by Tom Fletcher
Alan did not always understand McAlkie’s words, but he felt the fire in them. He could tell that the big red man was always angry at the Pyramid, but he couldn’t necessarily tell why. Later on he came to understand, of course, but as a child all that mattered was that the words somehow promised a future different from the present; that things shouldn’t be the way they were, and that they didn’t have to be the way they were, that things could change for the better. Alan found the speeches inspiring – uplifting, almost …
*
‘I get low, people. I get lower than the bright beetles, lower than a lizard’s cock. I get so low when I look up at that high spire, that gleaming peak, the upper reaches of that dark Pyramid, the point of the pointed hexagon that spikes the sky beneath which we toil, Millers, the sky that they purport to share with us, but when they look out of their high windows, this is the question I want you to ask, and I want you to answer it too: when they look out of their high windows, do they see what we see? No, they do not. Now, this time I’m not even going to talk about the taxes, only the sky. Their night skies remain unspoiled by devilish shadows, by great blank shapes looming up over them like the house of a dead god. Their night skies are beautiful, and ours are spoiled by the same device that makes them so. And they might say, “Well, McAlkie, you are naught but a petty butcher. Is it right to incite anger over a mere disparity in circumstance? Stop being so jealous.” And I do have it in me to be jealous, I will not deny it, because although I am jealous I strive to be honest, too. But it is not jealousy that drives me to this box each day to stand here and speak to you. It is justice. It is clear to me and to you, too – I know it – it is clear that what drives me is justice. I am not a wild man raving simply because I want something I do not have – something that somebody else has. I would be a pitiful creature indeed if my feelings towards other humans were cracked and riven as a consequence of their possessions. But I am an angry man. Because from where did the Pyramidders take the stone with which they elevate themselves so highly? Did it just rise from the ground beneath them, a divine reward for their inherent righteousness, their inborn superiority? Did they wake one morning up there in the great vault, surprised and relieved at having undergone some cosmic test and being found deserving? No, it did not; and no, they did not, people, no. No and no. Is there a good reason, a logical reason, a just reason, for them to be up there, where they are, keeping the stars from us? No. Because where did the stone come from? If it is not magic, then what is it? Let me tell you – last night I had a visitor. A small man with a great snail’s shell on his back, and yes, you may have seen him, stumbling into our town, exhausted after his long journey. And he told me that he knew of a place – imagine such a thing, if you will – a great scar in the world, from which that fine black marble had been extracted. A quarry, its sheer cliffs dark and translucent, worked in ancient days by – by who? By people like you and me, that’s who! Like the cotton that we turn into the robes they wear, like the pigs we farm for them, like the …’
*
His bare arms were muscled like twisted tree roots, and he’d wave them and clench his fists and point and gesture. But he never seemed mad, not like some of the others. He never spoke too fast, and he never opened his eyes too wide, and he didn’t spit, or at least not much. And he laughed, and sometimes he lowered his voice and spoke kindly to the children who sat cross-legged in front of him, the children whose parents were weaving robes in the long attics of the houses of Modest Mills. Alan often sat and watched him, on his own, with other children when they were tired of running around, and with his parents.
The last time Alan saw McAlkie like that – strong, and certain, and proud – he was being dragged through the dust between two Arbitrators. Alan was standing in the middle of the road and the houses all around him were in flames. The sky was full of red smoke that streamed from a hole in the side of the Pyramid. He was seven years old. Arbitrators were stalking through the fires, putting knives into those villagers who were still moving. He was looking at the bodies of his mum and dad. An Arbitrator was walking in his direction, blade out. He was so tall, and so clean. He wore a rounded helmet of dark leather. He wore armour – panels of beaten metal – between which folds of dark, loose, thick cloth were visible. This cloth was decorated with tiny crystals that shone as if they gave off their own light – and so was the skin of his face, Alan realised, astonished. Most Arbitrators wore masks, but not this one. A line of glimmering stones ran from the outside corner of each of this man’s eyes, and he had beads beneath his eyebrows and cheekbones, which gave his face ridges. Later Alan learned these ridges signified rank, but at the time he had simply looked monstrous.
The man smiled. His long, pointed chin dimpled. He moved his knife languidly towards Alan’s neck.
McAlkie’s voice distracted him. ‘Let the lad live, you fucking maggot!’ he bellowed. ‘You kill that boy, I’m going to try an’ eat your mate here’s sword and die meself, and then where’ll you be, eh? You’ll have no one to ask about the explosion.’
The Arbitrator frowned. He looked at Alan, then picked him up by the front of his shirt. He stared into Alan’s eyes. The Arbitrator’s eyes were green and bright. The jewel tears flickered orange. His face was thin – it looked thinner than it was because of the beads. The Arbitrator dropped Alan and he landed in a heap, his legs giving out beneath him. He felt the dust that clouded up stick to his cheeks, and he coughed.
‘Troemius!’ the Arbitrator said, not loudly, but precisely. An Arbitrator with its mask on stepped forward.
‘Yes, sir?’
‘We will take this boy with us into the Pyramid and raise him properly. You will be responsible for his passage back inside, and you will personally hand him over to the Teachers. Understood?’
‘Yes, sir.’
The Arbitrator who had intended to kill Alan gave him a swift kick in the stomach and then moved on.
Alan curled up around the pain and shook with sobs. He could hear McAlkie yelling still, but was too far out of it to be able to interpret the words. He felt hands on his body, was thrown over somebody’s shoulder. The bodies of his parents receded until they were obscured by smoke and flame. Somewhere behind him in the convoy of Pyramid troops, McAlkie was struggling with his captors, but Alan passed out then and didn’t see McAlkie again until both of them were back on the outside of the Pyramid, and the great orator who’d saved his life had had his eyelids cut off and been tortured into the wizened, jittery drunk who could barely lift a cup to his lips without spilling everywhere, who couldn’t cross a bridge without having a hand to hold, and maybe not even then.
*
Eyes’ feet went out backwards and he waved his arms about in a panic as he fell forward and ended up landing heavily on his knee, right on the edge of the bridge. His legs and hips hung out over empty space for a moment and then swung down, dragging his whole body off into nothing. Alan saw him scrambling for purchase, his movements frantic, the look on his face so extreme as to be comical, and grabbed Eyes’ right wrist with both hands – but Eyes was heavier than he looked and he pulled Alan off-balance. He didn’t fall, but he wasn’t strong enough and didn’t have the purchase to lift Eyes back up. And his hands were sweaty … He dimly registered the blindfold, wrenched free of Eyes’ belt by the edge of the bridge, tumbling in the empty space.
‘Your other hand,’ Alan shouted, ‘get your other hand up here! You’re a hell of a lot fatter than you look – grab hold of this bridge, come on, Eyes. Come on, McAlkie, do it … your other hand – come on.’
‘Can’t see,’ Eyes said, staring up past Alan with his open eyes, ‘I can’t see for shit, lad. Just fucking drop me.’
‘Stop it. Come on, lift that hand – just feel around. Pretend you’re in the dark, that’s all.’
Eyes groped in the air with his left hand, but kept stopping and wiping the tears from his face, just a reflex thing. He wasn’t crying, but his eyes kept filling up and overflowing, and he couldn�
�t leave them alone.
‘Leave your damned eyes alone,’ Alan said.
‘Can’t tell you how much they hurt, lad.’
‘Maybe they do, but I can’t hold you much longer. I’m trying to shuffle back here, but if I shift at all I’m going to fall.’ He shook his head, tried to laugh. ‘Your eyes are hurting, my back is hurting …’
‘I’ve a dense and solid body,’ Eyes said, ‘I will not deny it. Where is that Spider friend of ours?’
‘Doubtless he is on his way,’ Alan said. ‘It’s a long bridge, far longer than I knew.’ He looked up, and whatever hope he’d had of help drained away.
‘Spider is fighting,’ he said. ‘Spider and Churr are fighting with somebody at the end of the bridge. How thoughtless of them.’ He could see somebody else rappelling down the cliff above the road on a rope.
‘What about that Nora girl?’ Eyes said. ‘Where is she, our great hope?’
‘She is over the crest,’ Alan said, ‘but I don’t rightly know where she is. Nor will she know of our predicament, not unless she comes back. Though perhaps she too has been assailed.’
‘So it all depends on you,’ Eyes said, ‘a drunk and a layabout with a passable voice and not much else.’
‘It’s more than passable. And in truth, no, it doesn’t depend on me: it depends on that left hand of yours. Come on, Eyes. If you can talk so much, you can find this massive bit of rock. It’s not like your arm isn’t working.’
Eyes did find the edge of the bridge, and took some of his own weight. He tried to pull himself up and then yelped. ‘Slippy,’ he gasped. ‘It’s so damned slippy, this marble.’
‘Wait,’ Alan said. He was able to move now, so he pushed himself backwards, stabilised himself and swiftly transferred his right hand from Eyes’ right wrist to his left. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘you pull, and I’ll pull.’
This time it worked, and between them they got Eyes back up on the bridge.
‘Old Green be damned, I’m sorry,’ Eyes said. ‘By Green, by the Toad, by the Builders, I’m sorry. Leave me here, lad. What just nearly happened will keep nearly happening until it does happen, and each and every time it’ll slow you down.’
‘I’m not leaving you out here with no food, no water and no good eyes. You’re with us now for the duration and I won’t have this nonsense polluting the air between us again. For all that, stay here: just lie here and don’t move. I’m going to go back. Spider and Churr can’t defend the bikes all by themselves, and we can’t afford to lose them. I don’t want to lose them.’
‘Who are the bastards?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘I want to help.’
‘Keep going, if you can. Crawl. Try to get to the other side and send Nora back.’
Eyes nodded and rose onto all fours. ‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘Look at me: a blind old beast with a ruined knee.’
‘I’m going now,’ Alan said.
Once free of his charge he found he could move quickly. He stayed low and drew his long knives from his boots as he moved.
Spider and Churr were retreating along the bridge, their backs to Alan as he approached them. They were fighting a gang of berserkers: shaven-headed men with thick arms, foam around their mouths, and Daunt’s mushroom symbol tattooed onto their foreheads. The air between the berserkers and Alan’s companions was a blur of flashing metal. Spider and Churr were quick and strong, but Daunt’s fools were no doubt fighting for the promise of their queen’s body and her gracious satisfaction of their various addictions. They wore dead lizards around their necks and had long yellow teeth pushed through their ears. Their faces were misshapen from past brawls – noses bent, cheekbones uneven, ears so swollen and puffy they were only recognisable by their location on these dented heads.
There were three on the bridge, two in front and one, still chewing his mushrooms, waiting behind to replace one if he dropped.
Too eager, Alan thought. Any moment now the frenzy would descend and drive the meathead right on through. This was no planned, co-ordinated attack; no way would Daunt send these foamers out on an actual kidnap mission. Probably the encounter was pure chance; they were most likely one of several gangs out gathering supplies for her.
A blade flew out from the combat, spinning wildly into the void, and Churr’s berserker turned his head to watch it go, his empty hand still moving as if nothing had happened. Churr sank her own steel into the man’s neck and then used her foot to push him off the knife and off the bridge before stepping around and stabbing Spider’s opponent in the side. He screamed, and then he too was falling headlong towards the distant river. The third berserker was already sprinting away, his frenzy lending him an unnatural speed. Alan nearly went to throw his knives, but stopped himself. He’d only miss. The man ran and ran until he reached the concrete cliff, and then he started pulling himself hand over hand up the rope.
‘Back to Daunt, no doubt,’ Spider said, panting.
‘Let him go,’ Churr said. ‘He doesn’t know anything.’
‘He knows where we are,’ Alan said, ‘and that we killed two of her men.’
‘Will he know who we are?’
‘What route does Daunt take to Dok?’ Alan asked. ‘Are we on it?’
‘I don’t think so. I don’t think Daunt has a route, as such. It’s more of a relay, a chain of buyers and sellers. She uses local communities where she can, and bikers, transients, you name it. Her people do the bit at the dangerous end – in Dok itself – and safeguard the rest of the trade.’
‘And it just works? Nobody messes her around?’
‘No.’ Churr ran her tongue around her teeth, still staring at the man climbing the rope in the distance. ‘Well, not until now.’
18
The Oversight
Once over the bridge they roared across a concrete plain, the roof of something, blank but for cracks and weeds. Alan always thought he’d been comfortable with the scale of their habitat, but he felt monstrously exposed beneath Satis and Corval and the stars here, when they came out. He had known Gleam was big, but had never realised it was big enough to accommodate such expanses of nothing. Nora called this place the ‘Oversight’. They all came to smell of engine fumes, but he thought it was preferable to the scent of stale sweat. That night they built a fire of uprooted sunwort and redgrass, though it burned dismally, and Alan picked at Snapper and sang a song about the golem army that some believed built Gleam. He made some notes in his lyric book about there being magic in the stone itself, but nowhere else.
Eyes lay on his back and moaned softly as the night sky turned. Spider worked on new tattoo designs. Nora had unrolled several scrolls and sat with her back to the others, her work illuminated not by the firelight but by an uneven chunk of white stone that worked in the same way as the reservoir globes they used in the Pyramid. ‘This particular light has certain qualities I require for my maps,’ she explained. ‘Firelight is good for some Mapmakers, but not for me. We all work differently.’ Alan didn’t know if she was making a map or reading one, but he presumed the latter as from behind she was motionless. But later, when he saw her hands, they were black with ink, or something like it.
After Nora was done working each evening she would lie down behind Churr, who was often restless, and wrap her arms around Churr’s waist, and then Churr would quieten and sleep like a dead croc – apart from one night, when Nora and Churr whispered long into the small hours. Churr’s voice was louder, and she was crying. Alan thought that they thought he was asleep.
‘I don’t want to be that way any more,’ she was saying. ‘I don’t want to live in the dirt, eating nothing much and what there is is either stolen or bought with stolen bugs.’
Nora was murmuring assent or platitudes, or maybe no words at all, just soothing sounds.
‘I don’t want to steal from the rich any more,’ Churr continued, ‘I want to be the rich. I don’t want the crumbs, I want the loaf. I’m not like my people any more. I’m like you, Nora. I
’m like you.’
And when Alan did sleep, he slept badly. He woke repeatedly, the sound of a baby crying in his ears.
In the morning it was Churr who found the detachable metal cans built into the body of the bike she shared with Spider, and in between them, hidden deep inside the body of the bike, weapons. Upon investigation, the other bikes were also found to hold such a cache. The cans were empty for now, but still … The weapons included chains with handles, knuckledusters of gruesome design, gnarled cudgels sprouting razor blades, slingshots, and – inside Alan’s bike – a small crossbow.
‘Who’d be best with this?’ he asked. ‘There’s only one quiver of bolts. We shouldn’t waste them.’
‘I have never used one,’ Nora said, ‘and Eyes is blind.’
‘Aye, lass,’ Eyes said. ‘Thanks for that.’
‘I’ll take it,’ Churr said. ‘I had one of those once. Lost it at cards. Give it to me.’