The Modern World (11 page)

I had liked working in Dotterel’s chemist shop, it was dim and quiet; the gang’s fear of employment made it a safe refuge. With the shutters down, every customer who entered saw me, a boy slouching on the counter who had already looked them over, a freak perhaps, tall and skinny even for adolescence, but a perfect confidant.

My time looking for Cyan was nearly up. It’s hopeless, I thought – I’ll go and see Rayne instead, if she hasn’t already left for Slake, and then I’ll head back. At least I’ll be able to tell the others when Rayne should be arriving.

I reached an open plaza and stopped. This should be Cinder Street. Maybe … that row of shops was along the same line. I looked around. If this was Cinder Street, then the Kentledge pub would have been at the far end … And my chemist’s shop would have been … there. And the Campion Vaudeville! That should be on the next street over! I ran quickly towards it, remembering the peeling playbills fluttering on its boards, the shards of glass that topped the walls around it, the masks and scrolls around the windows in its leaking mansard roof.

The street ended at an empty plaza with a row of smart boutiques and some sort of trendy wine bar. The Campion Vaudeville had totally gone.

They’ve redeveloped my street! How dare they? Yes, it had been run down but I had liked it! There was no trace of the second-hand shops full of individual texture I had loved so much. That corner was where I busked with Babbitt – and now it had all been swept away.

The new shops had no character; time hadn’t given them any unique pattern of wear. They blocked my view of the canal towpath, pressed up tall and narrow against each other as if someone had put a hand at each end of the plaza and squeezed them together. Their colour-washed fronts were rose pink, yellow, pale blue, chalky green and grey. They proudly announced they’d passed inspection, with firemark, ratmark and lousemark tin badges tacked to their walls.

I walked along the row, half whited-out by drizzle. Streams of water dripped from the sign of the horrendous new bar at the far end and pattered into concentric rings on the paving stones. That bar would be more or less on the place where the Kentledge pub used to be, where our gang leader carved the Wheel scar into my shoulder. The power of the memory made me shudder: I outlast whole
streets
, and now Cinder Street and everything I remembered was no more.

*

This must have been exactly where Dotterel the chemist picked me up; when he made me his apprentice. I stood and stared at the row of shops until I could call up an image of the Campion two hundred years ago. It seemed larger in memory, closer and brighter than the shops it overlaid. Its smoke-stained stone had flaked off here and there showing clean, biscuity spots.

I heard a whir, a paddletram! – It sounded like it could be … but it wasn’t. Simply flocks of starlings screaming and swirling in to roost.

A vision of my younger self jumped down from the Campion’s portico and ran past me, soundlessly though his footsteps should have splashed. He vanishes. He reappears again in the alley by the Kentledge; transparent – then solid – a lanky fifteen-year-old in a filthy parka. He ducks his head and wipes his nose on his sleeve.

Lines of coaches are waiting outside the Campion Vaudeville, and wisps of smog are curling through and around their wheels. Oil lamps are guttering out with gin-blue flames since it is three in the morning and the late show is just ending. The act closes to half-hearted acclaim and people begin to stagger out into the street. Linkboys hang around in a curious cloud, their tapers scribbling lines of smoke into the air above them. The Rhydanne boy hates them, because they understand each other. They know how to buy bustard burgers and tablet fudge. They swagger with the all-encompassing importance of their job.

From the end of the street there are raised voices, lads shouting to each other about the can-can dancers. Paddletrams groan past in the background, grinding cabbage leaves and hawked-up chewing tobacco into a black sludge between the rails. The boy is faster than sight; he pauses to draw breath and ducks behind the frame of a waiting coach. The nearest human moves on and the boy relaxes.

He moves in quick bursts, waiting behind lamp post and coach wheel, doorway and alley. He crooks his elbow and tears the Insect wing windows of all the coaches along the line.

‘I saw you!’ calls a voice from somewhere in the fog. Quick as a rat the boy leaps onto the top of the carriage, which hardly rocks at all on its flat springs. He crouches, nose streaming, piercing eyes in a grimy face.

An old man emerges from the porch of the Campion. His head is bowed and his face is in shadow. This is a trick the boy very much admires. The man looks up; his face is padded, deeply wrinkled and his nose veined cranberry red. Wisps of hair too white for Galt adhere to his bald head. He is wearing a long, grey coat and carrying a cane with a silver handle, which he points at the boy. The boy simply crouches further on thin haunches and spreads his wings.

The man knows that if he takes a step or even stares too hard, the boy will run. Very querulously he says, ‘Who are you?’ but he says it in Scree.

‘You speak Scree? How? At last! What is this place? Er … I haven’t spoken to anyone since last melt season. I’m ill all the time. I’ve never been this ill before. I have to hunt for myself! And I c-can’t make any one understand! No one –’

‘Sh! Slower, boy; don’t gabble. You’re alone?’

‘You’re observant!’

‘Why did you break the windows?’

The boy shrugged. What else could he do to show his anger or make his presence felt? He sat cross-legged on the coach roof, reached a hand down through the torn window and brought out an apple. He began to examine it with the delicacy of mime.

‘They don’t belong to you, Dara.’

‘I’m a Shira. That could be the reason why I am finding it so entertaining to break them.’

‘You’re quick,’ said the old man, smiling.

‘I’m the quickest,’ said the boy.

The man took a tight grip on his cane and tapped the cobbles for a while in thought. The boy, seeing this, threw down his apple which rolled under the folds of the man’s long coat. Enthralled, the boy watched it, head on one side. His instincts were to bolt, but this man was the first person he had spoken to in a year. Indecision rooted him to the spot. He swore in Scree, but all those insults about goats didn’t seem too relevant in Hacilith.

The man gave a rustle of coughing laughter. ‘Well, I need an assistant, but I never thought I would have to tame one … I will turn now and walk away,’ he continued slowly. ‘You can follow me if you want. No one will hurt you. No one will force you, but it will be best for you if you come.’

The man walked on and did not look back, and gradually disappeared into the smog. He did not seem to be a threat; indeed, he could be a saviour. The boy watched from his precarious perch, then fluttered down and sauntered after him, still prepared to run.

Dotterel and the boy walked through the wall of the bar and disappeared. I sighed. Any Rhydanne would have been naı¨ve in the city, but I had been naı¨ve even by Rhydanne standards. I was quite the little foreigner; it’s a wonder I survived at all.

I need a drink after seeing that, and besides, the rain was running down my neck. I investigated the bar, plated with brushed and bur-
nished bronze along its whole front. Smooth almost featureless metal statues with folded arms and stylised wings like blades stood with heavy elegance on either side of its doorway. It was done up to look like Aver-Falconet’s square palace, in the new Decorative Art. Its sign said: The Jacamar Club. An Awian pub, then, the sort popular with the few tourists who came out this way from Fiennafor. As if to prove my thought, some frightful shrieking laughter resounded from inside. I have never understood why travellers and expats feel the need to go to a pub mocked up with all the features of a bar of their homeland to drink wine at ten times the price. There were any number of Morenzian inns nearby where they could drink beer, eat boar pie and hear the citizens speaking their own language.

I went inside, flapping my half-closed wings to dry them and flicking drops everywhere. A couple of students at a nearby table yelled, but when they looked up and saw me, they shut up abruptly.

The pub’s fittings were the most up-to-date design but the floor was sticky with spilt drinks. Square columns were bolted to the walls, all painted black but with gold lightning flashes and pointed feathers on the tops. A strikingly graceful fresco of a deer chased by hundreds of hounds fled along the walls. All the way to the rear wall the hind ran with the hounds ever at her throat and, below her outstretched legs, on a leather sofa stained with nicotine, sat Cyan.

Oh, no. I could hear Cyan’s voice from the doorway. She was too conspicuous, blissfully unaware she could be attracting every thief and rapist in Galt. She was recounting an anecdote at the top of her voice to a group of students and she hadn’t noticed me, so I approached slowly, watching.

Cyan was no longer a child. Her blonde hair hung perfectly straight to the level of her bodice top. Its straps and laces showed and so did her armpit hair. Her short skirt kept riding up and she kept pulling it down. Her stockings plunged into huge black boots. She didn’t have wings, she took after her mother, and she was willowy; slighter and more hourglass-shaped than an Awian woman.

At her hip hung a dagger, tied into its scabbard as city law dictated, and the most impressive little compound bow I have ever seen hung off the chair arm in a lacquer holster. Under the table a waxed cotton quiver held enough arrows to depopulate the whole bar. Didn’t she know it was illegal to carry a bow openly in the city?

I hadn’t seen Cyan since her mother’s funeral. Her very poise seemed to have changed; a vehemence had taken root in her previously innocent adventurousness. This was the girl I used to tickle until she was helpless with giggling. This was the girl I picked up off the shipwreck years ago – but of course she wouldn’t remember. I watched covertly, feeling special, slightly dizzy having flown such a great distance and having walked into the city-dwellers’ trivial little world. There was no way they could understand or even acknowledge my effort. To them I just appear.

As she talked animatedly an enormous ruby pendant on a gold chain rolled back and forth above her flattened breasts. Fortunately some of the other women’s glass costume jewellery was just as ostentatious, but you didn’t have to look closely to tell that Cyan’s ruby was real.

She was surrounded by lots of girls, who must mistakenly think she could arrange a rendezvous with Lightning. They started to notice me
and one by one slunk or darted back to their tables. She didn’t look up until I was directly opposite her and the last of her court sloughed away leaving just one rugged-looking fyrdsman.

Cyan jumped nearly clear of the cushions in surprise. ‘Jant! Come here, come here and sit down! Why have you come all this way? Never mind; the coolest Eszai will make my night complete!’

I sank into an armchair on the other side of the table. Everyone’s eyes were prickling from the corners of the room. Cyan was overjoyed. ‘Let me introduce you. Rawney, this is
the
Comet Jant Shira. He flies in from the Castle to see me. Sometimes he carries ice down from Darkling for our drinks … Jant, this is Rawney.’

‘Rawney what?’

‘No. Rawney Carron.’

‘Very Morenzian. Pleased to meet you.’ Rawney Carron ignored the hand I offered him and glowered at me. He seemed to have claimed ownership of Cyan. He was not tall so I guessed he was city born and bred. He wore fyrd fatigues with the murrey fist blazon of Hacilith sewn on the breast and he also had it tattooed on his arm. He had a weightlifter’s build and he clearly fancied himself.

‘He’s a corporal,’ said Cyan. ‘And this … er … that
was
Sharny. He seems to have gone. Well, never mind. What are you doing here? Did Daddy send you? And why do you have soot on your eyes? Oh, it’s make-up.’

Rawney sniggered.

‘Shut it,’ I told him. I was not prepared to take any cheek from a fyrdsman. ‘Cyan, this time I’m here to bring you home.’

‘She wants to stay,’ said Rawney.

‘Go and join the rest of your squad,’ I told him.

‘I haven’t got one yet. I have to press a General Fyrd squad tonight.’

‘Are you going to the front?’

‘Yes. I’m looking forward to it. It’s better than working in the docks. It’s an adventure.’

‘Good.’ I gave him a grin.

Only the musters of Hacilith pressgang fyrd, and I knew Rawney must be professional Select Fyrd because only Select can be officers of any rank in either fyrd. He leant back on the couch and put his arm behind Cyan. I shuffled forward, as if to protect her.

‘Did Daddy send you?’ she repeated.

‘As a matter of fact I suggested it to him. Are you all right?’

‘I’m having a great time!’

‘Do you have lodgings?’

‘Yes.’

‘And money?’

‘Yes, of course. Daddy gave me pocket money for the tour, and I can always draw on my account. He fills it up now and again. He’s loaded.’

‘In that case I’ll have a double whisky,’ I said.

‘Fine.’ Cyan shook a five-pound coin from her purse.

‘Ask him to fetch them.’ I nodded and smiled at Rawney, and pushed the coin towards him.