Chains

by A. J. Hartley

  “It will be magnificent,” he breathed.

  If we ever finished, it would be. But the rainy season had come in earnest and we were only half done. Every day the great blue sweep of the Feldesland sky would turn purple gray, bringing torrents of warm, blinding rain that turned the streets to streams and raised the river Kalihm eight feet or more. The land was awash in snakes of types we only saw at this time of year, and upriver, the Lani shanties where Tanish and I had been born were half submerged. Up on the bridge’s towers and gantries, the air was thick with mosquitoes and kuval flies which got into your hair and burrowed into your scalp so that we spent our evenings burning them off each other. The crocodiles claimed whatever ground the engorged river gave them, and the city huddled in a little closer, waiting for it all to stop.

  During one particularly bad morning drench, Sir William blustered, “Damned inconvenient, this rain,” from under the silk brim of a top hat that gleamed like the flank of a wet buffalo. “Wouldn’t you say, little Anglet?”

  I blinked and looked down, studying my hands.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “Though…”

  I faltered as he turned his gaze upon me. Once more it felt like being eyed by an aging lion.

  “Yes?” he prompted.

  “Nothing, sir,” I whispered.

  “Out with it, girl!” he said, nudging my chin up with the crook of a pink finger.

  I didn’t know what to say. Everyone stayed inside this time of year, of course, except us, the Lani steeplejacks and the black Mahweni laborers who were the masons and brick layers. We were out in it at all hours, a hundred feet up in the air as the lightning flickered around us and the wind threatened to blow us right off and into the churning waters a hundred feet below. I tried not to think of that nameless Lani boy who had fallen weeks ago and focused on Sir William; he was the one I needed to impress, after all.

  Or at very least, the one I should not offend.

  I shook my head, but I could not avoid his shrewd blue eyes, and suddenly he was smiling, though without much humor. “You were about to say,” he continued, “that the rainy season comes at the same time every year and we should have anticipated as much. Correct?”

  I blushed.

  “It would be impertinent to say such a thing, sir,” I said.

  “It would at that,” said Sir William, considering the bridge’s massive brick towers and the chain that looped between them. “Though that wouldn’t make it any less true. We’re behind and over budget into the bargain. If we’d had the backing of the dashed city from the outset we’d be watching coal and granite trains rolling across Bar-Selehm’s first suspension bridge right now.”

  That might have been overly optimistic.

  “Two more hours of daylight,” Sir William mused aloud. “Let’s get the next section dried off and see if we can get a lick of paint on her before we knock off for the day. Think you can manage that for me, little Anglet?”

  I wasn’t, in fact, little. I was tall and slim and strong, as strong as any of the boys my age, but next to Sir William, whose round, well-fed belly was draped with a frock coat big as a tent, I felt little, inside as well as out.

  “We can try, sir,” I said, eyes down.

  “That’s the spirit, Miss Sutonga,” he remarked, walking out onto the suspended catwalk. “That’s the spirit.”

  I watched him stroll away, unaware of the boy at my back until he spoke.

  “He needs to get you a leash,” said Vernal, one of the white boys whose masters supplied the paint. “That’s what they do with pet monkeys, ain’t it?”

  “I’m not his pet,” I shot back, my face suddenly hot.

  “No?” said Vernal, leaning into my face. “Didn’t know his lordship’s tastes ran to little Lani scrubbers,” he added, pouting his lips and making kissy noises.

  I reached back to punch him, but he ducked away and skipped off whistling, pleased he had annoyed me. He made for the lead paint wagon, absently patting the striped orlek that drew it, and it was clear that he had forgotten me already. I should have been used to that kind of thing, but I wasn’t.

  I took my paint, my brush stuffed into my tool belt, and climbed the ladder temporarily fixed to the side of the southern tower, moving fluidly, hand over hand.

  Like a pet monkey.

  I pushed the thought aside irritably. At the top, right below the burnished saddle over which the great chains ran, I climbed onto a scaffolding platform, listening to the whistle of the wind through the temporary timber frame. I took one of the harnesses from the hook on the wall, moving a little faster than usual. I was sure of the ladders because it was my team that had rigged them, but the scaffolding had been trucked in and hoisted into place by a crew I had never seen before, and I didn’t trust their work. They were Lani, like me, but they had come down from Tsuvada, a mountain town two hundred miles north of Bar-Selehm, and they were a strange bunch, their Feldish so heavily accented that the white foreman complained of not being able to understand them.

  I kept Sir William’s offer to myself, worried that the other painters would observe the way he talked to me, the way he took me aside at the end of each day to compliment me on my work. I didn’t even tell Tanish, though I caught him looking at me once as Sir William walked beside me, chatting amiably. The boy’s eyes were wide with surprise and, I thought, anxiety on my behalf, but when he asked me about it later, I dodged, shrugging it off as unimportant. I don’t think he believed me. That evening I watched Sir William take his seat next to Harkson between a pair of armed dragoons as each of the work crew filed forward to receive their wages, the foreman checking off their names in the great ledger. That somebody who handled so much of the company’s money on a daily basis, someone on whom the very city depended to make its trade and traffic run, would take the likes of me seriously seemed preposterous. I grinned to myself and Tanish, watching sidelong at my elbow, frowned.

  “What?” I asked.

  He shook his head but he looked confused and hurt, even resentful, so that I felt guilty. Whether it was my keeping a secret from him or the possibility of my leaving him that kept me awake that night, I wasn’t sure.

  * * *

  Two weeks after our initial conversation, Sir William and I were crossing the bridge with his backpack of wages and the laborers were beginning to line up at the dockside table set up by the foreman. He was pleased, and not just because it had not rained all day and we had almost caught up to where we were supposed to be so that one more week would finish this stage of the job. He had, he informed me, spoken to Morlak and terms had been offered. If the gang leader agreed and I was so inclined I would, on completion of my part in this project, be free of the gang. I would be a skilled worker in my own right with a wage of my own and, one day, all other things being equal, a house—a real house—in Bar-Selehm, my ties to Morlak severed in ways that did not mean I would spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder. It felt like one of those rare moments up high on one of the city’s great smokestacks when the wind clears the smog and you can see the beauty of the land and breathe the cool, bright air so that, for a second, you become a bird, alone and untethered, radiant, and giddy with joy and possibility.

  And now it was clear that I could no longer ignore the anxiety which had been swelling in my mind like the billowing purple clouds amassing over the river.

  Tanish.

  I did not want to leave the boy to Morlak. Tanish needed me, and if there was any way I could take him with me, I would. If I could not, if Sir William thought the boy too young or too undisciplined, I did not know what I would do. I would have to raise the matter, but how to do so needed thinking about.

  That night, under a sliver of moon thin as the blade of a Mahweni scythe, I took Tanish aside, away from the dinner-camp fires. He, along with the rest of the Seventh Street gang, had taken to making fun of our Tsuvada cousins, who sang folk songs as they worked and laughed too much. They marveled at the skyline of Bar-Selehm as it swelled throu
gh the smog across the river as if they had never seen a real city before.

  “Goodness gracious!” Tanish sang out in a shrewd parody of the Tsuvada Lani lilt, “Did you ever see such a thing? You call this a chimney? We do not have such things in Tsuvada. And this amazing construction is called a bridge? Never have I seen its like before! But certainly I will help you build it. How hard can it be? What is this? Metal? Never have I seen such remarkable stuff…”

  The Tsuvada boys seemed cheerfully unaware of the way they were so relentlessly teased. Nor did they seem concerned that the rest of us clearly had questions about the standards of their workmanship. But then why should they? They did not claim to be skilled craftsmen.

  “They work cheap,” I said. “And the heights don’t seem to bother them. I suppose that’s all they really need. It’s only painting, after all.”

  Quite unlike steeplejacking, I added to myself. I was proud of the work I did, work that took experience and expertise. It rankled to be working alongside boys who had never so much as rigged a ladder.

  “Morlak made fifty pounds out of us for this, you know,” said Tanish when we were a safe distance from the camp. “Commission, he called it. Fifty pounds! And he won’t do any of the work!”

  We would see half of that between the ten of us, if we were lucky. Tanish was new to the gang and hadn’t quite figured out the economic realities of life on Seventh Street. I shushed him even though there was no one around. Criticizing the gang leader, even in private, was a dangerous habit to get into.

  “Can you see Morlak up there, risking his neck a hundred feet above a river full of crocodiles and hippos?” I demanded in a low voice. “Of course he won’t be doing the work himself. Grow up.”

  “Sorry, Ang,” he said, crestfallen, so that I took pity on him and ruffled his hair.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “I just don’t want you drawing attention to yourself. Not with remarks like that. You hear me?”

  Tanish nodded, eyes wide and mouth closed. He hadn’t seen much of Morlak’s wrath yet, but he had heard the stories, seen the scars. We did not work for Morlak by choice. We worked for him because we had no other prospects and because, once committed, we were, as Sir William had observed, chained to him forever. If we ran away he would find us and make us an example to the others. The Bar-Selehm police paid little attention to the goings-on in the loose conglomeration of castes and families that the papers called the Lani community.

  “What did you want to tell me?” he asked.

  I blinked. Faced with the boy’s open, expectant gaze, and with the prospect of revealing that I might be leaving the gang, I found the words would not come.

  “Oh,” I said. “Nothing really. Just … I heard that when we’re done with the bridge, we’re supposed to re-point the brickwork on the Courtcastle chimneys at Evensteps. They say that from the top, on a clear day, you can see elephants moving along the riverbank.”

  “I know,” he said, giving me an odd look. “I was there when Sarn was talking about it.”

  “Right,” I said, feeling worse than ever. “I forgot.”

  * * *

  After Tanish wandered back to his friends, I made my way down to the river as the laborers in the camp spent their earnings on drink and women. I just sat there, gazing across to where the Beacon glowed over the city, listening to the water boiling around the bank, thinking about Tanish and about what my life outside the gang might be. Even in my reverie, I kept my wits about me. It was said that packs of hyenas sometimes strayed into the docklands, though it was men I was really on my guard for. Sure enough, after only a few minutes alone, I spied two figures moving purposefully down the shore toward me. Unlike the others whose shadows I could make out in the flickering of a dust-bin fire who were slovenly with drink, these two seemed quite sober.

  Something furtive in their movements made me wary. I slipped into the deeper shadow beneath the great pilings of the south-side tower and, because I feel safer in the air, began to climb the framework of girders silently. As I was doing so, they turned back to face their carousing fellows. In the amber light of the fire I saw something strange.

  I had assumed they’d be the black laborers from the hut camp, but I was surprised to see that one was Lani and one was white. Indeed, I recognized them both. The Lani was Sarn, a lean-faced boy from the Seventh Street gang who had used the tar-like paint with which we were coating the chains to clump his hair into little spikes. It looked both ridiculous and a touch frightening which was, I guessed, what he wanted. He was quieter than most of the others, thoughtful, but it was a devious kind of thought and there was an unblinking, animal watchfulness in his eyes that unnerved me. Of all the boys in the gang, I thought Sarn would eventually replace Morlak, and anything he lacked in real intelligence he made up for with a straightforward and ruthless talent for cruelty. He—sometimes assisted by Fevel—was Morlak’s enforcer, and I had long since learned to keep away from him. What he was doing apart from the rest of the gang, I had no idea.

  The other man, and this was stranger still, was Harkson.

  He was wearing a jacket with its collar turned up and a hat in spite of the humid night, but there could be no doubt. Why was Sir William’s white foreman, a man of status and responsibility at the company, meeting secretly—for that was surely what was happening—with a Lani steeplejack?

  I reminded myself that the strangeness of such an alliance was no more than my own with Sir William, but this felt different. They were more than cautious, moving into the deep shade below the bridge and speaking in whispers. Suddenly I was sure that climbing the piling had been a mistake, that they would look up and see me, and then would assume I had heard things I was not supposed to hear, and then … I didn’t know what would happen, but it wouldn’t be good. I felt it in the air like the aroma of the river, like the carrion stench that drew the jackals and vultures into the city markets.

  I was no more than twenty feet above them, perching on the slick, painted girders, my chest against the brick piling itself, arms splayed to grip the bolted steel above me. I wanted to be higher, but my only safety lay in stillness.

  Harkson struck a match and lit his pipe, hands and face flaring briefly in the amber glow, and then shook the match out and threw it into the river. I listened for its hiss but the noise of the waters drowned the sound. Try as I might, I could hear nothing beyond the faintest rumble of voices below. And I did try. For reasons I couldn’t entirely identify, I wanted to hear what they had to say that demanded such curious privacy. They were standing unusually close together, their heads bowed so that the brims of their caps almost touched. They would not see me if I risked a careful movement down toward them …

  I lowered my hands and dropped into a crouch, then gripped the edge of the girder I was standing on in perfect silence. I unfolded my long body until the toes of my boots found the girder below, and nestled in place, six or seven feet closer to them than I had been. It made a difference, and when the foreman raised his voice in something like menace, I heard every word.

  “Don’t you worry about my part,” he said, raising a warning finger. “You just make sure you’re there and ready and that you don’t bottle out on me. And remember. They have to see the bags go down with him or they’ll hang us for sure, got it?”

  Sarn gave a defiant grunt, but as Harkson’s loaded finger became part of a fist, he winced away.

  “I’m not a kid, you know,” Sarn shot back. “I know a good score when I see one.”

  “You’d better,” said Harkson as the Lani boy turned back for the camp and moved up the bank.

  Harkson stood smoking in the dark, watching him go. I waited for what seemed like an hour before the foreman knocked out his pipe in a shower of sparks and moved.

  Toward me.

  In fact, he moved up the bank a few paces and found the ladder up to the catwalk. Too late I remembered that he did not live in the camp but in the city. He was going to cross the river to go home, and that meant pas
sing no more than a few yards from where I hung like one of the fishing bats which sometimes roosted up here. I would have to move after all. I was suddenly very sure that I did not want the white man to see me.

  So I climbed, a quick, silent vertical sprint, all hands and toe caps, trusting to the darkness of the tower itself and the foreman’s caution on the ladder to keep me unnoticed. I was used to climbing in the low light of morning and evening and in the thick smear of the almost constant Bar-Selehm smog, but this was a different order of darkness which demanded caution. Even so, I nearly made it. But I was still climbing as he reached the catwalk, trying to get as far from him as I could. That was a mistake. As he got off the ladder, his gaze wandered up and spotted me in what minimal moonlight remained.

  Or found something. I felt his uncertainty in the way his body shifted and leaned, trying to get a better view. I huddled small as I could, my face mashed into the edge of a steel beam so I could feel its bolts digging into my forehead, hot and cold at the same time. He took a couple of steps, then waved and shouted wordlessly, like he was trying to shoo away an animal.

  A pet monkey …

  I kept still and quiet. For a moment I thought he was looking at the catwalk, searching for something to throw, perhaps, but finding nothing he did one last adjustment, one last probing gaze up to where I sat, an irregularity in the darkness, and then he turned and walked away. I watched him as far as I could, till I lost him in the dark and smoky pall that billowed across the docklands factories, and still I waited, unmoving.