by Anthology
If we got through the border.
It was nearly evening when we poured off the train, and grey clouds had drawn in around us like a heavy wool blanket, threatening snow. The wind was cold and ferocious, pushing through the pass like air through the lips of a dying man. It even smelled cold up here. Commonwealth guards peered closely into our faces and escorted us from the train to a concrete building where they would process our exit papers.
I shivered, from nerves or cold I wasn’t sure.
We were ushered through the document check and then out of the cold concrete building where found ourselves outside once more, on a flat band of freshly ploughed cement that stretched for three hundred feet between the New Commonwealth and the Mandate, an empty kill-zone over-watched by searchlights, guard-towers, and machine gun nests. On the far side sat another barbed wire fence and a brick building to counterpart the one we’d just exited. Above the brick building the red-and-blue flag of the People’s Mandate snapped in the wind. We walked out and into the killzone.
It was the longest three hundred foot walk of my life. With every step I expected to hear alarms or sirens, the chatter of machine guns, or the bright flare of a searchlight. But the only sound was the wind and the clapping of our boots against cement ground. The low brick building across from us gradually grew larger.
"Are you ready?" Song asked.
"No."
"Remember, they're going to separate us to be processed, so stick to the prepared notes in case they cross-reference our stories." She smiled at me then, and I was so shocked that for a moment I forgot all about Attia and defection. "Don't worry," she said. "Everything will go fine."
I could only nod.
The inside of the Mandate Custom House was heated and lined in eggshell-painted plaster. Soldiers separated us into lines that wove through cordoned pathways towards a row of polished wood kiosks.
Even through the freezing cold I could feel sweat in my arm pits and on my palms
A Mandate Border Officer waved me forward. He did not look up when I approached. Instead, he held out his hand expectantly. I froze. What was I supposed to do?
The man raised his and frowned at me. "Papers?" he said in a slightly pitched and strange sounding gothic dialect.
I hastily handed over the passport clutched in my sweaty hand. Gods! I could almost feel the fear seeping from my pores.
"I see those Commissariat officers really scared you," the guard said with a smile.
I opened my mouth to respond, and then snapped it close with a click.
I could defect.
I could tell him that I was being forced against my will to engage in espionage and that the woman now in line with the pleated dark coat was a New Commonwealth spy. I could start another new life for myself, somewhere near the coast. Sháng hăi or Guăngzhōu, maybe. I’d heard they were nice cities.
I shot a glance over at Song, who was talking to another guard not twenty paces away. A word and I could be free. A word and she was most likely dead.
The guard seemed amused as he flipped through the pages of my passport. "Don’t worry, I won’t make you say anything you’re not supposed to. What is your destination in the People's Mandate?"
"Korla," I croaked.
The guard nodded. "Purpose?"
Espionage. "Petroleum drill bits." If I was going to say something I should say it now. This was the moment where I got to choose. Until now I'd been pulled along by a rope, tugged by the whims of Song and the Commissariat and Attia. If I wanted to take my own route, this was my chance.
But what would happen to Attia? By necessity defecting meant revealing who and where she was. One way or another, it meant her death.
"Born in Kyiv, were you? I visited there once after the war. Those bridges over the Danapris!" the guard shook his head as though they were the most wondrous thing he'd ever seen. "What is the name of that tower bridge again? With the big red cables?" The guard looked up at me, mouth smiling but eyes dead behind big round glasses.
A test. The names of the bridges hadn’t been in the typescript.
The guard's smile was frozen. His eyes bored into me. Gods! I should tell him everything now!
And then I felt Attia's fingers walking up my back and I wasn’t Artur, or Unal, but Gaius again, lying in bed with her, sweaty and happy after having made love. "When I was young we lived in Kyiv," she whispered in my memory, "my Grandmother used to take me down to the river and tell me stories of Kyi and his sister Lybid, who founded a city to keep their people safe from dragons.”
I had turned over and smiled. "Was that true love, then?"
She shook her head. “True love is something else. Brighter even that dragonfire.”
"The Lybid," I whispered now to the guard. Damn you, Attia. I thought.
"What?"
"The Lybid. They call that bridge the Lybid." I said again, louder. Even now I couldn’t betray her.
I wondered if she'd known that.
***
EXCERPT FROM “ON WINGS OF VICTORY”
(TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL MANDARIN)
The Battle of the Bautai plateau is considered to have been the death knell of the Roman Empire. It had been so many centuries since the Imperial Air Command had used the dragons in battle that they made no attempt to adapt their strategy to fit the changing reality of war. The Mandate, on the other hand, had been desperately devising a way to meet the dragons that they knew were coming. Their draci had been dying slowly for decades, and unlike the Patricians, they had few qualms about developing new technologies. And so four hundred Mandate warplanes intercepted the Imperial flight on its way to strike Cháng’ān, and with carbines roaring brought down an entire generation of riders in a fusillade of tracer fire. Two hundred and thirty dead draci. In all the years since Actium, the Empire had never been defeated in battle. It is perhaps unsurprising that the Revolution followed so soon after.
***
5
The Korla safehouse was squared into the second floor of a three-storey tenement that sat on the outskirts of town. Out the window I could see a brightly lit fillingstation with a name written on it in characters that I couldn't read. It must have been the tenth such station I’d seen already. As far as I could tell, everybody in the Mandate had their own damn autocar.
Everything in the safehouse felt like it had been produced in a factory somewhere. The paintings were all prints that felt vaguely familiar, and the plastic-and-stainless-steel kitchen furniture looked utterly alien. The walls were papered in deep mustard yellow (printed with geometric designs that didn't line up along the rolled sheet's prominent seams) and plastic, lotus flower curtains covered the windows. Everything smelled like the chemical mothballs that were stuffed into the cabinets and between sofa cushions. A transistor radio sat on a sideboard in the living room, along with a pack of cigarettes. They tasted weaker than Great Northern Canal, and had little foam filters built into the butts. I sat at the plastic table in the kitchen and smoked them, trying to wrap my head around the strange world I now found myself in. After turning over the entire flat to make sure it hadn’t been bugged, Song had gone out into the city, to speak with her local contacts and leave a message at the hidden dead-drop for Attia.
The Mandate felt like an entirely different world. I’d noticed the difference as soon as we boarded the new train on the other side of the border. The seats were woven fabric and leather, and the private compartment even had a tiny little desk lamp bolted into the tinier side table. The glass on the window did not rattle.
"I think I was flagged at the border,” Song had said as soon as we were settled into our sleeper car.
“So what happens now?” I had asked.
“We stay alert.”
We had descended from the mountains at night and passed into the desert. I had quickly fallen asleep.
That first night my dreams were fractured and nonlinear. Perhaps a residual effect of the drugs they had given me. I would be at work, shovelling coal,
and then falling through foggy skies, sinuous dragons winging around me as I fell, breathing fire in bright flashes that lit up the white fog like signal flares. They would emerge briefly from the thick atmosphere and snap at my ankles with rows of jagged teeth. I would kick at them and then try to fly away but my legs transformed into fused blocks of granite. Legs that dragged me down to the surface, into murky dark, that weighed me down, down, down.
I had woken sweaty and restless to find we had stopped. Outside it was still night, the sky stretching endlessly over cold empty desert. Canopied trucks were parked alongside the train, and shadowed figures moved between them. Army men in olive coats and polished jackboots were on the train, checking passports and shining heavy electric torches in the faces of passengers. I felt my throat closing.
Song must have seen my face. “Don’t panic,” she had said. “This is routine.”
So I showed my passport to a bowed reed of a boy with thin dark whiskers sprouting from his lip and chin who barely glanced at it before moving on down the carriage. Then were moving again.
Night, day, and night again. More checkpoints. I slept and dreamed of Attia and of dragons.
I woke one morning to find we had arrived in Korla. One more check of documents and then out into the winter desert city.
It was an ancient city, a desert town in the Eastern Mandate that had at various times been part of other kingdoms and a key stop along the spice trading routes. It had been swallowed by the Han Empire centuries ago, and had stayed part of that state when the Mandate had moved from Heaven and to the People. The massive damming and hydrology projects of the previous decades had allowed Korla to boom into some kind of desert metropolis, with people fleeing the overcrowded cities of the East to settle on cheap land opened by networks of culverts and aquifers. Beyond the city limits sprouted new residential areas that had row-upon-row of symmetrical wooden dwellings with south-facing doors and hipped roofs tiled in baked clay.
The military loomed everywhere. Soldiers stood at every cross-street and it seemed that every other vehicle was a diesel-belching truck laden with strange equipment being ferried out into the freezing desert. If anything the troops here felt more edgy than those in Marakanda: so tense as to be almost fragile.
The research station where Attia had worked was out in the desert and restricted to military personnel. I didn’t want to think of how many more troops might be out there.
I lit another smoke. I was struggling to comprehend this place. Such an arid landscape, transformed now into something that teemed with life. Everything felt so deeply exotic to me.
I heard footsteps outside the door. Song, probably, returning from her reconnaissance. The door squealed open, and slammed shut with a thud. Song entered the laminated kitchen. "I think we're clear," she said.
“Any word from Attia?” I asked.
The spy shook her head. “No. There was no message from her at the dead drop. I’m not surprised. I think she must be laying low. The whole city is on edge. They know the military is looking for somebody. But they don’t know who. Or why. I’m going to leave a message for her tomorrow.” Song shrugged. “We have to hope that she responds.”
I raised my eyebrows. “That’s it? We wait for her to get in touch? That’s the Commissariat’s master plan?”
“Attia is hiding somewhere in this city, with half the Mandate army looking for her.” Song walked over to a kitchen cabinet and took a tin off the shelf. “Roadblocks, dogs, door-to-door searches, the whole thing.” She wrested the tin open and measured a few heaping spoons of dried chá into a glass pot. “They want her back, no doubt, but more especially they want the dragon’s egg she took with her.”
I frowned. “If they want her back so badly why haven’t plastered her face on every lamppost from here to the border?”
She set a kettle onto the stove and lit the gas burner. Blue fire flickered beneath the chromed steel. “When she defected it was on the front page of every newspaper here. The most prominent Commonwealth scientist, defecting—one more proof of the superiority of the Mandate way of life. If they admit that she’s a fugitive then they have to admit that they let a double agent into the most secret of their military research projects.”
I thought of Attia hiding in some tenement or basement here in this dusty, cold, desert city. Now it was her turn to sulk in the shadows, afraid that at any moment a heavy-booted kick would splinter a door and end her life. I wondered if she had any friends here, anyone she could trust.
Did she have a lover? Still, now, after so much time that thought made my heart ache.
“Do you want a drink?” The kettle barely had time to whistle before she whisked it off the element.
“Not any of that. You have kaffa?”
Song indicated a cupboard. “There’s some up there. I never drink it so you’ll have to brew it yourself.” She smiled apologetically. “I don’t know how. I always make my guests brew their own.”
“You get many guests here?” I asked as I walked over and opened the cabinet beside her. She indicated a tin painted with peonies and I slid it off the shelf.
“Song has many friends.” She brushed her shoulder against mine as she poured steaming water into the large glass chá pot. “She works selling petroleum. She hosts dinner parties once a month. Her friends think it queer that she never married.”
I put the kaffa tin on the counter, didn’t open it. “Why do you work for them?”
“What?”
“The Commissariat. Why do you work for them?”
Song smiled, regarded the chá leaves that unfurled inside the clear glass pot. “How could I betray my country, you mean?”
“No. That doesn’t offend me. I would betray the Commissariat in an instant.”
She laughed. “I suppose you would.” She stirred the tea and then placed a lid on the glass pot. “So what does offend you?”
“Why would anyone work for them unless they had to?” I said, thinking of Attia.
“Would you think less of me if I told you it was for the money?”
“I don’t believe it. Maybe if you were some minor functionary passing secrets in the mail for the occasional wad of cash. No. You’re in too deep, you know too much. You’re too good at what you do. You actually believe in them.”
Song was quiet for a long time. For a moment I wasn’t sure if she was at a loss for words or simply didn’t know where to start. “I did, once,” she said. “I’m well past a belief in anything now.”
She turned to me and our eyes met in a rush I was aware of how close she was, the heat of her body…in one moment there had been nothing between us, and in the next I felt some spark of tension or energy. I realized suddenly how long it had been. Her hand rested on the counter by the brewing chá. I placed mine on top of it. Without making a conscious decision, without considering, I leaned in.
My lips met a single finger she had raised between us. My eyes, which I didn’t remember closing, shot open. She took a half step back, opening a space between us that felt like a gulf, that snapped whatever energy I might have imagined between us. That finger could have been a wall, a thousand feet high. I felt my face going red. You’ve known her for less than a day. “I’m sorry,” I muttered.
Song just shrugged, picked up the pot and poured chá into an earthenware mug. "Tomorrow we will hear from Vitellia,” she said casually, as if nothing had just happened. “Hopefully we will get a better idea of what she wants. Why she wanted you brought out here."
I nodded lamely, shuffled back. “What—” I cleared my too loudly. I was only half-considering her words, still mostly thinking of how much of a fool I was. “—how do we get her out?”
"We’ve made plans. Here," Song reached into the same tin she'd pulled the dried chá leaves from. This time she removed a snub-nosed revolver. She placed it on the counter between us. "In case things get out of hand."
And like that, the moment between Song and I was forgotten. I reached forward cautiously and picked up t
he gun. It felt cool and heavy, nickel plated with a handle inlaid in polished black dragonbone. I hadn't touched one in decades, had never been trained to use one properly. I swung the chamber open and saw eight brass slugs inside.
Song's face became contemplative. "I have no idea what Vitellia was thinking when she insisted that we drag you out here to meet her. Why would she want you, a man she hasn't seen in twenty years?" She sipped from the steaming mug. "I keep coming back to that. Why you?"
A question that I asked often enough myself. “She saved my life once,” I said, thinking again of Aelia Capitolina. Smoke and fire and blood. So much blood. “Maybe she thinks I owe her.”
Song reached out and touched my cheek, the rough brush of her calloused hand reminding me of that attempted kiss. My face went hot again. “Get some sleep tonight. We have a lot to do tomorrow.”
Then she turned and left me standing in the kitchen, revolver still cradled in my beat-up hands.
***
NEWSREEL (ii)
YOUTH RISE TO THE CALL OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE
IN RAVENNA, AND EIKSTOWN. AELIA CAPITOLINA AND ROMA ITSELF, LOYAL YOUTH FED UP WITH THE COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY EXCESSES OF THE INTELLECTUAL-CLASS ARE RISING TO THE COMMITTEE’S CALL! THE UNIVERSITIES, THOSE FESTERING WENS OF PATRICIAN THOUGHT, ARE BEING OCCUPIED BY THE YOUNG GAURDS! THE INTELLECTUALS ARE DENOUNCED! IN TOWN SQUARES, IN VIEW OF ALL THEY SEEK TO OPRESS, THESE PATRICIANS CONFESS THEIR CRIMES! BUT THE PARTY IS BENEVOLENT! IT’S SEEKS NOT TO PUNISH, BUT TO RE-EDUCATE! TO THE FIELDS AND THE MINES THEY SEND THOSE WHO HAVE NOT LABOURED A DAY IN THEIR LIVES, TO LEARN INNER PEACE THORUGH HONEST HARD WORK. THE YOUNG GUARDS LOOK ON IN APPROVAL, KNOWING THAT TODAY, THE COMMONWEALTH IS STRONGER.