The Modern World (41 page)

Authors: Steph Swainston

Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Fantasy

BOOK: The Modern World

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In the seventh century I discovered that sexism was not a glass ceiling but is present at all levels, in all classes. It was a glass web, and I threaded my way through it, cut by the strands I broke. San was the first to see my merit and your father was the first man truly to see me as an equal.

Since he has confided in me on many occasions, I suppose I am even more indebted to him for his friendship. It is impossible for you to understand a friendship of fourteen hundred years. You discover things about a person that you might not like, but it makes their virtues all the more admirable. I have the measure of Lightning and he has the measure of me.

I hope I have given you food for thought.

Send word with Comet if you need anything.

Love, Ella Rayne

That
is
food for thought. I folded the letter and placed it on the table. Cyan was putting the finishing touches to hers. ‘Will you deliver this?’ she asked. ‘I don’t have any sealing wax. Actually I don’t have bloody anything here.’

‘It’s all right, just fold it. I can take it to Rayne unsealed.’ I slipped her letter into my coat pocket and said, ‘But she might be too busy to reply. I haven’t seen anything like the crowds down there in my whole life before.’

‘Will you be able to come back at least?’

‘I’ll try to.’

‘You’re the only person who’s noticed me.’

I patted her shoulder but she shrugged away. She smelt of soap and birch bark chewing gum, reminding me how young she was for her years. Other seventeen-year-olds don’t make idiots of themselves by Challenging Lightning.

I went to the window and opened the shutters. In the still night I could hear the clucking of the hens kept by the guards in their room downstairs. Very bass in the distance, the bass toll of the town’s gatehouse bell rolled out over the moorland, thinning as it filled the expanse.

‘Midnight. I have to go.’

Cyan tried again, ‘This is a prison.’

‘Honestly, it’s for your own good. You should thank Lightning.’

‘I’ll kill him!’

‘Shame. Thought cage birds sang more sweetly than that.’

‘Well, if you won’t free me, then bugger off!’

‘I’ll send you up some bread and water ha ha.’

I climbed onto the plank, ran along it and launched myself off. I flapped to the town with broad, uneven strokes, and landed on the hall’s roof. I sat down on the ridge, wings drooping, and shook my hair down my back.

Below me the square was bustling with people. Around fifty of Rayne’s orderlies with their white sashes were pulling tables out of the tavern and constructing beds. Fyrd squads were sitting on the tables, assembling arrows from piles of shafts and glittering points. The hall was packed with governors, wardens and captains as Lightning briefed them on the advance.

All the oil lamps and spotlights burned fiercely. The stars were dim in comparison, while the thick clouds at the edge of the sky seemed banked up above the town walls, hemming us in.

I unfolded Cyan’s letter and read it.

Peel Tower Ten

Thursday

Dear Rayne,

Please will you help me get out of here? It’s not fair that i’m locked up – it’s just not fair. Daddy is cold & distant – like he always has been – and Jant says Daddy is like that most of the time. Will you ask him for me?

Apart from you and Jant everybody is ignoring me. I try to be independent, and i’m punished. Typical. Even Jant says i made a fool of myself. But i have put it behind me & i’m not thinking of it any more.

I don’t want to be stranded in here during the battle – i’m not afraid of what may happen. I want to see the advance – i can come to help you at the infirmary. I’m sick of trying to be a good girl, i just want to be free – please, if you’re really my friend, send a note to the guards and cancel Daddy’s orders. Thank you for writing – please write again.

Yours,

Cyan xxx (Lady Governor Cyan Peregrine)

Slake Cross Hospital

18th May

2.30 a.m.

Dear Cyan,

I’m sorry but neither Jant nor myself can let you out of the peel tower, given what is happening down here at the moment. But please do not despair, my dear. Bear out your imprisonment patiently and in time the awful things that are happening will bring you wisdom.

You are intelligent but you are not yet wise. Do not blind yourself with opinions drawn from your own intelligence, because even the cleverest people can be wrong if they do not examine solid facts.

Wisdom never comes from staying at home and avoiding unhappiness. In order to become wise you must go out into the world and be tossed about in its storms, stripped bare by terrible experiences and confused by good ones. After a long time you learn to see and control the effect those circumstances have on yourself. Then it will never matter one bit where you find yourself in the world, because you will be able to cope with it. The top of a peel tower or a Hacilith bar will be all the same to you if you are comfortably at home with yourself.

Now you are a little uncomfortable you are crying out for help. But you are a Challenger! You can’t be Eszai material at all if you are disturbed by a little inconvenience. Every Challenger is prepared to forgo pleasure and comfort in the pursuit of success. You are now a Challenger, so what are you complaining about? Hadn’t you better prepare yourself for the competition instead? In a sense it’s already underway, your father made the first move and now you are in check.

I thought you wanted to rebel, to put distance between yourself and Lightning. Then why on earth have you Challenged him as if you are yet another good archer? Everyone expects Lightning’s daughter to have a modicum of archery. I thought you were trying to re-create yourself. You must know that if you follow the career of a great man like your father, you will have to accomplish twice as much to shine. You won’t be able to shine in your own right if you’re known as another archer, because everybody knows Lightning is the best archer.

I doubt you have even thought about it – but of course, you don’t really want to compete with Lightning, you just want to escape from his shadow. Consider this – every Eszai and Challenger must submit to a much greater authority: that of the Emperor. None of
us can escape San: not even Lightning. You rebel against your father and come under the power of a more authoritative man. Oh, Cyan, when you become wise you’ll realise that freedom is a teenager’s aspiration and illusion, and the world actually consists of varying degrees of compromise.

You say that Lightning is cold and distant. My dear, nothing could be further from the truth! He is passionate in the extreme! He must hide from his passions because they’re so strong. I could give plenty of examples, but I only have time to tell one, a secret to which Lightning never refers, and the other Eszai are too polite – or afraid – to mention.

Eighteen nineteen was a year in which everything changed. It was the year after Jant joined the Circle. Lightning was married and widowed in the same night, and his grief for Savory threw him into an almost catatonic state.

There had been no letters from Micawater. I taught doctors in the university. I sat in my room and read books. I did my daily rounds of the general hospital and came home tired but only in body; I was wondering how Lightning was. He was missed in court and at the front, at the King’s table and in the hunting stables. He had sequestered himself, to the exclusion of the real world. I am very much of the real world and, as his closest friend, I decided to pay him a visit.

Eighteen nineteen passed into eighteen twenty. On a freezing January night I arrived at your father’s palace to find the Lake Gate locked. The stone winged hounds stood rampant on the gateposts, rain dripping from their paws. I peered through the fine drizzle, but saw no lights shining in the bulk of the palace beyond the river.

I left my coach and followed the estate wall in the dark, until I came to the tradesmen’s little arched entrance. I hurried through and across the soaking lawns. I passed the grand staircase and instead knocked on the door of the kitchens in the basement.

Lightning’s steward brought me in and gave me supper. As well as his white apron, he wore a black crepe armband. He gathered a candelabra from the dresser and took a taper from the stove, talking all the while. He bent close to light the candles and whispered, ‘M’lord scares us. He sits alone for days, no meals, no sleep. He doesn’t bother to open the curtains and we don’t dare light the lamps in Main. Doctor, he’s wound up in himself and the manor go hang. Thought it best to warn you.’

He guided me, up out of the Covey cellars and through the silent, unlit palace. I think even you would find it discouraging, the building so majestic I felt it extending on both sides of me as we ascended to the main floor. The steward pressed on, past the drawing rooms.

Mourning cloths covered all the statues in the niches, reducing them to featureless, barely human shapes. The portraits had been turned to the wall; their blank backs faced us. I wondered at them, when there had never been any changes in your father’s house before; now I believe he wanted to rid himself of the mute, accusing glare of his ancestors.

The rooms leading off from the corridor were in impermeable darkness, but when light from the candelabra flickered in I glimpsed the furniture and objects of virtu standing in shades of grey. Dust sheets had been thrown over them, as when the servants expect Lightning to be absent for years on business. The chandeliers hung in thick wraps. Black linen masked the deep-framed mirror in the salon. The great gold clock had been deliberately stopped.

The ceilings may have been painted by the world’s greatest masters, but we walked past like thieves without looking up. A glimmer of candlelight shone under the door to the dining hall. The steward hesitated and looked at me anxiously. I nodded to reassure him; he gave me the candelabra and showed me through, then bowed and made a hasty retreat.

Lightning sat at the very end of the long table, halfway down the hall. He was leaning forward with his head down, resting in the crook of his arm. His reflection was blurred in the polished marble.

He was not aware of my presence. He picked an orange desultorily out of a bowl with his free hand and rolled it down the table without looking up. It rolled through the small gap between the legs of the silver centrepiece, out the other side and on for another five metres until it dropped off the end of the table beside me.

I put the candelabra down but Lightning did not acknowledge me. He picked another orange and sent it trundling straight down the middle of the table, through the centrepiece.

He was wearing a silk dressing gown and, over it, a very dirty and bloodstained Cathee plaid. He had wound it around his waist and over one shoulder with an automatic gesture from back when he used to wear a toga.

The rear of the hall was invisible in the gloom. I looked past Lightning, and at the edge of the darkness stood his grand piano,
wreathed in paper music. Its keys were smeared thickly with dried blood.

The centrepiece was the same then as now, the small statue of a girl reclining on a couch. Lightning rolled another orange between its legs with an accuracy that was both considerable talent and long, long practice. The orange fell off the end of the table and joined several others on the carpet.

‘Talk to me,’ I said, but the room was so sombre it came out as a murmur. I pulled up a chair and sat down. His breath misted the table top. I touched his arm. ‘Come on, Saker. Speak to me.’