Atlan saga omnibus, p.139
Atlan Saga Omnibus, page 139
7
Northstrong
The king’s walled City bombarded us with leaves. Fallen leaves, millions on millions of them, kept up a murmur and whisper like that in a seaport-town, so that there was never quite silence here, not even in the small parks and gardens. Leaves rattled against the doors at twilight, and down the chimneys at midnight.
My mother and I were housed in a hole in the wall, for there was not sufficient in the way of living-quarters in the laboratory. But I went to the laboratory every day to work. My mother did not work. She could not leave the baby, the scientists told her they would give me enough pennies a week to keep us, and every second night I was given a loaf of bread and a sausage. The Saint came often in the day to visit my mother and ask her advice as he set about the conversion of the King’s city; sometimes he came to supper, and brought when he remembered things he was given by the poor people of the place: a goodhearted cabbage, a whole roast pigeon wrapped in thin bread.
The hole in the city-wall was not a safe locality. Only pence were charged for the rent here. My mother and I both curled up on the shelf before the window, every evening when the curfew had been sounded and we knew there could be no visitors, no hurrying out to the street-vendors for a forgotten necessity, no wandering in the little parks to watch the litters and bearers and beggars all among whisking leaves. We folded up a bed-cover and sat on it to make a sort of cushion, and forgot how dangerous our place here was; we would not for anything have exchanged such a horizon for the dreary empty streets outside ‘safer’ windows.
The window did not at first yield more to us than a bit of blank light on bright days. We were allowed to use a lamp or candle in our other room, but not in this one because ’the enemy’ could see it from their naughty peering-posts. But my mother said if we were to use no artificial light in this room, then we must have some real. We unstuffed the rags from the window, chipped with a knife at the metal plate bolted over it, and could see out to the ‘siege’. Also beyond to the true North—rolling hills on hills on hills, land steeped in sour rolling melancholy. It was obviously a land where many men still haunted, here. Later we heard Chat area called Battledown—and were told it was forbidden wilderness. It was an unpopular place of old defeats against the Blue Tribes now rampant in those hills, entrenched out there, in control.
The ’rebel troops’—Zerd’s, Sedili’s, the Pig’s, the others—did not come round often to this North curve of the King’s city, in fact. The fires I once or twice saw gleam high up and far away in the hills were the Blue Tribes’ fires. I put forth my mind and sent it flying into the dark rolling spaces towards the little quick lights, and met a confused alert warmth—met something. They were after all my kin.
We saw blue people in the streets in the day, but they were not much fun. They were city-bred, heavy surly slow blue people. They were big, they were strong, they were not very bright. They carried the Northern ladies’ litters aflutter with ribbons and mirrors. I saw a herd of blue people in pens at market. I went up to the fence to return to one big female the baby left on the straw and dung when a soldier had taken it out to pinch for plumpness, then put it carelessly aside. The mother grunted. She was almost hysterically grateful to have the baby back, but could not say so. I realised two things. She did not see me as blue, in spite of my small stormcloud look: I was outside the pen. And she had never been taught to speak.
As I became more used to the life of the Capital, as I found my way from ramp to ramp grown with plants and hung with ‘drapes’—great weatherproof canvas monstrosities once ’elegantly’ painted to provide areas where the civilised could shelter from the elements, now cracked and creaking in every breeze, throwing shadows like crazed pterosaurs at noon—I could differentiate more between the lives of the blue people and ourselves. The blue people were not slaves. They did a lot of carrying—they lifted litters up and down the ramps, they even carried high-born children up and down the hilly streets on their backs. But they were not told where to go, for most of them could not speak. They had merely learned directions and certain homes or stables, as a horse learns. And that is what they were. They were beasts, they were fodder, they were fed well—and when they were needed, they were eaten. The Northerners, so clever with their science and knowledge, had killed off almost all their ’real’ cattle with insecticides and chemicals introduced to improve either the soil or the cattle’s flesh. They were finding it oddly difficult to breed more, and here after all were cattle, blue strong protein.
What scandal! What licence! More, what avid greed for the Princess Sedili to mate with the blue body.
Yet I saw how many brothels were staffed with blue bodies, (for we passed through a street of low open brothel-windows on our way to our rooms in the wall). And I saw how plenty of soldiers too, in Northstrong parades and barracks, were blueskins.
And I realised that the Northerners now saw in the blues a sort of silent secret inadmissable salvation. They lusted after their energy and virility. I met blue people who could speak. They lived in palaces, much at their ease. They were entertainers, athletes, long-distance javelin-throwers, tireless cocksuckers. Only the old-fashioned ate them. It was considered progressive to be very polite and honour them behind their backs when there was nothing they could do about it, to their faces lust after them and their new blood, stamina, ’freshness,’
‘robustness.’
For the Northerners’ own peasants were not good to look at. They were pallid, puffy, dewlapped. Northern peasants eat far more meat than peasants elsewhere, but look pastier, weaker, more rotted from within. They have poisoned even their poultry with chemicals, in the great surge of ‘science’ which saw also the flooding with air of Atlan’s old clean private vacuum.
Yet nobles and scientists looked healthy. Why? They had bred a special meat, non-infected.
No wonder the Northern King was humiliated at being vanquished, his Army led, by stud beef! But how proud Sedili must have been.
I saw Sedili once, from our window—Sedili directing manoeuvres out on the river-delta. She rode a white bird (of course) and a veil of muslin gauze misted from the crown of her helm. She darted around rising in her stirrups again and again to point proceedings (so easy on the mount.) She was the very essence of modern princess-hood, rebellious-new-generation, passions unfettered and muslin gauze unfettered too.
The two rooms we lived in were very bare, and unpromising in texture—things were damp, no matter how we brushed the very old rug, which had mortised itself almost into the equally soggy floorboards, it could not take on a nap—it was more like dank paper. But this is one of the best times I ever remember for my mother. She was living alone. There was not one other woman there to spill where she had mopped, or to smash where she had placed gently. If she kept things neat so did I, for I shared her affection for placement. If she kept a remnant of old brass, polished up with the right kind of soft rag, by the hearth even when most of the time no fire could be lit, I knew why: she used it as a symbol of the way it could reflect the flames if ever there just might be any. If she placed a chip of broken blue glass in front of our window, I kept it there: I knew she loved to see the waxing or waning light throw its blue little pool on the ceiling or the ‘cushion’. She began to be happy.
Her face became less thin. She began to look young again. Her movements became quick: she was sure of them, she knew they would end up wherever they’d been planned for. Someone would not appear to change all her directions.
I think she knew she was happy. Suddenly this was the life she’d always asked for. I read her Diaries after they were returned to her, and before she burned them. I read how she had always asked, Please, could she be let alone, could she be not her mother’s chess-game, her husband’s waiting-game. She had always said, All I want is to be left to be. She began to sing as she worked, and to stew truffles.
Since one day he noticed her bare mauve feet, The Saint gave her his old boots: “There!” he said, standing back so they could both admire her. They were the ones that had got fouled in the Quar ending. They were too big for her. They slopped and shuffled even when she stuffed them with rags and thrown-out stable-hay we found on the streets. But it was too cold to take them off. The Saint now wore officer’s boots again. After all, undeniably, that was what he was.
I knew my little Cija wanted nothing more in the whole world than a decent pair of shoes. She felt that slopping and flapping and dredging and slipping around with her ankles sticking out of these grotesque stained things degraded both her and myself—it didn’t, but she felt it did. She had made me a little pair of soft canvas slippers, stitched to wooden soles the carpenter shaped for her for several coins. She could not afford the extra for an adult’s soles. I saw her adding on sheets of paper and they were all different ways of juggling into our budget a pair of adult-size wooden soles. But that didn’t work and she held my face in her hands, softer again now, she looked lovingly into my eyes, and she said: “If only you could walk down the street beside a mother with proper feet!”
I thought again about using my gold coin. But it was not economic to use it. I would never get the right change for it in this part of town—and being a child, particularly a child unable to speak up. One day we would need all the coin could buy, not just part.
I felt it was still the coin Ael had given me on my silent tongue. It might very well be the same exact coin. What after all would the Mill children have done with the coin, once they had taken it from me, but throw it down and lose it again? For looking eyes to find once more?
There was at the laboratory a very golden boy, a thirteen-year-old noble who had from infancy been brilliant scientifically and whose presence with us now was one of the main reasons for the ultra-protection enjoyed here by the scientists, since the boy’s parents were related to the King’s something or other.
This boy began to think that I was perhaps extraordinary.
I was sent by him into the laboratory with the key, on an errand. This was to the part of the laboratory which was still used as a cell, since it was very bare but for cupboards with phials stacked in them; in it was still kept the prisoner we’d been donated and who was supposed to be kept hungry.
We were still dutifully keeping him hungry. Every now and then someone official arrived to check up on’ him. No one mentioned moving him to a real prison. No one told us what he was incarcerated for. He seemed quiet…pot surprisingly, I thought.
As I unlocked and walked into his ‘cupboard’, the young woman who visited him from The Saint ’to fill in his soul-gaps’ gave a scream. She seized one of her own breasts and aimed a jet of milk at the candle: out went the flame. But not before I had seen her suckling the prisoner, the prisoner’s tired patient furrowed grey face pressed to her breast, working at the nipple with his mouth, his eyes closed wearily as she herself held the creamy globe creased almost double as she too worked on it with her fingers to ease the nourishment towards its exit. The way she had aimed that spurt made me think of the bandit Ael and his magnificent aim at the candle-flame.
The young noble came running in, knocking a retort to the floor: it crashed and splintered. “What? What happened?” he cried.
By the time he had lit the candle again, the young woman had pulled her coarse demure grey mourning over her chest, and the prisoner lay slumped on his bench, his eyes still closed.
“Why did you scream?” the golden boy rather impatiently asked the young woman.
“That child who walked in—” she faltered. She was trying to think of a lie I would not contradict. She did not know I could not speak. “She reminded me of my own dead daughter,” she said hesitantly.
“You seem confused, madam,” the boy sighed.
The young woman would not be bested. She stood up and in a great voice cried: “I tell you that child is a spirit.”
The golden lord—his ringlets, his experiments, his amber eyes were all golden—he looked at me and winced. “Into the other hall, Seka,” he said curtly. And then as he saw over my shoulder the river at which I had been idly gazing through the window as I waited my dismissal, his eyes sparkled in shock.
Below the narrow slit window of the laboratory-ward, the river had begun plunging and curvetting. It was jetting like semen. I had been thinking of Ael still, and his beautiful control, and my nails had been digging into my smock. As the boy gazed from me to the river, and I realised what I had done, what a messy liquid commotion I had caused and how the fish must be leaping churned up in dismay, I dropped my gaze in confusion and the river-waters fell away, curling upon each other, and subsided. The boy did not fail either to note this.
Sometimes the golden boy’s illustrious parent came to visit him here at the laboratory, to pause before the humming phials and turn on one foot and say, “Yes, interesting, interesting…Now tell me—” and then take his son out to eat better food than we could provide. And on one of these visits, after the golden boy had spoken quietly to his parent, the parent came over to me and clapped a hand on my shoulder.
“Little lady,” he said to me, “now you, you must come to the temple with us this feast-day morning coming. It will be a pleasant ceremony and since we have asked our son which of his colleagues here he would like to accompany us as his guest, he has named you. He asks if you would like us to ask permission of your mother, so that she knows you are away for that hour or two in safe hands.”
They did come and ask my mother. The parent cast judicious eyes about our dwelling, and raised one brow very, very slightly. He was more cordial than ever to me after that. He was surprised at, but proud of, his son for being so democratic. The golden son noticed nothing: he did not notice social bits and pieces.
On the morning of the feast-day they fetched me from our hole in the wall, to which “we shall deliver her home in good time,” the father assured my mother. She smiled. She kissed me. She had dressed me in clothes she had mended very carefully.
The streets were full of proud, clean, fervent religious feeling. The temple we were going to stood on a hill. You could see it from most directions. Ramps led up to it, hung today with flags and striped silk awnings.
We sat on low plain wooden stools. My hostess passed me some candy. She tried to give some to her son too, but he didn’t notice.
In a very short while my back was aching and so was my stomach, for the stool was pretty low and you had to dispose of your legs in trailing tangles. I thought the others, taller and bigger than myself, must be pretty uncomfortable. But that was what they came here for, or part of it.
The great gaunt echoing temple was filling up around us. I could see what a fashionable temple it was. Officers were coming in, braided with gold, leaving their swords with their servants at the first entry-arch. Officers don’t go just anywhere to church. Ladies were here, their hair braided with flowers, looking very good, in high-necked dresses only a little accidentally tight.
The entire congregation on its uncomfortable wooden stools shifted and turned as two entrances galvanised the temple, one from either end of the high hall. At one end the priest in a great cloak of black and ivory was lowered seated beneficently smiling in a tasselled cradle of rope-of-gold. A huge hidden choir of boys’ or eunuchs’ voices swelled in a crashing of paean on paean. At the other end of the hall entered coincidentally a young couple obviously much celebrated socially, whom everyone wished to see: they always knew what the priest would be wearing, but this lady’s church-attending attire must not be missed, for later it must be commented upon, compared with, costed, a little admired and much tittered at.
The lady, who was small and skinny except for a good high shelf of torso, like a soldier’s breastplate, was wearing a drift of yellow on yellow, with yellow flowers pinned here and there. Her escort, an officer in the 18th Golds and thus resplendent already, had tucked a yellow flower into the shako he held, too. Naturalness was very important to the Northkingdom society and nobility at this time. Flowers had begun to die out of their gardens, their city and its purlieus, which were increasingly difficult anyway for them to reach, and had become symbols of all that was strong and poignant, as the blue people had become.
The lady’s gown was of fine linen too—gods knew what that had cost. There just was no linen around. Perhaps she had found it folded in her grandmother’s closet. In this case, she was wearing it illegally, which was very elegant of her. To encourage the synthetic clothing industry, a law had been passed and never repealed: any garment over ten years old was a punishable garment. The only materials really available in Northkingdom were those synthetic stuffs of which the shopkeepers and main middle classes were still immensely proud, but which the nobles were beginning to loathe—they were made very cheaply and fast, employing the maximum number of labourers who were still called ‘weavers’ but who once had been craftsmen and were still somewhat bewildered by their retained name and vanished trade, by boiling and refining a mineral which was mixed with the smallest possible residue of genuine linen; long fibres were then pulled out of this coagulant, coated with a preserving chemical and shaped into garments. Because they were not spun, but more or less glued together, they did tend to fall apart at the slightest stress, and were never happy in rain. They developed odd weaknesses, hems hung and drooped, the colour lost in patches. A new garment was then needed, and readily available. The North had been very proud of its prosperity, the endless production, the immense wardrobes of its ordinary people. Nevertheless, rain had never been welcome in the towns since the synthetic stuffs; and this partly accounted for the awnings and ‘drapes’ over the streets, ramps and boardwalks, to keep the weather out of the city. In consequence, the soil had suffered and plants become sickly and rare; also the chemicals were pumped back into the ground— some as waste, some as ‘miracle earth revitalisers’ which burned out the land. The leaves of the trees fell almost before they had grown.
