by Col Buchanan
The Lord Protector muttered something, squeezed his fist upon the rail. Coya could only sympathize with the man, though he sensed that they were still skirting the heart of their meeting, the full reason why Creed was here.
‘We could have corresponded on this,’ he ventured. ‘You hardly needed to come all this way in person.’
‘No.’
They fell to silence, each buffeted by the wind. Let him settle his temper first, Coya decided.
The skyship was turning to windward, bringing the world around with it, so that Minos drifted away to the left and the striking cobalt of the sea filled their eyes. Coya could see a hint of an island chain to the far east, little more than hummocks of rock extending south-east in the direction of Salina. He imagined the loose collection of islands beyond Salina, stretching all the way to distant Khos at its easternmost point over six hundred laqs from where they were now; the archipelago of the Free Ports and of the democras, people without rulers.
Along with the egalitarian participos of Minos and Coros and Salina, if you took the time to travel the Mercian Isles, you could come across islands that elected councils by lottery and believed in no personal possessions at all, or were based on administrative matriarchies of the old tradition, with simple cottage industries and tightly controlled tariffs on trade, or were free-for-all enclaves like those of Coraxa, fierce individualists living in loose tribes and scattered communities. Even distant mighty Khos was represented in the League, where the last vestige of Mercian nobility, the Michinè, had somehow held onto power following the sweeping years of revolution over a century before – albeit aided by many concessions to the people, and by endless centuries of sieges and invasions that had made the Khosians, as a nation, mutually reliant on those who paid and maintained much of their defences.
The varied democras of the Free Ports, based on the dreams of a political prisoner who had died centuries previously – a philosopher whose blood was running through Coya’s veins even as he thought of him now – were the same only in that they shared the common ideals of the League constitution, at least in principle if not always in action, and that they were all part of this unique experiment in rule by the people. It was hardly a utopia they had created here. No one and nothing was ever going to be perfect. But perfect or not, they had fought for a free and fair way of living, without slavery or exploitation of others, and on most islands they had achieved some working approximations of it.
And now this speculation of invasion, ringing in his mind day and night, a jangly disjointed series of anxieties and teetering hopes. It was hard to think of anything else just now. Only last night, Coya had experienced a dream that had caused him to awake in a shaking, sweaty panic.
In his dream, he had imagined the imperial capital of Q’os as a monstrous quivering thing pulsating at the absolute heart of Mann. Its tendrils had flowed outwards across the world of humans in the form of self-fulfilling credence, reaching deep into the minds of people as they slept, and even more so when they were awake; whispers upon whispers that told how life was a vicious competition and nothing more, how human worth was to be found only in those measurable effects of status and materials either gained or given, how man must prey always on man, how those who would be free must first of all enslave. In his dream, the whispers had flowed never-ending until it was all the listeners could do but believe in the words and follow them, and their neighbours the same, and their neighbour’s neighbours, so that the needs of the monstrosity were pulsing through them all, and they were inflating with the ugly power of it, becoming the words themselves and making of them a reality – and all the while the monster gorged, and the world itself grew crazed and barren.
All his life, Coya had loathed and feared the tyranny of Mann. And now this impending invasion, these Mannian fleets heading straight for the people of the League with their intentions of conquest; causing him nightmares in the coldest hours of the night.
‘There’s another matter I must raise with you,’ Creed announced, stirring from his own musings. ‘Something I can only discuss in person.’
‘Oh?’
‘If I’m right, and the Mannians invade Khos rather than Minos, then full martial law and all its powers will fall into my hands. I want your people in the Few to know that I will use that power only as intended, in the defence of Khos. Nothing more.’
‘Really, Marsalas. Not here.’
‘Then where else? Time is short. I need the Few to know that I harbour no plans of becoming a dictator.’
Coya shook his head. ‘I would not have supposed it, anyway. Still—’ Coya faltered, his mouth open.
Marsh had caught his eye. Something had changed in the stance of the man, a sudden alertness that would have gone unnoticed had Coya not know known him for the better part of his life.
‘I’m certain your words will be well received,’ he continued as Creed followed his gaze: both of them looking at Marsh, at the bodyguard’s hands now reaching beneath his brown leather longcoat for something in the small of his back. ‘You have nothing to fear from us, believe me. You are wise enough not to allow such power to ruin you entirely . . . Besides, you know too well the consequences, should that ever occur . . .’
Coya blinked in surprise as Marsh lifted a pistol in his hand and aimed it towards the crew.
The crack of the shot went right through him. He stared in shock at his bodyguard, standing there like some duellist with his right leg extended forwards, his other hand still beneath his coat, a puff of smoke dispelling in the wind from the end of the raised gun. Coya followed the line of the shot and spotted a man toppling backwards onto the deck, while crewmen around him shouted out in surprise or dived for cover. The victim was a monk, he saw, one of the pair of monks who had come aboard to bless this august occasion of their meeting.
Another bang went off nearby, loud enough to burst his heart. Creed shouted something by his side as chunks of debris whistled past them.
A wash of black smoke blew across their position by the rail. He had time enough to see a second monk leaping towards them, something round and black in his hand, and Marsh pulling another pistol from his coat, then firing it, before the smoke engulfed them entirely; and then Coya was sprawled on the deck with a great weight pressing down on him, and another bang tried to squeeze the insides out from him.
When the smoke cleared, Marsh was still standing there with his hands now empty save for a knife. He was turning to track the monk vaulting over the rail to his death.
Coya gasped as the man vanished over the side.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Creed, patting him down before helping him to his feet.
Coya found his voice again. ‘I’m fine, I think,’ he said as he stooped awkwardly for his cane. ‘And you?’ he asked, as he leaned on it for support and looked up at the general. ‘You seem to be bleeding, on your head, there.’
Creed dabbed at his head where a shallow wound ran crimson. The general frowned then turned to look over the rail. Coya was curious too.
Below, a great distance below, a canopy of white drifted down towards the surface of the sea. As the wind carried it in the direction of the coast, he saw a man dangling beneath it, the burned orange of his robes unmistakable.
Creed shook his head in obvious fascination.
‘These Diplomats. They grow crazier every year.’
CHAPTER FOUR
The House on Tempo Street
In sweat, they lay with their lungs heaving and their cries still ringing in their ears, both of them splayed like martyrs on the sodden bed, their bodies glistening in the daylight cast through the tattered, mouldy curtains of gala lace that hung across the open window.
Bahn blinked to clear his eyes. Through the air above the bed the dust motes were dancing as though in play, whipped up by the frantic action of the last hour.
‘We make too much noise,’ she muttered next to him, but without much concern in her voice, even as a child’s yell rang up through the thin board
s of the floor, and voices murmured from behind the even thinner wall at their heads.
Bahn could only gasp and wait for his galloping heart to stop racing. He was burning up, and he kicked away the thin blanket that had snared itself around his ankles. He wiped his stubbled face dry, and realized that he’d forgotten to shave that morning.
The room was a cupboard-like space with a triangular, slope-beamed ceiling too low for a man to stand properly beneath. It reeked of dampness, sex, and the spiced smoke from an incense burner sitting beneath the open window. A perch, they called this kind of attic room in Bar-Khos; the preserve of prostitutes and street hustlers, or those in hiding from the law.
Bahn looked down at the girl as she rolled against his side and rested an arm across his stomach, her white skin as smooth as paper. Like her face, her small breasts were flushed, and he lay there and enjoyed the sensation of them flattening against his chest while the soft lilt of her voice played in his ears. ‘Or rather, you make too much noise,’ she was saying in her Lagosian accent, and she slid her hand downwards past his stomach, and stroked his downy hair with painted nails.
‘You were hardly quiet yourself,’ he breathed, and felt his scrotum tighten as her nails explored him further – sweet Mercy, he was responding again already. He could not get enough of this girl.
Absently, Bahn wondered if a shade had possessed him these past days and weeks; one of those spirits of mad impulse that seized hold of lives and spurred them headlong into tragedy with their insatiable needs.
If only I believed in such things, Bahn considered in his usual rational way. He knew that this weakness was his alone to carry. He thought of Marlee, his wife, and felt the usual first flutters of guilt in his stomach, a nausea he would carry with him for the rest of the day. He sighed heavily.
The girl beside him knew that sound by now, and she drew her hand away to leave him in peace. She cradled her head against the nook of his shoulder, her blue eyes fixed on the low sloping beams of the ceiling above them. He observed the spikes of her honey-coloured hair as they bristled against his skin.
‘I hardly recognized you, when I first came in,’ he told her.
She looked up with those eyes that he still found so mesmerizing.
‘Your hair,’ he explained, nodding to the ridge of erect hair that ran along the middle of her scalp, like the mating display of some jungle bird. He could smell it, the wax that coated it and made it stiff like that. ‘It makes you look like one of those travelling tuchoni.’
‘You don’t like it? Meqa did it for me. She’s half tuchoni herself, or so she tells it.’
‘I like it well enough. It’s certainly . . . exotic.’ Yet Bahn couldn’t help but think of the first time he’d ever laid eyes on her, standing on a corner with the other street girls of the Quarter of Barbers, in a thin rain that had plastered her short hair in curls around her head. ‘I just thought it suited your name, the way that it was.’
‘I still have my curls,’ she purred, twisting one with a finger, blinking up at him through her lashes.
‘Enough now,’ he urged.
‘What?’
He said nothing for a few moments. ‘Let’s just lie here a while. Two people in a room together. I’ll still pay for your time.’
She smiled, and it was the first genuine smile she had ever offered him. ‘I can do that.’
The girl lay back against his arm. She pursed her lips and blew at a shining dust mote to push it away from her face. Her eyes followed it and Bahn found himself doing the same, tracking its motion through the cloud of swirling specks that filled the room.
The mote drifted over a stack of folded clothing pressed between the bed and the wall. At last it vanished amongst the leaves of a jubba plant in a chipped wooden bowl, where a single blue flower was in late bloom. A Lagosian thing that, to pot plants and bring them indoors, a fashion that had been catching on in the city since the steady influx of refugees from Lagos had first begun; Marlee had even started doing it.
Outside, a crow flapped past the window, making its ugly calls. For long moments Bahn simply gazed through the curtains of lace, staring at the meagre view of housing tenements under construction on the other side of the yards and communal vegetable plots, the cranes and scaffolding poking up beneath a slab of azure sky. The voice sounded again through the sheet-thin wall behind them; Meqa, bartering with a customer over her price. From below, the sounds of the children continued to rise from the ground floor.
They were a tribe, those fifteen children, and they were ruled only by their mother Rosa, the landlady of the house, who as it turned out was not their mother at all, save for two of them; rather, she was a middle-aged widow with a good heart, who could not help but take in every stray hungry child that she encountered. The children themselves barely seemed to notice the men who clambered up the creaking stairs at the rear of the house at all hours. Bahn, on his handful of recent visits here, had been ignored by them after only a few glances his way – the children too busy shrieking around in the muck of the backyard, fighting over worms and yelling in delight each time they snapped one in half.
It was enough to make Bahn think of his own son and infant daughter, though he chased those thoughts away, quickly, before they could gain any substance.
‘It’s quiet,’ the girl said.
She referred to the silence of the guns at the Shield, half a laq to the south.
Bahn nodded. The Mannian guns had lain silent for more than a week now. It was said that a period of mourning had been declared across the Empire in respect for the death of the Matriarch’s son. In return, the guns of the Bar-Khosian defences had followed their example, though purely to preserve their blackpowder.
His voice was wistful as he spoke. ‘It was like this ten years ago, before the siege and the war. Just normal everyday sounds of a city.’ Bahn sighed once more. ‘I wonder if it will ever be this way again.’
‘You sound troubled,’ she said, and narrowed her eyes as she watched his expression. ‘Have you heard something?’
For an instant Bahn felt a tension in his chest, his muscles clamping tight around his heart. In his mind’s eye he saw the far sparkle of fires in the distance, like cities burning.
‘No,’ he lied to her. ‘Not that I could tell you, anyway, if I had.’ Bahn squeezed her shoulder and tried to ease the tension in his chest by breathing deeply. ‘I’ve too much on my mind, that’s all.’
She asked nothing more of him, and simply laid her head upon his beating heart. ‘You should not fret so,’ she murmured.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because you worry like an old woman. Too much thinking,’ and she lifted her head to tap him twice on his left temple.
He forced a smile to his face. ‘My mother is the same. Always worrying about something or other.’
She nodded, understanding.
Bahn looked at her fully, sprawled as she was against him; the slight redness of her nostrils from inhaling dross; the bruise on her neck the precise size of his pursed lips. He had been rough on her again.
When had he last given Marlee a lusty bite like that? he wondered. Before their son had arrived, he realized. Before the war, when they had both been young and carefree.
Bahn ran a finger across the smooth skin of her shoulder.
I will feel this guilt either way, he considered.
Without warning he rolled himself on top of her. For a moment there was surprise in her eyes, though it was gone in an instant as he bent and kissed her throat, to be replaced by something unreadable.
He was losing it, Curl thought to herself as Bahn departed and the thump of his boots faded on the outside stairs. Curl had seen it before in other siege-shocked soldiers of the city, men ready to snap and run amok through the lives of those around them, tearing and snarling for a way out. They were always the roughest ones, she’d noticed, but Bahn in truth was not so bad on her, more fiercely passionate than anything else, as if he simply needed, in these br
ief hours with Curl, to forget everything about his present circumstances.
A suicide case, perhaps; hardly a berserker.
She hadn’t liked the fear in his voice though, when he had been talking about the guns lying silent. As if he was doomed; as if they were all doomed. She didn’t need to hear things like that; let him share those worries with his wife, whose name he kept crying out in the heat of the moment.
Curl rose and slipped her payment into her hidden pouch of coins in the pot of the jubba plant. The pouch held a handful of silvers and a little more in coppers. Not much for all the business she was doing. With the worsening shortage of food in the city leading to ever-higher prices, forcing Rosa to ask for larger contributions to their meals, she was finding it hard to maintain even that small sum from week to week.
Curl poured a jug of water into the clay washbasin. She stood naked on a cotton towel that she lay on the small portion of floor-space before the stand, and washed herself down with a bar of apple-scented soap. Around her, the smoke from the incense coiled about her body and chased away the after-scents from the room. Still, an atmosphere of heaviness remained behind, the man’s woes and low spirits lingering on in the quietness. Curl hummed something from her childhood, making the room her own again.
Goosebumps rose on her skin as a cool breeze played through the open window. She dried herself quickly, and smeared a little lemon juice over her legs where the fleas kept biting. She checked her hair in the broken sliver of mirror that leaned next to the washbowl, then slipped into the cotton robe that she wore whenever she wasn’t working. Still humming, she slipped the wooden charm back around her neck, and listened to the shouts of Rosa chasing the children from the kitchen.
Rosa rented out all the upper rooms of her house to feed and clothe her tribe of wayward urchins. It made for a curious combination, with their world of playful youth and tantrums seeping always upwards through the cramped, sordid sessions of the working women in their tiny rooms, and the ghostly lives of the hardcore dross junkies, and the gentle madness of the urban hermits and struggling artists who lived alongside them. But it worked somehow, perhaps simply because they had no other choice but to make it work. Rosa kept the rents as low as she was able, and ensured that everyone felt part of an extended family. Against all expectations, there was a warmth in the house, a sense of belonging.