A Whisper of Horses

by Zillah Bethell

  “Minister, we were simply on our—”

  “Is that correct?”

  Professor Nimbus looked at me before speaking again.

  “We were simply trying—”

  “Is. That. Correct?” The Minister’s face was as deadbolt as could be.

  The Professor nodded.

  “I see. So you were trying to escape. Why? Are you not happy in Lahn Dan? Are you dissatisfied with what the State has done for you? The people of Lahn Dan have good lives under my Ministry. Pbs have full access to food pills and drinking water in exchange for their physical labors. The Cus help keep order and educate the new generation. The Aus keep the system running. It is a perfect society.” As he spoke, bees seemed to buzz into my mind. “I really don’t understand what would possess you to attempt an escape. It’s such an antisocial, selfish thing to do. In Lahn Dan, everyone has a role to fill. To run away is to”—he made a kind of flicking motion with his hand—“is to wave everybody else away with thoughtlessness. It’s just not decent.”

  “We were going to search for the horses.” I found myself speaking out in this large echoey room, and my voice took me by surprise. “It was my idea.”

  “Horses? Ha!” He rolled back and forth on his desk with spiteful laughter. “There are no horses, girl. There’s nothing beyond the wall. Everything outside of Lahn Dan is destroyed. Especially the horses. You must be simpleminded. What is your name, anyway?”

  “Serendipity, sir.”

  Nimbus seemed to lean forward. “Serendipity. She’s Oleander Goudge’s daughter.” He said it like it meant something.

  The Minister scrunched up his forehead and stared at me, and for a few seconds, the air hung heavy like a storm cloud. There was thunderous silence as he surveyed me before shaking his head.

  “Like I said, there’s nothing outside of the Emm Twenty-five Wall.” The Professor crumpled beside me. “The reason why the Emm Twenty-five Wall was built by my predecessors in the first place was to protect the inhabitants of Lahn Dan from the horrors of the outside world. To keep you all safe. What is so wrong with that? Is there anything so bad about trying to keep the people of Lahn Dan safe? Eh?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No. Of course there isn’t. Sometimes people need to be protected from their own curiosity. What good would it serve Lahn Dan if everybody could come and go as they pleased? Lahn Dan would just fall apart. Can’t you see?”

  I managed to keep myself from speaking.

  “With respect, Minister”—the Professor was busy staring at his own feet—“if horses did exist, then they could be used to help Lahn Dan rebuild itself. They could be used for—”

  “Are you not listening, Nimbus?” The Minister’s face was horribly sour again. “There. Are. No. Horses.” The Professor went quiet. An embarrassing void filled the room. “Get that into your history-addled brain, if you can.”

  It was awful. The Minister didn’t even believe that horses still existed. The whole idea was ridiculous to him. And it had been dug in deep, six feet down. There was no way on earth or in the universe that we were ever going to persuade him that horses might—just might—exist.

  “Ahem.” Both the Professor and I turned as Commander Mordecai coughed to intervene. “What shall we do with them, sir?”

  The Minister gave a gigantic sigh and his eyes flickered to me for a moment. “Treachery is treachery, Mordecai. No two ways around it. Anybody caught fighting the system by trying to escape…” He paused. “You know the law. Anybody caught fighting the system that seems to work for every other Lahn Daner will be taken to Two Swords and frozen into submission at a time and date of the State’s choosing.”

  “No. Please.” Nimbus took a step towards the Minister. “Freeze me. Not the girl. She still has a great deal to offer the State.”

  “Oh, do be quiet, Nimbus. You always were such an inflated fool.” The Minister stood up and walked back to behind his desk once more, sitting himself down on his chair. “You shall both be driven from here to a place where you shall await the execution of the sentence. Now take them away.” His eyes lowered to something on his desk and didn’t lift back up again.

  chapter 13

  TO BUCKNAM PLACE

  WE WERE THROWN into the back of a different modpod, one even darker than the first. It grumbled before moving off and we steadied ourselves on the benches.

  “You know the Minister?” I asked. My mind was all dazey with the past few minutes and it latched on to something to say. “He knows you?”

  It was hard to see the Professor’s face in the gloom, but I could tell that it was turning sad. “Knew. Knew would be more correct. I knew him many, many years ago. Back in the time before the Party had managed to get hold of him and twirled and twisted him into the leader they needed him to become. Back in the days when he had a semblance of a heart.”

  There was silence for a moment. Then I remembered something.

  “You told him who Mama was. Why did you do that? Did he know her?”

  More silence. Only a slight snuffly sound from the opposite corner of the speeding cell seemed to break the thick black monotony. The modpod bumbled over a hole in the road and the jolt shook Nimbus back to life once again.

  “It was just a thought,” he muttered. “A hope that he might just have known her. A pot in the dark, that’s all.” But something in his voice didn’t jangle right.

  Suddenly, before I could push the questions a little more, something ran out from the opposite corner and brushed against my leg. I shrieked. It felt like a giant rat, like one of the ones that you’d see scuttling around the old sewerage pipes along the Tems looking for dropped crumbs and rubbish to nattle up. I shivered and pulled up my legs without thinking.

  A thin wispy voice came from the corner of the pod: “Mouse! Come here.”

  There was somebody in the pod with us. I munched up my eyes and could just see a shape in the corner. It was either a small man or a boy. And jumping up onto his lap was the furry thing that had tickled my legs.

  A mouse?

  “Hello?” The Professor’s weary eyes could see less than even my own. “Is there somebody there?”

  But there came no reply, and for the rest of the journey the person in the corner sat silent, the rat on his lap snorting and yawning and puffling now and then, as though tired with the whole business.

  * * *

  The daylight was harsh again as the door lowered on the modpod. The Professor put his arm around me and squeezed my shoulder as we were made to walk down the ramp. Police with guns waved us on towards a pinkish building.

  “Where are we?” I whispered.

  “I believe … Yes. It’s Bucknam Place. This is Bucknam Place.”

  Bucknam Place was the headquarters of the Minister’s Police Force. Sectioned off with fences and wires, it was usually impossible to get anywhere near it. Down the end of a long pink road known as the Mall, it was a massive multi-windowed police station with a tremendously open courtyard in front.

  “And you!” a voice barked behind us.

  “Awright, awright. We’re comin’. Keep yer hair on.” Out of the modpod came a boy a year or two younger than me. His hair was spiky and sticking up and his face was smeared in dirt. In his arms wriggled a bundle of hard fluff. “We know the drill.”

  “Hurry up.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  He came up behind us. The Professor tried a smile at him but the boy ignored it, stroking his horrible-looking dog instead.

  Inside the building, the corridors were like tunnels. Huge tunnels that could probably accommodate modpods going up and down on either side. But there were no modpods going up and down, just police men and women, uniformed and armed, chattering and serious-faced—all of them with somewhere to go or something to do. None of them looked at us.

  “Up the stairs. Move it.” The soldier alongside us waggled the tip of his gun up and down. “All of you.”

  At the top of the stairs, an officer with a thick mus
tache gave the one with the gun a dull nod and unlocked a gate. Through we marched, into an area with blacked-out windows. There were a number of rooms with solid metal doors and numbers on, and as we passed them I could hear shouting and crying coming from behind some. It made my blood run away.

  “Here.” The police man stopped outside a door with the number 7 on it. He pushed it open. Beyond it was something I hadn’t really expected to see. Instead of a drab, sparsely furnished cell with gray walls and nothing much else, was a room that had once been brightly colored and beautiful. Soft, satiny wallpaper had been scratched from the walls and hung now like layers of flaking skin. Golden mirror frames with crackled glass dangled uselessly. Thick, rich luxurious carpets had been kicked and scuffed and worn away into hopeless patches over the years. An intricately carved dressing table had been overturned and smashed up along with shapely bottles of expensive perfume. And a giant wardrobe with tarnished wooden panels stood guard against a wall. In the center of the floor, a bed larger than any bed I’d ever seen before or since—even Miss Caritas’s—sprawled itself over the room, striped silky drapes falling from the posts at each corner, veiling the grubby sheets. “Get in. You’ll stay here tonight and get moved first thing in the morning. All of you.”

  The boy with the dog rattled up and squinted beyond us. “What a dump.”

  “Shut up, kid.”

  The man shoved us in and clanged the door shut.

  * * *

  “Kings and queens used to live here,” the Professor stuttered. “Bucknam Place was home to the kings and queens of Gray Britan.” You could tell he was nervous. Whenever he was anxious or nervous about something, Professor Nimbus would chatter away like he couldn’t control his teeth. “That’s always been the rumor, anyway. They would rule the whole of Lahn Dan and Gray Britan from this very building. I’ll bet there’s a crown or two floating around here somewhere. That would be interesting to see.”

  The boy pushed past us like we weren’t even there, clumping towards the bed where he put the mangy dog on top of one of the flattened pillows. “There you are, Mouse. You rest there for a bit.” The dog licked itself before settling down. I could practically see the fleas leaping off it.

  “Er … excuse me.” I stepped forward. “There’s only one bed and three people. I don’t think your … dog … should be lying on the bed.”

  The boy looked at me with a puzzley expression. “Three people can’t share one bed. It don’t go. There’s one bed, there’s one dog. That goes. You do the maffs.”

  “So where are we going to sleep tonight, then?” For some reason I put my hands on my hips and looked at him straight on. “I mean, there’s nothing else to sleep on. Should we all just sleep on the floor?”

  The boy wandered over to the broken-up chester drawers and started rootling around inside. “If you like. I don’t plan on being ere that long meself.” He pulled a bunch of dirty old clothes out of the drawers and dropped them all over the floor, discarding everything like he was searching for something in particular.

  “Anyway.” I felt pretty annoyed by the boy and wanted a bit of a diggity at him. “What sort of a name for a dog is Mouse? If you ask me he looks more like a rat. A rat that’s never learnt to clean itself properly. Mouse! Ha! Ratty, more like. Stinky Ratty … thing.”

  The Professor cast me a tutting kind of glance before offering up his hand to the boy. “Horatio Nimbus. Good to meet you. And you are?”

  The boy looked at the Professor’s hand like he’d never seen one before. It took a few seconds for him to pull his eyes away from it and to face the Professor fully for the first time. “Tab. They call me Tab.”

  “Hello, Tab.” The Professor lowered his hand back to his side. “And this is Serendipity.”

  “Hmmph.” The boy went back to his emptying of the drawers. “And you got the nerve to say my dog’s got a funny name,” he mumbled so I could barely hear it.

  “What?”

  “Nuffin, nuffin. Go back to sleep.”

  “So, Tab”—Nimbus was chuntering on to avoid the awful silence of our dreadful situation—“what brings you here?”

  “Eh?”

  “What have you done to be brought here?”

  “Oh.” The boy’s eyes never stopped their search. “Y’know. The usual.”

  “The usual?”

  “Yeah.” He abandoned the chester drawers and moved over to the wardrobe, flinging the doors open and mussling up the stuff inside. What was he looking for? “The usual.”

  The dog on the bed gave a wet snort and we all turned to look at it.

  “You do know what is going to happen to us, Tab. Don’t you?” The Professor’s voice became all fatherly and soft. “They have told you, haven’t they?”

  “Eh?”

  “We are all to be taken to Two Swords. You’ve heard of Two Swords? It’s where they freeze criminals and put them on display.” As he said it, it sent a shiver along my back. “That’s what they are going to do with us tomorrow.”

  The boy looked up from what he was doing.

  “Nah.”

  “I’m afraid so, Tab.”

  “No such thing as Two Swords.”

  “Yes there is.” I was getting more irked by the second. “I’ve been there. Lots of times. Haven’t you been there? People all frozen to death. It’s horrible.”

  The boy seemed to smile. “Nah. They’re just wax models from the olden days.”

  “What?”

  “They’re not real people. Just a load of old dummies. Made out of wax.”

  “No, no. That’s not right. Is it?” the Professor stuttered.

  “Yes it is. Where you been living? Under Earl’s Caught?” He climbed back into the wardrobe and pulled out a shiny necktie. “Might be useful.” He rolled it up and stuffed it into his back pocket. “The Minister just pretends to freeze people. Thinks it scares everyone into doing what they’re told.” He reached up to the top of the wardrobe. “Seems to me, if you say something loud enough and often enough people start believin’ it.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “So what happens to all the people who break the rule of the Minister?”

  He had clambered back into the wardrobe so his voice sounded all stuffled. “There are prison camps. In the north. There’s one in Hen Field. We’ve seen the prisoners, smashing up rocks for the Emm Twenty-five Wall.”

  “We?”

  Either he didn’t hear me or he chose not to answer, just kept banging around in the wardrobe.

  “Prison camps?” The Professor looked as dumbfoundled as I felt.

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. At least we weren’t going to be frozen stiff. Smashing up rocks didn’t seem too bad compared to that.

  Nimbus and I sat on the edge of the bed. “Two Swords is a lie?” He still couldn’t climb over it. “Incredible.”

  “It’s a good thing, isn’t it?” I asked aloud. “All those people everyone thought were dead. They’re still alive.”

  “Yes. Yes. It’s just … incredible. Utterly incredible.” He shook his head. “I feel so foolish.”

  * * *

  Soon after arriving, a guard came to the room and ordered me out. On my own. I stopped at the door and looked nervously back at the Professor, who gave me a you’ll-be-alright sort of smile, though his eyes said something quite different.

  The guard marched me along the long, wide corridors that peered out over the rooftops of Lahn Dan, and eventually down some worn stone steps to a door that looked as though it didn’t go anywhere.

  “In there,” he growled. “And show some respect.”

  The door slammed behind me.

  It was dark inside, with a single lamp dangling from the middle of the ceiling. The light from the lamp didn’t stretch far, the walls were still smothered in darkness. As far as I could tell there was nothing else in the room.

  “Walk forward.” A voice suddenly came from opposite me and made me jump. “Come into the light.”

  Th
ere was something familiar about it.

  “Walk forward, I said.”

  I shuffled forward until I was standing almost directly under the lamp.

  There was a long silence.

  Eventually the voice spoke again. “How old are you, Serendipity?”

  “Twelve, I think. My mama says I’m about twelve.”

  “And where is your mother? Why aren’t you at home with her?”

  I tried to block the light out with my hand so I could see the person asking the questions.

  “Mama’s dead,” I said. More silence. “She died recently.”

  The man stepped forward slightly and I nearly fell backwards. It was the Minister. He looked as cold and as dead-eyed as he had earlier that morning.

  “I’m going to give you a chance. A chance to save yourself from Two Swords.” He looked me up and down. “Give me the information I want and you can go back to living your life.”

  I thought hard, wondering what information I could possibly have that the Minister would be interested in.

  “Why is Nimbus trying to escape? I want to know precisely what he’s up to. All his little meetings with his storyteller friends. Everything. Tell me everything you know about Nimbus and you can walk free.”

  A flash of whispered conversation between Tumbril and the Professor passed through my mind. What were the storytellers up to, and why was the Minister so bothered about them? I shivered. The room was cold, but that wasn’t it. The Minister was asking me to betray the Professor. The man who took me in when my mama died. The man who gave me a chance when I could have just been left alone to rot. The man who chose my dreams over his own life in Lahn Dan.

  The Minister wanted me to sell the Professor to save my own life.

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “No. I won’t do it.” I was suddenly angry. “Two Swords is a lie. Everything’s a lie. I’m not going to help you.”

  The Minister frowned and his eyes twitched. We both stood there silently for a while as he plotted his next move.

  “I think…,” he started. “I think, perhaps, you need to sleep on it.” He strode across the room, brushing past me and banged hard on the door. “Think it over. Come to your senses.” The door creaked open. “This is your one chance, Serendipity. Your only chance. Don’t mess it up.”