A Brother's Secret

by Andy Graham

  Aalok joined in with a tale of a witch who got revenge on a bullying prince who wanted a medicine to cure his sea sickness. She sold him a storm in a bottle. Slowly, the stories moved from mischievous to malevolent. They finished with Kaleyne’s tale of a druid who discovered the secret to reincarnation.

  “She used it to exact eternal revenge on the man who killed her brother,” Kaleyne whispered. “She murdered him over and over and over again, each death was more inventive than the last.”

  Then Kaleyne threw the rock to Ray. He had been dreading this and had been dragging through his memories for something interesting to tell them. After a chorus of boos, he told them the story he had heard so many times from his mother, warning them it was not very scary.

  “My village is called Settlement 9. We call it Tear. Long before the bloody birth of Ailan from Brettia, a town named Greenfields stood on the site of my village. We still find sections of old paving stones in the Weeping Woods around us.” Ray took the bottle of spirits off James, he needed to keep his hands busy. “Like many towns of the time, the people of Greenfields had their own customs and dialects that reflected their gods, lives and beliefs — beliefs at odds with the horned knights and their new god who were sweeping across the nation.

  “The knights besieged Greenfields for days. Tired men, women, children and injured soldiers defended themselves against the mail-clad Warriors of Reason battering at their walls. These men were driven by their most elemental needs, hidden under sparkling white tunics.

  “There was no organisation, no tactics, just a relentless tide of hate breaking on the rock of humanity. When their swords broke, the knights used whatever they could find. Clubs. Stones. Scavenged weapons. Even torn-off limbs.

  “The gates failed. The townsfolk rallied around the Sheriff’s fallen body. Butchers fought with cleavers. Cooks with knives. Blacksmiths with hammers. One mother was said to have thrown her baby’s cradle out of a top-floor window at the men clawing at her front door. But they were losing. They won a brief respite when a unit of military veterans from Axeford outflanked the knights. A handful of spearmen used the reach of their weapons to cut down dozens of knights, forcing many into the river that split the town in two.”

  A commotion on the other side of the fire stopped Ray mid-sentence. A woman pushed her way into the crowd to grab a young kid by the ear. She dragged the struggling child off to bed, deaf to his protests that he was grown now.

  “Grown,” the mother told the boy as she clipped him around the back of the head, “means you earn your keep, not stay up late drinking.”

  Ray waited for the shuffling crowd to stop whispering before continuing. “That river’s nothing more than a stream now, but still no one in my village will swim in it. My grandad Stann Taille, otherwise known as Tear’s Rotten Egg—” The crowd chuckled dutifully. One woman pinched the bridge of her nose and pretended to faint. “Stann says the water has a memory of those who drowned in it and the only way it can quench its pain is to drown it in new pain. Another legend claims the autumnal floods are the stream’s tears.”

  As a boy, Ray had watched the glitter of the summer sun on the stream. The light had reflected onto the bright lines streaking down his mother’s face. “Despite their age, the experience and discipline of the silver-haired soldiers from Axeford swung the battle their way. Then sheer numbers and brute force overcame them, too.

  “The rout began. The streets were red and slippery. Villagers tripped over the corpses of their friends and family as they fled. A cry went up. The National Cavalry were coming. ‘There. Beyond the gates. The rising cloud!’ Approaching horses were kicking up dust in the cornfields. The riders’ spears bristled like a swarm of steel wasps. Pennants cracked in the wind. The cavalry galloped into the town of Greenfields, scattered the knights and surrounded the square. A double line of man and beast, spears lowered. The villagers cheered. They were saved. Greenfields would survive. The knights threw down their weapons. All but one.”

  Ray stopped. Waited in silence. Counted his breaths. Just like he knew Stann Taille did when he was holding court around the Hallowtide fires. A branch cracked, sending a shower of sparks arcing into the night. A few of the listeners jumped. Hands fluttered to chests and mouths.

  “All but one,” Ray repeated. “Blood-drunk. Tunic shredded. Spitting mad. The knight charged and hacked an arm off the butcher. His cleaver clattered to the cobblestones. The villagers looked to the cavalry. The mounted men didn’t move. A second knight retrieved his sword, a bastard sword as some have it, and took a swing at one of the townsfolk. The blade opened up a crimson gash in a woman’s face. A third knight scrabbled for his mace. Cracked open a skull. One by one the knights realised the cavalry weren’t going to stop them. The slaughter started again, this time contained by a ring of steel and horseflesh. The riders, some with tears streaming down their faces, sat motionless on their stamping horses and watched until the river was black with crows.

  “Greenfields was almost entirely wiped out. But it didn’t stop there. Whole communities were slaughtered, the villages and farms turned into a wasteland, where, as Stann Taille says, ‘not even grief would grow.’ The victors, led by their three rulers — the Head, Heart and Hand — renamed Greenfields Cleanfields. They declared that no one should ever defile themselves by living there again. The knights who had committed the original atrocities referred to the area as Screamfields; some of my family still use the name today.”

  Ray took a deep swig from the bottle, coughing as it burned his throat. He pushed down the memories fighting to be heard in his head. Those that had never seemed to belong to him reared up the loudest. He passed the bottle to James, who was watching him with a strange expression.

  “Once the scavengers and looters had left and the crows and fisher gulls flown away with fat bellies, the survivors returned. They planted a tree for every one of their fallen kin. Over the years the trees grew and multiplied, tended in secret by the descendants of the tree farmers.

  “They named it the White Wood, the bark of the birch trees stained that colour by the salt in their tears. The wood spread, the newer trees dwarfed by the original ones at the heart of the now sprawling forest. Eventually, villages sprung up around it as the once mighty conquerors also succumbed to the vagaries of victory. The knights of the Head, Heart and Hand faded. They became myths and legends only remembered around the Hallowtide fires of Tear, Axeford and a few other local villages.

  “The new generations learnt the stories and started referring to the area by its previous name. They renamed themselves after the original people, seeking identity in a romanticised version of a bloody history their ancestors had been part of. They adopted the tradition of honouring their dead with a tree, and so the woods, now called the Weeping Woods, grew again, becoming a dark green memorial to a people all but wiped out. Those memories were forgotten again when Brettia was remoulded into Ailan. He stared deep into the embers of the fire. “Every time I hear the story I hope it ends differently. It never does.”

  He paused, soaking up the silence around the fire. “Things all changed after the Purges, what the government call the Silk Revolution. We became Settlement 9, the Free Town of Tear. We maintain whatever traditions we can, even some of the less pleasant ones.” He took the bottle back off James, who was watching him, puzzled. “I guess I do remember more than I thought.”

  Nascimento snorted, the sound cutting through the night. “The fuck, dude? Got ourselves a natural-born minstrel right here. You Bucket Heads are almost as bad as the Cloud People. Never heard such a steaming pile of nonsense.”

  Mutters sprang up around the fire. The dog sitting at Lukaz’s feet pricked up its ears.

  “What now?” Nascimento asked.

  “Nice work, Jamerson, you’ve just insulted everyone here,” said Brooke. “You’re the outsider, remember?”

  Kaleyne laid her hand on Nascimento’s shoulder. The firelight gleamed off the steel clips weaved through her hair. “Please
don’t call us that. It was a name forced on us along with the other changes your people made.”

  Nascimento made a stumbling apology. When the conversation kicked up again, it was more subdued than before.

  Brooke punched Ray in the ribs. “The idea is to entertain people, not make them maudlin.”

  “Back off, Brooke.” He’d heard enough bad stories from his grandad, bitter old Stann Taille, to last him a lifetime. He’d spent most of his adult life trying to redress the balance. No matter how hard he had tried to memorise other stories, this was the only one that had stuck. Damn his mother and her melancholy streak. He threw a rock into the fire and watched the sparks fly.

  29

  The Spokesperson

  Walking the streets of Ailan at night was an interesting exercise. It felt like the city had been stripped of its soul. David Prothero had always maintained that buildings needed people more than the other way round. This abandoned quarter of the capital, Gallowgutter, where Bethina Laudanum had been born, just confirmed that belief. Prothero peered behind the green-netting that flapped on the scaffolding. Gold-leaf was peeling off the ornate, black stone. This theatre was in more need of an undertaker than a brickie thanks to the government’s proactive policy of underfunding the arts. But, as Bethina had once said, buildings were easier to rebuild than people.

  While he amused himself with thoughts of what productions he would put on if this theatre were ever restored — Something political but accessible, Prothero decided. A morality play for the masses. Maybe with a fallen angel in it, hell-bent on divine retribution. Anything but musicals. Even the best of them sounded like someone attacking a cat with a banjo. — a patrol of police officers watched him from their van. Prothero had been stopped for breaking the curfew. He waited as the police ran his ID. He had insisted. “No-one is above the law.”

  “Except when it comes to breaking curfew, right?” replied one of the officers, Sergeant Wilson according to the name tag. He handed Prothero his swipe card back. “See you around, Spokesperson.”

  He cringed. Wilson had insisted on repeating the ridiculous title forced on Prothero by the government. ‘Spokesperson for the Unions’. It was embarrassing as well as disingenuous. There were no unions any more. Any unofficial gathering of more than three people at work was banned. He wouldn’t put it past the brilliant minds of whatever think tank had been behind the title to suggest he wear an official cape and mask. Maybe one of those wrestling masks the caravan fighters had worn for the kids when he was younger. The Spokesperson arrived in a crash of lightning and a flash of thunder. Here to save the day! It reminded him of the comics he’d forced himself to read as an adult. As a child he would have found them juvenile, but as an adult they’d been oddly liberating, despite the facile plots and predictable physiques of the protagonists.

  Sergeant Wilson, a man with a twitchy gleam in his eyes and no cable connected to his body cam, climbed back into the armoured patrol van just before it sped off. Prothero guessed the man was around the same age as that legionnaire, Franklin. “Now that’s all a big mess waiting to blow up in someone’s face,” he mumbled. “Playing a man off against his own history is worse than wrong. Especially when you start making bets on it.”

  He balanced his pocket watch on his satchel and spun it. Once it had stopped, he followed the direction the winder had been pointing in. It seemed as good a route as any.

  Prothero’s own life had been very different when he had been the age of Wilson and Franklin. His knee hadn’t been so painful, for a start, and insomnia had been a problem for other people. The Window Riots, just over thirty years ago, had been his pivotal moment. He had been faced with the choice of melting back into the electronic shadows behind his keyboard or standing up for something he claimed to believe in. With a little cajoling from an unlikely co-conspirator, Prothero had made his choice and used his family’s status to make a public stance for democracy.

  After the Window Riots, his co-conspirator had disappeared back into the heart of government and Prothero had been made the official leader of the opposition. There wasn’t much of a party at that time, but the government had liked enough, or not disliked too much, about him to want him as a potential alternative to what they were offering. But after yet another argument with the VP this afternoon, Prothero wondered whether he had made the right choice. The problem was, apart from the Resistance, there was no one else fighting the fight that needed to be fought.

  He paused next to a huddled figure in the doorway of a food market. The woman was lying on the spikes that protected the entrance at night, using old clothes and plastic bottles for bedding. That and the alcohol Prothero could smell were probably the only things that would dull the pain of the spikes to allow any sleep. Better that than sleep where the police would look for you. Better the police than the others who stalked the streets — the 13th Legion, the Unsung. He laid a food package next to the snoring woman’s head and left. He would most likely be let off with a warning again for breaking curfew. At best, the sleeper would be punished.

  His feet took him under the first section of the elecqueduct. The once gleaming monolithic steel and concrete supports competed with the surrounding buildings for air. The top of the pillars were weather-worn and pock-marked, thick with nests of pigeons and cameras. Devised by Ray Franklin’s grandfather, Rick, the elecqueduct had been envisaged as a giant electrical conduit to connect the Gates to Substation Two. The post-Silk Revolution government had been desperate for it to work – politicians so focused on leaving tomorrow a legacy, they forgot about today. But after innumerable delays and rewritten targets, which were hastily rewritten again when it was obvious the time scale and budget were not going to be met, the elecqueduct was quietly dropped. More of an afterbirth than the rebirth of glory that had been promised. Now the structure was earmarked to be replaced by luxury flats.

  It was a carbunculus demonstration of the permafrost of political hypocrisy, the smell of which fermented and made his conscience boil. For every one stumbling step forwards, society staggered back two. Not as many starved or froze as before, medical advances were leaping ahead, but literacy and numeracy levels were plummeting.

  “It was about priorities,” Bethina Laudanum had once said. “Would you rather have bread or books?”

  Finally, though, hope was breaking through. Prothero had managed to push through some basic workers’ rights. He’d hammered out the outline of a free rudimentary health care system for the Gates and a mobile version for the Free Towns. He’d even got the bodyball ban lifted. These were all battles well won, but the blazing trail of reform he’d dreamed of had been buried in the realities of the politics of appeasement over progress. Why was it always the haves that decided what the have-nots could have?

  The president had agreed to his latest demands but, again, he’d come up against a predictable stumbling block. Patient explaining hadn’t worked, neither had shouting. The VP’s sheer obstinacy had tempted Prothero to slap him. He’d walked away before doing or saying anything he would have regretted. He had made a promise to keep a secret a long time ago and would do so. You also said you’d stay away from the elecqueduct, he reminded himself. The structure reminded him of Rick Franklin and that led to memories of his daughter, Rose. She had grown up to be quite a handful after her father’s disappearance. Prothero’s grin faded. One moment of unrequited madness on his part had led to thirty years of a bittersweet mess and more arguments than he could count. He patted the concrete pillars farewell and continued his nocturnal rounds. It would be a shame if the government actually did pull down the elequeduct, but maybe it was for the best. In the meantime, it still had one more role to play in his fight for Ailan’s people.

  Prothero walked the streets, handing out what food he could, until he reached the river. Star-flies battered themselves against the glass bulbs of the street lamps. At the end of a private road, four gleaming columns thrust up to the moons. The building beneath those old chimneys was bathed in soft sw
athes of uplighting. Unlike the rest of the city, these lights were never turned off. Alternating sections of most of the capital were illuminated or plunged into darkness as the power-saving rotations cycled through the night. The brownouts were just short enough to keep food cold and flats warm, but long enough that you could never forget power was scarce.

  Energy was a currency more valuable than money; you couldn’t burn the swipe cards nor use them to stop food spoiling. Fuel was the way forwards. That was kept Prothero coming back to the elecqueduct, for the potential it had held. Fuel was the bargaining chip which would get him what he needed. What the world needed. He may not be able to save the coal mines, but he could save the miners. His waiting game of compromises and reluctant obsequiousness would play out the way he wanted. And it would start just as he’d planned back during the Window Riots, during sweaty nights in the cramped single bed he had shared.

  30

  The Angel Nation

  Ray left the last of the tribes folk talking around the embers. Aalok had already turned in and Nascimento had helped Orr back to the hut they were sharing. The adrenaline of the win that had carried Orr through the day had long since worn off.

  Maybe it was the Greenfield story, but the Angel City reminded Ray of his village of Tear more now than when the squad had first arrived. The noises from the woods, the night sky, the crunch of frosty grass under his feet, they were things he didn’t realise he missed until he was experiencing them.

  Above him, the constellations watched, the Jester most prominent amongst them. Ray’s mother had taught him to navigate by the stars. It had annoyed the teacher from the Access School no end that Ray had known more than she did. Ray had learnt that the painful way. His mother had found the yellowing bruise a few weeks later.