a truce declared in their constant bickering as they huddled into the thin heat of each other’s bodies. I was exhausted, elated, so tired that it seemed as though I had detached from my own self, become the wind, the breath of the kakuy, floating above human events.