by Sean Wallace
Song must have seen my face. “Don’t panic,” she had said. “This is routine.”
So I showed my passport to a bowed reed of a boy with thin dark whiskers sprouting from his lip and chin who barely glanced at it before moving on down the carriage. Then were moving again.
Night, day, and night again. More checkpoints. I slept and dreamed of Attia and of dragons.
I woke one morning to find we had arrived in Korla. One more check of documents and then out into the winter desert city.
It was an ancient city, a desert town in the Eastern Mandate that had at various times been part of other kingdoms and a key stop along the spice trading routes. It had been swallowed by the Han Empire centuries ago, and had stayed part of that state when the Mandate had moved from Heaven and to the People. The massive damming and hydrology projects of the previous decades had allowed Korla to boom into some kind of desert metropolis, with people fleeing the overcrowded cities of the East to settle on cheap land opened by networks of culverts and aquifers. Beyond the city limits sprouted new residential areas that had row-upon-row of symmetrical wooden dwellings with south-facing doors and hipped roofs tiled in baked clay.
The military loomed everywhere. Soldiers stood at every cross-street and it seemed that every other vehicle was a diesel-belching truck laden with strange equipment being ferried out into the freezing desert. If anything the troops here felt more edgy than those in Marakanda: so tense as to be almost fragile.
The research station where Attia had worked was out in the desert and restricted to military personnel. I didn’t want to think of how many more troops might be out there.
I lit another smoke. I was struggling to comprehend this place. Such an arid landscape, transformed now into something that teemed with life. Everything felt so deeply exotic to me.
I heard footsteps outside the door. Song, probably, returning from her reconnaissance. The door squealed open, and slammed shut with a thud. Song entered the laminated kitchen. “I think we’re clear,” she said.
“Any word from Attia?” I asked.
The spy shook her head. “No. There was no message from her at the dead drop. I’m not surprised. I think she must be laying low. The whole city is on edge. They know the military is looking for somebody. But they don’t know who. Or why. I’m going to leave a message for her tomorrow.” Song shrugged. “We have to hope that she responds.”
I raised my eyebrows. “That’s it? We wait for her to get in touch? That’s the Commissariat’s master plan?”
“Attia is hiding somewhere in this city, with half the Mandate army looking for her.” Song walked over to a kitchen cabinet and took a tin off the shelf. “Roadblocks, dogs, door-to-door searches, the whole thing.” She wrested the tin open and measured a few heaping spoons of dried chá into a glass pot. “They want her back, no doubt, but more especially they want the dragon’s egg she took with her.”
I frowned. “If they want her back so badly why haven’t they plastered her face on every lamppost from here to the border?”
She set a kettle onto the stove and lit the gas burner. Blue fire flickered beneath the chromed steel. “When she defected it was on the front page of every newspaper here. The most prominent Commonwealth scientist, defecting – one more proof of the superiority of the Mandate way of life. If they admit that she’s a fugitive then they have to admit that they let a double agent into the most secret of their military research projects.”
I thought of Attia hiding in some tenement or basement here in this dusty, cold, desert city. Now it was her turn to sulk in the shadows, afraid that at any moment a heavy-booted kick would splinter a door and end her life. I wondered if she had any friends here, anyone she could trust.
Did she have a lover? Still, now, after so much time that thought made my heart ache.
“Do you want a drink?” The kettle barely had time to whistle before she whisked it off the element.
“Not any of that. You have kaffa?”
Song indicated a cupboard. “There’s some up there. I never drink it so you’ll have to brew it yourself.” She smiled apologetically. “I don’t know how. I always make my guests brew their own.”
“You get many guests here?” I asked as I walked over and opened the cabinet beside her. She indicated a tin painted with peonies and I slid it off the shelf.
“Song has many friends.” She brushed her shoulder against mine as she poured steaming water into the large glass chá pot. “She works selling petroleum. She hosts dinner parties once a month. Her friends think it queer that she never married.”
I put the kaffa tin on the counter, didn’t open it. “Why do you work for them?”
“What?”
“The Commissariat. Why do you work for them?”
Song smiled, regarded the chá leaves that unfurled inside the clear glass pot. “How could I betray my country, you mean?”
“No. That doesn’t offend me. I would betray the Commissariat in an instant.”
She laughed. “I suppose you would.” She stirred the tea and then placed a lid on the glass pot. “So what does offend you?”
“Why would anyone work for them unless they had to?” I said, thinking of Attia.
“Would you think less of me if I told you it was for the money?”
“I don’t believe it. Maybe if you were some minor functionary passing secrets in the mail for the occasional wad of cash. No. You’re in too deep, you know too much. You’re too good at what you do. You actually believe in them.”
Song was quiet for a long time. For a moment I wasn’t sure if she was at a loss for words or simply didn’t know where to start. “I did, once,” she said. “I’m well past a belief in anything now.”
She turned to me and our eyes met in a rush I was aware of how close she was, the heat of her body . . . in one moment there had been nothing between us, and in the next I felt some spark of tension or energy. I realized suddenly how long it had been. Her hand rested on the counter by the brewing chá. I placed mine on top of it. Without making a conscious decision, without considering, I leaned in.
My lips met a single finger she had raised between us. My eyes, which I didn’t remember closing, shot open. She took a half step back, opening a space between us that felt like a gulf, that snapped whatever energy I might have imagined between us. That finger could have been a wall, a thousand feet high. I felt my face going red. You’ve known her for less than a day. “I’m sorry,” I muttered.
Song just shrugged, picked up the pot and poured chá into an earthenware mug. “Tomorrow we will hear from Vitellia,” she said casually, as if nothing had just happened. “Hopefully we will get a better idea of what she wants. Why she wanted you brought out here.”
I nodded lamely, shuffled back. “What . . .” I cleared my throat too loudly. I was only half-considering her words, still mostly thinking of how much of a fool I was. “. . . how do we get her out?”
“We’ve made plans. Here,” Song reached into the same tin she’d pulled the dried chá leaves from. This time she removed a snub-nosed revolver. She placed it on the counter between us. “In case things get out of hand.”
And like that, the moment between Song and I was forgotten. I reached forward cautiously and picked up the gun. It felt cool and heavy, nickel plated with a handle inlaid in polished black dragonbone. I hadn’t touched one in decades, had never been trained to use one properly. I swung the chamber open and saw eight brass slugs inside.
Song’s face became contemplative. “I have no idea what Vitellia was thinking when she insisted that we drag you out here to meet her. Why would she want you, a man she hasn’t seen in twenty years?” She sipped from the steaming mug. “I keep coming back to that. Why you?”
A question that I asked often enough myself. “She saved my life once,” I said, thinking again of Aelia Capitolina. Smoke and fire and blood. So much blood. “Maybe she thinks I owe her.”
Song reached out and touched my cheek, the rough brush of her
calloused hand reminding me of that attempted kiss. My face went hot again. “Get some sleep tonight. We have a lot to do tomorrow.”
Then she turned and left me standing in the kitchen, revolver still cradled in my beat-up hands.
NEWSREEL (ii)
YOUTH RISE TO THE CALL OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE
In Ravenna, and Eikstown. Aelia Capitolina and Roma itself, loyal youth fed up with the counter-revolutionary excesses of the intellectual-class are rising to the committee’s call! The universities, those festering wens of patrician thought, are being occupied by the young guards! The intellectuals are denounced! In town squares, in view of all they seek to oppress, these patricians confess their crimes! But the Party is benevolent! It’s seeks not to punish, but to re-educate! To the fields and the mines they send those who have not labored a day in their lives, to learn inner peace through honest hard work. The young guards look on in approval, knowing that today, the Commonwealth is stronger.
6
The next morning saw Song drive her autocar through the bustling center of Korla to the Tiānlóng War Museum. Low mountains dusted with snow rose to the north of the city, and as we drove along the straight paved roads we passed ancient sandstone stupas and temples that sat beside low brick office buildings with brightly colored awnings. The sidewalks were crammed with people: men in pressed suits with large open cuffs, women in long high-cut dresses with satin or silk shawls, an underclass dressed in gray coveralls covered in grease or coal, and hawkers with carts piled high with the fragrant dried pears that grew in orchards that surrounded the city. On the streets were hulking autocars with big round headlights and engines that growled like starving animals. When we finally pulled into the large gravel parking lot by the museum, I leapt from the stuffy cab and into the cold desert air. Chrome-sided buses were parked in a neat row, and groups of tourists thronged everywhere, some chattering in Mandarin, others in Türkik dialects I couldn’t quite understand, most wielding hefty foldout maps and taking grinning family fotograms. They all seem so rich.
“We’ve been using war museum as a deaddrop for the last year,” Song had told me as we drove up. “There’s a potted plant in a Tiānlóng exhibit – when either of us need to communicate we mark the pottery with chalk and sink a deaddrop spike into the earth.”
I felt a knot in my chest. Just knowing that Attia came here regularly was almost too much to handle. What if she was here now? Twenty years separated us. Would I recognize the woman she’d become?
The museum had once been some kind of temple or palace: its façade was several stories tall and built of smooth stone the color of desert sand. Pointed niches and intricate scrollwork ran along the second story, above large brass-bounded doors that stood open in an arched portal. Around the entrance leaf-less polar trees clustered along wending paths dotted with benches, their empty-fingered hands clutching at a gray winter sky. Song gestured, and then followed the surging mass of tourists as they flowed into the building. “The deaddrop is in the third exhibit hall,” she whispered, as we squeezed with the rest of the tourists through the tall open portal. “Anybody could be watching. Stay back from me.”
I suddenly wondered why she’d even brought me here. I felt the weight of the revolver in my pocket, pressing against my thigh. I shot surreptitious glances at the tourists who milled about, doing my best not to seem scared. I felt keenly an outsider here, no matter what Song said about looking like a mongrel. In Korla there seemed to be more Urghyrs than there were Hans, and many other races as besides: in theory an easy city in which to blend in. In theory.
We stepped into the large domed entrance and found ourselves beneath the outstretched wings of a dragon. Its skeletal frame was suspended from wires and lit by spotlights that reflected as small pools of bronze against polished black bones. Hanging opposite the dragon was a decommissioned Mandate warplane, nose-mounted prop still, under slung machine guns quiet. The creature above us was a Nile Dragon, the breed cultivated and brought to Roma, distinguished by its longer tail and lack of crest horns. Plane and dragon had been positioned by some drama-loving curators so that they were locked in frozen combat.
As we shuffled toward the wooden kiosk to buy museum tickets I was reminded that this wasn’t a culture that hated dragons, at least not the ones that had belonged to their own people. The Mountain Dragons – Heavenly Dragons, as they were still called here – were regarded with something verging on nostalgia.
We purchased tickets and entered into the first exhibit hall. “Wait here,” Song whispered. She disappeared into the crowd.
I stood alone in the middle of a long, dimly lit rectangular room dominated by a ceremonial stone arch, crenelated and covered with glazed brick. The arch was topped by an archery tower with a bowed roof that nearly brushed the ceiling of the exhibit hall. Along the black-painted walls there liteboxes with fotos of the original ruin standing in a mountain pass – “Iron Gate” was written in Türkik below the characters I couldn’t read; “Re-creation” scrawled beside the tall arch. Tourists milled about, passed beneath the arch, peeked down from the archery tower above.
My head felt light and my hands jittery. Fear crept into me, seemed to pool in my gut. What if this was a trap? Song had said she thought she might have been flagged at the border.
I ran my gaze over the arch that rose in the middle of the tall-ceilinged room, trying to appear as if I was taking in the architecture. Instead I watched the people milling about it. Which of them might be spies, here to catch us.
Then, in the corner of my eye I saw her.
A woman, dark shawl wrapped about her head, dark glasses covering her eyes. I sucked in an audible gasp. She moved through the crowd, appearing and disappearing like a drowning swimmer being carried out to sea.
Attia. It was her. I knew it. Was so sure.
Just a glimpse in a crowd, a woman turning a corner into another exhibit hall, away from the gate. Away from me. I stood numbly. I wanted to call out to her. My heart thudded against my ribs.
Had it been her? I’d barely even glimpsed her face . . .
I was moving.
I pushed through the crowd and into the other hall. Dragons hung above me. I ran my gaze desperately through the crowd, searching for that dark shawl and dark sunglasses. Faces of grimacing tourists and laughing children swam through my vision. I shoved past them. Where had she gone? I had just seen her!
I was running. People cried curses as I elbowed past them. Through one exhibit and into another. Hanging planes. Machine guns and gas masks and shells as big as autos. Dragons, horned and not.
But no Attia. I was back in the domed entrance.
Am I hallucinating? The people milling around eyed me strangely. I didn’t care. I opened my mouth to call her name . . .
. . . and then Song was there, gripping my shoulder in a powerful hand, her broad forehead creased in anger. “What are you doing?” she hissed. I let her drag me across the tiled floor to the side of the room.
“I saw her,” I gasped. “Attia is here.”
That seemed to startle her for a moment. But then she shook her head and started hauling me toward the entrance of the museum. “It’s too late now,” she said. “I’ve been marked. There was a man watching the deaddrop. He’s following us.”
“What?” I craned my neck to look behind us.
“No,” she barked, and gripped my arm tighter. “Don’t look back.” She pulled me tighter as we passed the bronze doors and into the flat winter light. “I’ll deal with him, you hope he’s alone.” She pushed me away, toward the parking lot. “There’s a bus leaving in exactly one minute. Get on it. It will be safer if we split up. It will stop by the filling station. I’ll try to meet you at the safe-house tonight. Don’t trust anybody. If Attia is here I’ll find her.”
For a moment Song was another woman standing before me, saying much the same thing. Split up, it will be safer. I’ll meet you tonight.
But before I could say anything Song turned and hurried in t
he opposite direction along a path that wove through the leaf-less poplars. “Wait!” I called after her, questions only now bubbling into my stunned mind, but she did not stop or turn. She ducked, weaved, and then was lost in the crowd.
I turned to the parking lot. A bus was being loaded: a wobbling old man dressed head to toe in khakis was being helped up steep stairs his equally wobbling wife.
My gaze skittered through the crowd that milled in front of the museum, searching desperately for Song or Attia. Only blank and unknown faces looked back. They all seemed to be watching me. I’ve been marked. I felt a shiver. Suddenly every man in the crowd was a Mandate officer. Every pocketed hand was reaching for a gun.
In the parking lot the bus door rattled shut. The engine growled. Air brakes hissed.
And I was running. Out into the lot, away from the museum and the dragons. From Song and Attia, and whatever men hunted them. I ran into the path of the bus as it started to turn out of the lot, beat my open palms against the aluminum grill. The driver swore as he slammed the breaks. I ran to the side door and hammered on the glass-and-metal until it folded in. I managed a mangled apology in Türkik and pulled some creased banknotes from my pocket. I didn’t bother to count them as I shoved them at the driver. He and everybody on the bus stared at me as I made my way to an empty seat at the back.
My breaths came in short gaps. Had I been seen? If Song was marked then there was no way I hadn’t been. I ignored the disapproving looks of my fellow passengers and stared out the window, waiting for olive garbed soldiers to come running toward the bus, brandishing lights and guns. But nobody approached, and after a pregnant moment the driver yelled something at me I didn’t understand and then pulled out of the lot and onto the road. We turned a corner and the museum disappeared behind us.