Klade came to love maps. The blue water you couldn’t drink because there was so much salt in it. He liked the ones best of all where the whole country they lived in, which was called England, was made tiny. He loved Africa, which was dark in its heart, yet hot and bright under a bigger sun. The people were mostly brown there as well—but here, Klade, you’re getting confused. And remember when you asked about electricity, and I told you there wasn’t any here in Einfell?
It was a warmer day, and the study window was open and the song was full of birds nesting and the moss which was growing over the new bit of roof. Silus gave a chuckling sigh. His eyes brightened.
‘This, Klade, is the first thing I was shown when I was apprenticed as an electrician. Despite all that’s since happened, I still remember it now.’ He took out a rod of something he called amber, which was beautiful and heavy, and rubbed it whisperingly with a fabric he termed silk. ‘Now. Watch what happens when I pass it over these scraps of paper …’
Klade gasped in wonder. They lifted and danced like snowflakes.
He tried walking the other way down No Through Road where thin trees grew up through slabs and there were fallen things called lampposts. He felt all the life and colour seeping from him until he saw in the downhill distance a fence fierce with firethorn and the hills of Outside rolling beyond in cloudy haze, and strung with marching poles and lines as if the world were sewn up and would otherwise fall apart. He stood there, breathless. The song was scarcely in him, and he pitied these greys, these browns, these Outsiders, for having to live in this empty world which they had made. Pitied, but was also fascinated.
There was a Meeting Place which lay on the far side of the woods. It was a newsprint-before-the-mouse-pee-had-got-to-it sort of place, grey and flat and surrounded by a wide space of lawn which the Master Mower, who was generally best avoided, came out to cut on summer twilights, hands which weren’t hands spinning like the webs of insects in the trembling dusk. The song here was like the passage of water in winter when ice grew across the Impassable Stream, and Klade was borne on its arms as he stepped inside and smelled the Meeting Place smell, which was overpowering, and yet no smell at all. Shivery with excitement, he clattered along the corridors.
Sometimes, people were brought to the Meeting Place—Chosen or Outsiders, Klade; these things don’t always matter. But, always, they were in Some Bad Way. Once, there was a thing there called a baby, which was like the cats having kittens, which an Outsider had left at the gate. It spoiled the clean Meeting Place corridors with its songless mewing and off-sweet smell. Klade, looking at it, prodding when it stopped squawking until it started again, twisted it around by the wrist to see if it was Chosen. He still wasn’t sure. But he didn’t like the way so many of the Chosen crowded around it: how even the Huntsman brought lumps of meat which he laid red-blue and bleeding on the Meeting Place front step to be found there in the mornings, and which Ida told him to get rid of and wash away. He didn’t like the way how even the song from the Shadow Ones in the deepest part of the wood changed.
The baby had a face which was drawn up with fleshy webbing and only one eye through which it didn’t seem able to see. That in itself, Klade, doesn’t mean it’s Chosen. Some things just didn’t come out right, which was like the kittens again which Silus collected in a bag to drop into the Ironmasters’ butts because that was a mercy. The baby didn’t last long either, which was at least something, although Silus grew as cross with Klade when he said this as if he’d used words like cunt or witch or monster or you bastard fucking changeling.
Then came what Klade thought of as the Diving Man. From what he’d glimpsed of him, he looked like a picture he’d seen in the Bristol Morning Telegraph of a guildsman dressed in a huge diving suit topped with a portholed brass helmet, although the outfit had become part of the Diving Man, so that he seemed to have been made from rubberised canvas and brass and glass and bloody flesh and loops of strappy leather. The Diving Man, Klade learned, was nothing to do with the sea and had in fact been some kind of aether worker. He’d come from a nearby place called Invercombe, where so much of the stuff had got into him that he was bright at night and dark in the day, which was called a wyreglow. Klade was warned on no account to go near him—You most of all, Klade—but he crept up to the Meeting Place anyway, and peered through a gap in the door into the shuddering gloom where the Diving Man lay on his bed dripping and gasping through his porthole face as Blossom tried to sing his pain away. Dark and light tendrils of gas like bits of the Shadow Ones floated around him.
Klade was happy when the Diving Man left them to lie under the earth and the Meeting Place went back to its old, empty ways. There was a sense of lost purpose along its corridors which reminded him of the announcements he found in newspapers for Guild Open Days which he now knew from the dates had taken place long ago. He came often to wander there when he was sure no one else was about, and brought with him the new tinned drinks of which he was growing especially fond and was always asking Master Brown to bring in his van. They were called Sweetness, which was exactly what they were, and they were Made With Bittersweet which was a Product For A New Age. There was Ripe Raspberry and there was Honey Orange and there was Candy Apple and there was Mellow Tonic, and the lists of their ingredients in tiny print were something Klade loved to read as he sat in the corridors with his back against the cold white walls. He wandered afterwards with their sweet secret bitterness still filling his mouth through rooms dedicated to the sad Ages when the Chosen were chained and imprisoned and marked with a cross and a big letter C. He found the mottled prints and photographs of the Chosen in all their marvellous variety both comforting and fascinating. He experimented, with a puzzled excitement which reminded him of the feeling he got when he looked at the adverts for Hygienic Suspenders and Stays, with closing the creaky manacles around his ankles and wrists, although they were mostly so big they simply fell off him.
Then more Outsiders were coming, for their own Outsider reasons, and in that sudden, inexplicable Outsider way. And no, Klade, they’re not bringing any produce—least of all those blessed tins. And they’re not in Some Bad Way, either. Sometimes, they’re like us and they come here because they want to say hello just as you might go to visit the Ironmasters. These particular Outsiders were from York, which Klade had discovered wasn’t in Africa at all, but nevertheless struck him as a coincidence which he wanted to share with Ida until he felt the sad turbulence of her song and smelled the charcoal wetness of her face.
‘You should stay down at this end of the Meeting Place,’ Silus told him. ‘I want you well out of the way when they come.’
‘Why’s that—is it because they think we’re goblins and steal their babies although in fact they simply leave them at our gates?’
Silus’s breathing lisped and rasped. His eyes settled like a slow fog on Klade. I can’t get angry with you now. Please, just do as I say …
By now, Klade knew the doorways to slip behind and the corridors to duck along. Windows, especially, to peer through. And here they came. Outsiders. Big ones and little ones, with big and little voices and not a trace of the song, and holding on to each other as if they could scarcely see or had lost their way.
‘Come on, Stan. You said you would.’
‘Some bloody way to spend a Noshiftday.’
And here was Silus and here was Ida as well, fully dressed up in their big green cloaks and their hoods up so you could scarcely see them as if they were ashamed of being Chosen.
The one called Stan let out a barking moan. He said, ‘Jesus, Ida.’ Klade had a rough idea who Jesus was—he was dead, and important—and he knew his name was not a word you should use in that way.
I don’t know what to say. Were you my children—you’re so grown! Were you ever really mine? Is that you, Terry—whatever happened to your golden curls …
‘Christ, don’t do that—talking in my head!’
It’s all I can do. I have no—
Klade was surpr
ised when Stan covered his ears with his hands against Ida’s song. Doing that didn’t even work very well with ordinary sounds, and it was obvious it wouldn’t stop Ida talking to you. But the whole scene went on surprisingly long, with a large amount of sobbing and howling from the Outsiders who were worse than the Farmers at milking time in the sounds they made. Klade didn’t particularly like these Outsiders—not with the way they were making Ida feel and behave. Silus’s lisp was getting worse than ever as well as he tried to Calm Things Down and created nothing but hiss and spray.
The Outsider called Stan eventually stumbled out of the Meeting Place into the grey light of the Master Mower’s fine lawn. Klade, curious, followed him through a side door and watched from around a corner as he wiped his face and looked across at the woods as if they were something terrible, although there would be no sign of the Shadow Ones or the Huntsman at this time of day. Then Stan made another barking sound and started laboriously coughing up lots of the stuff which was inside him, all of which struck Klade as surprisingly copious and colourful, considering little globs of brown were all Master Brown ever made.
Stan finished and wiped his mouth. He checked the thing on his wrist just below his Mark, which Klade knew was called a wristwatch, and his gaze trailed back towards the main door of the Meeting Place, then settled on Klade.
Klade just stood there. Stan just stood there for a while as well, his mouth going loose and tight and gulping like the fish in the Impassable Stream, and his face turning even more blotchy white.
‘Sweet Elder—this place is even worse than I thought…’ Stan coughed again, staggering away from Klade and spitting and hawking. Then he went back in through the shining doors of the Meeting Place, and Klade hid—properly this time—and then eventually he and the other Outsiders went away. This wasn’t the first occasion Klade had had a bad experience with Outsiders. He already knew that whatever it was about the Chosen which made them react was something which he seemed to have strongest of all; stronger than the Master Mower, even, which was saying something. Normally, he wasn’t bothered, not even by the things Master Brown said to him as long as he brought him his tins of Sweetness, but today he was upset in a way he couldn’t explain. Ida came to him as he sat on the empty edge of the desk in the furthest of the Meeting Place’s rooms, kicking the boomy metal of a filing cabinet. Her mood was wet and her mood was grey; the sadness leaking out of her like rain from the sky.
I’m so, so sorry. People can be so hurtful. In a sense, Einfell really is a haven—
‘Why else would we live here?’
He gave the filing cabinet another booming kick.
We all start as Outsiders, Klade. Being Chosen—it’s being caught in a spell.
Klade nodded. Boom, Boom went the filing cabinet with a hollowing of the song which was just how he felt. Boom. He knew all these things which Ida was trying to tell him. Boom. He stared at the wall. There were photographs there—but in this particular room they were not of the Chosen but of Einfell’s so-called benefactors and friends. Men and women. Guildsmen and mistresses. Ladies and gentlemen. Stan and Eddie and Mum and Terry. All those names they gave themselves. Fuck the fucking bastard cunting lot of them.
When you came here, Klade. When we first brought you here, we thought—
‘Don’t tell me! I don’t ever want to know.’
But—
‘—NO!’
Even as the afternoon was deepening, it remained bright in this room, with the windows kept clean here and the glass sheets of the picture frames shining so strongly that they washed away the photographs which lay inside in the pureness of their light. Klade studied each one, and the face in the glass which blinked and flinched in surprise was that of an Outsider, and was always the same.
Klade was growing. Klade, in his own different way, was changing as well. He helped Master Brown unload each shifterm’s produce mostly unaided, and stacked it himself in the so-called New Barn where the cats kept the rats away. Master Brown, whose first name was Abner, talked to him more easily now, and spat less often, even though he still chewed his wads of tobacco, which he told Klade was a filthy habit he should never acquire. Klade took a hand now in deciding what was ordered, especially the new promotions and the tins of Sweetness in all their surprising new flavours.
‘It’s all right,’ he would say when he saw a new face climbing from a van or wagon as he crossed the Fold Yard, for he’d now learned how to distinguish one Outsider from another with almost complete accuracy, ‘I’m really not what you think …’ He’d practised and refined that phrase and the smile he put on with it in the glass of the Meeting Place’s picture frames. He’d learned, in these moments of meeting and interaction, how to make the song fall quiet within him so as not to become distracted. For Klade understood now that he wasn’t like the Diving Man, who had been poisoned by aether, but that he was like that baby which had mewed and stank. Not that he’d ever been in A Bad Way, but he’d been left by his mother in some Bristol institution, which struck him as pretty much the same as being dumped at Einfell’s gates.
Sometimes, Silus or one of the other Chosen went Outside. After all, it was only a matter of climbing into the shining green wagon and hooking up the fine horses the Farmers tended. Still, it was a surprise to Klade when Silus came to him one morning, dressed in his best grey cloak, and announced that it was time that Klade also went.
‘Why?’
Silus made a sound which approximated to laughter. After all the newspapers you read, Klade!’ I’d have thought you’d have been desperate… ‘You should wear this.’ Silus was holding out in his white hands another cloak.
‘But won’t I… ? I mean—how will they … ?’
‘The thing is, you’re with me, Klade.’ You’ve seen how people react…
The horses were already waiting in the Fold Yard, and Klade was glad of his cloak as the carriage started moving and bits of Einfell began sliding away. Past the edges of the wood, which looked dark and homely and strange. Across the lawn, with the Meeting Place afloat at its green centre. Silus talked to the horses. His song was absorbed and strange.
‘Will you get those gates for me, Klade. You just lift that latch.’
Rusty metal complained. A wonder, really, that he’d never thought to do this thing himself. Then he was back in the carriage, and they were Outside. The hedges were green, and the road was long and flat. There were fields. Beyond, and sometimes closer, lay the neatly ridged backs of houses. A dog came scrabbling beneath a wooden gate. It was the first dog, out of the pages of books and Ida’s thought imaginings, which Klade had ever seen.
On that first and his other subsequent journeys Outside, Klade was struck just how similar everything was. How one field was square, and then so was the next. He wondered how the Outsiders understood which house to go in at night when they wanted to sleep, and how Silus knew which turn to take along these daunting lanes. The song had drained, was almost gone, and the silence was clamorous with the noise of the horses and the rattle of the carriage. Breath and heartbeat, the feel of his buttocks against the bench and his tongue lying trapped and songless in his mouth, and the dim focus of Silus as he steered. Other carriages now. Whole clusters of houses, their chimneys straight, not beckoning, their gardens like tiny fragments of field, and just as square. Windows as well, glass eyes staring. Some Outsiders looked and some didn’t, Klade noticed, as their carriage went by. Some twisted their heads and spat like Abner Brown and others pulled the little Outsiders to them and made shapes with their red mouths and signs across their chests.
There were, Klade discovered, snatches of the song to be heard Outside. One of the first came when they passed a forge, which was recognisable from its smoke and banging, and then from the salty singing of men—who were ironmasters, and yet had fleshy Outsider faces and hands. Klade felt a homesick ache. Then there came trills and cascades of other notes, abrupt and surprising, from places called guildhalls, and from the bustle of other workshops and mill
s and factories, and then as their carriage passed under the black lines which looped here and there on the long fingers of poles, where it was whispering and intense. Klade cocked his head and brightened as he saw another line knitting the space between treetops and sky. But the song here was different. Scarcely a song at all, but nevertheless surging pale and familiar. The hairs on his hand prickled. There were, he had learned, two types of pylon. There were those of the Telegraphers which bore messages, and those of the Electricians which bore electricity, and both were the pride and the emblem of their separate guild.
They reached Bristol. The song here was in the buildings as well, if buildings was what they were, for, torn out of the newsprint, unflattened and daubed with dimension and colour, they were extraordinary beyond Klade’s imaginings. And it was joined by shouting tumults of ordinary sound and guild-house bells. Outsiders were teeming here like woodlice, up and down the streets and in and out of the traffic, within which their small carriage was indistinguishably lost.
Things to be done that first time Klade went Outside on what Silus called Business, which, it transpired, involved settling the many bills which Einfell’s running of incurred and arranging for the organisation of the funds which had been established at the start of this Age. Klade learned how to brace himself as he stepped from their carriage, and remembered to pull up his hood. Cold shock of the pavement. Bodies, elbows and smells. Words hawked to the pavement by his feet in shining gobs. Troll. Bastard. Changeling. As he stood waiting for Silus to arrange for the keeping of their horses, Klade leaned to look above at the looping lines, both telephone and electric, at the advertisements from his newspapers made elephantine. Snowberry Sweetness. Mistress Bessie’s Water-Apple Pie. Then dark offices, walls and ceilings laden with ornament, and the song sometimes heavy and sometimes dim in the smoke-hung air as Outsiders called accountants consulted machines which were both far off and near and were called reckoning engines, which, Klade surmised, were quite different to the engine which drove Abner Brown’s van. In time, there were many things in this Outsider world which he came to understand. The gaze of the men behind desks which lingered on him when he wasn’t looking, then scurried away when he did. Tremble in the hands as they offered Silus a pen to sign. The breathing through the nose as if there was something bad they couldn’t resist smelling. Words muttered more quietly as they were leaving than they were spat on the street, but the same words nonetheless.
The House of Storms Page 23