by A. E. Shaw
The Before
The servant has Aiden back in his beautiful, oh-so-elegant quarters before Aiden can say “Wait, stop, I hadn’t finished my breakfast…” and whilst he isn’t in any way forcing him up there, Aiden finds the firm attitude the man is taking with him to be most unusual and confusing. He isn’t used to being followed so closely, to having someone he doesn’t know so physically near him, and to someone who doesn’t respond to the interesting comments and questions he asks of them as they go. What is the point of being quiet when there are things to discuss?
And when they arrive in Aiden’s room, he doesn’t leave, either. He stands, tall, wiry-slender, eyes so wide that blinking doesn’t lessen the strength of their gaze. His clothes are different from the other servants, all but uniformed in silks and leathers - this man wears a black cloth nipped in tight around his waist and shoulders and finished in pleats that fall, old-soldier-style, just above his knees. The outfit accentuates sharp, keen muscles and a dark-tan complexion. He keeps his gaze right and fixed on Aiden.
“Have you come to teach me something?” Aiden asks, because that’s the only thing he can think of that could plausibly be happening. After all, he hasn’t had a lesson in, well, he must have missed at least a whole cycle now, surely? (Two, but there’s little point in counting).
The man shakes his head. Flicks of jaw-length hair slip from behind his ears as he does so, and he brushes them back again, meticulously.
“Take a seat,” he says to Aiden. “I’ve nothing to teach, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn a few things whilst we wait.” He leans against the wall, casually. Too casually? Who is he, anyway? “Have you any questions?”
Something in this oddness still seems right and good to Aiden, even if he’s no idea what it is they’re waiting for. He settles himself down in a chair covered in rough leather which looks and feels as old as the best things in the castle.
He does have questions, but isn’t sure how to ask them, nor if he wants to hear the answers. He starts with his favourite, just to see how it goes. “Do you know who I am?”
“Of course. You’re His Excellency’s son.”
“And do you know where I’ve come from?”
“Of course. The castle, atop the mountain.” Blase as you like. Inconsequential. Matter of fact. Uninteresting? It sparks a chill along Aiden’s ribs.
“Did everyone here know I was there?”
“To one extent or another, yes. You were no secret.”
If this is true, then, Aiden wonders, where is his welcoming party, and why has he been so lacking in adoration thus far? Are there final tasks to complete before he ascends to the greatness he already knows is coming?
He changes tack, from talking about himself, which is arousing bubbling disorientation inside him, to trying to identify where this man fits into this world, and, by proxy, his world.
“Do you know much about Outside?”
“Yes, a thing or two. I saw it, long ago. Before.”
The man has a tight, clipped voice, with something to it Aiden recognises, without realising it. It makes him feel a warmth for him, where before the presence had irritated.
“Before?”
“Before, when the Outside was full. Since His Excellency came to power, it’s been emptied. I’ve not seen it in recent years, but I imagine all that space will be beautiful one day, once it has regenerated itself.”
Aiden nods. “And you’re allowed to talk to everyone, as you please, about this kind of thing?”
The man laughs. He stretches his arms out as he does so, and then folds them behind his head, looking curious, informal. Certainly not prestigious. “Allowed. There’s a curious choice of word. Of course I’m allowed. I’ll talk about whatever I wish. We’re all aware of His Excellency’s place in the world, of your great family line, of our great family lines; we all know our place. We’re fortunate to be here, and we all understand that we’re part of something better than anything else in human history. Perhaps you don’t really understand what this is just yet. I confess, you’re not quite as I’d expected you’d be. Then again, I think His Excellency expected something a little different himself. I thought there was a book that explained matters? His Excellency has been writing it as long as I’ve known him.”
The next question asks itself with Aiden’s lips, with great suspicion.
“And how long have you known him?”
The man shrugs. “We grew up together. In the castle.”
Aiden bites right through his lip in surprise, and sputters on the keen taste of blood.
“In…my castle?”
The man gutters another laugh. “Well, it was your father’s then. But yes, the same castle.”
“Who are you?” Aiden asks with terrible incredulity.
“Juan,” the man answers, without a beat.
Aiden repeats the noise, precisely, accurately. It means nothing to him. If ‘Juan’ was important, then surely he should’ve been in one of Aiden’s books? Shouldn’t he have been a lesson? Oughtn’t someone to have mentioned him?
Juan smiles. Aiden doesn’t notice. He’s tired of the sensation of surprise, and of confusion, too. Separately, they’re tumultuous and nauseating. Combined, they’re unbearable.
Aiden wishes with most of himself that he was back in his room, his familiar, damp, dark room and he wouldn’t give up a second in this room for the world. He wishes he could meet his father all over again, only so that at this point, he hadn’t done it. I’m supposed to be special. How can I be special when I am not alone?
“What do you do?” he asks. Because, the castle is…was…for him. So if others have come out of it, then what are they going to do for him?
“I work with His Excellency.”
“Work?”
“Yes.”
“You said you’d answer my questions.”
“Yes, if you ask the right ones.”
“What are they?”
Juan shrugs, and takes another couple of strides about the room, as if to walk something off. “I thought you’d be more like your father.”
“I don’t know what that means.” Why would anyone want me to be more like someone else?
“You read that book, though, didn’t you?”
“Did you?” That book was for me.
“I lived it.”
Aiden narrows his eyes. The man looks a little too pleased with himself, a little too smug, and now he’s standing in front of the great double doors, and Aiden feels a new thing, a strange thing, a thing that makes breathing that bit harder and faster.
“Lived it.”
“I was there.”
The chair seems too small for Aiden now. It doesn’t contain him adequately, so it might as well not be there at all. Overall, he’s too exposed. He wants to close the door on this man, to close his eyes and go back into somewhere dark and safe, soundtracked by a dying fire and the creak of old floorboards, but that isn’t possible, not now, because now the lights are always on, the world is always open, Outside exists and mocks his confinement, and his father is a man who calls himself something better, thinks himself something higher than his son.
This was not the world he had intended to come down to.
“Why did you live in my castle?”
“Well, you had companions, did you not? I was your father’s companion. I still am. I have my place in this world, now.”
Had companions. Past tense.
“What was the castle for?”
Aiden knows, he knows his answer to this - the castle was to ensure the best for him, that he was the ultimate human, unconcerned with the ways and means and yes, Aiden, because it was all about everything being perfect just for you, the greatest and most special boy that ever was and will be.
Juan unfolds his arms, and paces a little way around the room to the window. He peers out.
“See out here?”
Aiden nods.
“There’s things to see. There’s life, out here. Constructio
n. Mental, and physical. There’s a world, but we keep it small. It’s all near enough that there’s no rule, everyone’s clever enough, wise enough to live the right way. Everything’s good, out here, now. Because we made it so.”
“So…”
“So it was time for you to come here, and see this world, and learn that it is a good world. You will learn that, in time, you’ll be as wise as the rest of us. You’ll work out where you fit in. You’re lucky, Aiden. You don’t have the burden your father had.” Juan pauses, like he expects Aiden to intervene, which he doesn’t.
“That old castle, it had no windows. You know why?”
Aiden doesn’t even motion that he’s heard.
“Because if you grow up with things, you think they’re normal. So your father’s family go back to the dawn of the Empire - they holed their children up to learn the real values of life, of humanity. So you didn’t get distracted. So you’d grow up and have the guts your ancestors didn’t, would find a way to make things better, to use the knowledge that you’d learnt from your time with only the best and the wise to be better and wiser than your past. Couple this up with the concept of what is always right and what is always good, and you get a man like your father, who can do what needs to be done, and you get someone like me who can make it possible.”
“Then…” and he wants to ask what am I for but he can’t get the words together, can’t form the thought.
“Things are complete. You are so fortunate, Aiden. So fortunate.”
Why?
The question is answered without it being asked.
“You can live without thought, without guilt, you need not hold the responsibility or grandeur of His Excellency. You can form the new world from within. You just need a little time to…adjust. I remember that castle. It’s a beautiful place, but it’s a lonely place. It’s nothing like community, society. You have the basics, but you’ll have to figure out for yourself where you belong in this world, where you want to be…”
And Aiden stops listening, because the words have become blades which rip at his insides and threaten to shred all that is his comfort.
He closes his eyes, tight, and tries hard to see his old room, with its old ways, with its beautiful panelling, the dark shadows in corners, the fusty scent of scrolls and metals and wood, the damp wood, the burnt wood, the ashes of yesterday and the flames of the morning. Oh, those things. Never to be his again.
Even the silk against his skin feels too different, too clean, too fresh, too new, scented wrong. The bright lights of the chamber are still too bright, and the windows peer at him like eyes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The Back-up
Kit leads Alej the opposite way from the one in which Eliza and Selina have gone. He tries conversation, but Alej doesn’t seem interested. On the contrary, he is, but he’s used to being passive in conversation, to listening to whatever it is that others want to tell him. Kit, unlike Aiden, does not proffer stories and information unasked.
The idea that Aiden was the only other boy in the world, that he was everything Alej was not, gave Alej himself such a sense of his own value, if only because he so was defined by everything that he was not, and by everything he did each day. In the absence of this, and of Aiden himself, Alej is increasingly feeling as if he is nothing at all.
He focuses on the ground as they walk, uneven and cracked in places, curious bluish mosses flourishing now across the scrabbled stone. Kit points out the ‘Pulse-holes’ as they go, and Alej tries to imagine diving into them, yanking covers of dirt over himself, consciously throwing himself back into that hideous place of choking, airless misery.
“When we get where we’re going, I’ll show you, a couple of things. It’s a good place to hide if the Pulse does come. It’s how we got here.”
Alej can’t put these phrases together to make any kind of sense at all. Kit doesn’t seem to want him to, though, so that’s fine.
Kit assumed Alej would at least want to know more about that, but he doesn’t seem to want to, so that’s fine.
They continue until the side roads fall away, and the heaps of ruined buildings grow a little smaller, and there is only this central road, winding and stretching its way into the distance and here, this side of the city, there are the beginnings of vegetation - strange, strange bushes, which extend until they’re more trees, weeping translucent-cream branches, trailing vinelike over the edges of the stone. Pale yellow leaves come in sprouting increments along their reaching fronds. This, to Alej, is a welcome and pleasant sight. Like the rows of shoots confirming that he had done his job well, pushing through the rich soil, it is the first time he has really thought well of anything out here. The end of life remains in evidence, too, as they go, nondescript carcasses, or parts of them, look to be rotting still, crawling with the microbial life that refuses to be wiped out by anything, creating a wobbling sheen across old ex-flesh.
Why, then, with all these growing, living things finding their way into existence here, are Kit and Ali so dismissive of gardening? If one thing can grow in a place, then surely anything can? He distracts his mind with ideas of how he might prepare the soil somewhere like this, and wonders about this Pulse and how it could affect plants. His logical mind constructs machinery that will pull the soil - which must have a crawling, soggy potential below the dry crust - up, and he imagines the seedlings that he could cut from the trees, because there have always been seedlings available and he can’t imagine this not being the case even in such a near-barren land.
They walk, and walk, and the wide road narrows, and eventually becomes only a merging of vine-coated stone, and it’s been at least a quarter of the arc of the sun, which is well on its way to evening, and Alej is feeling tired, not to mention hungry. Hunger has evaded him since they first found the others, but those were likely more nerves, novelty and exhaustion. The change doesn’t seem to have any intention of stopping, and the walking, after two days of nothing, has repaired something in him. He finds himself shaking his arms out, testing the muscles there, feeling how they’ve softened without even a few days of his regular labours.
He wants to shift and push and pull at things, and misses, it comes to him, in sense understanding and wordless thought, productivity, order, clearing and forming things, the satisfaction that came from completing daily tasks. There has been no satisfaction to be found in the days since they left, and still he wants to return to the castle with a part of himself, to see if he can rebuild it, to see if there’s any chance that they - or he, even, because in his head at the top of that mountain there is still Michael and each time he remembers that there is nothing left at the top of that mountain it is a terrible absence to try to fit his mind around - and then there is a break in the trees, and the pale, but living collective, and there is a wide open space.
Its centre is blackened, but there’s a hint of yellow crawling over that too, as if time has decided that this blot in the landscape is ready to heal over.
The blackness, though, frames something so extraordinary that Alej doesn’t even see it at first. What light there is in this shaded place bounces off it so that it’s easier to see the halo around it rather than the thing itself, and then when Alej tries to look at the thing itself, it appears only a mass of goldenness and shape; he can’t relate it to anything he understands, so he can barely focus upon it at all. He looks back to Kit, the shape of it still glowing in his shifted vision.
“What is that?” Alej asks of him, his jaw dropped, involuntarily. The machines he used at the castle were ornate, yes, much more so than they needed to be to do their duty, but you wouldn’t know it, carved with the most intricate details as they were, they looked as if they might do anything at all. Sometimes instructional pictures were enamelled at the handles, which were in turn bejewelled, or wound with streaks of precious metals. Alej never thought that tools might come in any other form until Aiden told him that in the old world, some people had things that were made only of metal, or that were e
ven more crude, using sticks and stones, whittled and chipped, to go about their daily business.
Kit runs his hand down the golden surface. Alej feels a desperate urge to copy him, to see if it really is as slick and pleasant as it looks, but he also feels that he mustn’t - mustn’t touch - that, just like Aiden’s things, this is not his, and he has no business with it.
“Feel,” Kit says, destroying that line of thought in a moment, “come on. And Alej does. It is surprising. It is familiar.
The rich texture, made with care and skills Alej more than appreciates, it’s like those handles, like the best tools, it feels of industry, of use, and the second his fingertips are immersed in that sensation, his body is urged to use this, that it is his business after all.
Kit watches his face closely. It’s changed from that bland, blank expression that he’s worn virtually since arriving, into something bright and collected and thoughtful. Capable, even.