by Andy Graham
Rick took the metal box off his wife and offered it to Rose. She grabbed it. Threw it under the clock. Thryn trailed a finger around his scalp. It brought goosebumps up on his skin. He reached behind himself and squeezed her ankle.
“Patience, my husband,” she crooned, “will make it all the sweeter.”
Rick’s head dropped. “They contacted me as I was walking up the hill from Stann’s. There’s something going on in the capital. There was all kinds of talk before I left, a compulsory dress code for citizens, a one-child-only policy, grumbles over president De Lette’s new trade policy, aliens in baskets, too many foreigners, monsters under mountains, the usual rubbish.”
“What did the message say?”
“Just that I have to go back. The army doesn’t give reasons. I swear they timed the message deliberately. It’s almost as if they were watching.”
Thryn disentangled Rose from her legs. She sent her to get the picture Rose had spent the last few days ‘drawing for Daddy’. The little girl scampered over to the clock, fished out the metal box and crawled away on all fours.
“As it’s a special occasion, I let her draw on paper. We’re running low on chalk anyway,” Thryn said once the girl had disappeared into the next room. She smoothed the skin on his forehead. “When do you have to leave?”
“In a few hours, if I rag the car back to the capital. I fought for this week’s leave for months and they take it away from me in seconds. It’s been happening to all of us, officers, soldiers, rooks—”
“What’s a rook?”
“Rook: rookie, new soldier, green, fresh, inexperienced, young ’n’ dumb.”
“You have an interesting way of encouraging self-confidence in your youth. I don’t know what a real ‘rook’ is,” she paused, wrapping her tongue around the unfamiliar word, “but green can be a good thing, plants for example. Fresh food tastes better and the energy of youth can make up for a lot of inexperience. Remember?” Her eyes, just south of brown and north of black, looked up at him through the long eyelashes their daughter had inherited. “And in your next life, you can only join up if you promise not to shave your head,” she whispered into his ear, breath moist.
“I could wear a wig?”
“Another new word. If it means what I think it does, then you can sleep in that wig outside. Maybe it will scare away the ghosts of the pigs.”
There was a thump of feet as Rose ran back past the stove. She was clutching a torn piece of paper in one hand, tears streaking down her face. She’d ripped her picture.
It took them the best part of an hour to explain to the hyperventilating child that tearing the paper wasn’t a problem. They could get some more from somewhere. Maybe. Not even the pencil in the metal box calmed her down. That had just reminded her of the grandad who had taught her to write and was gone forever. Thryn explained the little girl had been bouncing off the walls since before the moons had set that morning, asking if Daddy was home yet. And when they finally managed to get her down for an afternoon nap, it gave them enough time for a brief, groping lunge at each other. Then Rose woke up screaming, so Thryn went to her.
Rick listened to the grandfather clock for over an hour, stretching out every second it was going to take him to get back to the capital. The heavy tick of the hands creeping round was a sound he felt rather than heard. It was a clunk that had a tangible weight to it, each one sounding like it was the final one, the last best of someone’s heart. When the clock chimed again, another thirty minutes had passed and Thryn still hadn’t returned.
Rick dragged himself to his car. The military didn’t look kindly on tardiness and he wasn’t sure he wanted to test the new-found leeway his minor celebrity status had brought him.
Halfway back to the capital, his phone buzzed. Thryn had sent him a rare message. She had just got downstairs. His pig-headed daughter, who had refused to let him put her to bed, had said she was scared daddy wouldn’t be there when she woke, that she’d never see him again. Then Thryn wrote that she loved him, in her language. She claimed the words had more weight in her mother tongue. Maybe that explained why, when she swore in his language, it was spectacularly, wince-inducingly, toe-curlingly inappropriate. Love and curses, something you had to feel, not learn.
“Damn you, Stann,” he said, refusing to admit it had been his choice to visit his old friend. “I could’ve spent today with my family, not you.”
A flash of pain piercing his shoulder made him gasp. He blinked a tear out of his eye and gunned the car along the uneven road.
10
Change
Just over twelve hours after getting home to Tear, Rick was waiting to be admitted back through the main entrance to the capital, Effrea-Tye. Either side of the road, a deep trench snaked towards him from the horizon, nettles snapping at its edges. It stopped just shy of the half-built gate, cast-off tools and heavy machinery standing guard. Rick wasn’t sure what had come first, the ditch or the road above it. What he did know was the long queue of traffic crawling through the roadworks had been there longer than the road and the ditch. Probably longer than the bloody city he was trying to get into as well. Car horns were going off like fireworks on Hallowtide, setting Rick’s teeth on edge. Souring his mood further was the heat.
The early-evening sun hammered down on the roofs of the metal vehicles, shimmering off car bonnets and baking the occupants. Rick mopped his brow with a towel that was already soaked through. It was illegal to transport animals like this and people climbed in voluntarily? At least the sweat in the car was his own. That was not the case on the occasions he had dared the city’s public transport network. It was a death trap in high summer. If the heat and dehydration didn’t get you, the body odour would.
Despite stewing in his own sweat, the blue-purple fog of exhaust fumes hanging over the line of traffic was enough reason to keep the windows closed. Today, the pollution was even worse than normal. Plumes of it twisted through the spired towers, cranes and skyscrapers of the capital.
It was an irony of city life that puzzled Rick. He understood the desire for cheap food and fuel, he almost got the need to brag about bagging a bargain, too. But the clamour to drive prices down further and further was increasingly being drowned out by people who realised, yet again, that they hadn’t been filling their vehicles or bellies with what they thought they had. No one wanted to admit that basic maths was absolute: cutting costs meant cutting corners. As a result, the capital was now choking in a cloud of particulate-filled filth and most food was about as nutritious as the packaging it came in. It was, as Stann’s father had slurred one drunken evening, tantamount to an act of self-decapitation to save on barber’s bills.
Rick placed the damp towel back over the scorching steering wheel. If he were prone to imagination he’d swear he could feel the exhaust fumes staining the inside of his lungs black. Someone somewhere in the queue honked a horn and a noise like a choir of angry cows added their voices to the sticky air.
“That never works, you idiots!” Rick yelled. He slammed his fist onto the horn. A braying note added to the cacophony in the air and the car in front of him lurched forwards. “I don’t believe it, it worked.”
The procession of vehicles inched along the road towards the new gate, jolting over a series of potholes. Evening sunlight burst off their mirrors. The explosions of colour made him wince. A truck backfired. The reflection of a wrinkled old man, one gun-grey eye open, the other covered by a buckled coin, flashed across Rick’s windscreen. He gripped his steering wheel. His eyes flicked to the sides. Rick revved the engine, preparing to swerve off the road. I have to get out of here. Drive. Now! Before the bombing starts. The bullets. A stationary target is a dead target. I’m not safe. Get—
A beige car edged past him, roof-rack laden with rough-cut wood and music blaring out the open windows. A woman, tousled hair plastered over her red face, was yelling at a collection of kids. Each one of those kids was battering another one with a menagerie of stuffed toys. Rick sank ba
ck in his seat, the smell of fear mixing with the heat sweat. The death trap that was Castle Brecan was a long way away. He was on the outskirts of the capital. He was safe.
He forced the image of the old man out of his mind. The girl from his nightmares was lurking just out of sight, too, even in the day. Sleep was worse, he couldn’t keep her out of his dreams. Last night, she’d been wearing an Ailan military uniform with the sleeves ripped off. She’d scrubbed at her stomach to get rid of the red stains until her hands had started bleeding.
“Don’t think of her,” he said, throttling the steering wheel. “Think of your wife, your daughter. And let go of the wheel.” He plucked at the shirt on his chest, peeling it off his skin.
It would be cooler back home, sitting in the orchard behind his and Lenka’s properties. His mind’s eye could see Rose running around in knickers, wellies and a sunhat, flipping between blind stubbornness and guileless charm in a heartbeat. The beige car pulled in front of him. Rick smiled and waved at the storm of kids and their toys. He got a chorus of raspberries in reply.
As he rolled into the shadow of the growing gatehouse, he dipped his head to get a better view through the windscreen. It wasn’t pollution twisting through the Ailan skyline but smoke. Thick pillars of it smudged across the late-evening sun. The smoke looked to be coming from north of the river, where Tye, the older half of the capital city, stood. Other drivers noticed it, too. The car horns faded, replaced by the sound of sirens in the city. Rick could just about make out public announcement speakers crackling at the crowds beyond the gates.
A group of people flooded from the gates and squeezed between the cars. They were handing things out. What? Leaflets? Water? He snorted at the last thought. Most folk from Ailan saw charity as something they were owed. They were the kind of people who wouldn’t help an elderly person back up to their feet unless they could rob them, bill them for the service, or were planning on suing for the wear and tear to the skin on their palms.
Rick wound his window down. The hot breeze cooled the sweat on his skin, offsetting the acrid taste of the blue fumes. He wasn’t interested in whatever these kids were giving out but they may have some information. He pulled a baton out from under the seat, just in case, and wondered just when he had started feeling threatened in his own country and what that meant for his wife and child. The traffic trundled to a halt again and a bearded face ducked down to window level.
“Greetings, brother.” The man reached into a lopsided pocket sewn onto his trousers.
Rick’s fingers tightened around his baton. “Hands out of your pockets and step away from the window.”
The man’s eyes widened.
“Whatever you’re trying to sell, I don’t want,” Rick said. “Whichever religion you’re trying to convert me to, I’m not interested. And if you’re yet another pacifist trying to convince me of the error of my ways, remember it’s soldiers like me that bleed and die so people like you have the freedom to protest about war.”
The stranger took a pace back, his rainbow-coloured trousers billowing in the breeze. He held his empty hands up in front of him. “None of the above, my friend.”
“What’s going on?” Rick got out of the car, baton held by his side. He got a sniff of a conspiracy theory from this guy and he might just batter some facts into him. Or you could stab his eyes out with a bayonet, Stann’s cracked voice whispered in his mind, that shuts people up. Rick shuddered and levelled the baton at the man.
The man armed the sweat off his brow. “Can I?” He gestured to his pocket.
“Slowly.”
“What I have for you today is free and, as of tomorrow, there will be nothing to convert to or from.”
‘The government are going to take your gods from you. They’re going to take from you what they’ve already taken from us: hope.’ Not Stann’s voice this time but that of the girl who had tried to kill Rick in Castle Brecan. The one that stalked his dreams, blind and forever dying. Her words were as clear now as they had been when she had been forcing her rifle into his face. He had dismissed what she’d said. Tried to forget it. But had she been right? If so, how had she known months ago and he had heard nothing of it since? Rick checked the other side of his car; more people were giving out the same thing to the other drivers. Behind the gates, a military truck screeched to a halt, disgorging a pack of heavily-armed soldiers.
“OK, friend.” Rick gripped the baton’s sweaty handle tighter. “Without any crap or poetic licence, tell me. What’s going on?”
The man licked his yellow-brown teeth and pulled something from his pocket with a flourish. He draped his gift across the wing mirror. “Change.”
Rick grabbed the gift off the wing mirror and sprinted for the gates. Screw the car, the old military vehicle wasn’t worth the rust that held it together. The man with the scruffy face yelled after him, the wind blowing his rainbow trousers tight around his legs. Rick flashed his pass at the soldiers. They waved him through and continued to set up check points to process the traffic jam.
The streets on the other side of the half-built walls were struggling to contain the teeming mass of people hurrying every which way. Streams of civilians crammed into the underground rail network entrances. Some were squeezing through the steel barriers, others lifted kids over the spike-topped railings. All were deaf to the screams of the staff that they were wasting their time; the network had been shut down. Rick joined the people weaving through the labyrinth of abandoned vehicles. Groups of youths in long scarves and hoodies skirted squads of twitchy, armed police, a slow dance of nervous smiles and hidden text messages. The plumes of smoke from north of the river scarred the evening sky. Slack-jawed watchers dotted the shifting crowds, their phones fixed on the black clouds.
A rattle of metal. A surge of movement. Screams. A wail of sirens punched through the air. Cameras hunted to record the commotion. One pasty-faced kid snapped a bunch of pictures of himself. In the background, police were wrestling a man in a bloody apron to the pavement. Rick pushed through to the red-faced sergeant in command. He pointed out the metal shutters that needed oiling. The police let the butcher go, swearing at the muttering crowds to back off. Gibbering, the sweating man retreated to bar his shop from the inside.
Rick had been in Stann’s corner the night he had won his first regimental boxing championship. The air in the converted aircraft hanger had reeked of excitement and opportunity, an undercurrent of fear nipping at the heels of the unwary. That had been a few hundred soldiers, people that dealt with violence on a daily basis, men and women exposed to progressively more intense videos on killology. This evening, under the claustrophobic heat of a sun that felt like it was setting for the last time, the taste of anticipation in the air was sharper, amplified by the hordes of people sprawled across the streets.
An explosion from Tye sent a spike of terror along the pavements. Rick stumbled into a placard-toting procession, cheering and chanting in a city of mayhem. Some demonstrators were waving things above their heads. Flashes of colour caught the light. Silk scarves were wrapped around wrists, necks and ankles. Others were nailed to sticks or knotted into streamers that fluttered in the air. There were silk hankies everywhere. The same type as the one the bearded man had given Rick in the traffic jam and hung over his wing mirror.
Rick felt for the hanky in his pocket and collided into the back of a protester. She staggered, dropping her banner and phone. Someone swore at him. Rick pivoted to avoid a bunch of people armed with tambourines and songs. He ducked down past the entrance to an alleyway. Gloved hands grabbed him and dragged him into the shadows.
11
The Unsung
Rick grunted, air rushing from his lungs. He slid down the wall and rolled to his feet as his opponent collapsed, legs at awkward angles, nose flattened into a bloody mess. Rick stepped around — Never over! — the body as he tried to stop the other two men backing him into the corner behind the bins. The knuckles on his right hand were bruised and sore. The stench o
f the black plastic containers was rank — urine and rubbish being slow-baked by the heat.
“I don’t know who you are or what you want,” he said, “but back off now and we can forget about this.” He groped for his belt, where his baton should be. He’d dropped it somewhere.
Dark eyes glittered behind the balaclava of the larger of the two remaining men. His hand danced over his holstered stun gun, fingers twitching. “Lucky punch.” He nudged his fallen comrade with a boot. “This rook was new, wanted to prove himself—”
“Needed to prove himself,” the other cut in. He gripped his own baton in both hands, flanking Rick.
“Maybe it wasn’t lucky, maybe it was a good punch. Think you could do it again?” The leader moved forwards.
Rick circled away, his feet grinding on the gravel. He backed down the alley he’d been dragged into and sneaked a glance over his shoulder. He’d ruled out running; an enemy behind you was worth twice one in front of you. Besides, there were some things he’d been brought up not to do. His mother’s harsh upbringing was still lurking just below the surface, restrained by his father’s calming influence.
He stumbled. Dropped to a knee. The man with the baton jumped for him. Rick grabbed a handful of gravel and flung it at his attacker. The man flinched. Shielded his eyes. Rick launched forwards, slamming his shoulder into his opponent and the guy staggered. Rick snaked behind him. Grabbed his neck, trapped one of the thug’s arms above his head. Rick squeezed. The man’s baton clattered to the floor, echoes rattling around the alley.
“Fucking idiot.” The leader side-stepped to cut off Rick’s escape.
“Stumble and feint,” Rick said through gritted teeth. “The Stann Taille one-two. A friend of mine taught me that move. You can have it for free.”
The man he was choking fumbled under his leather jacket for his knife. Sweat was burning Rick’s eyes. “Think you can draw that blade before you lose consciousness?” Rick hissed into his ears. The man clawed at Rick’s hands, shifting from side to side, trying to unbalance him. “Think I’ll let go when you pass out?”