by Ken MacLeod
“Do you believe that?”
“I don’t think there was anything special about the stone,” Druin said. “But there may have been something special to the eye or the brain behind it.”
“The second sight?” I said sceptically.
“I don’t know about that,” said Druin. “The Brahan Seer saw the future in his imagination, and so do we all.” He chuckled. “He was just better at it than most.”
Druin stopped at a wee place called Dark, and, leaving the truck parked off the road, led me up through the pines on the left.
“No smoking,” he said quietly. “And no talking either.”
I nodded, concentrating on heaving myself and the increasingly heavy rifle up the slope. The thick needle-carpet made for slow, if silent, progress. I had a bit of difficulty keeping up with Druin, and decided then and there that smoking was indeed unhealthy. At the same time, I was feeling a tension that only a smoke could relieve. Something in Drum’s manner, and something about our location, was bothering me, but I couldn’t think what. We climbed steadily, away from the road and up the hill.
Druin reached the top of the ridge ahead of me, and there paused, hands on one knee, while I caught up. He pointed down through a gap in the trees to where the other side of the ridge sloped back to the road. Looking down, I could see the road, the railway line and a long, narrow loch.
Loch Luichart. I recognised the place with a sudden jolt at remembering that this was where—as Jeanna had told me—Fergal worked and the tinkers made their strange stone computers. The old power-station, at which Druin was pointing, was a large, dark, block-shaped building at the foot of the slope below us.
“What’s this about?” I asked Druin, as quietly as I could.
He grinned at me and began walking slowly up the ridge.
“Thought you might want to hunt more than deer,” he said. You’re after your man Fergal, and your lassie Menial. Down there might not a bad place to look.”
I gasped, and not with the exertion of keeping up with him. “We can’t just march in there!”
“Why not?” he grunted. “But anyway, we won’t just ‘march in’.” He stopped, and took a few paces off to the right, into a clump of bushes. “Ah, here it is.”
He’d arrived at a cylindrical structure of weathered, creeper-covered ceramic, about a metre high and a metre across. As I approached he leapt up on top of it and began scraping away the overgrowth with the side of his boot. In a moment he’d exposed a rusty hatch.
Not so rusty it didn’t open, though. I looked in and saw a series of rungs disappearing into the blackness. Druin dropped a pebble in and cocked his ear.
“It’s only about twenty metres deep,” he told me.
“Good grief, man, you’re not talking about going down there, are you?”
“Aye, I am that,” he said. “It’s safe enough, so long as you hang on.”
“But do you know what’s at the bottom?” I looked at him suspiciously. “And how do you know about this, anyway?”
Druin sighed theatrically. “What’s at the bottom is a tunnel—I don’t know if it’s part of the original hydro-station or something that got added later. This whole hill has been tunnelled and mined; it was used as an underground base by the British army, and by the Republicans during the civil war before the First World Revolution—changed hands a few times, I think. As to how I know about it—” He laughed. “There’s a map and a diagram of it all in the museum at Jean town! Mind you, I guess the tinkers will have made yon diagram out of date, one way or the other.”
“Looks pretty dark,” I said.
“Ach, there’ll be some kind of lighting down there. And I’ve got a torch.”
“Was this on your mind all along?”
“Aye,” he admitted. “But I didn’t want to tell you beforehand, in case you got cold feet from worrying about it before we even got here. As it is, I’m just beginning to wonder if I was right in thinking you had a spirit of adventure. You’ve done nothing but raise objections this past five minutes. Do you want to go after this woman, or no?”
“Of course I do,” I said, stung into action—as he no doubt intended—by his hint at cowardice. I slung the rifle across my back and scrambled up and set my feet on the rungs as I lowered myself in. “You’ll be coming too, will you?”
Til be right above you,” Druin said.
For the next couple of minutes I concentrated entirely on descending the laddered steps. The rungs looked rust-free, as did their bolts—in fact, the metal and the ceramic of the shaft were both unknown to me. But I could not be sure that every rung had survived the centuries, so I tested each one before putting my full weight on it. The slung rifle made it even more awkward. One upward glance confirmed that Druin was following. Above him the hatch was visible as a small, bright hole.
After what seemed a long time my foot encountered empty air where a rung should have been. After a moment of fright I lowered the foot further, cautiously, and touched a floor. I grunted with relief and stepped down and away from the ladder, still taking care where I placed my feet. Druin completed his descent a moment later and we stood together in dark and silence.
On the descent my eyes had adapted to the diminishing light and even here, at the bottom of the shaft, it was not entirely dark. I became aware, without quite knowing why, that we were indeed in a tunnel and that it sloped fairly sharply. Looking around, I could see a brighter area lower down. I peered at Druin and gestured in that direction. The pale oval of his face made a bobbing motion which I interpreted as a nod. Together we turned and headed down the slope.
After a few steps I stubbed my toe on something hard. “Damn,” I muttered, pulling up short. Druin bumped into my back and we both swayed dangerously.
Tuck this for a game of soldiers,” said Druin. He undipped the torch from his belt and switched it on. A powerful beam of white light illuminated the tunnel in front of us. It revealed that the floor was indeed littered with obstacles—oddly shaped seer-stones of various sizes. It also revealed that the tunnel was full of people.
Druin yelped a curse and brought his rifle to bear in a surprisingly smooth and swift movement. The torch-beam wavered hardly at all. I was still stiff with shock; the instant I recovered from it I looked over my shoulder and saw more figures crowding behind us, dim in the backwash of the torch’s light. One such figure was apparently in the act of reaching out for me—I struck wildly at his arm, and almost fell over because my fist passed right through it. Druin whirled around at the same moment, and the torch-beam cast my shadow grotesquely on the figures before me. They responded neither to the shadow nor the light. Druin let out his breath in a gusty gasp, then laughed.
“They’re just hollows, man!”
“Ah.” I stood looking at them in amazement. “Aye, like the tinkers scare children with at fairs.”
“That’s it. God, they had me scared enough.”
“No wonder Jeanna said the place was haunted.”
“She said that, did she now?” Druin pondered. “I’ll have another chat with yon lassie sometime. Anyway. Let’s go on. Keep the voice down a bit though.”
Neither of us had spoken loudly at all, but the slightest sound seemed magnified by the tunnel’s acoustics. We turned again and walked on, the pool of light from Drum’s torch enabling us to avoid the stones on the floor, and almost to ignore the apparitions they cast. Almost—for the still faces of the men and women depicted in this intangible statuary were caught in a moment of anguish and alarm, which, as they repeatedly loomed out of the dark and passed us—or passed through us—was enough to inspire, in me at least, a creeping sensation of disquiet. They looked uncannily like the lost souls, the damned of the Christian and Mohammadan superstitions, and it would have taken a stouter faith in Reason than mine to have walked that dark path unshaken. Irrational as it may be, I drew some comfort from the fact—known to any child old enough not to be frightened by the “ghost tent” at a fair—that hollows have no existen
ce outside the light, and that, therefore, there was not an unseen crowd of them in the darkness behind us.
Presently we passed beyond their eerie company, and closer to the source of light at the end of the tunnel (an expression whose full force I for the first time appreciated). The air smelt damper, and at the same time fresher. We had reached the foot of the slope; the rocky floor of the tunnel here was flat. Druin switched off his torch and we proceeded very slowly and silently for the remaining few metres. The reason for the light’s vagueness turned out to be a sharp bend in the tunnel; we crept around it, keeping close to the outer side of the crook, rifles gripped (though not, I recalled at that very moment, loaded).
I nudged Druin and, taking a shell from my pocket, made to put it in the rifle. He shook his head, firmly, and I desisted, reassuring myself with the reflection that the pistols on our belts were ready for immediate use. We rounded the bend and found ourselves looking out at a brightly lit space of great size—at least twenty metres across, I guessed, and ten high. The lighting came from overhead panels, and seemed like sunlight. The walls curved over to the ceiling, all stone; a cavern then, and not a natural one. Its full length was not obvious from where we stood, at one corner of it.
It contained row upon row of stone troughs, connected with stepped open pipes through which rivulets of water trickled; some arranged to feed the troughs, others to carry away waste—or so I guessed, from the fact that no channel that came out of a trough went into another. I could make out half a dozen people working there, moving from trough to trough, making undetectable adjustments to the flow or sifting some powdery material in. They looked like hydroponic gardeners, and I thought at first glance that they were following this familiar trade, possibly for some recondite component of the tinkers’ food-supply. Then I noticed the contents of the troughs farther to my right, and—as I quickly realised—of more mature growth. They were growing seer-stones—I could distinctly see the larger ones lined up, five to a trough.
“Well, well,” said Druin, as though thinking, as I was: so that’s how it’s done! He slung his rifle on his shoulder, glanced at me and shrugged.
“No point in creeping about now,” he said.
With that he marched boldly out into the light.
10
Forget Babylon
They made their way back from the ossuary, ducking under arches and through hammered holes in the walls, into the church. Beneath pocked, defaced Orthodox murals a Turkish woman sold silver and jade and crochet. They ignored her gestured pitch, stepped outside, stalked past more stalls. Across the hollow from the hilltop where the church stood, a hillside of streets of empty, roofless stone houses fought the slow green entropy of birch and bramble. The light was blinding, the heat choking, the silence intense. The cicadas broke it, the birds, the skitter of a lizard.
Jason wandered around to the front of the church, traced a date in coloured pebbles on the paving.
4912,” he said. That’s when they finished it. How proud of it they must have been. Ten years later, they left. Voluntary population exchange, hah.”
Myra squatted in the sunlight, swigged Evian, sucked Marlboro. “Worse things have happened since.” The dry, ancient ribs and femurs in the ossuary hadn’t disturbed her as much as the fresh bodies she’d seen the evening she arrived.
“No doubt.” Jason shrugged. “But you know, this place, it makes me feel like I’m a Greek, for the first time in my life. Even a goddamn Christian.” He glanced at the hawkers a few tens of metres away, hunkered down beside her and spoke in a low, earnest voice. “As in, you know, Western. It’s a different culture. They don’t like us.”
Myra stared at him, shocked. Karmilassos, or Kaya, or Kayakoi, or whatever it was called (the Turks shamelessly called it “the Greek ghost village”) oppressed her too, but the CIA agent seemed to be drawing entirely the wrong moral from it.
This is what nationalism does,” she said. “And what that kind of thinking does. No, thank you. I don’t buy it.”
Jason looked somewhat hurt. He tilted his hat back and started skinning up a joint. His age—he claimed, and she believed, though who could now be sure?—was twenty-four. The last time she’d been seriously hassled by the CIA had been just over sixty years earlier. There was something awesome about a man following up a file so much older than he was.
(Last time: the man from the Agency had talked to her over lattes in a Starbuck’s off Harvard Square, in July 1998 when she was touting for medical aid to Kazakhstan’s fall-out victims; the campaign’s poster child had a cleft palate. A surgeon she’d met had set up the contact; someone who’d worked at the consulate in Almaty, he’d said, but she wasn’t fooled. She brought a tape-recorder, discreet in the pocket of her blouse. She expected someone who looked like a Mormon, a Man In Black. He was young, dark, bright; blueberry T-shirt, baggy camos. Called himself Mike.
They chatted about Britain. Mike was interested in Ulster. The Orangemen were marching at Drum-cree. Myra told him nothing he didn’t know; he knew more about her than she did, casually name-dropping demos she’d been on in the seventies as he idly turned the foreign news pages of the Boston Globe. They took their coffees outside, sat on a low wall while Myra had a smoke.
Mike nodded at the clenched black fist of a faded black power mural high on a wall on the other side of the street, above the map shop on the corner. “All that’s over,” he said. “No more arguments about the politics, Myra. All of the line-ups are new, now. We aren’t asking you to betray anyone, or anything. Just share information. We have mutual interests. You’re going to a dangerous place, after all.” (Ah, there it was, the threat.) “You never know when the right contacts might be crucial.”
“Indeed,” she said. She was staring abstractedly at a teenage girl with pink hair, sure she’d seen her before. She shook her head. “I’ll bear it in mind,” she said. “Here’s my mobile number.”
Mike gave her his, and went away. That night Myra phoned her tape of the whole conversation through to the office of one of the local sections of the FI, and to a reporter on Mother Jones. The journalist was dubious, the local cadres—after a quick, panicky consultation—told her to play along.
Two weeks later she was in New York, and met Mike again, leaning on the rail of the Staten Island ferry. The last round trip of a day which had been humid, and was now hazy. Commuters dozed on the benches, tourists posed for pictures of themselves with the Statue of Liberty or the towers of Manhattan, the apparat of capital, looming in the background. She agreed to liaise with the consulate when she got back; and in the years that followed, she did, now and then, as she and Georgi clawed their way up the structures of post-Soviet Kazakhstan, through revolutions and counter-revolutions. Mainly she reported on people who were as much her enemies as they were the CIA’s; smugglers of drugs and people and arms, dealers in corruption and mineral concessions and resource looting. She told the FI about every such encounter, and nothing came of it, and it all faded out. After the Fall Revolution a lot of files were opened. Myra had idly run searches on her own name and code-names in them, and found that most of the individuals and companies she’d shopped to the CIA were working for the CIA.
But they still had her down as an asset, the bastards, after all those years and changes.
And the girl with pink hair had been on the Staten Island ferry, too. She never did figure that out, and in the end put it down to coincidence.)
Jason passed her the joint, and they smoked it together as they ambled down the steep, rocky path through neglected olive-trees to the foot of the hill, where they’d left their hired jeep. The dingy little settlement there had consisted of newly built concrete houses, and a few of the stolen stone houses in the first street of the long-emptied Greek town. All of them had been gutted years ago, the Turkish families living there slaughtered by Greek partisans in the last war. The blue-and-white ceramic eyes—for good luck, against the evil eye—above the doors were cracked, the timbers blackened. Myra ground the
roach into charcoal ashes that still lay inches deep. She didn’t feel high, just focused, her sight enhanced as if by a VR overlay. She could see why this land was worth fighting over.
Jason got into the driver’s seat as Myra climbed in the other side. He looked at her sympathetically, as though half-sorry for having brought her here.
“Sometimes God is just,” he said.
“Yeah. In a very Old Testament way.”
Jason started up the engine and swung the jeep around on to the narrow road to Hisaronu. The road climbed, scraping trees, edging precipices. Pine and rock and dry gullies—it was like a hot day in Scodand. Myra remembered a day with David Reid, by a river between Dunkeld and Blair Atholl, that had felt just like this. He had talked about depopulation and forced migration in biblical terms as well, she recalled.
“Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin,” she heard herself say.
“What?”
“That thing from the Bible. You know, about the king of Babylon? ‘Thou art weighed in the balances, and found wanting.’ ”
“I’m aware of the source,’Jason said, keeping his eyes on the road. “It’s the relevance that kind of escapes me.”
“It’s the way I feel,” Myra said. She stuck her hand in the air above the windscreen, feeling the cool rush between her fingers.
“That’s how you feel about yourself? That’s bad.”
“No,” she told him. “About the fucking world.”
“That’s worse.”
She laughed, her spirits lifting.
“Anyway,” Jason went on, “it’s just the rejuve talking. People get like that.”
“You would know, huh?”
“Not personally. With me, it’s just stabilising, right? With you—” he smirked sidelong at her “—it’s got a lot of work to do.”
“Thanks.”
“It makes you feel strange. Euphoric and judgemental.”
“Yeah, that’s me all right!”
It was the fifth day since she’d swallowed the surgery. The nanomachines had differentiated and proliferated inside her, spreading out through her circulation like an army of sappers, tearing down and rebuilding. She felt their waste heat like a fever, burning her up. Her moods swung from normal to high, she didn’t have depressions any more, it was like a biological Keynesianism, except that in the long run she was not going to be dead. She was not immortal, not really—who could tell? The best guess was centuries and in that time something else would come along—but she felt immortal, she felt like people did in their twenties before their cells started running down and their neurons began to die, no wonder she could remember the seventies so vividly, no wonder she was getting so arrogant!