“And the books,” Esther says, reverently. “Quartos and folios bound in lambskin, vellum scrolls, and manuscripts so old and fat they wheeze when their covers are buckled. Some handwritten, some pressed, some printed and handwritten—with ink sketches and marginalia …” She lowers her voice before continuing. “I have one such volume in my archive. I can show you, if you like.”
“Tell me about the plains,” Peytr says—and she describes fields full of statues. Men and women, some with wings, some cradling cherubs, some stoic, many—if not all—weeping. Wearing veils of marble, long granite robes, circlets of copper wire that radiate the strangest glow. Memorials, she calls them, each one so detailed, so realistic, you’d swear it was about to blink.
Peyt raises his eyebrows. Fuckin’ waste of stone, he thinks. Much like the ancient fortresses Esther fabricates—also of stone, she says, but Peyt knows better—with labyrinthine corridors and tiered fountains and mazes in the gardens. There are galleries, she says, and other houses of stolen treasures—
“Ah,” Peytr says. “You’ve been to our city before?” He’s seen the museum. He went there, many years ago, with school. Not long before the greys destroyed it.
“No,” Esther says, smiling. “Not quite. There are so many caches of knowledge, so many stories to index, and only so much time.”
“Yet, somehow, you’ve managed to see all this?” he says, knowing it’s impossible, she’s too young to have gone so far, done so much, it must be a lie, but she nods and smiles so sincerely, so honestly, that he rolls over and kisses her, in the crook where neck and shoulder meet. Just like that, he kisses her, just like her smile, a spontaneous, heartfelt lie.
And when she responds, presses up against him, when she unbuckles and strokes him until he’s hard, when she slides onto him and thrusts and thrusts until he’s emptied and gone soft again, Peytr buries his head beneath the pillows and concentrates. He tries to relax. Does his damnedest to still the chatter in his mind. To keep his thoughts short, concise, and close.
“Good story,” he says, after, and blows her wordwind tenderly away.
Dot 32. Aria: Flattering tongue, no more I hear thee… .
Using hands and teeth and wet lips, Esther tells the same story again.
“Good morning, Jaunty,” Esther whispers, running her fingers up and down Peytr’s bicep. A shuffle of skin across fabric. Pillows slipping. She snuggles against him, curls herself small, burrows her head beneath his chin. Her good ear pressed over his heart, the earring she never takes out digging in. Peytr cracks an eyelid, spies through his lashes. Her inked arm is wrapped round his waist, a dark belt against the mottled flesh of his midriff. Her hair undulates in the breeze of his breath, loosing words of contentment. With inward joy… . Virtue truth and innocence… . Our souls glow …
He exhales, hard, as if snoring. Pretends he’s asleep. Flounces onto his side, tossed by a nightmare, to shake Esther off. Buries his face in the pillow. Pulls the blanket up to his neck, soft armour against her embrace.
She sits up. Not touching him now, she sits and stares and doesn’t move. He can feel the stillness radiating from her, the body in stasis while the mind races. He can picture the vortex of her ’wind churning the air, churning her stomach. And he lies there, back turned, tense, his breathing unnatural, not the steady rise and fall of a sleeping man but the shallow lung-skimmings of an actor feigning death. He clutches the blanket, afraid to move. She knows he’s awake. She’s waiting for him to roll over and grin. To stop lying and just fuckin’ roll over. In his thigh muscles, electric eels jolt and slither. He can’t do anything to stop them, even though he’s so obviously awake. He’s awake and she knows it.
A minute passes.
Esther is a statue.
Peytr fake-snores.
A hard-knuckled rapping at the door forces Esther out of bed. She climbs over Peyt, gets dressed. Goes along with his ruse long enough to go outside to meet the caller, closing the doors behind her.
Peyt sighs, temples throbbing. Relief and guilt warring in his belly. What the fuck was he thinking? Just now. Last night. He shouldn’t have… . No. He shouldn’t. But he did. And now? He should apologise. He should stay. He should go with her, with them. He should go. She deserves better. And he just wants to be—
“Well?” Through the bus and all its shelves, Guillaume’s voice is muffled. Peytr strains to hear. “Anything?”
Peyt senses Esther shaking her head, the old woman mimicking the gesture.
“There’s a law of diminishing returns in research,” Guillaume says after a long pause. “You know that as well as I do. This quadrant has yielded nearly all the files we’re going to get, so the cost of tarrying much longer outweighs the benefit. Agreed?”
“Yes, Nan. But—”
“But what, child? Our branches are laden with ripe fruit. We have reaped what we can; now we must share this bounty lest it spoils in our trucks. Unless you’d care to stay? Winnow the bare stalks?”
“No,” Esther says eventually. “I would not.”
When she comes in half an hour later, Peyt’s up and dressed, lacing his boots. He was hoping to be gone before she came back. His bag is packed, hood and jacket draped across his lap. A hasty apology scribbled on a scrap of foolscap, close at hand. But seeing her now, framed by the narrow doors of her bus, crazy hair backlit by the unreasonable sun, ’wind serious, subdued, he hesitates.
“We’re going?” His tone light enough to lift her eyes, distracting from the paper being swept off the table and scrunched into his back pocket.
“We’re going,” she says, frowning. Watching him, seeing him. Understanding. Her ’wind, as always, is ordered, organised. Dot 25. Aria: How can I stay (Tenor)… . Dot 34. Aria: How art thou fall’n (Bass)… . But some of the phrases seem torn in odd places. Snipped and shrouded for secrecy.
She’s hiding her feelings, he thinks, he knows. All the things she isn’t saying. That she’s sick of his fuckin’ shudders, how he spills food instead of eating it, how he won’t use utensils, how his thoughts veer like the horses, off track half the time and the other half stubbornly going wherever they want, how he doesn’t sleep—can’t sleep—even this morning. Even after last night.
How he sometimes calls her by the wrong name.
How he can’t forget.
Her mule-driver shoulders, he thinks, aren’t broad enough.
Not fuckin’ broad enough for him.
“Here,” Esther says, tossing a bright bundle from across the room. I’ve repelled her, Peyt thinks, watching the fabric unfold mid-air. I’m repellent.
“A couple days ago, I asked Parrot if he had one to spare.” She watches him, so awkwardly still she might as well be fidgeting. Discomfort making her tone casual. “He washed it—well, steamed it in a cedar box. For the fragrance… . I just thought, you know. Parrot’s such a clotheshorse and… . You’ve only got that flimsy undershirt and …” She shrugs. “You’re always cold.”
The shirt is target-red, patterned with miniature palm trees and ocean-view scenes. He slips it over his head without undoing the pearlescent buttons. Its sleeves would be short on Parrot—but on Peyt they hang midway down the forearm.
“It’s really something,” he says, tucking the tails into his pants before putting on his jacket, doing it all the way up. Then, somehow, he’s at the bus steps. Hunching, arms outstretched. Now rigid around Esther. Hugging without using his hands. Her breasts squashed up against his ribcage. A whiff of sweet lemon off her scalp. Bitter rinds. “Really. I—”
As he pulls back, fumbling for thanks, his wordwind arcs overhead. A bridge. A rainbow. Peytr shakes his head and a word—a name—breaks loose. Snags in wisps of Esther’s black hair. He hesitates, watching the letters struggle with her tousled strands. Let it go, he thinks. Just leave it.
Esther shivers when he brushes her cheek. His fingers intimate, inexperienced, groping. She leans into him, plumps her lips for a kiss.
His mouth skims hers.
“Esther,” he says, wanting to say so much more. “I—”
She recoils, stiff and flat.
Gorge rising, he breaks away. Bends to grab his ruck. Licks the wriggling letters off his fingertips.
“Come on,” she sighs. “Guillaume said there’s time yet for one last trip into town.”
“Thanks,” he mumbles, shouldering his bag. “Thank you.”
Before she clomps down the steps, he snatches her hand. Squeezes it. Pretends to feel her squeezing back.
“Tomorrow,” she says when the team’s hitched to the wagon and they’re—mostly—on the road, “the library travels north.”
On the bench beside her, up front, exposed, Peytr reaches over. Clasps Esther’s knee. Massages the taut muscles around it. “Will there be meadows?” He laughs, ignoring the heat in his cheeks. He’s overcompensating, pathetically, but can’t stop.
He wants her to be specific, to relax, to sparkle and flirt, to get carried away as she has before. But when he asks for more details, she is withdrawn. Formal.
“Alas, my trove is depleted,” she says. “What say you tell a story? I can record it, if you grant me permission. It is, after all, the only reason I’m here.”
Peytr’s throat constricts. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what to say.”
“Those with the most valuable insights always feel most like impostors. Only fools are bolstered by the conviction of ignorance. Brilliance is forever wed to self-doubt.”
Esther flicks the reins, drives the pair on. He stares at the city, unsure if she’s insulting or flattering him. They’re approaching the same wall they attempted before, but from this vantage Peyt has a much better view. Vacant tenements and abandoned apartment blocks ring the inner side of the wall, but beyond them, maybe three miles further up the road, there are spires of unbroken glass. Buildings with scaffolding. Reconstruction cranes. Chimney stacks billowing smoke. There are people, he thinks. Busy people hoarding their busy stories.
“How much time have we got?”
Esther eyes him warily. “Why?”
A few hours, he says, is all they’ll need to make it to the CBD and back with at least one boulevard’s worth of new chronicles. A few hours to more than triple the lore they’ve accumulated at camp. A few more hours, he thinks, to earn forgiveness.
The prospect is enticing—a half-smile teases Esther’s lips—but she isn’t a fool.
“What about the greys?” she asks, and it takes every ounce of Peyt’s willpower to reply, “They prefer bleak days. Just look at that big old nonsense ‘sun. Never seen it brighter.”
Esther scans the skies without even squinting. Then a brief glance at the city gates, mentally measuring the length of each shadow.
“In and out,” he hears himself say, then, quavering: “They could nab us just as easily out here.”
A moment passes, while Peytr watches her desire grow.
“You’re the soldier,” she says at last, lashing the horses.
Twenty minutes later, they’re passing under the tarnished arch of the city’s gates, the doors swung wide and rusted off their hinges. Their hoof-beats echo through gaps in concrete structures lining the road, hollow towers gawping blindly at them with ply-boarded windows. White-knuckles welded to the bench beneath him, Peyt’s eyes are in constant motion. Sweat has soaked his new shirt. He feels it trickling down his back, under his belt, until he’s sure, if he stands, he’ll find a big wet arse-print on the seat. He doesn’t stand.
He can’t.
“We can turn around,” Esther says, soft now, soft again, leaning close, clearly wanting to touch—touching. “Let’s turn around.”
He can’t.
Ghosts caper in his peripheral vision. Grey sprinters become an old man negotiating sidewalk crevasses in his wheelchair. Dark shooters devolve into a little boy wearing a school skirt and rubber boots, following a woman—a shadow-turned-mother—through a broken store entrance. The shop owner, shielding a grey crossbowman with his fat aproned belly, sits on the curb out front. Smoking pungent herbs. Selling cans of tinned beets, five dollars a pop.
Esther halts the wagon. Introduces herself. Takes up her notebook and pen. Makes a joke about beets that isn’t remotely funny. The shopkeeper chuckles. Between drags, he tells part of his story. How he’d been a doctor, once. Flown in an airship whenever he wanted, not just when the gov’t allowed. How he’d treated people who weren’t sick, not really.
“Their problems were all up here,” the man says, blunt fingers jabbing his greasy forehead. When he invites them in—he’s relaxing into his narrative, gaining momentum—Esther takes one look at Peyt and declines.
He can’t.
“I’ll turn around at that intersection,” Esther says, taking up the reins. “Just hold your hand out like this”—the gesture doesn’t register—“if you see someone coming. Make it noticeable, all right? So they’ll stop.”
He can’t.
Someone’s coming.
Someones.
“Hurry, Esther.”
A herd of men—of boys—wearing windbreakers and fatigues and multicams—are marching—yes, they’re marching—out of an alley on the right—now they’re goosestepping—in unorthodox squadrons—must be Special Ops—and they’re barking—not at each other, not at the same time—a leader, a muscle-bound Cap, is barking orders at his platoon. And the fuckin’ horses are being stubborn—“Hurry, Esther, please”—not trotting, not even walking, fuckin’ tiptoeing through a space in the median—and Peyt knows these boys—he thinks—he knows them—and—he thinks—they know him.
“Go.” All knees and elbows and boneless between, he scrambles, kicking Esther’s notepad, the shopkeeper’s tale, into the dirt. “Go, go, go,” he whispers, voice lodged somewhere down in his guts, as he flop-falls into the back of the wagon, under cover, out of sight, where he tries not to whimper, blood awash in his mouth, tongue throbbing, the cartwheels jostling, rattling his skull, picking up speed. “Go, go, go, go, go …”
He doesn’t know when they stopped. His skull is still rattling, bones still shaking, teeth still thirsting for blood. The canvas cover slaps against the wagon’s arched ribbing, buffeted by a strong wind. But the scene out back—the flaps are pinned up, a rush of cool air gusting in—isn’t changing. The dust behind their wheels has settled.
Esther cradles Peyt’s head in her lap as the fit wracks and, eventually, leaves him. She rocks him like a child. Singing under her breath, the timbre of her song less buttery, more charcoal, than it was that other day, before. Her ’wind subdued, almost transparent, dwelling on images of deserts, bombed-out meeting halls, a line of caravans, singular, thin, alone. Dot 29. Chorus: He comes to end our woes… . She notices the focus in Peyt’s gaze, his senses returned, and smiles sadly.
“If love and affection could mitigate sorrow,” she whispers, leaving the thought unfinished. Dot 34. Aria: How art thou fall’n (Bass)… . Her words are always so fancy, he thinks. So highfaluting. But he knows exactly what she means. There are no curlicues in her wordwind, in her embrace. He sees the plain way she loves him.
She sees that it’s not enough.
“I’m sorry,” he says, he thinks. Sorry …
And she reads him again, reads him well, and nods How art thou fall’n … and kisses him on the eyes, soft lips smothering his lids. She lies down beside him, soothes him silently, and when they’re gasping and sweating and utterly spent, when his wordwind is mingling, entangling with hers, he opens his mouth and starts talking. There are no notebooks, no scrolls, no fragile ink pens. Just his memory and hers, working in tandem. He talks about Jean and her scars and her obsession with bombs. He talks about Borys and his steel leg and the factory where it was made. He talks about the girls and the groundhogs and the trouble he has with darkness—he talks about everything he can bear to voice.
“Thank you,” she says, kissing him again and again and again. And he feels hollowed, exhausted, relieved. At last, nuzzled against
her breasts, her strong, steady heart, he sleeps.
In the cold pale before morning, he wakes alone.
Eel-jolts through his limbs, and he’s upright. Scouring the wagon—the fuckin’ greys have her!—feeling the pinch of their deadly fingers, scraping through their shadows. Finding nothing but his pants. Backpack. Boots. His new shirt, neatly folded on a box—red on the coward’s seat. Above the breast pocket, sloughed letters are arranged in a frown on the fabric. A precious ’wind-pressing. One-of-a-kind. The word now-forgotten in the mind of she who presented it.
Tristan.
Quiet, alone with his words, Peyt gathers his few things. The hacks are gone, burdened with the wagon’s contents. He lines the bottom of his bag with the shirt, snugs his hood and jacket, and climbs onto the driver’s seat. Sits there a spell. Esther’s bootprints are clear in the dust, invisible on the gravel. She’s made no attempt to scuff them out. Crooked as truth, they lead back to the library, dots of shade on the horizon, obscured in the twilight. In the other direction, back in the city, the nightmarkets are glowing like dawn.
Crazy, he thinks. Setting up shop like that, right in the thick of it, right in the heart.
With some effort, he gets his pack on. Follows Esther’s trail for a minute or two, then stops. Retraces his steps. Shuffles toward the lights.
There was a show Ruby used to watch as a little girl, every night after the dinner dishes were done, and she was washed and snugged on Gramp’s knee. It was so old there were holes in the picture, big yawny-melty brown mouths that gobbled up bits of the story, making Gramp swear as he got up to fix the reel. One-handed, he always managed to get the film running smooth again—but even then the sound was wonky. Voices always seemed on the verge of tears and birdsong fluted in a weird key, high-pitched and warbling straight into Ruby’s tum. Sometimes she plugged her ears, quietly invented plots and effects just for herself. A show without sound was still better than anyone else had in their building, and Gramp had said Ruby was gifted in the way of imagination.
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