by Alex Pheby
Bellows paused to note whether this had satisfied Nathan’s curiosity, but Nathan could not remember why he had asked the question. In the space that their joint silence made, Nathan felt anxious, reached for his locket. ‘Does she hate the Master because she is sad?’
This question was much more to Bellows’s liking – he raised his hands to the ceiling. ‘Can it be otherwise?’ he cried. ‘Since there can be no fault in Him, the fault must reside in her. Yet there is no understanding her motives. I have tried to speculate – perhaps she has some deluded vendetta, perhaps not, but if reason there is, I have not discerned it. Some say that the Master spurned her advances, long ago, and that, in her pain and jealousy, she now seeks to punish him, but that I do not believe. I think, for what it is worth, that there exist in the world two forces – that of good, and its opposite evil – and that these forces are of the same order as the light and the dark – without reason or rationale, simply existing. Let us glory in the fact that we are on the side of good, and pity those that must live out their lives for evil, as she and her people must. Let us seek to end their misery and put our faith in the goodness of our Master, who has demonstrated His worthiness beyond all doubt in all that He does.’
The locket was warm in Nathan’s hand. ‘How can we end their misery?’ he asked.
Bellows stiffened and pulled the two sides of his collar together so that they met in the middle. For a while he paused there without moving, and when he eventually let the collar fall apart again it was with a sigh. ‘That, Nathan, is the question. Who can say that in doing good, there is not the danger of doing evil? I once thought that if one only put his faith in a higher power and did its bidding, placing one’s own faulty and corrupt desires to one side and living as a tool lives – inanimate, unconscious, unreasoning – one might ensure that good things come of good actions. The matter, in practice, is not so simple. In the hearing of the command, there is room for misinterpretation, and in the acting on that command there is room for failure and mistake.’
There must have been something in Nathan’s odour that indicated that he did not understand, so Bellows gave an example. ‘What if the Master were to say: Bellows, it is against all our interests for rats to make their way into the workings of the Manse – they clog up the machinery and disrupt the smooth turning of the cogs when they fall, by accident, into the gears. Bellows, who trusts always in what the Master says, knows then that to do good he need only prevent rats from entering the machine. Say, then, that he goes and finds those places where rats enter the tower and, with concrete, he has Caretaker block their runs. He must, must he not, be doing good?’
Nathan nodded.
‘Indeed. Such was my feeling. But what then, if, on coming to check on the drying of the amalgam, Bellows descends in the quiet night and hears, at a distance, a noise, high and faint but insistent, very insistent, like a ringing bell or the drawing back and forth of a tiny bowstring across the highest tuned strings of a violin? What if he follows this noise and smells something unusual, behind a cabinet which has been pushed against a wall and forgotten, filled with woodworm and sawdust, the glass on the doors showing nothing behind but pieces of broken crockery? Under, there is a bundle of dried grass and sticks, and amongst them, like forgotten blackberries in a tangled bush when the pickers have retired at the end of the season, are the children of the rats who have now been barred by Caretaker’s concrete. They are blind and wriggling, no larger than a finger, ammonia-smelling, hairless and writhing and endlessly crying. What then of these little things, who have committed no sin except to be born to parents who make a pest of themselves about the place? What choice does Bellows have but to take the nest from behind the cabinet, grubs and all, squeaks and all, smells and all, and throw the lot of it into the furnace, to end their suffering?’
Nathan said nothing, but Bellows went on and would probably have paid him no attention if he had spoken; indeed, he no longer seemed to be talking to Nathan but addressing the world in general, or himself, or the Master. ‘And what if Bellows knows that the rats only found their way to the nesting place because of the laxity of Groundskeeper? And in his desire never to have to punish innocents in the future, Bellows dismisses this man and sends him back down to the slums, and then this man, with veins broken on his cheeks and skin perpetually glazed with a film of cold sweat, begins a tirade against Bellows and the Master, cursing them in terms that would shame a docker, and later beats his wife, who works in the laundry, until he ruptures an organ in her, and then she sickens and dies amongst the steam and sheets. What of good and evil then, Nathan?’
Nathan did not know.
‘And that was only the smallest thing. An infestation of vermin, the removal of which, in the concept, was an unalloyed good. In the execution, badness crept in. Imagine then how complex matters might become if the stakes are raised. What if it is the Mistress who must be removed to the greater good, and her people who must suffer the flames, like the rat babies did? Is this a sum worth counting? And is Bellows capable of mathematics of that complexity? Or you, Nathan: are you capable? Can you weigh up the wrong a man might do in doing good and match it against actions that might be taken to prevent that wrong?’
Nathan shook his head. On the table in front of him, right where he would put his exercise book, someone had carved ‘The Master lies’.
‘Indeed; you cannot,’ Bellows said.
This carving was new, freshly splintered, overwriting where there had previously been a crudely sketched cat’s hindquarters. Nathan ran his finger through the rough channel someone had made with a knife.
‘Yet there will come a time,’ Bellows continued, ‘when you will be asked to make such judgements. And then there is only one piece of advice – adhere as closely to the commandments of the Master as you can. He, alone among us, has the ability to judge the outcomes of all things, because His field of vision is so much wider than ours, His wisdom is so much greater. Do those things that He asks of you, even if they seem to you to be incorrect – He, after all, sees and knows things that we may not see, or may see and fail to understand. One must put faith in those things which are deserving of faith, and if He tells us we must do one thing then we must do it, and if He tells us we must do another thing then we must do that, even if it is consigning the innocent to the flames, because who is to say that the Master is not avoiding some greater misery that we cannot recognise, let alone explain, or is providing some boon that is not immediately visible?’
Bellows paused here and it seemed to Nathan that he was waiting for something, as if Nathan might agree and his agreement might help to convince Bellows that what he was saying was true, but Nathan said nothing, and Bellows coughed and returned to the board. When Nathan returned his attention to the table, the carving was gone, and the cat was back where it had always been.
In the corridors as Nathan returned to his room, the gill-men were out in force, slinking three at a time, turning whatever senses they possessed at the corners of places, at the joins of the carpet and the skirting boards, behind pictures.
Some crouched spider-like, others progressed with high-kneed gaits, one was flat to the floor paying all possible attention to the pattern in a rug. What they wanted was obscure and they ignored Nathan as if he was invisible. When he passed them, they curved in whatever way their sinuous bodies would allow so that he didn’t touch them. This Nathan could have interpreted as trust or disgust, but either fact was an irrelevance – gill-men could not be spoken to as one person speaks to another and if Nathan ever tried, they would comment to each other in words or exchange thoughts but never would they reply directly.
By the time Nathan reached the corridor leading to the playroom they were gone. He had stopped fearing these things, but he still breathed easier in their absence. He looked down the corridors – empty. When he turned there was a glint in the varnish of a picture – blue – and then another, the same colour, further down towards the playroom. This glint moved like a firefly from o
ne frame to another.
Nathan automatically looked for a gill-man, almost called for one, but then the glint was gone, and he wondered what he would have said to him.
LIX
‘So, this is Malarkoi on the Island of White Hills, and here is our enemy, the Mistress.’
Today was a sunny day, and Nathan’s collar itched.
‘And where the Master represents all those things that are good – industry, application, learning, and the brilliance of the developed intellect – the Mistress represents their opposites. Firstly, there is sloth. Unlike the Master, who works tirelessly to the benefit of us all, the Mistress turns her hand to nothing – she lies in a melancholy fugue, shut off from the world by the walls of her pyramid. She makes nothing; she does nothing; she merely is.’
On his way to be educated by Bellows, he had seen a portrait of a girl, the same girl he had seen before, except that she did not have feathers in her hair. Her hair instead was made of feathers, like a bird’s.
‘Secondly, there is solipsism: she turns all her thoughts in on herself, rather than out to their proper place where they might act on the world.’
The plaque beneath the portrait had read ‘Destroy everything.’
‘Thirdly, she is ignorant – her magics come not from the written word, but from the fostering of occult things: artefacts and all the feeble gods of the distant past that litter her ancient land and haunt the forests and lakes – ghasts and shades of things that live above and behind and below the world. The Master turns his attention to less evanescent phenomena, and so creates something solid in the world.’
But then it was gone, back to a man of the past whose name Nathan had already forgotten, and Nathan had arrived for his lessons.
‘Finally, she makes a fetish of the body, inscribing her skin with runes and charms with which she summons aid from the other side, and so allows the other side purchase in this world, where it should properly be exploited and excluded and relegated to its place. And so, like her, her city is a miserable thing, unlike the city of your birth, Nathan. Come.’
Bellows took him by the hand and pulled him to the window. The clouds had gathered together again, and there was no sign or hint of the other place that had been revealed the day before. Instead, it was as if the clouds were the end of everything again, a container for this city of smoke and towers, surrounding it and blocking out the sun. Bellows saw nothing of this, and his attention was spared only for that part of Mordew Nathan could see from the window.
‘You see the Merchant City? In Malarkoi this is nothing but grass and fields. On it, her sickly subjects pitch tents between which sheep and dogs roam, grazing where they can, barking and howling into the night. Where the Master has suspended the Glass Road in our city, the Mistress has done nothing. The only roads are paths of muck and gravel that run without structure or forethought and lead nowhere.
‘Where the great factories that serve the Manse are placed, they have forests of wasted timber growing unchecked, home to creatures that prey on livestock and children alike – bears and wolves and great falcons that swoop in and around the tents, picking off the sick and the unwary. It is as if our Zoo, in which the beasts of the world are held and categorised, studied and cared for, has been thrown open and the creatures – whether rare or dangerous – have been given free rein to challenge man for superiority and control of the land around them.
‘In every way and in every place Mordew the great dwarfs and shames the Mistress of Malarkoi. Think of it, Nathan. Our towers and glass and great engines, our colonnades and markets, and around it all the Sea Wall, our protector, guaranteeing our safety from the endless efforts of the waters to drown us, and firebirds to burn us. Is it not marvellous? Does it not speak most powerfully of the goodness of the Master, who made it all?’
Nathan tried to see it. But he saw still the haunting grounds of the Fetch; the dead, damp, lightless earth on which his mother’s shack was stacked; the cracked sewer pipes that spewed ordure onto everything; the festering pools of dead-life and the writhing of the Living Mud. The place where his father died. Would they have buried him by now? Or burned him?
Why don’t you touch your locket?
Nathan turned to Bellows. ‘But what of the slums?’
Nathan’s hand wanted to touch the locket.
Bellows turned away from the window.
‘There is always a price, my dear boy. There is always a price.’
‘Are there slums in Malarkoi?’
‘Child, it is all a slum. And all the people in it are slum-dwellers.’
Nathan nodded, locket warm in his palm, and when Bellows returned to the cupboard to find a painting he might show Nathan of Malarkoi, Nathan turned to the window again and tried to break the cloud cover between here and there by staring until his eyes were dry.
After much rooting around and scraping of drawers, Bellows returned with a scroll, held it against its attempt to curl itself shut. ‘It is almost as if the paper is reluctant to display the paint that has been consigned to it, as if the pulp itself is ashamed to bear the image of the place.’ Bellows slapped it down in front of Nathan and spread the paper flat, resting an elbow and forearm against one end and pinning the other with his opposing hand so that Nathan had an uninterrupted view of the offending sight.
‘There. Malarkoi – although this is a depiction from an earlier age, before the Master’s campaigns were properly begun – the place now is even more derelict, the hinterland having been scourged away and the people made refugees with no choice but to crowd the central areas and occupy the steps of the Mistress’s pyramid.’
It was a painting done in gouache with a heavy hand, the pyramid clear in gold at the centre, with a mess of brown and grey splodges surrounding it. All around was green, but when Nathan looked closer it was possible to guess at what the painter had been hoping to show: a jumbled chaos of brightly coloured tents, rendered as dots like wildflowers in a meadow.
‘Not a single building worth the trouble of an architect’s drawing,’ muttered Bellows, ‘not a single monument, not a single erection above two storeys – little more than earthworks, such as the prehistoric men turned their hands to. One step away from the ape, these people of Malarkoi.’
Nathan let his finger run across the paint, tracing the dots, as if he might make sense of their distribution by drawing a line between them, connecting them up into the outline of something greater, trying to find in it an analogue of the sweep of the Glass Road. There was none to be found. ‘If it’s so bad, and they’re so stupid, why does the Master bother with them?’
Bellows nodded, as if Nathan had struck to the heart of the matter. ‘He would not, Nathan, except in the heat of his generosity. In fact, he has sent out word to the people that they should come to him here, in Mordew. He has sent boats to facilitate their emigration, so that he might bring them under the protection of this great city and that they should lend their toil to the ever-greater glory of Mordew, in defiance of their mistress. But they do not come, except a few.’
‘Why?’
Now Bellows adjusted his collar and the blade of his nose swung from left to right like the sail of a clipper, seeking to make best use of the wind. He coughed and put his hat right on his head. ‘The answering of this question,’ he said, after a long time, ‘was a task that was once given to me.’ Bellows turned away entirely, and from the set of his shoulders beneath his jacket Nathan could tell that he was very uncomfortable with the thought, his bones pressing in all directions and moving here and there as he tried to quieten himself.
‘What did you find out?’
‘Nothing at all, child, for I did not undertake the task.’ He looked around the room, seemingly for something he might find that would take precedence over this new topic of conversation, something that he could switch to, justifying the telling of this tale another day. But there wasn’t anything. ‘It was shortly after I came into the service of the Master, when I was no older, child, than you ar
e now. I came here with my brother, who was older than I was. As is often the way, the older child exceeds the younger in his abilities, having received the full measure of the generative source, and though the Master charged me to leave Mordew by boat and go into Malarkoi and there canvass the people for their views of Mordew, instead I begged Him to send my brother, Adam, in my place. I felt that I would fail and that he would succeed, and that thereby we would both be spared the inconvenience of my inadequacies.
‘He did not wish to go, but I begged him – I was not the man I am today – and he loved me, and he went. The Master, not caring, perhaps, which of His charges did which thing, allowed it, and put him in the boat and let him leave by the docks, and set him sailing to Malarkoi.
‘A month or more passed before Adam returned, and when he did he had no satisfactory account to give – the people of Malarkoi, he reported, had forgotten how to speak as we speak in Mordew, and instead had taken to the exchange of gibberish words and to taking meaning, limited as it was, from an entirely incomprehensible vocabulary.
‘The Master heard this, and cast spells and enchantments on Adam so that he might understand their language and speak it too, and sent him back. To see him go once was terrible enough, but to have him returned to me only to be sent away again was worse still, and I waited for him anxiously, so that, I am ashamed to say, I could not properly attend to my work. I believe I was a problem for the Master in this, for He had plans for Adam that I was required to meet in his absence, and I think I was less than adequate to these tasks too, and that the Master rued His generosity in having allowed me to send Adam in my place.
‘Many months passed, and I became less and less equal to the tasks put to me, and more and more concerned as to the fate of my brother. One morning, the Master called for me, and I was sure I was to be dismissed and returned to my father and mother, who relied on me for their living. I went, cap in hand, to the Great Hall, head bowed. But when the Master appeared, He was not alone. Adam was with Him.