by Anthology
***
6
The next morning saw Song drive her autocar through the bustling centre of Korla to the Tiānlóng War Museum. Low mountains dusted with snow rose to the north of the city, and as we drove along the straight paved roads we passed ancient sandstone stupas and temples that sat beside low brick office buildings with brightly coloured awnings. The sidewalks were crammed with people: men in pressed suits with large open cuffs, women in long high-cut dresses with satin or silk shawls, an underclass dressed in grey coveralls covered in grease or coal, and hawkers with carts piled high with the fragrant dried pears that grew in orchards that surrounded the city. On the streets were hulking autocars with big round headlights and engines that growled like starving animals. When we finally pulled into the large gravel parking lot by the museum I leapt from the stuffy cab and into the cold desert air. Chrome-sided buses were parked in a neat row, and groups of tourists thronged everywhere, some chattering in Mandarin, others in Türkik dialects I couldn’t quite understand, most wielding hefty foldout maps and taking grinning family fotograms. They all seem so rich.
“We’ve been using war museum as a deaddrop for the last year,” Song had told me as we drove up. “There’s a potted plant in a Tiānlóng exhibit—when either of us need to communicate we mark the pottery with chalk and sink a deaddrop spike into the earth.”
I felt a knot in my chest. Just knowing that Attia came here regularly was almost too much to handle. What if she was here now? Twenty years separated us. Would I recognize the woman she’d become?
The museum had once been some kind of temple or palace: its façade was several stories tall and built of smooth stone the colour of desert sand. Pointed niches and intricate scrollwork ran along the second story, above large brass-bounded doors that stood open in an arched portal. Around the entrance leafless polar trees clustered along wending paths dotted with benches, their empty-fingered hands clutching at a grey winter sky. Song gestured, and then followed the surging mass of tourists as they flowed into the building. “The deaddrop is in the third exhibit hall,” she whispered, as we squeezed with the rest of the tourists through the tall open portal. “Anybody could be watching. Stay back from me.”
I suddenly wondered why she’d even brought me here. I felt the weight of the revolver in my pocket, pressing against my thigh. I shot surreptitious glances at the tourists who milled about, doing my best not to seem scared. I felt keenly an outsider here, no matter what Song said about looking like a mongrel. In Korla there seemed to be more Urghyrs than there were Hans, and many other races as besides: in theory an easy city in which to blend in. In theory.
We stepped into the large domed entrance and found ourselves beneath the outstretched wings of a dragon. Its skeletal frame was suspended from wires and lit by potlights that reflected as small pools of bronze against polished black bones. Hanging opposite the dragon was a decommissioned Mandate Warplane, nose-mounted prop still, under slung machineguns quiet. The creature above us was a Nile Dragon, the breed cultivated and brought to Roma, distinguished by its longer tail and lack of crest horns. Plane and dragon had been positioned by some drama-loving curators so that they were locked in frozen combat.
As we shuffled towards the wooden kiosk to buy museum tickets I was reminded that this wasn’t a culture that hated dragons, at least not the ones that had belonged to their own people. The Mountain Dragons—Heavenly Dragons, as they were still called here—were regarded with something verging on nostalgia.
We purchased tickets and entered into the first exhibit hall. “Wait here,” Song whispered. She disappeared into the crowd.
I stood alone in the middle of a long, dimly lit rectangular room dominated by a ceremonial stone arch, crenelated and covered with glazed brick. The arch was topped by an archery tower with a bowed roof that nearly brushed the ceiling of the exhibit hall. Along the black-painted walls there liteboxes with fotos of the original ruin standing in a mountain pass—‘Iron Gate’ was written in Türkik below the characters I couldn’t read; ‘Re-creation’ scrawled beside the tall arch. Tourists milled about, passed beneath the arch, peeked down from the archery tower above.
My head felt light and my hands jittery. Fear crept into me, seemed to pool in my gut. What if this was a trap? Song had said she thought she might have been flagged at the border.
I ran my gaze over the arch that rose in the middle of the tall-ceilinged room, trying to appear as if I was taking in the architecture. Instead I watched the people milling about it. Which of them might be spies, here to catch us.
Then, in the corner of my eye I saw her.
A woman, dark shawl wrapped about her head, dark glasses covering her eyes. I sucked in an audible gasp. She moved through the crowd, appearing and disappearing like a drowning swimmer being carried out to sea.
Attia. It was her. I knew it. Was so sure.
Just a glimpse in a crowd, a woman turning a corner into another exhibit hall, away from the gate. Away from me. I stood numbly. I wanted to call out to her. My heart thudded against my ribs.
Had it been her? I’d barely even glimpsed her face…
I was moving.
I pushed through the crowd and into the other hall. Dragons hung above me. I ran my gaze desperately through the crowd, searching for that dark shawl and dark sunglasses. Faces of grimacing tourists and laughing children swam through my vision. I shoved past them. Where had she gone? I had just seen her!
I was running. People cried curses as I elbowed past them. Through one exhibit and into another. Hanging planes. Machine guns and gas masks and shells as big as autos. Dragons, horned and not.
But no Attia. I was back in the domed entrance.
Am I hallucinating? The people milling around eyed me strangely. I didn’t care. I opened my mouth to call her name…
…and then Song was there, gripping my shoulder in a powerful hand, her broad forehead creased in anger. “What are you doing?” she hissed. I let her drag me across the tiled floor to the side of the room.
“I saw her,” I gasped. “Attia is here.”
That seemed to startle her for a moment. But then she shook her head and started hauling me towards the entrance of the museum. “It’s too late now,” she said. “I’ve been marked. There was a man watching the deaddrop. He’s following us.”
“What?” I craned my neck to look behind us.
“No,” she barked, and gripped my arm tighter. “Don’t look back.” She pulled me tighter as we passed the bronze doors and into the flat winter light. “I’ll deal with him, you hope he’s alone.” She pushed me away, towards the parking lot. “There’s a bus leaving in exactly one minute. Get on it. It will be safer if we split up. It will stop by the fillingstation. I’ll try to meet you at the safehouse tonight. Don’t trust anybody. If Attia is here I’ll find her.”
For a moment Song was another woman standing before me, saying much the same thing. Split up, it will be safer. I’ll meet you tonight.
But before I could say anything Song turned and hurried in the opposite direction along a path that wove through the leafless poplars. "Wait!" I called after her, questions only now bubbling into my stunned mind, but she did not stop or turn. She ducked, weaved, and then was lost in the crowd.
I turned to the parking lot. A bus was being loaded: a wobbling old man dressed head to toe in khakis was being helped up steep stairs his equally wobbling wife.
My gaze skittered through the crowd that milled in front of the museum, searching desperately for Song or Attia. Only blank and unknown faces looked back. They all seemed to be watching me. I’ve been marked. I felt a shiver. Suddenly every man in the crowd was a Mandate officer. Every pocketed hand was reaching for a gun.
In the parking lot the bus door rattled shut. The engine growled. Air brakes hissed.
And I was running. Out into the lot, away from the museum and the dragons. From Song and Attia, and whatever men hunted them. I ran into the path of the bus as it started to turn out of the
lot, beat my open palms against the aluminium grill. The driver swore as he slammed the breaks. I ran to the side door and hammered on the glass-and-metal until it folded in. I managed a mangled apology in Türkik and pulled some creased banknotes from my pocket. I didn’t bother to count them as I shoved them at the driver. He and everybody on the bus stared at me as I made my way to an empty seat at the back.
My breaths came in short gaps. Had I been seen? If Song was marked then there was no way I hadn’t been. I ignored the disapproving looks of my fellow passengers and stared out the window, waiting for olive garbed soldiers to come running towards the bus, brandishing lights and guns. But nobody approached, and after a pregnant moment the driver yelled something at me I didn’t understand and then pulled out of the lot and onto the road. We turned a corner and the museum disappeared behind us.
On my chest I could feel the weight of my terror and in my pocket I could feel the weight of the gun, pulling me, down, down, down.
***
EXCERPT FROM, “ON DRACI AND REVOLUTION”
(CENSOR’S COPY, REDACTED)
The First Mandate War ended shortly after the Glorious Revolution, with the New Commonwealth Committee suing for peace after being unable to organize anything resembling a defence. Many of the former Empire’s Northern and Eastern territories were ceded to the Mandate, a sore wound that would fester in the heart of the Old Empire. Some hoped that a new government would mean an end to all war between the two powers. They were wrong. The Second Mandate War began some ten years after the end of the first, with the New Commonwealth government demanding the return of ceded territories. The conflict has raged since, fought mostly in the mountains and steppes of the central continent, with intermittent ceasefires that last sometimes years, sometimes only months.
In the current estimate some 98 million men have died over a border that has shifted imperceptibly in the last forty years.
***
7
I was a piece in some game being played and I didn’t understand the rules.
I took a drag of a cigarette and watched the darkened outline of the safehouse. I had been out here for hours, smoking cigarette after cigarette, waiting for any sign that the safehouse had been compromised. Waiting for Song. Waiting for some sign from Attia.
Had that truly been her?
I lit another cigarette.
Don't trust anybody.
That wasn’t new to me. I’d known that since those bloody days in Aelia Capitolina, the massive student rally that was supposed to have been the beginning of our own revolution. The Commissariat had known all about the rally, of course. They had infiltrated our local organizing councils with spies and agents.
People like my roommate Sina.
And at the height of the riots, as the students gathered at the foot of the Great Hill and the army brigades had closed in around them, Sina and those like him had pulled out their guns. They didn’t even try to arrest anybody: they had just started shooting. We were unarmed. Many of my friends, the last true friends I could remember having, had died in those desperate moments.
In that bloody chaos Attia and I had become separated. We’d made desperate plans to meet in a rundown kaffahouse and gone our separate ways. It was safer to spit up, we’d thought. But of course she had never shown up.
And now I stood in another city in front of another safehouse, waiting for another woman to come meet me.
Res mutatae mutatae non sunt…
The cigarette butts built up about my feet.
It was well past midnight when I slunk through darkened hallways up to the second floor and entered the safehouse. The inside was black. I stumbled around the dark room, trying to remember where the light switch was, cracking my toe against a wood footstool and banging my shin against a low glass table.
I stumbled into the kitchen. Through moonlight filtering in the window I could see the outline of the peony-painted kaffa tin still sitting on the counter. Quiet. Empty.
I flicked on the kitchen light and picked up the tin. In that moment there was nothing else in world I needed more. I filled a pot with water spat from groaning pipes and cranked the gas burner. I prised the lid off the coffee tin and scooped down inside.
Something beneath the powdered grounds. I reached into the tin with my hand. My fingerers found something. A thick piece of card. I pulled it free.
Words and numbers, written in a blotted black script that I knew so well.
Don’t Trust Her. Come Alone. Res mUtatae
279.0557 φ, 274.552 λ
Attia. I knew that writing anywhere. She had been here. But when? A woman in a shawl, moving away through a crowd.
Heart hammering, I stepped backwards and slumped into the kitchen chair. Don’t trust her. Who, Song? The woman who had brought me here, who had probably just been arrested? Had the note been left for me? It must have been. But how would she know…the kaffa tin. Song never uses it.
Come Alone. But where? How to find her? My head swirled.
The numbers…an address? Map Coordinates?
I heaved out of the chair and back into the livingroom, to a tall red-mahogany bookcase with an oversized atlas. I dropped it onto the table and flipped it open to a massive map of the world. There was the zero degree line, running through Sháng hăi. I ran my finger along it. 274.552 λ. I frowned. There were only 180 degrees in each direction. 274.552 didn’t even exist as a position. More from habit, I ran my finger along the equator, and then counted lines to the north, were the pole was marked 90. Neither coordinate was even on the map.
It doesn’t make sense…
Why the riddles? Why all the games? I was furious. I ground my teeth so hard I thought they might explode into talcum.
Focus. Obviously it was a code. One I could decipher and Song couldn’t. Res mutatae…Those words we’d thought were so clever. That she’d inscribed in that copy of the Little Green Book.
Suddenly inspired, I reached into the worn leather bag that still sat by the door where I’d left it. I pulled out the copy of her book. 279.0557 φ. I flipped open to page 279. Her scrawl filled the margins: symbols and numbers raised to the power of crazy. Nothing stood out. Frustrated, I flipped to 274. The same. I thumbed through the book, looking for either of those old Greek letters.
“Cāco,” I swore. What the hell was Attia playing at? Why the hidden messages? Why all the secrecy? Why had she not left a message for Song at the deaddrop and have done with it? Why had she brought me all the way here…
I was staring at the last page of the book, with the airbrushed image of Wagner smiling benevolently. Attia had defaced his image with her pen, making him look like some kind of demon or evil spirit. She had hated the Party, the Central Committee. What had happened to her? Why had she changed so suddenly and so much? That was the real question.
On the blank page opposite the Chairman she had scrawled our slogan.
And a number. No equation this time, just a single long string of digits: 239.0521634, followed by a ‘u’.
I looked back at the thick card I’d pulled from the kaffa tin. Res mUtatae.
Things Change…
Pen, paper, some hastily scrawled equations. If I took each number on the note, subtracted it from the value in the book…I ran my finger along the map. West and then North. My finger ran along the map, drawn to the new coordinates like a lodestone. It stopped in the desert to the south and east of Korla. I felt triumph, and then a cold chill. There. Attia was there.
I’d need a more detailed map to find out where, exactly, but she was there.
People talk of butterflies in their stomach—I felt more like mine was being gnawed at by a nest of rats. I took a calming breath. Think clearly. Things weren’t always what the seemed. How had she known I’d take the book? How had—
Footsteps outside the door. I slammed the atlas closed and shoved the green book into my bag just as the door swung open.
Song stood in the doorway. I found that I was holding my breath. Don�
��t trust her. She looked me over, ran her gaze through the room, over the atlas on the table, the leather bag on the couch beside me. Her thin lips pursed into a line. After a moment she stepped inside, bolting the door behind her. “Going somewhere?” she asked.
I tried to keep my breathing calm, my voice steady. “I thought you might have been arrested.”
“I managed to slip him.” She took the plush chair beside me. “Were you followed?”
“I-I don’t think so. I waited outside to make sure.”
She nodded. Her eyes searched my face, and I couldn’t meet that gaze. I studied the closed atlas before me. “Did she get in touch with you, Artur?”
Should I tell her? Did I have any reason not to trust her? “No,” I said, though I knew that I’d hesitated longer than I should have.
Song reached over and put her hand on my leg. Firm pressure moving up my thigh. I was hard almost immediately. All those years alone, hiding, nobody to trust or to talk to…My eyes met hers. That arcing energy I’d felt the night before and thought imagined sparked in her eyes.
Don’t trust her…
I sucked in a ragged breath. No. This wasn’t right. I stood up suddenly.
“What’s wrong?”
“I need the bathroom,” I managed. I grabbed my leather case from the seat beside me.
Song stood up, but I was already moving. Into the hallway and towards the bathroom. I did not stop or think. I slid through the doorway and slammed it shut behind me. I yanked the light-chain and rattled the lock across.
My breath came in ragged gasps. What was happening?
I shoved my hand into my pocket and pulled the gun out. The gun Song had given me. If she meant to betray me why would she had given me a gun? I snapped open the chamber. Inside: eight brass slugs, arranged in a tight ring.
Song padded to the threshold. She tried the door, which rattled against the lock. "Artur," she said. "What’s going on? Let me in.”
I pulled one of the rounds out of the gun. Turned it over in my hand. My stomach was doing somersaults. The casing was empty. There was no bullet loaded inside.