Whit

by Iain Banks

  * * *

  It was while I was sorting out my kit-bag the following morning that I found, right at the bottom of it, something extra and very special; something I did not know I had. It came in the shape of a tiny vial wrapped in a scrap of paper and secured by a rubber band. 'In case. S.,' said the words printed on the note. I opened the tiny glass jar with some difficulty and sniffed the dark, almost black ointment inside.

  It was zhlonjiz; the priceless, irreplaceable unguent that is more precious and significant to us than gold, frankincense and myrrh to Christians… no; more precious yet; it is as though we possess our Grail, but it is still magically powerful, and consumable. I had heard of zhlonjiz since toddlerhood but only ever seen or smelled it once before, at my coming-of-age ceremony three years earlier. I knew that my Grandfather had only the tiniest amount of the treasured, mystical salve left after all these years. That he should honour me so by entrusting this substantial fragment of our holy of holies to my keeping was both a humbling tribute to the love he had for me and the faith he had in me, and a sobering reminder - had I needed one - of the importance of my mission.

  I felt tears prick behind my eyes. I carefully resealed the vial, pressed its little bakelite cap to my forehead and whispered a blessing, then kissed the tiny glass jar and stowed it carefully, wrapped in my extra clothes, back in the bottom of my kit-bag.

  * * *

  Edinburgh has the merit as a city - by our beliefs - that it is at its centre erratic, convoluted and full of different levels and strange steep passageways (though by all accounts the old cities of the Holy Lands surpass it in this regard, and Tokyo, in Japan, is apparently quite creditably difficult to find one's way around). Edinburgh is still a city of course, and therefore to be avoided unless one has some pressing need to stay there - in Gertie Fossil's case a nostalgic weakness for the marital memories associated with the house was what had persuaded her to remain - but as cities go it is neither overly regular in pattern (save in the New Town) nor too large to see out of, two criteria which have always seemed to me important. We have always held it to be a bad sign when navigating one's way round a city becomes a matter simply of knowing one's x-axis from one's y-axis, and we are I think rightly horrified at the prospect of discovering that the only direction to look in the hope of finding something natural to look at is up at the clouds (like as not polluted by the sight of aircraft and their vapour trails or, at night, by the reflected lights of the city itself).

  I had still to decide how I was to make my journey to London with sanctity, but the relative speed of my progress the previous day - I had envisaged taking two days and having to find shelter somewhere ashore - together with the comparatively benign atmosphere of Edinburgh left me in no hurry to start travelling immediately when I woke up the next morning at a shamefully late hour; I decided I could take up to a day to rest and think.

  Fêted at breakfast as much as at supper - there were rose-petals in my tea and I had to let Gertie Fossil wash my feet - I told her and her son that I needed to reconnoitre various aspects of the city, and would return once I had completed my scouting expedition. I declined Gertie's offer of a guide in the shape of Lucius - he looked relieved too, behind an anxious smile - and assured her that I could look after myself. Gertie still looked worried, and so I mentioned that I felt doubly secure knowing that I had the jar of zhlonjiz upon my person; Sister Gertrude was suitably impressed that the semi-legendary salve had been entrusted to my care, but seemed satisfied that my safety was thereby guaranteed.

  And so I went out amongst the Unsaved (also known as the Wretched, the Insane, the Norms, the Obtuse, the Reject, the Clinker, the Chaff, the Cluttered, the Rank, the Passives, the Benighted and the Asleep), uncomfortably conscious of the fact that I was walking away from the only other two people in the city who were numbered among the Saved (likewise the Enlightened, the Sane, the Preferred, the Acute, the Chosen, the Refined, the Engraced, the Clear, the Commissioned, the Active, the Dawned and the Awoken), my jacket pockets filled with the more precious items I had brought from the Community and a couple of cheese and mango pickle sandwiches prepared by Gertie.

  The day was warm and I left my hat dangling down over the back of my jacket, which had been cleaned as best she could by Gertie overnight. The main thoroughfares of the city were choked with cars, the pavements aswarm with people. The air reeked of burned petrol; lurid advertisements and shop windows screamed for attention from every side. A few people looked at me oddly -I did not think that my monochrome garments were particularly different from those worn by many of the youths - of both sexes - whom I saw, and I observed a few people with hats, so perhaps it was the staff I carried which set me apart. I felt awkward and tense in the midst of so much strident clutter and so many people and after a while I took to the quieter streets, away from the stressing mass of humanity.

  Some children in a school playground shouted through the railings at me, accusing me of being what they called a Loony, and asking for 'a shot of your stick. Does it turn into a power sword?'

  I had been going to ignore them, but turned and approached instead; they shrank back initially, then - perhaps encouraged by their numbers and by the railings between us - they came back.

  'What's a power sword?' I asked

  'You know like in Transforcers; on Saturday mornings,' one of them said.

  I thought for a moment. 'You mean on television?'

  'Aye! Of course! Yeah! On the telly!' they chorused.

  I shook my head. 'We don't have a television set in our house.'

  'What? No! Yer kiddin'! Get outa here! You live in the loony bin, missus?'

  'No, I live in the Community-'

  This caused some mirth amongst a few of the older ones, one of whom - the one who'd talked first - asked, 'What's that on your forehead?'

  'It's a mark of respect,' I told him, smiling. 'A mark of love, and faith… what's your name?'

  'Mark,' he replied, to some giggles. He looked defiant. 'What's yours?'

  'Well, I have a bit of a funny name,' I told them. 'I am The Blessed Very Reverend Gaia-Marie Isis Saraswati Minerva Mirza Whit of Luskentyre, Beloved Elect of God, III.'

  More laughter. The bell rang then and they were called away by a teacher who looked at me suspiciously. I waved to the children and blessed them under my breath, then turned away, looking at the stave in my hand and thinking how slight are the signals by which we serve notice - inadvertently or not - that we are not part of the Bland world. It also struck me that such signs are often emblems of an unfamiliar practicality, and how misguided it is to believe that the greater world is somehow ultimately cosmopolitan and tolerant.

  My own school days - not long over I suppose, judged against the scale of a full life, though they seem moderately distant to me now - were passed at the Gerhardt Academy. We have been sending our secondary school children as day pupils to the Academy - just outside the village of Killearn, on the western flank of the southern hills - for thirty years, ever since we'd had some trouble with the local authorities; they were and are happy with the standard of our primary teaching but demanded we put our elder children through more formal educational channels. The Gerhardt Academy is a school for the children of parents who wish them to have an education that is officially recognised but less strictly structured than the state or private norm. It was still a long-term aim of my Grandfather to educate all Order children up to secondary standard and even to lay the foundations for a college some time in the future, but in the meantime the Academy provides a satisfactory secondary alternative.

  I had both mostly enjoyed the experience at the time and felt afterwards that I had benefited from it. To this day whenever I see the younger Brothers and Sisters heading off to catch the bus in the morning, I still feel a smidgen of nostalgia for the days when I too carried a Sitting Board and a satchel over the bridge, past the Woodbeans' house and up the drive to the rusted gates (the satchels are self-explanatory; the boards were because the bus had pad
ded seats which we were not allowed to use, so took our own hard wooden boards to sit on. Rebellion then consisted of sitting on the soft seats and using one's board with a roller skate underneath as a skate board).

  The Academy, housed in a high and Gothic castle in the trees above Killearn village, is a good place to learn; I'm sure to some of the pupils and parents it seems a strange, spartan and even eccentric institution with its odd combination of archaic fixtures and traditions (I was given slates and chalk to work with during my first year), free-flowing curriculum, easy discipline and unconventional teachers, but to us Order children it tends to seem like a haven of luxury, order and common sense after the Community.

  In addition to its formal scholastic role, the Academy has traditionally been the place where young Luskentyrians learn more about the non-academic world, mixing with Unsaved children and being exposed to the more common adolescent interests such as pop music, comics, the adulation of sporting and cultural heroes, the use of popular slang and so on. This can be a traumatic experience for a child of the Community, however we tend to arrive forewarned by those who have gone before us and in groups that can offer support to any individual in need of it, plus of course we have our Faith to comfort us through any teenage angst that may result. Furthermore, possessing a generally superior (if usually only theoretical) knowledge regarding sex and drugs compared to our Unsaved peers - gained in the enlightened atmosphere of the Community - means that we can give as good as we get when it comes to peer-impressing.

  So, I had enjoyed my school days and I suppose I could even be said to have shone academically, if that is not too immodest. Indeed, a few of my teachers had tried to persuade me to go on to university, either to read physics or English, however my Grandfather and I knew that I had been marked out for a more holy purpose, and that my rightful place was with - and in - the Community.

  I turned and walked away from the school.

  * * *

  In the end it took me two days to get out of Edinburgh. I spent that day fruitlessly trying to work out how to stow away on a Motorail train at Waverley station, but it looked too difficult (to my surprise, I saw a notice that said the service would soon cease altogether). I could just have jumped on a London-bound train and trusted to my wits to keep away from a guard -we have our own nonsense language and a look of somehow foreign incomprehension perfected for when one is caught in such situations - or I might have tried a long-range variant of the technique we call Back Bussing. However it struck me that this would prove problematic over such a distance, and - more to the point - there was something insufficiently holy about this approach. We are not averse to travelling in trains - either sitting on the floor of the guard's van or using the wooden Sitting Boards we carry to avoid the luxury of soft furnishings - but my mission was so important I had to be rigorous in my piety, and there was something too beguilingly easy about simply avoiding paying my fare on an ordinary passenger train.

  I retreated to Morningside, using as many out-of-the-way routes as I could, including one snicket, or footpath, charmingly called Lover's Loan. En route I saw several cars with signs in the back saying 'Child On Board', and was reminded, by now with more amusement than embarrassment, of my first trip to Edinburgh three years earlier, when I had proudly pointed out to Sister Jess - who was one of my attendants for that trip - that given the number of people so advertising the fact their offspring were not deigning to sit on soft automobile seats, our Order obviously had many converts in the city.

  While taking tea at the Fossils' that afternoon I heard the distant sound of a diesel locomotive, and was reminded of the train which had passed me the night before as I'd been travelling along the nearby cutting. Thereafter I went out and walked around, trying to recall exactly what the cars I had seen last night on the freight train had looked like. Happily, I have a good memory and the cars proved common. I went to the nearest car dealership and inquired about where Ford Escorts were constructed, then spent some considerable time in the area around the junction where Morningside Road and Comiston Road join, watching freight trains. The trains came from the west through the abandoned station immediately to the west of the bridge carrying the crossroads, or through the shallow, tree-lined cutting just to the east, which had been the point at which I'd struck out for Gertie Fossil's the night before. The trains were few and far between, which made it easy to memorise their times via the old clock tower near the junction, but I became concerned that I might become conspicuous, and so returned to the Fossils' and borrowed a wooden tray, a length of wallpaper which I tore into tray-sized rectangles, and a thick black crayon Gertie used to write messages for the milkman; thereafter I returned to the railway and the road junction, and made a series of sketches of the buildings while I watched for passing trains. I was relieved to see one pass westwards loaded with cars at approximately the same time as the one I had hidden from yesterday.

  Finding no regularity in the trains' schedule from hour to hour, but having formulated a plan which might work if they kept to the same timetable on a day-to-day basis, I returned to the home of Gertie Fossil and another ceremonial supper followed by a service, which I trust I conducted in a manner my Grandfather would have approved of. The service went well enough, I think (despite the fact that Lucius is profoundly tone deaf and when it comes to singing in tongues can only mumble in them).

  Still thinking about my plan, and having come to the conclusion that it possessed the flaw of being difficult to carry out in daylight or even around dusk, I walked back to the road junction yet again, and was rewarded with the sight of a train that would suit me perfectly.

  * * *

  The following night found me crouched in some bushes on what had once been the platform of Morningside station, my jacket buttoned up so that no trace of my white shirt showed, my hat on so that my face was in shadow and my pale kit-bag concealed behind me. A light rain was falling from clouds smudged orange with the city's glare. I was getting wet. Above and behind me, late-night traffic roared and hissed on the road junction where I had spent so much time yesterday. I estimated that I had been waiting for almost half an hour, and was beginning to worry that somebody might already have noticed the large cardboard box I had thrown over the train signals further up the track near the next bridge to the east, where the railway passes under Braid Avenue.

  The box had apparently once contained a washing machine; I had found it in a skip a couple of streets away, carried it to the cutting, made sure there was nobody about, thrown it over the jagged railings and climbed after it, then fought my way through brambles and bushes and heaved the box over the signals. I wondered how long it would take for somebody to spot this and report it to the relevant authorities. Luckily no trains had yet passed in the opposite direction whose drivers might have noticed, but I was becoming concerned.

  I had bade the Fossils farewell after another solemn supper and another reverential washing of my feet by Gertie. She gave me food and water for my journey; Lucius mumbled and spluttered until hit firmly on the back of the neck by his mother, whereupon he explained that the cravat he was holding out to me - and which I had been about to bless - was a present.

  I accepted Gertie's food and Lucius's cravat and thanked them both. I had already packed the map of London I'd asked to borrow. I presented them with the drawings of the buildings around the road junction and told them they could keep the wooden staff. Lucius bubbled with gratitude; Gertie put her hand to her chest and seemed about to have a seizure. She thereupon fell at my feet, and so I exited the house, backwards, as I had entered it, with Sister Gertie patting my boots.

  Walking through the drizzle to the railway track and the abandoned station had been oddly relieving.

  I heard a train rumbling towards me along the cutting to the west. I gripped my kit-bag and flexed my legs, which had become stiff squatting in the same position for so long.

  Small white lights appeared in the black cutting and the diesel noise swelled; the dark mass of the loc
o rumbled past; I could make out the driver, sitting staring ahead in the yellow-lit cab. The engine hauled empty open wagons similar to those I had seen the night before at around this time, and which I guessed I had seen twice before in addition, on each occasion loaded with new cars. The locomotive roared under the bridge supporting the road junction, its exhaust billowing around me, stinking. The train of wagons flowed clatteringly past, and for a second I thought my plan had foundered, then with a squeal and a cacophony of metallic shrieks the train began to slow.

  I almost jumped up then, but waited for the wagons to draw to a stop before walking calmly out of the bushes to where the third-last wagon lay, stationary. I stepped onto it from the weed-strewn platform as easily as a fare-paying passenger into a normal carriage.

  I squinted down the girdered length of the train towards the rear, then walked in that direction, jumping from one wagon to the next. On the final wagon there was a single automobile, sitting right at the rear. I went up to it. Its bodywork looked dull and mat, and felt as if it was covered in wax; there was a large, pale, chalky-looking X scrawled on its bonnet and a sheaf of paperwork taped to the inside of the windscreen. I tried the passenger door and discovered it was unlocked.

  I looked up into the drizzle. 'Praise be,' I said, smiling, and would have whooped for joy had I not been afraid of revealing my presence. 'Praise be indeed,' I said, laughing quietly, and jumped inside, my heart rejoicing.

  A minute later, the train gave a series of jerks and started moving forward again, gathering speed and taking me away from Edinburgh, heading south.