Horus Rising (11 page)

He took out his chapbook and his pen. He was a man of traditional inclinations, believing that no great lyric could ever be composed on the screen of a data-slate, a point of variance that had almost got him into a fist fight with Palisad Hadray, the other ‘poet of note’ amongst the remembrancer group. That had been near the start of their conveyance to join the expedition, during one of the informal dinners held to allow the remembrancers to get to know one another. He would have won the fight, if it had come to it. He was fairly sure of that. Even though Hadray was an especially large and fierce woman.

Karkasy favoured notebooks of thick, cream cartridge paper, and at the start of his long, feted career, had sourced a supplier in one of Terra’s arctic hives, who specialised in antique methods of paper manufacture. The firm was called Bondsman, and it offered a particularly pleasing quarto chapbook of fifty leaves, bound in a case of soft, black kit, with an elasticated strap to keep it closed. The Bondsman Number 7. Karkasy, a sallow, rawheaded youth back then, had paid a significant proportion of his first royalty income for an order of two hundred. The volumes had come, packed head to toe, in a waxed box lined with tissue paper, which had smelled, to him at least, of genius and potential. He had used the books sparingly, leaving not one precious page unfilled before starting a new one. As his fame grew, and his earnings soared, he had often thought about ordering another box, but always stopped when he realised he had over half the original shipment still to use up. All his great works had been composed upon the pages of Bondsman Number 7’s. His
Fanfare to Unity
, all eleven of his
Imperial Cantos
, his
Ocean Poems
, even the meritorious and much republished
Reflections and Odes
, written in his thirtieth year, which had secured his reputation and won him the Ethiopic Laureate.

The year before his selection to the role of remembrancer, after what had been, in all fairness, a decade of unproductive doldrums that had seen him living off past glories, he had decided to rejuvenate his muse by placing an order for another box. He had been dismayed to discover that Bondsman had ceased operation.

Ignace Karkasy had nine unused volumes left in his possession. He had brought them all with him on the voyage. But for an idiot scribble or two, their pages were unmarked.

On a blazing, dusty street corner in the broken city, he took the chapbook out of his coat pocket, and slid off the strap. He found his pen – an antique plunger-action fountain, for his traditionalist tastes applied as much to the means of marking as what should be marked – and began to write.

The heat had almost congealed the ink in his nib, but he wrote anyway, copying out such pieces of wall writing as affected him, sometimes attempting to duplicate the manner and form of their delineation.

He recorded one or two at first, as he moved from street to street, and then became more inclusive, and began to mark down almost every slogan he saw. It gave him satisfaction and delight to do this. He could feel, quite definitely, a lyric beginning to form, taking shape from the words he read and recorded. It would be superlative. After years of absence, the muse had flown back into his soul as if it had never been away.

He realised he had lost track of time. Though it was still stifling hot and bright, the hour was late, and the blazing sun had worked its way over, lower in the sky. He had filled almost twenty pages, almost half his chap-book.

He felt a sudden pang. What if he had only nine volumes of genius left in him? What if that box of Bondsman Number 7’s, delivered so long ago, represented the creative limits of his career?

He shuddered, chilled despite the clinging heat, and put his chap-book and pen away He was standing on a lonely, war-scabbed street-corner, persecuted by the sun, unable to fathom which direction to turn.

For the first time since escaping Peeter Egon Momus’s presentation, Karkasy felt afraid. He felt that eyes were watching him from the blind ruins.

He began to retrace his steps, slouching through gritty shadow and dusty light. Only once or twice did a new graffito persuade him to stop and take out his chap-book again.

He’d been walking for some time, in circles probably, for all the streets had begun to look the same, when he found the eating house. It occupied the ground floor and basement of a large basalt tenement, and bore no sign, but the smell of cooking announced its purpose. Door-shutters had been opened onto the street, and there was a handful of tables set out. For the first time, he saw people in numbers. Locals, in dark sun cloaks and shawls, as unresponsive and indolent as the few souls he had glimpsed in doorways. They were sitting at the tables under a tattered awning, alone or in small, silent groups, drinking thimble glasses of liquor or eating food from finger bowls.

Karkasy remembered the state of his throat, and his belly remembered itself with a groan.

He walked inside, into the shade, nodding politely to the patrons. None responded.

In the cold gloom, he found a wooden bar with a dresser behind it, laden with glassware and spouted bottles. The hostel keeper, an old woman in a khaki wrap, eyed him suspiciously from behind the serving counter.

‘Hello,’ he said.

She frowned back.

‘Do you understand me?’ he asked.

She nodded slowly.

‘That’s good, very good. I had been told our languages were largely the same, but that there were some accent and dialect differences.’ He trailed off.

The old woman said something that might have been ‘What?’ or might have been any number of curses or interrogatives.

‘You have food?’ he asked. Then he mimed eating.

She continued to stare at him.

‘Food?’ he asked.

She replied with a flurry of guttural words, none of which he could make out. Either she didn’t have food, or was unwilling to serve him, or she didn’t have any food for the likes of him.

‘Something to drink then?’ he asked.

No response.

He mimed drinking, and when that brought nothing, pointed at the bottles behind her.

She turned and took down one of the glass containers, selecting one as if he had indicated it directly instead of generally. It was three-quarters full of a clear, oily fluid that roiled in the gloom. She thumped it onto the counter, and then put a thimble glass beside it.

‘Very good,’ he smiled. ‘Very, very good. Well done. Is this local? Ah ha! Of course it is, of course it is. A local speciality? You’re not going to tell me, are you? Because you have no idea what I’m actually saying, have you?’

She stared blankly at him.

He picked up the bottle and poured a measure into the glass. The liquor flowed as slowly and heavily through the spout as his ink had done from his pen in the street. He put the bottle down and lifted the glass, toasting her.

‘To your health,’ he said brightly, ‘and to the prosperity of your world. I know things are hard now, but trust me, this is all for the best. All for the very best.’

He swigged the drink. It tasted of liquorice and went down very well, heating his dry gullet and lighting a buzz in his gut.

‘Excellent,’ he said, and poured himself a second. ‘Very good indeed. You’re not going to answer me, are you? I could ask your name and your lineage and anything at all, and you would just stand there like a statue, wouldn’t you? Like a Titan?’

He sank the second glass and poured a third. He felt very good about himself now, better than he had done for hours, better even than when the muse had flown back to him in the streets. In truth, drink had always been a more welcome companion to Ignace Karkasy than any muse, though he would never have been willing to admit it, or to admit the fact that his affection for drink had long weighed down his career, like rocks in a sack. Drink and his muse, both beloved of him, each pulling in opposite directions.

He drank his third glass, and tipped out a fourth. Warmth infused him, a biological warmth much more welcome than the brutal heat of the day. It made him smile. It revealed to him how extraordinary this false Terra was, how complex and intoxicating. He felt love for it, and pity, and tremendous goodwill. This world, this place, this hostelry, would not be forgotten.

Suddenly remembering something else, he apologised to the old woman, who had remained facing him across the counter like a fugued servitor, and reached into his pocket. He had currency – Imperial coin and plastek wafers. He made a pile of them on the stained and glossy bartop.

‘Imperial,’ he said, ‘but you take that. I mean, you’re obliged to. I was told that by the iterators this morning. Imperial currency is legal tender now, to replace your local coin. Terra, you don’t know what I’m saying, do you? How much do I owe you?’

No answer.

He sipped his fourth drink and pushed the pile of cash towards her. ‘You decide, then. You tell me. Take for the whole bottle.’ He tapped his finger against the side of the flask. ‘The whole bottle? How much?’

He grinned and nodded at the money. The old woman looked at the heap, reached out a bony hand and picked up a five aquila piece. She studied it for a moment, then spat on it and threw it at Karkasy. The coin bounced off his belly and fell onto the floor.

Karkasy blinked and then laughed. The laughter boomed out of him, hard and joyous, and he was quite unable to keep it in. The old woman stared at him. Her eyes widened ever so slightly.

Karkasy lifted up the bottle and the glass. ‘I tell you what,’ he said. ‘Keep it all. All of it.’

He walked away and found an empty table in the corner of the place. He sat down and poured another drink, looking about him. Some of the silent patrons were staring at him. He nodded back, cheerfully.

They looked so human, he thought, and realised it was a ridiculous thing to think, because they were without a doubt human. But at the same time, they weren’t. Their drab clothes, their drab manner, the set of their features, their way of sitting and looking and eating. They seemed a little like animals, man-shaped creatures trained to ape human behaviour, yet not quite accomplished in that art.

‘Is that what five thousand years of separation does to a species?’ he asked aloud. No one answered, and some of his watchers turned away.

Was that what five thousand years did to the divided branches of mankind? He took another sip. Biologically identical, but for a few strands of genetic inheritance, and yet culturally grown so far apart. These were men who lived and walked and drank and shat, just as he did. They lived in houses and raised cities, and wrote upon walls and even spoke the same language, old women not withstanding. Yet time and division had grown them along alternate paths. Karkasy saw that clearly now. They were a graft from the rootstock, grown under another sun, similar yet alien. Even the way they sat at tables and sipped at drinks.

Karkasy stood up suddenly. The muse had abruptly jostled the pleasure of drink out of the summit of his mind. He bowed to the old woman as he collected up his glass and two thirds empty bottle, and said, ‘My thanks, madam.’

Then he teetered back out into the sunlight.

H
E FOUND A
vacant lot a few streets away that had been levelled to rubble by bombing, and perched himself on a chunk of basalt. Setting down the bottle and the glass carefully, he took out his half-filled Bondsman Number 7 and began to write again, forming the first few stanzas of a lyric that owed much to the writings on the walls and the insight he had garnered in the hostelry. It flowed well for a while, and then dried up.

He took another drink, trying to restart his inner voice. Tiny black ant-like insects milled industriously in the rubble around him, as if trying to rebuild their own miniature lost city. He had to brush one off the open page of his chap-book. Others raced exploratively over the toe-caps of his boots in a frenetic expedition.

He stood up, imagining itches, and decided this wasn’t a place to sit. He gathered up his bottle and his glass, taking another sip once he’d fished out the ant floating in it with his finger.

A building of considerable size and magnificence faced him across the damaged lot. He wondered what it was. He stumbled over the rubble towards it, almost losing his footing on the loose rocks from time to time.

What was it – a municipal hall, a library, a school? He wandered around it, admiring the fine rise of the walls and the decorated headers of the stonework. Whatever it was, the building was important. Miraculously, it had been spared the destruction visited on its neighbouring lots.

Karkasy found the entrance, a towering arch of stone filled with copper doors. They weren’t locked. He pushed his way in.

The interior of the building was so profoundly and refreshingly cool it almost made him gasp. It was a single space, an arched roof raised on massive ouslite pillars, the floor dressed in cold onyx. Under the end windows, some kind of stone structure rose.

Karkasy paused. He put down his bottle beside the base of one of the pillars, and advanced down the centre of the building with his glass in his hand. He knew there was a word for a place like this. He searched for it.

Sunlight, filleted by coloured glass, slanted through the thin windows. The stone structure at the end of the chamber was a carved lectern supporting a very massive and very old book.

Karkasy touched the crinkled parchment of the book’s open pages with delight. It appealed to him the same way as the pages of a Bondsman Number 7 did. The sheets were old, and faded, covered with ornate black script and hand-coloured images.

This was an altar, he realised. This place, a temple, a fane!

‘Terra alive!’ he declared, and then winced as his words echoed back down the cool vault. History had taught him about fanes and religious belief, but he had never before set foot inside such a place. A place of sprits and divinity. He sensed that the spirits were looking down on his intrusion with disapproval, and then laughed at his own idiocy. There were no spirits. Not anywhere in the cosmos. Imperial Truth had taught him that. The only spirits in this building were the ones in his glass and his belly.