The Modern World

by Steph Swainston

  Lourie swept his glaive in balletic circling moves, not one millimetre out of the perfect sequence. He dipped the two-metre pole, swept the pointed blade under Wrenn’s feet. Wrenn jumped it. Its hook caught behind his shin as he landed. Lourie tugged the pole with a grace that belied his strength. Wrenn hopped and let the hook slip out under his foot.

  Gayle laughed and clapped her hands, bringing the Cook out of the tavern to watch.

  All fifty immortals were arriving. I had been calling them up one by one, either from the Castle or wherever they’d been pursuing their interests elsewhere. Those involved in advance planning had been here for a month but all would be assembled by the end of the week.

  Immortals, called Eszai in the low Awian language, are people proven to be the best in the world at their chosen profession. We all play our parts in the battle, because the Emperor San joins us to the Circle and shares his immortality with us as long as we lead the war. Here at the front we have overall authority, even over governors and the Queen; but elsewhere, or in issues not connected with the war we can do no more than advise them. Likewise, San’s word is advice to the world but to us it is law.

  Wrenn deflected Lourie’s blade. Lourie pulled it back, grinding its rebated edge, and thrust the metal-clad base of the pole. Wrenn parried it with a full-strength clash. The mortals watching gasped, but we Eszai knew Lourie’s great skill; we’d seen it a hundred times before.

  The Castle saves the very best and improves on it gradually, incrementally; little is ever lost. I’ve been Comet for two hundred years, the fastest Messenger of all time. I’m a freak, yes, but it means I get to live forever.

  I turned to the wall behind me, took a grip on the rough stone and pulled myself up. I climbed swiftly past the doorway and the plaque above it; the only decoration in the town. Its sgraffito red plaster, incised through to the white layer underneath, depicted the Castle’s sun-in-splendour standard, surrounded by an inscription: ‘In memory of the battle at Slake crossroads, one night in the ongoing war. 4981 Plainslanders, Awians and Morenzians died on the l2th of April 1925.’

  As if we need to be reminded, I thought as I pulled myself over the guttering and scrabbled up to the apex of the roof. Balancing there, I looked down on the mortal soldiers outside the pub and I suddenly realised they did need to be reminded. The massacre was three generations in the past, long out of their living memory. It meant nothing to them but a date in a schoolbook. I stepped lightly along the ridge, thinking for the first time that I had more in common with the other Eszai than with the mortals, the Zascai, who had no idea what it was like to stumble through the middle of a massacre. I contemplated with dread that no matter how much effort I put in to knowing every up-to-date trend in Zascai fashion and the developments in their business, the gap between us was steadily widening. Well, I decided, it isn’t inevitable that I will become as out of touch as Frost or Lightning. I must simply try harder; it’s my profession after all.

  From the rooftop I saw the series of concentric squares in which the town was laid out. The buildings around the courtyard formed the first of three rings. Behind them ran a wide road, then another ring comprising the smithy, workshops, food, livery and ammunition stores, since Slake Cross is the supply base for all of western Lowespass. Every junction was staggered to prevent any Insects that might get in running straight to the heart of the town.

  The smell of hot iron rose from the blacksmith’s shop, mingling with the yellow-hay stink of horse turds on the road and the washy smell of potatoes boiling in the cookhouse adjoining the hall.

  Below, the innkeeper thwacked a brass tap with a mallet to drive it into an enormous keg of beer. His blows rang around the square together with the wail of the innkeeper’s squab and its mother shushing as she tried to calm it. She held it inside her cream shawl, against her breasts. It flailed one naked pinion with three pointed fingers like the wing of a plucked chicken. ‘Squab’ is Morenzian slang for Awian babies before they are fledged, and it was probably crying from the itching as its pinfeathers were starting to push through.

  The long buildings of the third ring were barracks to billet ten thousand troops. I could see the stone cisterns on the shower blocks’ roofs, replenished by recent rainstorms. The Awian soldiers had added a sauna and a talcum bath: conditions are bad enough at the front without suffering from lice in your wings.

  Then came the stables and allotments, in shadow at the foot of the curtain wall. Mangy apple and hazelnut trees bowed over cramped, tilled plots with green shoots – hardy runner beans and turnips. The soldiers supplemented their diet by growing vegetables but they were only permitted to do so inside the walls because any kind of plant attracts Insects.

  A few metal cages beside them each contained an Insect the size of a warhorse. Their jaws and antennae were bound with wire; they were soon to be sold and carted south to the Rachiswater amphitheatre. Their scent set mastiffs barking on the far side of town.

  Towers reinforced the exterior curtain wall at intervals along its length and at all four corners. It was tall, height being more important against the Insects than thickness, and it extended below ground to stop them undermining it. Roofed wooden walkways overhung the tops of the walls along their lengths. The single gate faced north towards the Paperlands. A guard with a jaunty crest on her helmet stared out of the large, square windows in the gatehouse tower.

  These military towns – Slake Cross, Frass and Whittorn – had been designed by Frost soon after her initiation to the Circle. She became a great favourite with the troops who no longer had to construct open air camps. Each town was in essence a fort, with a shifting population of fyrd and the people who supply them: quartermasters, fletchers, sutlers and male and female prostitutes.

  Slake Cross gave me a sinking feeling like the cold trepidation you feel on returning to a place you knew long ago. All your friends have moved on; their houses have strangers in them now. Even the routes you used to walk have changed, because the pubs you knew have been boarded up and cafés opened where they shouldn’t be. The last time I was here I was completely screwed up, living on drug time, time measured by needles and veins, not real time at all, and I scarcely noticed how bleak and utilitarian the place was.

  I concentrated on the far end of the roof, breathing calmly like a gymnast on the high bar, arms out for balance. I started running, opened my wings and their fingers spread automatically. They dragged, pulling me back, and I pushed at the tiles to find more speed. I lengthened my stride, faster still. I reached the end of the roof, sprang into the air, pulled my legs up and swept my wings down powerfully.

  When I begin to fall I always – because I have the same instinct as everyone – expect to hit the ground immediately as if I’ve merely tripped. But I keep falling, feeling nothing under my feet but more thin air.

  Two more desperate beats, and I strained my body upwards in a graceful curve. My wingtips came together in front of my face, then I pushed away and I was no longer falling. I stretched out my legs, lying horizontally.

  The people below saw the soft inside surface of my black sickle wings, the sun shining through their trailing edges. I felt air spilling off every flight feather. Their hard and sharp leading edges rasped louder as I beat harder and gained height. I scraped over the tavern’s ridge, pushed off with my palms and started laughing ecstatically as I flapped over the road, the barrack ring, the curtain wall and out of town.

  The Lowespass Road ran straight as a rule. Its cobbled, slightly convex surface was crispy with hoof prints in reddish clay mud. Water filled its drains; since the completion of the dam the whole countryside was like a puddle and pools had begun to appear all over the place.

  From the air, Slake Cross looked like a square grey archery target lying on the contours of the pale green valley side. I looked back to the gatehouse. The gate, twice my height, was crisscrossed with deep iron strips. Shallow troughs scarred between them where Insect mandibles had reached through to scrape the old timber. On my ri
ght stretched the Lowespass Road and ahead the reservoir glimmered, flat and silver. I was heading towards the Insects’ Paperlands covering the entire north bank of the river and as far as I could see into the distance, like a white sheet drawn over the land.

  Strong gusts kept me flying low, no more than twenty metres from the ground where I could follow a direct path with the minimum effort. I flew over the crossroads with the smaller Glean Road along which troops arrive from western Awia. The Slake Cross monument, a smooth obelisk, stood there on grass scattered with yellow primroses – fragile blooms transplanted from the river bank before the flooding process began. Ointment made from them is a sovereign salve for wounds, and they had become a symbol of the massacre.

  The uncompromising hills were always striding along the horizon, their stony summits rose to mid-sky and framed Lowespass valley. Further east at Miroir there were exposed tracts of moorland covered in peat bogs. Pondskaters V-rippled over black gullies of acidic stagnant water and mosquitoes whined over patches of spongy sphagnum moss among the heather. At this end of the valley the soil was thin. Thistles and ragwort sprouted in the clints and grikes of the limestone pavements. Caves riddled the valley floor. For thousands of years the rainwater has been carving faults in the rock into fathomless potholes and massive chambers, where drops precipitate strange and magnificent formations like the Throne Room columns. The Insects’ own tunnels join the system; it does no good to think about it.

  Slake Cross town itself is built over a resurgence of an underground stream, so it never lacks fresh water. Frost has used dye to investigate the routes of the system. She started messing about with the water table and everyone watched, unnerved, as the level in the deep well rose to its very brim.

  The road crossed uneven ground, slicing through the outcrops, and a larger quarry had scarred the side of a big knoll. I glided over its levelled area where carts were parked, completely covered with hardened white lime dust.

  I passed some lime kilns in the side of a cutting; room-sized stone ovens with ragged chimneys, now cold and empty, with charcoal heaps growing damp outside their mouths. Frost had constructed them and employed the stokers; as soon as she knew she had enough cement she had moved them to work on the dam itself. A high wall protected a stand of pine trees, which grew relatively quickly and Frost used for building material.

  On the north side of the road was the first of a series of static catapults called petraries, set into a concrete platform slick with pools of green algae. Its waxed wooden beam and sturdy foundations glistened, beaded with rain water. Its cable had been removed and the counterweight box was empty. Barbed wire rolls stacked haphazardly beside its pyramid of ammunition stones. Far off I could just see the nearest peel tower, a link in the chain stretching from Frass to Summerday to monitor Insect activity.

  At the river I altered my course, heading upstream to the dam. Bulrushes bowed to the water’s creased surface as the wind ruffled through reed beds on the south bank. Its other bank was nothing but mud mashed with three-clawed footprints: Insects had stripped the vegetation bare.

  Frost’s workings began and the ground changed abruptly. Her company had done nothing less than remodel the valley. Cart tracks criss-crossed the bank; water in their ruts reflected the sky. Broken shovels, dirty string and red striped ranging rods littered the ground, with abandoned workmen’s huts, empty burlap bags, splays of spilt gravel.

  The overturned earth was glutted with beige specks – calcined bone fragments – some recognisable as ribs or skulls; the remains of generations of men and women. There were pieces of archaic armour and broken Insect shells, which don’t easily decay but weather to porous shards. The Insects have been creeping or swarming southward over fifteen hundred years. In response, we constantly move men and supplies to the front to stop them, on such a massive scale that I fancy all the Fourlands will eventually erode and end up here as a series of hills.

  The river banks straightened, reinforced by walls of metal mesh boxes full of rubble. The river flowed more slowly but its level had hardly dropped. Frost couldn’t allow it to dry up because, since Insects can’t swim, the Oriole River was our main defence.

  I approached the dam from the front, its stone face a gigantic sloping wall. The ends tapered down and curved towards me like horns. The outflow hole at its base looked like a giant blank eye. A fortified winch tower stood on the crest above it, holding the mechanism to raise the gate. The walkway ran through the tower, blocked with formidable portcullises on entry and exit, so Insects could not cross from the Paperlands.

  Lightning and Eleonora were two tiny figures beside it, looking down from behind the split-timber fence. The wind’s speed was increasing over the smooth outflow platform. Air hit the wall and hurtled up its slanting surface. I lay with my wings outstretched and let it carry me – square blocks and mortar streaked down past my eyes – I could have filed my nails on them.

  Along the whole length of the dam the wind went rocketing up the incline faster and faster until it burst vertically from the edge of the walkway around Lightning and Eleonora and up into the sky.

  I soared rapidly past them, hearing the last exchange of their conversation, ‘– This could be the answer.’

  ‘Perhaps. I just wish that we’d thought of it before.’

  I found the right balance to hang motionless above their heads. My shadow fell over them and my boot toes dangled at the level of their faces. They drew back and shaded their eyes, seeing me suspended in the middle of six metres of glorious wingspan.

  The enormous lake formed from the backed-up Oriole River spread out behind the dam. On its north bank the water lapped and merged into the mazes of Insects’ paper cells; irregular, many-sided boxes ranging from the size of a cupboard to that of a house. Passages wound between them, some covered with pointed roofs, the rest open to the air. They looked like ceramic fungi, or geometric papier-mâché termite mounds.

  The lake stood cold and mirror-reflective in the fresh morning light. A swathe of ripples dimpled across its middle, broken by white, angular peaks projecting from the surface: the tops of flooded Insect buildings.

  Insects had built and abandoned walls five times as the water level rose. Their tops contoured the irregular lake margin like tree rings. Our old camp and the shakehole that destroyed it were somewhere on the lakebed, completely papered over.

  I could just see the Insects’ new wall on dry ground ten kilometres distant, beyond the marshes. They had instinctively joined the new stretch to the immense Wall that seals them in, protecting their Paper-lands from coast to coast of the entire continent.

  I let the wind blow me backwards over the walkway. Little by little I flexed my wings closed and descended. I bent my knees, absorbed the shock, and landed in a crouch with my stiff feathers brushing the paved track on my either side.

  I stood and bowed to Queen Eleonora Tanager. She kissed me on both cheeks and studied my face at leisure. ‘How are you, darling? Oh, Jant, flying makes you so cold.’

  Her attar of roses perfume enveloped me, calling to mind the rose-scented letters that she used to send. They were always crinkled and salty, having been written on her most recent lover’s sweaty back. Eleonora was arguably the world’s most powerful mortal, but she was shod with scandal; she was no good at delicacy and even worse at tact.

  I stepped away and looked at the reservoir’s breathtaking expanse. ‘It’s incredible,’ I said. ‘I admit I had my doubts. But from up here you can see the extent of Frost’s vision. I feel privileged to be part of it.’

  Lightning, the Castle’s Archer, said seriously, ‘Well, I hope it is not just the latest of the thousand plans we have tried and had to put aside.’

  Eleonora shivered. She was wearing Lightning’s long, fur-lined overcoat and, statuesque as she was, it nearly fit her. Her scale armour glittered underneath. Awians sometimes wear full plate, but prefer their traditional scale mail and I can understand why because plate is horribly restrictive.

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bsp; She had tipped her helmet back from her head and it hung upside down from a strap showing its green satin lining. It had eye holes and a nosepiece in the Awian style. Its copper-pink horsehair crest rustled against her back and nearly touched the ground. Her chain mail coif and scale shirt were copper-coloured too, and damascened with a raised pattern of feathers matching her greaves and vambraces. She had pulled out her satin undershirt a little between each joint.

  Eleonora had a wide, prominent face with a delicate, tip-tilted nose. I should say she was good-looking but she had a sly and filthy smile. Her ecru wings were naturally a different colour than her close-cropped dark hair, a phenomenon so rare I had never seen it before.

  I said, ‘Queen Eleonora, I don’t know if you realise the time but you’re already late for the press conference and Frost sent me to call you back.’

  ‘Oh, I suppose we must attend,’ she said huskily. She set off along the walkway, between the sheer drop on one side and the lapping water on the other. She strode with a slow, shapely-legged pace; from the deliberate way she carried herself it was clear she was used to being looked at.

  She continued to enthuse as we joined her. ‘If this works we have a way of destroying the Paperlands completely. The effect’s there, right before our eyes! The Insects move out of the flooded area, make a new Wall and retreat behind it. Of their own accord, without any resistance!’

  ‘Then we drain the area and in we go!’ I said.

  ‘Let us concentrate on clearing this patch first,’ said Lightning.

  Eleonora smiled. ‘It all depends on infantry. We’ll position them while Frost empties the lake. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘Yes.’ Lightning indicated the town squatting in the mid-distance. A constant queue of mules and baggage carts plodded towards it, bringing provisions and tackle in preparation to set up the camp that would soon be surrounding it. Outriders protected the convoy, riding in formation at specified distances from the road as soon as they entered Lowespass. We had not yet mustered the main body of the cavalry, because they consume a tremendous amount of fodder. In the other direction a tumbrel cart of manure was setting out from the stables towards the pine plantation. ‘We will position twenty battalions of Select, wielding axes, there … and there.’