The Modern World

by Steph Swainston

  I put the bottle down. ‘What? Who told you that?’

  ‘Carmine Dei. One of my stepsisters.’

  ‘She’s lying. Lightning did all he could to save your mother. I know; I was there.’ Cyan’s stepsister was as big a bitch as their mother, Ata, had been. After she died, some of her huge family remained in contact, a large clandestine organisation, and these days Carmine has the whole suspect network well under her hand. She was the city’s harbourmaster; she had failed in the last competition for Sailor, and being Sailor manqué had made her even more poisonous.

  I said, ‘You mustn’t listen to anything Carmine says. Are you staying with her?’

  ‘No. Not quite. Carmine told me a lot of Daddy’s secrets and I know some of them must be true. After all he abandoned me with Governor Swallow Fatarse. She made me learn silly musical instruments I wasn’t the slightest bit interested in. Once, when I was little, I pretended to be an Insect under her dumb piano and I accidentally scratched it. She went totally crazy. After that being an Insect was out of the question. Silly cow. And she plays Daddy better then she plays any instrument! I visit Micawater now and then, but he doesn’t realise how long the gaps are between visits. What is he doing that’s so damn important I had to fend for myself?’

  Cyan has never had to fend for herself. Everywhere she goes, servants hover to accommodate her every whim. I tilted the glass back and swilled whisky. I didn’t want any more hassle. Cyan had used up my quota of patience and I had far too much on my mind. I wasn’t sure if I was becoming wise with age, or simply exhausted; but then, if wisdom is a more prudent use of one’s time, maybe it’s exhaustion that forces us to be wise.

  I shook my head. ‘Whatever. Oh, what it is to be seventeen and open to rumour. Believe what you like. I won’t tell Lightning that I found you. But when you tire of gallivanting around the city, join us at the front, all right?’

  ‘Great!’ She lit another cigarette and offered me one, leaning forward to light it with her own.

  Rawney glanced at her jealously, but he slopped some more whisky into my glass. Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all. He shook the bottle, then looked at me oddly. ‘Damn. All the tales I’ve heard about Rhydanne are true.’

  ‘Another cretinous comment from you and I’ll post you to Ressond. Anyway, Rhydanne live above five thousand metres. We need to drink alcohol so our blood doesn’t freeze.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ he said sarcastically.

  ‘All true,’ I said. ‘No word of a lie. Would I lie to you? No. We have to drink alcohol constantly. And it takes Rhydanne minds off their awful food. There’s no time for cuisine between the hunting and the hangovers; I think they only bother to cook because they can’t eat it raw.’

  Cyan said, ‘It can’t be true you’re the only mix of Awian and Rhydanne.’

  I shrugged. ‘I’m sure there were others, and there will be others in future, for as long as Awians keep trying to conquer peaks … I keep pulling their stupid flags off and sending them back. Some Awian–Rhydanne children might have been unviable and didn’t survive. Maybe some never made it out of Darkling or weren’t able to fly, either not strong or not clever enough to learn. It took me ten years, after all. I should imagine most half-breed babies were thrown over cliffs. I would have been if it wasn’t for Eilean. A Rhydanne single mother will kill an unwanted baby that slows her down.’

  Rawney said, ‘That’s brutal. Animals.’

  ‘No. It’s a matter of her own survival. And anyway, look who’s talking.’ I turned to Cyan. ‘Maybe we are similar. I’ve left my heritage behind me and you’re trying to.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ she teased. ‘You love being different. You keep turning your head so your eyes reflect.’

  ‘I do not!’

  ‘You do. And you read fortune cards. You carry them around everywhere.’

  ‘Only for a party trick.’ I dug in my inside jacket pocket for the battered sheaf of twenty-five squares of leather and, with a flick of one hand, spread them out. I offered them to her and she leant forward to pick one. She examined it closely, turning it over. ‘Look, Rawney. Jant has these Rhydanne fortune cards.’

  ‘Give me a break,’ he said. ‘Come on, babe, we ought to be going.’

  ‘I keep telling you to stop calling me “babe”!’

  He grasped her wrist and I tensed, but Cyan twisted herself free. I saw her blood rise and for the first time I could actually believe I was talking to Lightning’s daughter. She made the most of her accent: ‘If you do that again, fyrdsman, I will leave with Comet.’ Then she said to me, as if to cover up, ‘Will you read the cards for me, Jant?’

  ‘All right.’ I wiped whisky off the tabletop with my sleeve. I tapped the pack to neaten them and arranged them face down.

  ‘How does it work?’

  ‘The cards …’ I swigged my drink. ‘The cards don’t tell the future. How could they? The future isn’t set. These cards tell you about yourself in the present. All you need to know, to predict the future as accurately as possible … all you can ever know, is yourself right now. Most people don’t know their own character well and these cards help you reflect. Then for the future, you extrapolate. Go ahead and make the future up – your character will be the main factor.’

  ‘They’re cards for the present?’

  ‘Rhydanne live in the present. They don’t think ahead to the future much; it’s just another present to them. You have to do the reading yourself. You’re best placed to interpret your own character.’

  ‘But I don’t know what the pictures mean!’

  I waved my cigarette around. ‘They’re just pictures. They don’t have defined meanings. They mean whatever you think they mean. That’s how it works.’

  Cyan looked daunted. ‘I think I’m too drunk for this.’

  ‘There are five suits: ice, rock, alcohol, goats and eagles.’ I turned over the lowest in the ice suit, the snow hole shelter. ‘That one, for example, can mean: remember to maintain your equipment or you’ll starve. This one, the goat’s kid, can mean: don’t chase a woman you’re not married to. Or don’t marry some slow-running slut whose children are all Shiras. It depends on your circumstances, you see. Pick five cards …’

  Cyan did so. She set them precisely in line and turned over the first. ‘Boulders,’ I said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘That’s from the rock suit: grit, pebbles, boulders, cliffs and mountains. Make of it what you like.’

  She pondered the square of hide. ‘It means something that blocks your way, doesn’t it? An insurmountable problem. Like Daddy. You know his palace? Did you know that all the keyholes in the doors along the Long Corridor line up so well you can look down them from one end of the palace to the other? That’s how infuriating it is. It’s so finicky and stultifying it makes me sick. Every time I visited I was terrified of breaking something. I think I scare him, because he’s been trying hard to cultivate a friendly fatherly image. I hate Micawater. Boulders all right; it’s so heavy and stagnant.’

  She turned the next card, and exclaimed, ‘What in the Empire is that?’

  I peered at it. ‘It’s the dead goat. From the goat suit: dead goat, pastured goat, randy goat, mother goat, kid.’

  ‘You have got to be joking.’ She looked from the card to me. ‘It’s to do with mortality. These cards really do work, don’t they? I’m mortal and Daddy isn’t … Everyone knows that at some time in the future their parents will die. They wonder how it’ll happen. What will it be like to hear the news? How will they bury him? If they’re the eldest, they can’t help but think about the inheritance. I don’t have that. I can’t speculate. That’s one of the things I can’t stand – Daddy will always be there, exactly the same. In fact, I know that the day he buries me in a tomb on his stupid island, he’ll look just the same as he does now. The palace will be no different. I’ll never be rid of him! It makes me feel heavy … I think it’s dread.’

  She opened another bottle of beer. She had not inheri
ted Lightning’s connoisseurship but she had his ability to discourse at length. Beer begets beer, as you know, but she wasn’t as drunk as I was. I sipped the whisky appreciatively. ‘This was shit at the beginning but it’s all right now … All the nice whisky must sink to the bottom.’

  Cyan turned the next card, the soaring eagle. ‘Well, that’s easy. That’s me escaping, trying to fly free of the flock and find some clear air, trying to do something different. It’s a wild animal, symbolic of freedom like my name. I’m glad I didn’t bring any belongings. I’ve stranded myself here deliberately with no past, nothing to prove I exist. I have myself, that’s all; I’m content with that …’

  I waited, indulgently.

  ‘… I feel awkward in the city, big and clumsy. I pull at doors I’m supposed to push, push at doors that open by pulling. But I’ll get used to the city soon. I’m alone, scattered in the multitude – just as I want.’

  ‘To be scattered in the multitude, hey?’

  She glowered at me and flicked over another card. ‘What’s this one?’

  ‘The nesting eagle.’

  ‘A nesting eagle … That must stand for domesticity, marriage. Marriage … oh, yuk, did I tell you about all the men Daddy introduced me to? They’re horrible.’

  Rawney smirked. ‘Don’t the suitors suit you?’

  ‘They’re so superficial! They make all these unfounded assumptions!’ Cyan slipped into High Awian, which was good for talking of art, society and its insults, but not much else. ‘This is their repertoire: “You are Lightning’s daughter, really? When do you come of age?” “Oh, are you acquainted with Cyan Peregrine? Such a well-groomed blonde.” I grew up with all that small talk, it’s maddening. Their conversations revolve around themselves, they never talk about anything outside their own heads. I hated every last battalion warden of them. I didn’t bother to convey myself, I let them slip through my fingers – and I don’t care that they’ve gone.’

  She looked at the window, now a mirror backed by darkness. ‘In the palace the days seemed to last forever. I went to bed an entirely different person from when I woke up. I rattled around inside that bloody great building like a piddock in a rock.’

  ‘Like a what?’

  ‘Sorry. Awndyn slang. I tried to continue from habit but I couldn’t attend to my tutor. An inertia came over me. I kept excusing myself from the dinners and going to my room. I lay on my bed and wondered why I felt such confused dislike. I goaded and rebuked myself. I turned my thoughts over until they were a thick, boiling mass. I needed someone to talk to or I would have cracked. Swallow puts a dampener on everything and she’s happy to be of no use whatsoever. So I ran.’

  I folded my arms on the table and put my head down. I was at the point of drunkenness where any further drink tasted like puke. I felt my brain shrinking and my thoughts drying up.

  Rawney put his big, hairy arm around Cyan’s shoulders and whispered in her ear. She nodded, preoccupied with the cards. ‘I keep toying with ideas of the future. What will happen to me? I keep imagining myself in future scenarios but I can’t see myself as Governor of Peregrine no matter how hard I try.’

  ‘I’m not shurprised you’re afraid of telling Saker,’ I slurred.

  ‘Saker? Who? Oh, you mean Daddy.’ She giggled. ‘Weird … I never think of his real name … Yes. He’s been alive forever. It’s scary to argue with him. Maybe I am conceited to disagree with him. He has an answer for everything, tried and tested, and he’s always right! He knows everything and he never gets angry, he’s so bloody patient. He just gives me more boring answers! It’s so infuriating! I want to try something new, even if it’s wrong!’

  She turned the last card in the line.

  ‘That one … thatsh the jug of beer.’

  Rawney said, ‘Well, that has to be a lucky card for Rhydanne.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘So everything will turn out well,’ Cyan exclaimed, getting carried away. ‘I’ll be successful in making my own way in the world. It’s beer not Micawater wine!’

  ‘There isn’t a card for wine,’ I murmured.

  ‘I’ll learn who I am. If it really did depend on blood, Lightning would know me better, wouldn’t he? I might have inherited one or two family traits, but I’ll rediscover them myself!’

  So you should, I thought. My mind’s sky had thoroughly clouded over. I closed my eyes.

  Cyan leant and whispered in my ear, ‘I’m living my own life from now on, where and how I choose to. Tell Daddy to forget about me. In a couple of hundred years, he will. It’s the only way.’

  I woke up. The pub was unlit and deserted. An uneasy lamplight shining under the landlord’s door illuminated the shapes of chairs placed on the tables and textured lines drawn by the broom in the stickier patches on the floor. Towels hung over the pump handles.

  Shit. I am absolutely pissed … and I’ve lost Cyan. She’s given me the slip. Oh, shit, I had her, and I … she … Rawney got me drunk! The bastard, and I fell for it!

  I staggered over to the bar and stuck my head under a tap, pumped water into my face. The landlord must have left me sleeping there while he closed up the bar around me. Of course, he wouldn’t have dared to wake an Eszai.

  I wrestled with the door bolts. Outside, the misty drizzle gave everything a slick sheen. I turned my coat collar up, but it soaked through the denim, wetting me as effectively as pouring rain.

  Galt was very dark, none of the lamps were lit and the shops’ upper stories had closed their shutters. All I had to see by were occasional chinks of light between them.

  *

  Now I was back to playing hide and seek with the little cow across the entire city.

  CHAPTER 7

  All the oil lamps stood disused, their glasses fly-spotted and filthy. Whale oil was scarce these days, reserved for lighting homes, not streets. It had soared in price since some enormous sea snakes had taken up residency in the ocean. Their main source of food seemed to be whales.

  The paving of the plaza outside the bar was covered in a sheen of water, mixed with mud trekked in from the towpath. I looked down, at the palimpsest of footprints spreading out from the door. Could it be possible to track Cyan? I searched around and found the fine mud drawn into a distinctive print of a thick-soled boot, too small for a man. Those are Cyan’s expensive boots. I followed them slowly, careful not to miss any. They were few and far between, but if they were hers she seemed to have walked along the towpath.

  I carried on, beside the dark canal, shunning the varicose hookers and their crisp pimps revealed by the night. The mud squashed under my boot soles. I was heading east towards Old Town, but I wasn’t out of Galt yet, and horrible sights loomed in alleys and alcoves. I passed quickly by a whore with bare breasts and ragged shorts, her razor ribs showing through the stretch marks on her sides.

  I lost the trail under furrowed bike ruts and glanced all around, overly aware of how Rhydanne I looked. I learnt how to track on visits to the mountains. Veering towards the canal, a smooth leather imprint with a firm, mannish step could be Rawney’s. Yes, there was one partially obscuring Cyan’s smudged trace. I continued, thinking; I really tried not to be like a Rhydanne in Hacilith but other people’s expectations kept throwing me back on it. I often found myself playing out the solitary self-centred flightiness they expected. But what the fuck, it meant they gave me leeway. They might be patronising but they also didn’t expect too much, and they left me free to do what I liked.

  There was a strong smell of fried food grease, as if every citizen had scoffed a newspaper-full of chips, then belched simultaneously. I passed out of Galt into Old Town. The canal basin has obliterated most of it, but the remaining buildings, replaced many times over, are still so close together there isn’t room to fit one more between them. Awian towns are sometimes destroyed by Insects and rebuilt in one go, but here old buildings persist, with a mishmash of modern styles between them. New houses spring up in the wake of fires and the residents continually improve th
eir city so much of Old Town was quite new. I ran under the merchants’ tall houses. Their baroque gables sprouted pulleys and platforms to bring in goods they store in their own attics. I walked by the mooring of the River Bus that shuttles to Marenna Dock on the west bank. I passed a roast chestnut stand littered with paper bags and dripping with rain. I cut past Inhock Stables, making the rum-sellers’ pannier donkeys bray uneasily. Horses were tethered here, since they weren’t allowed in Old Town’s narrow streets.

  I passed the wharfinger’s office and came to a deserted part of the navigation, heading towards a footbridge. I swore as I walked; the whisky was smearing all my thoughts together and the rain was getting worse. All storms arrive first in Hacilith from the sea, all seasons seemed to start here too, and the spring rain fell with a vengeance.

  The gutters drained into the soupy canal basin where timber narrow boats were moored. Some were impossibly shiny, others rotting hulks. Several were a full thirty metres, others no more than boxes. Their curtains were closed and they were silent. The darkness muted their paint to different shades of grey.

  I went under the bridge, lit by the lamps of a narrow boat moored on its own. The tracks ran into a mass of scuffed ground, so many other prints I couldn’t tell what had happened at all. Some led back towards Galt; Rawney’s was among them but Cyan’s weren’t. She had stopped here – or the men had carried her.

  I searched for her tracks further away, my task made easier by the lights on the boat. In fact, the rotund lamps at its prow and stern were glowing as brightly as if there was a party on board, but it was quiet. Who would desert a boat and leave its lamps burning?

  The small barge was bottle green with red panels and brass trim. Its tiller was polished with use and wound with ribbons, and by it hung a bell to sound instructions to the locksmen. I casually looked down to its bow, just above the level of the quayside paving stones. Red and white diamonds like sweets decorated the top of its transom, either side of the nameplate that read: Tumblehome. Underneath in small white capitals: Carmine Dei. Registered: Old Town.