As Simple As Hunger

by D Des Anges

  “If that lazy cockroach turd shows up for his discussion with me you tell him I have died waiting and he will fail and spend his life as a farmer,” Benjon said, tucking the papers into his coat without order or grace.

  “I’m sure he will feel all the better knowing his doctor is among the Celebrated,” Rill sneered. “Listen, if you can’t make her curse with your usual charm could you just give her a quick pinch?”

  Benjon stuffed himself through the chink in the door as smoke patters through a broken window, and left Rill sitting alone in the murk of the tiny room.

  “You smell of coffee—” Rill shouted after him.

  It occurred to Benjon, as he pulled the door closed, that Rill might very well be sitting in there because he was too bloody fat to get out.

  The porter – Graves or Gull – had been relieved of his post by a different red-faced, flaxen-haired, grey-suited guardian when Benjon passed, and so he was forced to repeat the assurance that yes, he was going to be on the Wireless later, and no, he did not plan to make Mabeline Pilbrook call him a bastard this time. Anyone would think, from the behaviour of the university staff, that no one from the institution had ever been on the Wireless before, instead of the buildings having an unofficial use as a stock-handlers’ pen for opinions that might be used in broadcast; the place was teeming with loud voices suited to the assumption of authority.

  Benjon slipped over a fresh slick of leaves, and in the avoidance of downfall chanced to look up at the sky. The geese were forming the same V they formed every autumn, but he knew as he knew the sun would rise every morning that every cheap divinator in the town who saw their flight would have some contradictory flim-flam to pin to their passing, and that gargantuan snail-trail and peddler of lies, Divinator Jeppesen (were he here and not busily deforming the policies of the nation in York) would have the final say on it.

  Even though, Benjon thought, sidestepping more leaves with all the sedate grace of a startled egret, even though the geese sought only to escape the cold, even though, even though it had been proven by his colleagues. ‘Divinator Jeppesen knows best,’ never mind how geese flew for the warmth, the Divinator’s thoughts were those which had the ear of the land.

  In the centre of the city, which took Benjon twice the time to reach now that he avoided the canal path, the vast clock struck a lazy hour and scattered the rock doves like a thrown stone. The work, of course, of Non-Occult engineers, but the Knutfirst Divinators claimed it as their own invention.

  He thought the same every time he passed it, but the knowledge made him no less irate.

  He had in hand an excess of time, and if he took a train now he would only arrive with hours to spare, standing about in Edinburgh in the same biting wind without the choice to return to his house and to a promising reiteration of the infusion of molten wax through the nervous system which had suffered so last week. He had no particular need to spend hours in Edinburgh, but Benjon set in motion was as difficult to stop as a fully-wound clock, and he jerked and bounced up the great stone steps to the railway station with the same mindless certainty as the geese in their flight south.

  Since Hajar’s arrival at the university, Benjon found, he paid a little more attention to the growls and gross extrusions of the engines that carried him back and forth in his journeys to Edinburgh. It was the way of colleagues: small knowledge sparked small curiosity, and observation followed. For now he observed only that the raised platform was full of rock doves, common sparrows, starlings, wood pigeons, early fieldfare, crows, and some winter-tossed gulls.

  Benjon extracted his notes from inside his coat. They were inconclusive – he had plain intended to discuss with Katherine her thoughts on the treatment of lunatics, but he recalled that this had been derailed by the vocal presence of Willets and his acolytes outside their office. The remainder were repetitive scrawlings on the inhumanity of the madhouses and the distortion of fact by divinators – for which he had no evidence, Benjon sighed, and whose lack of evidence would undermine him – and the phrase ‘convenient dumping ground’, which he suspected he had overheard rather than invented.

  A chaffinch hopped between his feet.

  Benjon pulled a stub of graphite from behind his ear and made an attempt at flattening the papers over the almost cylindrical circumference of his thigh. He scribbled: do not use phrase “inhumane”, do not mention torture broadcasts, agree without agreeing, knowing as he did that it was hopeless to apply the advice given by an effortlessly diplomatic woman like Hana al-Fihri to himself. She, Hajar had told him, had been trained to courtly discussion, and he, Benjon knew, was honed by shouting himself hoarse at his rivals in the various Occult Schools, often in what the Dean delicately called ‘colourful idiom’.

  Do not swear, wrote Benjon, under the four other instances of this admonition. Do not make accusations for which you have no evidence – and here he was on firmer ground, for was not the core principle of Empiricism the struggle for evidence? – Do not raise your voice.

  The station sat above the city as if reaching for the clouds, raised not by a hill but by the diligent work of builders, and into this artificially raised hall ran the tracks, iron tracks, raised themselves above the city by the great stone arches of a vast bridge. It was, therefore, impossible to miss the glimpse of the oncoming train as it breached from the barren woods on the neighbouring hillside and began a slowing haul across the rooftops of Durham on the viadukt; more so as the train vented a piercing whistle and scattered the birds from the station.

  Benjon shovelled his notes haphazardly back into his coat. The oncoming train sighed and groaned, hissed and gulped, pistons pushing and pulling with an underhanded ease, and with a mountain’s cloud of steam it screamed and squealed to a stop at the platform.

  Wiping smuts and soot from their faces with their sleeves, his fellow-travellers tugged open their doors (shoulders straining and backs bending against the weight) and climbed aboard the Edinburgh train.

  * * *

  Edinburgh, even more than Durham, laboured under a deep, thick blanket of dark clouds. While in Durham the malignant weather had settled upon the Winterzeitwinde for its weapon of discontent, in Edinburgh the clouds rent themselves bit by bit onto the cobbles, each smooth stone a slippery, slithery obstacle beneath Benjon’s feet.

  He was not ten minutes out of the station, bowed in half against the rain, which found its way down inside the collar of his coat and made him very uncomfortable indeed, when he was already grateful for his impatience. Had he waited on his usual train he would have stumbled much too late into Albion Broadcasting-B, and out of breath at that.

  Now he was assured of the time to drink the rotten coffee they always thrust upon him.

  For ease of broadcast (or so the story ran, Benjon didn’t believe a word of it and thought it mere showing-off) Albion Broadcasting-B was housed in an old keep above the city, which dominated the skyline of Edinburgh as the University and station glowered over Durham. Broadcasting-A, as all knew, had been in Glasgow.

  This imposing silhouette with its herd of outbuildings and own stable fairly bristled with the rods, the rudely-named ‘antennae’ (deliberately chosen after the arthropods, though most called them ‘rods’ in quaint horror), that Wireless men used to throw their voices across the dominions of Albion – even, it was claimed, to Isǽland. The surrounding hills, too, were peaked with rods – with antennae – in every direction.

  Impressive it might be, but it was hard on the legs to stumble up the cobbles in the rain, and the porters of Broadcasting took a dim view on those who scrabbled their way up the grassy slope instead, insisting that the grass was for the horses. Benjon was sure that the stories of intruders tossed from the cliff were apocryphal, but he didn’t want to test this hypothesis.

  As he thought, he was out-of-breath and cross when the doors of Albion Broadcasting opened before him and another large, humourless man in a woollen tunic (this time a deep red with the insignia of Albion Broadcasting painstakingly em
broidered upon it in some costly silken thread) planted himself directly in Benjon’s way, as immovable as a tree.

  “I am supposed to be here,” Benjon barked, dripping rain from the end of his nose, his eyebrows, and his ears.

  “Can’t come in without a letter of invitation,” the porter said sweetly, showing ragged brown teeth.

  “I have to go and let Mabeline Pilbrook call me a bastard again,” Benjon said, putting his hands into his coat and feeling around for the letter he knew very well was at home, balanced on top of a preserving jar with a terse Don’t forget about me scrawled on it in whatever fluid had been closest to hand at the time: either coffee, or blood.

  “Oh, yes, I remember you,” the porter said with another predatory and unpleasant smirk, “but all the same. No one comes in without a letter of invitation.”

  “And if my letter of invitation is in Durham?” Benjon tried, looking through his notes as if they would prove his suddenly very acute memory wrong.

  “Then you don’t come in,” the porter said, watching him with ill-concealed amusement. “I’m sure Goodwife Pilbrook can call you a bastard out of the window if she needs to.”

  “Tyodor, Tyodor,” sang a rich, unctuous, and immediately-recognisable voice. Even Benjon, who had a sixmonth ago withdrawn from listening to the Wireless in defence of his nerves and temper (and to prevent himself from destroying any further equipment in response to the mindless chatter), knew to whom it belonged and, absurdly, felt a little stricken at the thought of being spoken to by Hugo Waldren. “Tyodor, you grim-toothed thug, you nancy-handed bully, who are you locking out now?”

  “He’s no letter,” said the porter, looking momentarily uncertain. “It’s that Israeline, the Semite doctor with the Non-Occultists, come to get on Mabeline’s nerve again.”

  “She brings it on herself,” Hugo Waldren said sagely. “Let him inside, rot you, it’s raining.”

  With a flagrant shrug and seeming relief at being allowed to surrender responsibility to someone else, the porter stood aside, and Benjon stepped over the knee-high door-rim into the over-lit room beyond. Albion Broadcasting must use half the gas in the nation keeping their station lit up like day, and heated like midsummer, but Benjon felt little moved to complain.

  “I have twenty down on you making Mabeline swear at you again,” said Hugo Waldren, just inside the doorway and looking exactly as his voice sounded. He was perhaps a little shorter than Benjon might have imagined, but he was stout in an affable rather than muscular way, his hair was white and his beard short, his features showing the later vestiges of what must have been a very handsome youth, and he was smiling a little fixedly at Benjon.

  Benjon, who himself had rarely been able to master smiles that were not distressingly ghoulish, felt warmed as much by this as by Albion Broadcasting’s loose heating practices.

  “She swears black and blue that you won’t drag another oath from her, so I suppose you’ll have to try a bit harder.”

  Unsure exactly how to respond, Benjon grimaced nervously and backed toward the place he most often sat in waiting to be called to broadcast.

  “Fantastic to meet you,” Hugo Waldren finished, patting Benjon companionably on the upper arm as if they were old friends, and he rolled away with a lightness of step that surely belied his age.

  Folded up in a waiting armchair like a fretful student, Benjon reviewed his notes again. There was no profit in it, his arguments were in his head rather than on the paper and he needed no prompting, but he hoped that by some undiscovered alchemy of his person he might absorb Hana al-Fihri’s advice and become the charming, convincing spokesperson for Empiricism that he had so far failed to be.

  A painting hung on the wall opposite. It was in enormously poor taste, and for that reason Benjon felt at that moment that he could appreciate it. It showed a kind of humour, the sort that his few closest confidants imbued, in its subject matter: a near-heraldic depiction of the Franks and Albion squabbling over a chalice, while in the background a vast centipede made off with their women. A crude piece of satire, but not so crude as the inscription, which read “The Policy-Makers”.

  To Benjon’s surprise the painting was signed (such things were left unclaimed for the safety of the artist, the Governance being, as he knew only too well, a little over-sensitive to criticism) and to his abject shock, it was signed with a flamboyant “HW”.

  “Benjamin Jonatan Silverstein?”

  The name sounded read-out. Benjon stumbled to his feet, crumpled his notes into his pocket and, steeling himself for the contact, thrust out his hand at the first person who came toward him.

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” said the short woman in a Moorish cut of trouser. She was a redhead, an Albionwoman through-and-through, but the clothes she wore were a strange hybrid of the Moorish cut and the Albion cloth. She did not shake his hand, but folded a piece of paper in the palm of her own. “This way, please. Overseer Greytooth wants to talk to you about guidelines for the debate.”

  The words ‘wants to tell you to keep a civil tongue in your rotten heretical head’ hung in the air between them without the need of speaking aloud.

  Before he was able to take his scolding and admonitions, however, Benjon was placed in another room full of empty armchairs while his new companion strode away to “see if Greytooth is available”. He was left without so much as a painting to stare at and puzzle over, and was ready to take out and fuss over his notes again when he realised that he had been joined by someone else.

  The large Iberian Moor was dressed in worker’s tunics, appended with several pockets, some of which were full of strange solid shapes. He was very tall, taller than almost anyone Benjon could remember, and broad, and had he been ten years younger he would have troubled the restraints of Benjon’s bromine most perniciously.

  His face was distorted in something Benjon recognised as ‘concern’, through a haze of his own discomfort.

  “You’re a doctor,” the large Moor said eventually. He seemed unsure of what to do with his hands, and they twisted anxiously through his clothing.

  Benjon said nothing very much. He nodded.

  “A non-occult doctor,” the Moor pressed. There was white in his short beard, and grey in his hair. It was close-cropped, against the fashion of the land, like Benjon’s. Benjon assumed it was for the same reason: the unruly nature of the hair unkempt.

  “An Empiricist,” Benjon corrected, taking refuge in pedantry. Though often, he was told, oblivious to the mood of a room, there was no mistaking the tension in this. There seemed no sign of the redhead who had accompanied him in here, and he wondered if Greytooth was really proving so hard to find when he had sent for him in the first instance.

  “One capable of discretion?” the Moor persisted, his hands crushing and releasing the wool of his tunic. Benjon imagined with some alarm the damage such hands could do. They looked rough.

  “I follow the same lore as any other doctor,” Benjon said curtly, in spite of his nerves. There was no question in it. He might be cursed for uncouth and despised for his Method, but a doctor was a confessor to his patients, not some gossiping fishwife. He pulled his earlobes fitfully, and harassed his shorn head as if the restlessness of his interrogator was contagious.

  “I need your help,” the Moor said quietly. “You have to be secret about this, all right? You have to. No one can afford to know. Of course I can pay you, as much as you want.”

  Uneasy, and unexpectedly eager now to get into a fight with the Wiltshirist if only to escape from the intensity of the conversation in which he found himself embroiled, Benjon said, “If it is the pox then I can give you the name of a perfectly good apothecary in Edinburgh.”

  “It isn’t the pox and it isn’t the flux and more importantly it isn’t me,” said the Moor. His voice, too, was strangely familiar, although at present Benjon could not pinpoint where he might have heard it before. The genius of recognition was not his even in calm moments. “I’m asking for someone el
se, because he won’t ask for himself. He hasn’t noticed. There is something wrong with him. There has been something wrong with him ever since that professor came up from your university – you are from Durham, yes? Right? You’re always from Durham, your lot.”

  Benjon made a nonsense gesture with his hand and tried not to flatten himself against the wall.

  “I can’t put my finger on it,” said the Moor, “I can’t say what it is, but there’s something – the best – the best description I have, he just isn’t himself. Do you understand? He’s like a mummer, playing himself. Or, or. Or someone describing him to someone else, who he has never met. It’s not right.” The Moor made a hopeless sound and turned beseeching eyes on Benjon. They were large and dark, and made Benjon desperately uncomfortable as much for the truths they imparted as for the ever-sickening matter of eyes meeting his. “Do you see?”

  “This … someone else,” Benjon said carefully, “is important to you.”

  The Moor stared at him with such ferocity that Benjon made an involuntary sound and stuffed his knuckles into his mouth quite without willing it.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it is what you think. And that is why I asked for your discretion, Doctor Silverstein.”

  Benjon reminded himself to up the dose of his bromine.

  “I cannot see him now,” he said, pulling his knuckles from his mouth with his other hand. “I have to –”

  “—Upset Mabeline again, I know,” said the Moor. “But soon, please? You will see him?”

  “I have to come back next week,” Benjon said a little sullenly, “to talk to bloody Greytooth. I’ll see him then. Who am I seeing? Who should I ask for?”