White Time

by Margo Lanagan

  ‘It looks beautiful,’ said the attendant when I returned to him. With a thudding heart I smiled, relieved him of my gift, and moved by.

  ‘Where would you like to be placed, miss?’ said another.

  ‘As near the young ladies as possible.’

  ‘May I take your gift and have it guarded during the ceremony?’

  ‘Thank you, but I am quite comfortable carrying it. It is fragile, you see, and for a very special person.’

  ‘As you please, miss.’

  I was passed up an aisle and ushered to a cushioned bench seat right up against the girls’ corral. I glanced across the hall at the boys, and among all the piled, coiled, fanciful hairstyles there – all of which would be unpinned in the course of the ceremony, tumbled down to nothing but their weight in the scales – I sought out the highest gleam there, the gold of golds, and yes!, it was Lar’s. He was a-shimmer with nerves. It suited him.

  I tucked the gift under my seat, up against the wooden wall of the corral. The crowd noise was growing, and the seats around me were filling. Superseding the smells of cold stone and bench-wax were the scents of hair-wash and cloth-freshener, and the cedar that was used in tamsin bedding to absorb their natural rank smell. I sat there breathing it all in. I had done it, the ‘big job’ Chirrup had failed to do – not so big after all, eh? And because of my skills, I’d done it better than he ever could have; I’d brought the two nuisances right into the heart of Leet territory, right into the—

  The gift moved, behind my slippered heel. ‘Look, mam,’ said a little voice behind me.

  I turned and saw the gift rising, in hands too small for its weight. Slipping, slipping – the woven cane of the bench-back kept me from it. I gave a muted cry.

  ‘Oh, Lossie, mustn’t touch!’ Lossie’s mother caught the present as it slipped from his hands. ‘Oh, it’s heavy!’ she muttered, and through the cane I watched it stagger across the air with her hand chasing it below until bang!, it hit the side of the corral, with the mother’s hand bracing it.

  ‘Oh, please be careful!’ I whispered.

  ‘You should cloak such a thing,’ she said, handing it to me. ‘There are always lots of curious children here.’

  ‘I thank you.’ Warily I watched the parcel for the wisps of smoke that would betray me.

  Another person had been squeezed onto my bench, and there was no longer any room for the gift beside me. I held it in my lap. The air was now very warm, and the girl next to me had a heavily perfumed tamsin – crudely augmented, too – and I felt slightly ill. I wondered if I was as white, behind my face-paint, as Rustle’s man had been. Get out of there, he’d said. As if I’d miss this. As if I’d ever get another chance to watch a weighing ceremony, one of the highlights of the Leet calendar, the highlight of Lar’s whole life!

  And then my memory proffered me two pictures. A younger Chirrup at the kitchen table, tying up smell-bags to let off at school, cloths, powders and fuses laid out neater than ever he laid out his study tools. Powders were how you made smells, not force-metal. And – I lifted the box in my lap doubtfully – powders weren’t this heavy.

  The other picture was more confused. Legs, soldiers, Purl pulling me away. I crane back; I see a soldier setting a time-piece into a patch of shining metal-paste at the base of a pillar. But why? I say. Because it was a rebel meeting-house, she answers. And she adds, when we’re away from the crowd, Because it was a thing of beauty, of Ord beauty, one of the few left.

  That was what you used force-metal for.

  Surely not.

  I rose and shakily placed the gift on my seat. ‘Excuse me,’ I said to the woman next to me. Her tamsin stretched out languidly to sniff at the gift-cord where my fingers had sweated on it. The girl tutted and minimally moved her knees, and all along the bench people began gathering in skirt and tamsin-paw and saying, ‘Oh really – You would think – Must you?’

  I forced my way along them, apologizing in my false voice, cursing them in my head. I trod on the toe of one lady’s slipper and she hissed to her companion, ‘Manners of an Ordinary!’ I was so glad to be an Ord, glad I didn’t have to wear this daft cumbersome costume, glad I didn’t have to closet myself with these pinheaded decorated people all the days of my life!

  I stumbled out at the end of the bench, straightened my snood full of padding, hurried past all the attendants offering, ‘May I help – Is there something—?’

  ‘All I need is air.’ And to get out, out!, before whatever was going to happen, happened. I had to force myself not to rudely push through the families and dignitaries flowing down the staircase.

  I stood gasping in the sudden cool emptiness of the key-arch.

  ‘Miss? For your return?’ The attendant held up a Key, its slim chain swinging and shining. I took it, calm now, as good as away now. ‘Don’t be long, or you’ll miss the start of the ceremony.’

  I smiled. ‘I only need a moment or two.’ Folding Key and chain into my hand, I stepped outside.

  It was quieter now, the equipages clearing from under the portico, the broad avenue beyond almost empty, for no normal Leet business or politicking went on on weigh-day. It was cool and clear, sunny and peaceful as I walked seaward, smiling at my panic of a few moments ago. All those unfamiliar smells must have affected me, the proximity to all those Leets, the strain of pretending to be Leet myself. Since when had rebel activities been truly dangerous? No one was ever hurt, either rebel or Leet.

  There was no one on the beach, only sandpipers picking at the low-tide line, only wavelets turning over, glossy with the morning sun. I found the hut I’d used earlier, took off the heavy snood and gave my scalp a luxurious scratch. As I undressed I wondered, had Chirrup met with Rustle yet? Would Rustle say anything about me, about any of this? I wished I could be a fly on the wall for that meeting, wished I could see Chirrup’s face. I wished I could have seen Lar’s face, Lar’s mother’s, everyone else’s, as they unloaded all that beautiful hair into the scales. I should’ve kept my head; what did I know about rebel methods? Maybe there was some new kind of smoke or smell you could make using force-metal. There must be, since rebels never caused anything worse than a nuisance—

  First came the stunning noise of the bomb, then the shock. The wooden walls juddered and cracked, and I flung out my hands as if I could steady them. ‘No,’ I said very firmly. I scrabbled my own clothes on, over the Leet underwear, and ran out, up onto the promenade wall where I could see the city centre.

  The verdigris dome of the weighing-hall lay tipped in the cup of the walls, rakish as a scholar’s cap. The second blast – from the bouquet against the pillar – blew out all the walls. They hung a moment as stone lace, then sank, as the dome sank, into a vast soft uprising of dirty smoke.

  ‘No. No. It’s not possible.’

  Get out of there, Rustle’s florist-man had said.

  ‘They don’t do this kind of thing!’

  And then he’d whitened. Whatever you’ve been told to do, he’d said.

  ‘No-no-no-no-no!’

  It’s not for me to go against his orders.

  ‘Oh, no.’ I clutched my stomach as if someone had just punched me. Not for you to step in and save my life or anything. Bastard Rustle! Can’t kill off my brother so I’ll do, will I?’

  Then the Trades Hall blew, just across the Vines. The explosion thumped me sideways off the wall. Then something else, bigger, farther, went up. I scrambled back onto the wall and stood on my toes to see. The spires of the bourse buildings no longer adorned our skyline. With a roar the specialists’ shops threw themselves into the Vines; with a thud, my college (my colleagues! my teachers!) made a puff of dust among the apartments to the west. The Protocol Prison – with Chirrup’s empty cell in it – blew a great hole open in the Wall.

  Someone behind me on the promenade, a terrified minor Leet, began to scream, ‘Everything’s going! Everything!’ And a common voice cried joyfully, ‘Yes, everything – at last! The rebels! Our man Rustle! Praise heaven
!’

  And the bombs kept on.

  I was running. There were lost and frantic Leets, half-dressed, all through the Vines; there were Ords, thick-freckled brick-dusters, swarming in the Avenue of the Conquerors, cheering, loosing their long hair from caps and kerchiefs. Stones were falling from the sky – I saw a street guard felled by a flying gargoyle off a Wall-turret – and all the air was hazy and unstable.

  I was running home. Ours was an Ord sector; nothing would blow there. But I could not get past the weighing-hall bridge; all the lanes were blocked with fallen masonry.

  A man was screaming out pain and terror from the rubble in front of me, Ord or Leet I could not see for smoke. His screams had a strange, open-air sound where they should have echoed from wall to wall.

  I would have gone to him, but the smoke caught me by the throat and brought me to my knees, carrying with it from the flaming weigh-hall the sharp, rich, disgusting smell of burning hair.