by Steve Haynes
‘But surely,’ I struggled to grasp all the implications, ‘it’s not unheard of for crowds of people to gather together.’
‘It’s rarer than you think. And when it does happen, who do the people gather to listen to?’
‘The Duke,’ I said.
‘Yes – or his officials. And who does he place throughout the crowd?’
I thought back to the public hangings I had seen not long before. People were gathered in the square. The Autumn Guard had been placed strategically among the crowd. They were all strong men and fiercely loyal to the Duke. They set the tone for such gatherings, always.
He smiled. ‘You might think the Duke is always going to parties, always surrounded by many people. In a modestly sized room with not too many people, he can still dominate. He is, after all, one of the most powerful men in the city, a popular man. So long as the people admire him, he has nothing to fear.’
‘Every public appearance is carefully managed?’
‘The mores of our society have been meticulously orchestrated for generations. The room is never too big, the crowd too large, unless the situation is controlled.’
I sat in silence for a while, considering what he had said.
He was the one to break that silence. ‘I’m wondering what you’ve got yourself into, kid.’
I stood up and headed for the door. ‘Thank you for your time, Mr Knox.’
As I was leaving he said, ‘Whatever it is, if I were you I would put a stop to it, before they notice you.’ He grabbed my arm. ‘And one other thing. Whatever you do, don’t mention my name.’
I stared at him, then pulled my arm free. ‘One other question,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard rumours of secret theatres, secret performances.’ In truth I had heard only the slightest hint of this, from Ivy. ‘Know anything about that?’
He shook his head, so I turned and walked away.
He called after me. ‘Promise me you won’t mention my name.’
I walked along the river for a while, going over what Knox had said, then decided to head back to the Café Soleil. The place was full when I went in, and there was an intoxicating taste of joy in the spores in the air. Mr Bigbury spotted me, came over and shook my hand warmly.
‘It’s incredible,’ he said, ‘I’ve had people queuing to come in.’
The Sholla silhouette play was running. I could see Bigbury had already employed new serving staff to cope with the upturn in his fortunes. I glanced around the café. Over by the window there were two men who looked out of place. They were dressed sombrely and seemed to be more interested in us than in the play. I couldn’t sense their spores, beneath the strength of the others in the café. One of them had a notebook and wrote something down in it. As he began to look up in my direction I turned away.
‘Mr Bigbury, can I speak to you in private?’
‘Very busy here,’ he said, waving me away.
I wanted to insist but what would I say to him now? Did I really expect him to let me just pack up the mechanism and take it away? Was that even what I wanted?
It was getting late and I needed to think. I left the café and headed for my lodgings.
I lay on my bed, my mind a whirl. Would my little silhouette display in a small café really cause concern amongst the city’s rich and powerful?
Then there was a knock on the door, and the fact that I almost jumped out of my skin told me how on edge I’d become. To my surprise, the person standing there when I opened the door was Eleanor. She looked almost as nervous as I felt.
‘Powell,’ she said. She threw her arms around me and kissed me.
Her spores insinuated themselves into me, dark and heavy like anchor weights dragging me down into darkness and uncertainty. She was on the verge of tears, and all I could think of then was that I wanted to make things right with her. She kissed me again, so fiercely I couldn’t help but respond. She pulled me over to the bed and brought me down with her. She pulled her skirt up and grappled with my belt. The sex was desperate and brief, and she left the bed almost immediately afterwards.
‘I can’t stay,’ she said simply, ‘and I can’t see you again.’
‘What?’
‘You’re being watched. I’ve taken a risk by being here.’
‘You can’t just, do what we just did, then leave.’
‘I have to. If you care anything for me, don’t try to speak to me again. Go back to clocks and phenakistoscopes, Powell. Do it now, while maybe you still can.’
She came close, kissed me again, then left before I could argue any more.
I hardly slept that night. In the morning I forced myself to get dressed and head out to work. I moved down the stairs. In the front hall I looked for the morning’s letters on the table by the door. There was a letter with my name on it. I picked it up, cautiously, turned it over. And saw the state seal stamped in red wax.
I opened the letter at once. I had been summoned to meet with the Duke again, that afternoon. A carriage would be sent for me this time.
At work I explained to Mr Jackson that I would have to go out in the afternoon, and showed him the letter. I struggled through the morning, unable to focus on my work.
‘Whatever is the matter with you?’ Ivy asked me.
‘It’s nothing,’ I said.
She frowned at me, knowing I had lied but not knowing why.
The carriage arrived at the appointed hour. I was ushered into the room and left alone with the Duke.
‘Take a seat, Powell,’ he said.
I sat down.
He paused, then took a quick breath. When he spoke, it was a grave sound at the lower end of his register. ‘Last year, over in Summer City, the Summer Duke was replaced. Did you hear of that?’
‘It was reported,’ I said, ‘in the newspapers, Your Grace.’
‘Yes. The Summer Duke developed a kind of illness. He no longer commanded the respect of others. It emerged that while in office he had committed certain acts that were illegal, and he was brought to justice for his crimes. It was all quite shocking.’
I tried to remain calm. I thought it best not to comment unless comment was requested.
‘Those of us in positions of power, we have a certain responsibility to maintain order. Don’t you agree? Events cannot be allowed to fall out of control. That would embarrass us all.’
‘I agree,’ I said, automatically without any conscious thought. I could not do otherwise in the presence of a man whose spores were so dominant.
‘I feel in a way that I am responsible for the situation you find yourself in. I encouraged you to take action. But to improve your prospects, not to cast them to the wind. Unfortunately you have chosen a very unwise path.’ He picked up a piece of paper that was on his desk, then placed it back again. ‘This café owner, Mr Bigbury, is in a very precarious position, though I daresay he is unaware of it.’
‘I would like to assure you – ’
The Duke held up a hand to silence me, and fixed me with an icy stare. ‘Should things return to normal quickly, there will be no need for any action against him.’
‘His business had declined of late, Your Grace,’ I said. I don’t know what I hoped to achieve by this.
‘Should things not return to normal he shall have no business at all. Are we clear?’
‘Yes, Your Grace.’
‘I am being lenient with you, Powell,’ he said. ‘As a kindness to my niece, I am taking the view that your actions were unthinking and careless, and that you did not intend this . . .’ He hesitated, then said, ‘Perversion.’
The force of his contempt struck me like a fist.
‘I could easily take a different view,’ he said. ‘You can leave now. I hope for your sake I have no cause to speak to you again. Live a quiet life, Powell.’
A footman escorted me from the building. A carriage took me
to the Café Soleil, rather than to Mr Jackson’s studio. It seemed I was to waste no time in removing my mechanism.
Mr Bigbury had seen the carriage drop me off outside.
‘Was that a state carriage?’
‘It was,’ I told him. ‘There is something I have to discuss with you.’
‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’
‘You need to make time for this,’ I said. ‘I’m taking the mechanism.’
His expression changed from impatience to confusion. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Please, can we go somewhere and talk?’
He relented, gave some instructions to his staff and went with me to an upstairs room. I followed him up the stairs with a heavy heart, readying myself for another difficult discussion. With Knox I had been in charge. With the Autumn Duke I had been powerless. What was my relationship with Mr Bigbury? I realised I had not given this any thought till now.
Before we’d even sat down in the small sitting room he said, ‘You can’t have it.’
‘It seems I’ve infringed someone else’s copyright,’ I said. ‘The machine is illegal. I’ve been ordered to dismantle it.’
‘Who has the copyright, then? I will deal with them instead of you.’
My heart fell, caught out immediately in a deception conceived in too much haste and told with too little conviction. He caught the crestfallen stench in my spores and his eyes narrowed.
‘You’re lying.’
I nodded, admitted it, and told him the truth at length. Slowly he came to accept that the machine would have to come down. In the course of this he seemed to age before my eyes, the spark of new life I had ignited in him cruelly snuffed out.
We sat in silence for a while, not knowing what more to say. At last he looked at me and shook his head sadly.
‘We’ll take the machine down after I close up for the day. If we try to do it with customers in we’ll have a riot on our hands.’
I nodded.
‘I’ll take no money from you,’ I said. ‘Perhaps what you’ve made will tide you over for a while.’
‘That’s not necessary,’ he said, ‘we made a deal.’
But I insisted.
‘If only we were warriors like Sholla,’ he said.
‘She defended her King,’ I said, ‘but I wonder if perhaps she had no more choice than us.’
I tried to go back to my former life. Weeks passed. I assembled clock mechanisms, and always in my head I imagined they would drive a play of light and shadow through mirrors and lenses. I took photographs and installed them within phenakistoscopes. How joyously the images danced before my eyes as I gazed through the slats as the drum turned.
Sometimes I would look up from my work and catch Ivy watching me. She would sigh and shake her head, and swear that she did not know what to do with me. I felt some kind of mistrust from her, or disappointment, which I could not understand.
I went back to the Café Soleil from time to time, and was relieved to see the business had not gone completely back to its former state of ruin. For now at least, many customers were continuing to visit there. I came to recognise a certain look in the eye of the people there, the scent of nostalgia lingering in their spores. They had found something wonderful for a time, and they would remember it always.
I thought often of Sholla, the warrior woman who defended her King. How I wished that she could have been free to follow her own destiny, to live a life of her own choosing.
One day I saw Eleanor again. She was on the opposite side of a busy square, almost masked by street stalls, but we saw each other and she came over to speak to me.
‘Powell,’ she said, ‘it’s been a while.’
‘How are you?’
She sighed and glanced behind her. People were bustling around us and our voices could barely be heard with the rattle of barrows and cycles moving past. ‘I don’t have the same freedom I once did,’ she said.
‘What can I do?’ I asked.
‘Can you change the world for me?’
At the time, I didn’t know how to answer. She smiled sadly, then said goodbye and vanished back into the crowd.
It struck me then that the danger had not passed. If I stayed in Autumn City I would always be watched, for years to come. I would have to live my life within the narrowest of margins or suffer the consequences.
That would be no way to live.
‘I have to leave,’ I said.
Ivy and I were alone in the workshop. I had already spoken to Mr Jackson.
She said, ‘I think that will be for the best.’
There was suddenly a striking openness in the taste of her spores, like a flower opening up in the morning sun. I was quite taken aback by it, hadn’t realised until that moment how very closed off she had been with me.
‘This episode,’ she said, ‘has put many people in danger. Those of us who love theatre so very much.’
‘Ivy?’
‘Oh Powell, you really have been crashing around. Your research in the library was noticed, of course. Then asking questions down in the old Riverside district. Fortunately you never did track down anyone really important. If you had, I don’t know what we would have done with you.’
‘Done with me?’
She reached out a hand across the workbench and placed it tenderly on mine. ‘I wish I could take you to a performance, let you see for yourself, but the risk is too great now. I could never be sure that we wouldn’t be followed.’
I should have been shocked, but somehow I was not surprised by any of this, not at all. Spores may tell you that someone is being evasive, but they do not always tell you why. Now I knew.
‘The best I can say to you, Powell, is that you were almost there, with what you did at the Café Soleil. If you really want to know what it is, what’s so very special about theatre, you have the means to discover it for yourself.’
I smiled, and she did too.
She rose to her feet, withdrawing her hand from mine. ‘But,’ she said, ‘you will be very wise to discover it somewhere far away from here.’
She pressed her hat into place, paused for a moment by the entrance. It was late and it looked dark outside.
When she had gone I sat alone for a while in the quiet stillness of the workshop, then locked up for the last time, posting my keys through the letterbox as I left.
The difficult part was figuring out how to travel lightly with the gear we needed. A quadricycle with a storage compartment at the back met our needs perfectly. It meant we had to follow well-worn routes, but that suited us. After all, we needed to come into contact with people.
We’d spend the morning setting up the tent, and putting up signs advertising our show. If we chose our spot well we could easily get a dozen customers, several times over each afternoon, enough to fill our small tent. We sold drinks too, at a little profit per bottle. We got by.
Knox really took to this kind of life. It came naturally and easily to him. He was hardly recognisable as the dishevelled, beaten down man I first met in a hovel in Autumn City.
‘Roll up,’ he called out. ‘See something you’ve never seen before!’
I wound up the mechanism and let it go, casting light and shadow inside the tent. Over time we created new plates for the mechanism, some of them a little more political than others. Someday, perhaps, things could change. But for now we concentrated on putting on a good show. We got a real sense of satisfaction from that, and we always had happy customers.
We travelled far from Autumn City. A small show like this could go unnoticed, we hoped, so long as we kept moving and never stayed in one place too long. It’s a very small kind of revolution, I know, but maybe that is the only way it can be done. Knox and Powell took each day as it came, and served no Duke or King.
V. H. LESLIE
The Cloud Cartographer
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The plain stretched boundlessly into the distance, an uninterrupted path of white. Frontier land as untouched as virgin snow. The wind at this height blew unrestrained, buffeting the terrain, shaping it, creating a rolling appearance like the crests of waves ebbing and flowing against the horizon. It looked pure, solid from afar, but when up close, in the midst of it, you could see how insubstantial it was. Not even white but a medley of misty colours, grey or blue or pink. In a certain light, you could almost see the particles, the ground grainy underfoot as if you were seeing it drunk. If you looked at it too hard, at the hazy floor beneath your feet, your body would become conscious of the laws it defied and it was easy to imagine yourself plummeting back to earth. So you kept your eyes level with a point at the horizon and kept on walking.
Ahren had been cloudwalking for ninety days. He knew exactly as he recorded each day in his journal. It was more of a log really, containing details about the expedition so far, the terrain he’d covered and the distance he made each day, along with any meteorological data of significance. But he’d always conclude with a line or two of his personal musings, fragments of half-remembered poetry, his memories and regrets. In such a lonely land, his thoughts were his only company.
Ahren looked up. Above, cirrostratus clouds had appeared like floating cotton and he squinted into the halo they’d formed around the sun. He was happy for the reprieve; the last fortnight had been especially fine and the lack of cloud cover above had left him terribly exposed. But though he was thankful, he watched the sky cautiously for if the halo began to shrink, it would bring rain. And rain was the worst variable on this cloudface.
Ahren needed to get further inland, where the terrain was more solid. He pulled the compass from his pocket and watched as the needle settled. He wrote the coordinates in his journal and began the slight ascent west.
Ahren had always been fascinated with the contours of the sky. He wanted to go up, up where the air was cleaner and purer, up where you could see stars, a mere myth to the people below his feet: the sky forever obscured by smog and dense cloudscapes of pollutants. The clouds that floated above Ahren – cirrus, altostratus, cumulonimbus – were the only reminders of what had existed before, and he was one of only a few privileged enough to see them.