Aijlan

by Andy Graham

  Rick squatted down next to Stann’s chair. “We’ve been friends since we could walk. It doesn’t have to be this way.”

  Stann sneered down at him. “Stand up, Rick. You know I can’t bear all this hearts-and-mind crap. You’re a soldier, not a counsellor. And don’t think that you can just wait this out, and I’ll come round. I know what you’re like.”

  Rick stood. “I’ve told you—”

  Stann slammed his palm down on the table. The picture frame lurched and fell off the table, the purple medal clattering against Stann’s prosthesis. “No, I’ve told you! I said I had nothing to say to you and I meant it. I don’t know why I’ve wasted so much time on you already.”

  “I can help, with Edyth, with Donarth.”

  The cup flew across the room, shattering against a wooden wall. Dark tea spilt on the floor, running down between the floorboards. Stann lurched to his feet and rounded on his old friend.

  “You will do no such thing,” he shouted. “Guilt doesn’t fix anything, and I won’t take your money. Get out. Get out before I bludgeon you with that prosthetic leg your rookie mistake cursed me with. It’s more useful as a club than anything else. Get out, now!”

  Tears streamed down Stann’s face, getting tangled in the thick stubble across his chin. He stumbled, crashing to the floor. Red-cheeked and panting, he clutched at the end of his left thigh. “Please, Rick, go. Just go.”

  Rick closed the door behind him, walked past the burnt armchair in the garden. The sound of the indistinct sobs from the house stopped. As he stepped through the gate, the morning air was split by a howl. He heard the dull thud of metal, and wood splintering.

  XI - Pig-Headed

  Thryn turned the metal box over in her hands, tracing slow spirals with the point of a chipped nail. She had a streak of soot on her face from cleaning the blackened old tractor engine. It squatted at one end of the room that stretched the length of their cottage.

  The engine had been gutted by Rick’s father. He’d added short, fat exhaust pipes to it. They poked out at odd angles, making it look like a chubby spider that had fallen over while ice skating. Once the cold winters bit, the engine became a second heating source, fuelled by whatever would burn. The blunt bladed metal fan on top of it pumped hot air into the under-ceiling heating pipes.

  A low, sonorous chime rolled through the long room, chasing shadows into the cracks between the floorboards. Rick glanced across at the wizened wood of the grandfather clock, checking the pendulum was swinging. The towering clock predated the tractor engine. He was convinced it had been there so long it had taken root. He’d told Thryn that the dust was reserved for spiders and archaeologists, and forbidden her from cleaning behind it. He hadn’t had to try very hard.

  Rick scrambled to his feet, wiping tiny splinters out of his trousers. He spread his hands in front of him, and looked down at the little girl hiding behind Thryn’s legs, grumbling about her stubbornness.

  “You’ve been away for almost half a year. You come back with a funny shoulder and a brand new uniform,” his wife said. “It’s odd for me; give Rose time to get used to you again. Calling her pig-headed is not going to help.” She reached down to stroke their daughter’s hair, and murmured something to her. “It’s such a wonderful word, though. My language doesn’t even have a close translation, but yours has several variations. It does for rain, too, and we have only one word. What does that say about your nation, apart from it being wet and miserable, and you refuse to admit it?”

  Rick grunted noncommittally.

  “But pig-headed is wonderful. It describes you and your daughter perfectly.”

  “Our daughter. It’s convenient that she becomes my daughter when she’s done something wrong. You have your moments of pig-headedness too.”

  “Not possible. I never even saw a pig before I married you,” she retorted. “You grew up next to a whole pack of them.”

  “Herd.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t have a pack of pigs, you have a herd, or litter if they’re young, or a drift, a drove, a farrow, or a sounder, or any other number of terms.”

  Thryn muttered something he wasn’t sure he wanted translated.

  The clock chimed again, the vibrations tingling through his soles. The sound was as much a part of Rick’s childhood as the long cottage that he now shared with Thryn.

  One Hallowtide, Stann’s father had told the two boys that every time the pendulum stopped swinging, even just paused at the end of each arc, a heart stopped beating. Rick had spent that entire night refusing to sleep. He’d watched the clock until sunrise, just in case his family was next. Rick’s father had come down early the next morning to find his red-eyed son shivering in the shadow of the ancient clock. After putting him to sleep with a mug of honeyed goat’s milk, he’d disappeared to have a quiet chat with old man Taille.

  Rick took Thryn’s hands in his, squeezing them, running his fingertips around the burn marks. “I’m sorry I’m late,” he repeated. “You have no idea now much I’ve missed you, but I had to see Stann. I—”

  Thryn put a finger on his lips.

  “A reason is worth a thousand excuses.” She wrapped her arms round his shoulders to kiss him. “You’re here now, that’s what important.”

  Rick melted into the embrace, breathing in the smell of her hair, the scent of her skin. Something tugged at his trouser leg. He peeled Thryn’s arms off his shoulders and sat cross-legged on the floor. Rose pouted, twisting her head away, pushing her chin into a shoulder.

  He took the metal box off his wife and offered it to Rose. She grabbed it, throwing it under the clock. Thryn trailed a finger around his scalp. It brought impatient, hungry, goosebumps up on his skin. He reached behind himself and squeezed her ankle.

  “Patience, my husband,” she crooned, “will make it all the sweeter.”

  Rick’s head dropped. “They just messaged me as I was walking up the hill from Stann’s. There’s something going on in the capital. There was all kinds of talk before I left, a compulsory dress code for citizens, a one-child only policy, grumbles over president De Lette’s new trade policy, aliens in baskets, dragons fighting under mountains, the usual rubbish.”

  “What did the message say?” Thryn asked. She tucked one of her stubborn brown curls behind her ear.

  “Only that I have to go back. The army doesn’t need to give reasons. I swear they timed the message deliberately. It’s almost as if they were watching.”

  Thryn disentangled Rose from her legs, and sent her to get the picture she’d spent the last few days drawing for him. Rose scampered over to the clock, fished out the metal box, and crawled away on all fours.

  “As it’s a special occasion, I let her draw on paper. We’re running low on chalk anyway,” Thryn said once the girl had disappeared into the next room. She smoothed the skin on his forehead. “When do you have to leave?”

  “In a few hours, if I rag the car back to the capital. I fought for this week’s leave for months, and they take it away from me in seconds. It’s been happening to all of us, officers, soldiers, rooks—”

  “What’s a rook?”

  “Rook: rookie, new soldier, green, fresh, inexperienced, young ’n’ dumb.”

  “You have an interesting way of encouraging self confidence in your youth,” she said with a wry smile. She pulled him closer, and placed a finger on his lips. “I don’t know what a real ‘rook’ is,” she paused, wrapping her tongue around the unfamiliar word, “but green can be a good thing, plants for example. Fresh food tastes better, and the energy of youth can make up for a lot of inexperience. Remember?”

  She grabbed his belt, and tried to twist the fingers of the other hand through his short hair. Her eyes, just south of brown and north of black, looked up at him through the long eyelashes his daughter had inherited. “And in your next life, you can only join up if you promise not to cut your hair,” she whispered into his ear, her breath moist.

  “I could wear a wig?” />
  “Another new word. If that’s what I think it is, then you can sleep in that wig outside. I think even the ghosts of the pigs will run from that image.”

  There was a thump of feet as Rose ran back past the stove. She was clutching a torn piece of paper in one hand, tears streaking down her face. She’d ripped the paper.

  It took them the best part of an hour to explain to the overexcited child that tearing the paper wasn’t a problem. They could get some more from somewhere. Maybe. Not even the pencil in the metal box calmed her down. Thryn explained that the little girl had been bouncing off the walls since before the moons had set that morning, asking if Daddy was home yet. They managed to get her to sleep in the end. It gave them enough time for a brief, groping lunge at each other. Then Rose woke up screaming. So Thryn went to her.

  Rick listened to the clock for over an hour, stretching out every second that it was going to take him to get back to Aijlan-Karth. The heavy tick of the hands creeping round was a sound he felt rather than heard. It was a clunk that had a tangible weight to it, each one sounding like it was the final one. When the clock chimed again, another thirty minutes had passed, and Thryn still hadn’t returned.

  Rick dragged himself to his car. The military didn’t look kindly on tardiness, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to test the new-found leeway his minor celebrity status had brought him.

  He thought his wife had fallen asleep with Rose, but once he was on the main road to the capital, she sent him a rare message. She had just got downstairs. His pig-headed daughter, who had refused to let him put her to bed, had said she was scared he wouldn’t be there in the morning.

  Then Thryn wrote that she loved him, in her language. She claimed the words had more weight in her mother tongue. Maybe that explained why, when she swore in his language, it was spectacularly, wince-inducingly, toe-curlingly inappropriate. Love and curses, something you had to feel, not learn.

  “Damn you, Stann,” he said. “I could’ve spent today with my family, not you.”

  A flash of pain piercing his shoulder made him gasp. He blinked a tear out of his eye, and gunned the car along the uneven road.

  XII - Change

  Just over twelve hours after getting home to Tear, Rick was waiting to be admitted back through the main entrance to the capital, Aijlan-Karth. Either side of the road, a deep trench snaked towards him from the horizon, nettles snapping at its edges. It stopped just shy of the half-built gate. Cast-off tools and heavy machinery stood guard, unsure what came first, the ditch or the road above it.

  The long queue of traffic was crawling through the roadworks that had been there for longer than the road. Car horns were going off like fireworks on Hallowtide, setting Rick’s teeth on edge and twisting his eardrums into knots.

  The early-evening sun was hammering down on the roofs of the metal vehicles, baking the occupants. Rick pulled his fingers out of his ears and mopped his brow with a damp towel. It was illegal to transport animals like this, but people climbed in voluntarily. The public transport network in the city was a death trap in high summer. If the heat and dehydration didn’t get you, the body odour would.

  The shimmering heat off the car bonnets distorted the shape of Aijlan-Karth in the near distance. Plumes of smoke twisted through the spired towers that rose high over the city.

  Despite slowly stewing in his own sweat, the blue-purple fog of exhaust fumes hanging over the line of traffic was enough reason to keep the windows closed. Rick resisted the temptation to try the air-con again. He knew it didn’t work, but the urge to flick that switch wouldn’t go away. He refused to be one of those people that tried the handle of the locked door he had failed to open, just in case he had forgotten how doors worked.

  “At least my sweat’s clean,” he said to himself, “not the particulate-filled filth that a lot of these cars are belching out.”

  It was an irony of city life that puzzled him. He understood that the public wanted cheap food and fuel. But the clamour to drive costs down further and further was increasingly being drowned out by people who realised, yet again, that they hadn’t been filling their fuel tanks or bellies with what they thought they had. Their shock and outrage took precedence over the natural urge to be able to brag about getting the best bargain. Or maybe they didn’t like the facts they ignored being waved around under their noses: the squalor their cheap meat lived in when alive, favourable trade deals for repressive regimes with a litany of human right abuses, and arms sales to governments who turned those weapons against the seller. Basic maths was absolute. Cutting costs meant cutting corners. It was, as Stann’s father had slurred one drunken evening, tantamount to an act of self-decapitation to save on barber’s bills.

  He placed the damp towel back over the scorching hot steering wheel. Someone somewhere in the queue honked a horn, and a choir of angry cows added their voices to the sticky air.

  “That never works, you idiots!” Rick yelled at the windscreen. Spraying the air with curses, he slammed his fist onto the horn. A braying note added to the cacophony in the air, and the car in front of him lurched forwards.

  “I don’t believe it, it worked.” He dropped the towel and fumbled for the gear stick.

  The procession of vehicles inched along the road towards the new gate. It was a modern day castle with an age-old purpose. Antennae bristled on its turreted roof. Slit-like windows glared down from the round walls. Cars jolted over a series of potholes. Evening sunlight burst off their mirrors. The explosions of colour made him wince. A car backfired. The reflection of a wrinkled old man, one gun-grey eye open, the other covered by a buckled coin, flashed across Rick’s windscreen. He gripped his steering wheel. His eyes flicked to the sides. Rick revved the engine, preparing to swerve off the road. He had to get out of here. A stationary target was an easy target. He wasn’t safe, he —

  A beige car trundled past, roof-rack laden with rough-cut wood, and music blaring out the open windows. A woman, tousled hair plastered over her red face, was yelling at a collection of kids. Each one of those kids was battering another one with a menagerie of stuffed toys. Rick sank back in his seat, the sweat of fear mixing in with the heat sweat. Castle Anwen was a long way away. He was on the outskirts of Aijlan-Karth. He was safe here.

  He forced the image of the old man out of his mind. The girl from his nightmares was lurking just out of sight. Last night, she’d been wearing an Aijlan military uniform with the sleeves ripped off. She’d scrubbed at her belly to get rid of the red stains until her hands had started bleeding.

  “Don’t think of her, think of your wife, your daughter,” he said. He plucked at the shirt on his chest, peeling it off his skin, and berated himself for not having brought any water.

  It would be cooler back home, sitting in the orchard behind his and Lenka’s properties. He remembered Rose running around earlier this year dressed in knickers, wellies, and a sunhat, flipping between blind stubbornness and guileless charm in a heartbeat.

  The beige car pulled in front of him. Rick smiled and waved at the storm of kids and their toys. He got a chorus of raspberries in reply.

  As he rolled into the shadow of the growing gatehouse, he dipped his head to get a better view through the windscreen. The plumes of smoke were thicker now, smudging across the late-evening sun that was pumping heat out as if today was its last day.

  The smoke looked to be coming from north of the river where Karth, the older half of the capital city, stood. The smoke was just beginning to reach him, filtering through the smog he’d been sitting in. Other drivers noticed it too. The car horns faded, replaced by the sound of sirens in the city. Rick could just about hear the public announcement speakers crackling at the crowds beyond the gates.

  A group of people were squeezing between the cars, handing things out. Rick wound his window down, and the handle snapped off in his hand. The hot breeze blowing through the window cooled the sweat on his skin, offsetting the acrid taste of the blue fumes. He wasn’t interested in whatever these
kids were giving out, but they may have some information.

  He pulled a baton out from under the seat. The frustrations of the journey, and the heavy feeling in his loins he’d had since leaving Thryn too early were forgotten. As the traffic trundled to a halt again, a bearded face ducked down to window level.

  “Greetings, brother,” the man said. He reached into a lopsided pocket sewn onto his trousers.

  Rick’s fingers tightened around his baton. “Hands out of your pockets, and step away from the window.”

  The man’s eyes widened, flashing from side to side.

  “Whatever you’re trying to sell, I don’t want,” Rick said. “Whichever religion you’re trying to convert me to, I’m not interested. And if you’re yet another pacifist trying to convince me of the error of my ways, remember that it’s people like me who bleed and die so people like you have the freedom to protest about war.”

  The stranger took a pace back, his colourful, stripy trousers billowing in the breeze. He held his empty hands up in front of him. “None of the above, my friend,” he said. He licked his crooked yellow-brown teeth.

  “What’s going on?” Rick demanded. He got out of the car, baton held by his side.

  The man wiped his brow. “Can I?” he gestured to his pocket.

  “Slowly.”

  “What I have for you today is free, and as of tomorrow there will be nothing to convert to or from.” The man’s voice gained momentum as he realised some of his colleagues were watching. He pulled something from his pocket with a flourish, and held it out towards Rick.

  Rick frowned, the beating in his chest quickening. For a split second he thought of the grandfather clock back home, glad that Thryn and Rose were in Tear. He checked the other side of his car; more people were giving out the same thing to the other drivers. In the city a military truck screeched to a halt behind the gatehouse, disgorging a pack of heavily armed soldiers.