Thunderer (19 page)

T
he Thunderers stole
whatever they wanted. Now that Jack was with them, to dart in doors and dart out windows like a shaft of light, they could take anything. They all seemed faster when they were around him. Suddenly they had money.

When they had more than they knew what to do with, Jack went into Fourth Ward to buy a whore. Fiss smiled and said that he had more important business to take care of, but Namdi went with Jack eagerly. All the way there, Namdi talked about his various conquests. Some of the stories were probably true. Jack had no stories of his own, so he kept quiet.

They found a place upstairs from a seedy bar on a street that was really just a cut between two tangled masses of crumbling brick. Jack and Namdi went to their separate rooms.

At first, the girl reminded Jack uncomfortably of his sister, who had worked in a place probably much like this—although his sister would be older than this now, he thought. He put it out of his mind quickly, and soon it didn’t matter at all. He lay there shortly afterwards, feeling both proud and oddly sad. The whore took a swig of some piss-looking booze from a lipsticked glass and said, “What else do you want, then? Fuck off now, will you, chicken?”

Namdi met him outside. They both opened their jackets a little and smiled; they’d both stolen a bottle from the bar on their way out. They found a churchyard a couple of roads over, dedicated to a god neither recognized, and hopped the fence and sat on the gravestones drinking, telling each other lies. Weathered statues of the god, or perhaps its priests, stood between the stones. They looked like spry old men, knees half bent, right foot forward, shoulders rounded and arms up. Namdi suggested that they were boxers; Jack thought they were making gestures of benediction. There was no way to be sure: someone, or generations of someones, had broken off the statues’ hands. A tinny trumpet-blast heralded a group of men in red uniforms, marching down the middle of the street outside. Behind the trumpeter, two standard-bearers marched abreast of each other, carrying flags on their pikes. One flag bore the Countess’s insignia. The second flag bore an image of the
Thunderer.
Two short lines of red followed.

It was a recruiting party for the Countess’s militia. Both boys froze against the stones, making themselves inconspicuous. They’d both known people scarcely older than them who had been pressed into the Countess’s forces, or the Parliament’s, or the Council’s, or the Agdon Deep Worker’s Combine, or whoever.

When they were gone, Namdi took another swig and said, “Maybe I will, though.”

“Will what?”

“I mean join ’em. You’re not thinking about it?”

“
Fire
no. What do you mean, join the redcoats?”

“You know about the Gerent. How he’s been threatening the Countess. Cutting off her ports, refusing her taxes, stealing cases from her courts, paying her no respect.”

“So what?”

“You know the Gerent works children to death in his factories?”

“They work children to death down
here.
This is Fourth Ward, idiot. And you can’t tell me Lime Street was any easier.”

“Everyone says there’s going to be a fight, and it’s time to settle who’s in charge. We’ve got to stand up for ourselves.”

“What do you care who’s in charge? And what do you mean, ‘ourselves’? The Countess isn’t
us
. I hope they both kill each other. Who’ve you been listening to?”

Namdi shrugged. “I don’t know. Just everyone.”

“She sends her men through here shouting about the Gerent, or whoever it is, and you believe them?”

Namdi leaned back against the stone and turned his head away. “Not really. I don’t know. I thought you’d want to, too.”

“Why?”

“You know. The ship. We’re the Thunderers, like you said. We have these,” Namdi said, tapping the crest on his jacket, “and everything else. And the
Thunderer
is the strongest thing in the city. Who wouldn’t want to be on it? And it’s hers.”

Jack stood up and stretched his arm back and threw the bottle in a high arc so that it brushed through the branches overhead and smashed against the roof of the nameless church. “No. It’s not hers. It’s ours. That’s what it’s all about. Come on, then. It’s getting late; they’ll be missing us at the Moon.”

T
he next day, Jack took Namdi and some of the other boys down to Gies Landing at Ar-Mouth. He told them they were going to steal dried fruits from the ships that came in from Aysuluk.

They found a group of young sailors with spiked hair and tattooed faces, staring around, dismayed by the crowds. “They look stupid enough,” Jack said. “They’ll do.” Namdi, Tull, and David ran after them, taunting them, cursing in all the languages they knew, until the sailors lost their patience and gave chase. The boys dodged through the crowds, ducking under stalls and benches covered in wet fish and bowls of spices and a hanging curtain of exotic, recurved blades, and the sailors came after them, knocking people aside. Jack and Frawney and Nef rushed in through the confusion and lifted their lunch from the brimming stalls, while Beth and the others stood watch.

They slipped out from the disturbance easily, dispersing into the crowd to coalesce again at the other end of the Landing, past all the crowds and the beer-tents and the groaning cranes. They sat on the stone steps at the foot of the lighthouse and ate, looking out over the bay and the tall masts cautiously threading their way around each other. The spray in the air was cold and bright. Jack watched the crowd intently.

After a while, Jack saw what he had brought them here for: a slow line of red, the crowds parting nervously around it. Another recruiting party for the Countess.

“Come on,” he said. “Put all that away and follow me.”

I
t was a longer column than the one in Fourth Ward. Their uniforms were brighter and in better repair. A drummer marched alongside the trumpeter. Two men at the front and two in the back carried the Countess’s insignia on their pikes, while a pair in the middle shared the flag of the
Thunderer,
slung between their weapons. By the time Jack reached them, they were marching round and round in a circle, inside a ring of market stalls, beating out a trumpery rhythm, pressing their pamphlets into the hands of passersby.

Jack signaled to the rest of them to stop following him. They climbed up onto the low wall around a money changer’s office and watched as Jack went round the circle’s edge and hopped up on a pile of wooden crates by a fishmonger’s stall. Calling on the gift he had been given, he put his hand lightly on the swaying pole supporting the canopy and vaulted up. The fabric tightened for an instant under his feet as he broke into a run and threw himself onto the slick canvas over the next stall. He came round the edge of the circle at a run, over the heads of the crowds and the shopkeepers, gathering speed, weightless.

The men in red uniforms were marching toward him. The lead man was shouting some rubbish not worth listening to, something about
duty
and
honor
. When he saw Jack coming, he stopped with his mouth hanging open, and the drummer behind him bumped into his back. Jack launched himself off the tightly bowed edge of a black canvas and across the yard, to land lightly on the man’s shoulder. Between the waving pike-points, he stepped from head to shoulder to capped head along the column. He leaped over the banner and, turning, snatched it neatly away. Waving the thick fabric over his head, he launched himself off the back of the man at the tail of the column and onto a butcher’s awning, then across the market’s canopies and
up
onto the low sloped roof of a countinghouse. He ran up to the peak of the roof, high over the market, and turned back, and lifted his trophy in his left hand. One of the soldiers, recovered from his shock, fired on Jack, but the shot went wild and shattered the roof tiles twenty feet away. Jack turned and ran down the other side of the roof.

Back in the Moon that evening, Jack held the banner in his fist and thrust it at Namdi’s face, saying, “See? The
Thunderer
’s not theirs. It’s ours. We don’t owe them anything.”

They nailed it up on the wall behind the bar.

A
rjun lay on the stone
through the night. All of his strength was drained. His wet clothes entombed him. As the foul water left his lungs, fever set in and wracked his bones. A hundred hideous false dawns colored the sky. A group of children found him in the morning, twisted up against a lamppost, and took his money.

For a time in the afternoon, he was able to stand. He stumbled through the alley to a street with sounds of life, and fell down again. A face came and spoke to him, and he was aware that he was speaking back, but he had no sense of the words.

Later, two men in brown uniforms came for him. He spent some time on a stone floor, then he was taken to a place where he was given something strong and pungent to drink, and slept.

H
is bed was in a small room with plain walls. They had taken away his sodden clothes and dressed him in a white gown. There were bars on the window. A wall of iron bars opened onto the corridor. People came and watched him through it. At first he thought they were phantoms of his imagination. There were other cells like his there, full of screaming and ranting and raving.

T
here was a family outside his cell, watching him solemnly. A mother and a father, two small daughters. Father wore a dark suit and blue tie. The girls were in pink dresses and curls.

He grabbed the nurse’s arm with a weak hand, and asked, “Who are they? What do they want from me?”

She drew a warm wet cloth across his forehead. “Shush. You’ve not got yer strength back. Rest. They’ll do you no harm. You’ve been blessed. Just let ’em share it.”

One of the little girls waved shyly at Arjun. He turned against the wall and sunk back into sleep.

When he woke up, afternoon sun was coming in through the window. He recognized the sounds of the bay outside: rough voices shouting in sailor’s cant, the cries of the gulls.

Two young women came to see him. Like the family before, they were dressed well. They looked like the wives of lawyers or doctors from Foyle’s Ward. They stared at him through the bars.

“What was it like?” one of them asked, nervously. Arjun had no answer. He curled his body against the wall.

“Which one was it?” her friend asked. “That touched you? They said they found you by a canal. Was it the Typhon?”

Arjun didn’t answer. When the nurse came, hours later, he asked her, “What is the Typhon?”

“The Typhon. The Vodya. The Nix. The Nöckan. One of the gods of the river.
You
can tell
me
what it is, I think.”

“Nix. It means ‘nothing’ in Kael,” he muttered.

“That’s nice. Now try to sleep.”

He lay awake, drifting in and out of fever. In a lucid moment, he thought:
Typhon. It has a name.
Water-spirit. Nothing-spirit. Haunter of rivers and canals. So, what
was
it like? What should he tell these people, these voyeurs? It was hungry. It took sacrifices. It was a god of the sucking ooze and the brutal past, rot and foulness. It was a thing to be loathed.

But they
knew
that. It was
ancient
. He had hung dying inside it; he had
felt
its age. The Typhon had been in the River before the city’s busy little people first chained it with bridges. It was there before the first life they ever fed to it. Of
course
they knew about it. Their mothers must have told them:
Never go near the river alone
.

And they drank from the River, and they let the canals cut their way into the city’s veins, and they let their economy rest on it in a hundred ways. They had reached an accommodation with it. It was in their blood.

Three middle-aged men in business suits came to see him. They knocked rudely on the bars. They appeared to be drunk. The breweries were all poisoned with River-water, and these men were, too. They asked, “What’s your story?” and he lifted himself from his bed long enough to spit at them. They laughed and seemed to find that entirely satisfactory.

T
he nurse gave him something sickly sweet to drink. Was it night? It was night.

“It noticed me,” he said.

“What did? Drink up.”

“The Typhon. It saw me. It hated me and it was afraid.”

The nurse shook her head and gave a little businesslike laugh. “That’s a new one.”

He disliked the nurse more than he had ever disliked anyone in his life. “No,” he said, “there’s something wrong with it. It’s broken.” She nodded without listening. Her refusal to understand was intensely irritating, not least because he did not understand what he meant himself.

He couldn’t keep the sickly sweet stuff down. The nurse deftly caught the vomit in a metal bowl, in which Arjun’s reflection bulged and lurched monstrously.

T
he nurse came again the next morning to change his bedpan. He was able to sit up to ask her, “What is this place?”

“You sound stronger. That’s nice. But rest now.”

“I
am
resting. But where am I? It sounds like Ar-Mouth.”

She sized him up. “That it is. Under the Jaw.”

“And what is this place?”

“I am Sister Judith.”

“Thank you for your care, Judith. But I asked, what is this place?”

She busied herself with his bedding. “One of the Houses of the Nessene, of course.” Seeing his blank look, she said, “The Healer. Our Lord of the Ocean. Haven’t you heard of him?”

“Oh,” he said, “another one of your gods.”

“The watch found you. You was half-drowned and half-froze, and you’d no money, so they brought you here. You’re safe now.”

“I’m stronger now, Judith, and I’ll be ready to leave soon. I don’t think I’ll be able to repay you for your services.”

“Just a little longer,” she said, and gripped his weak shoulders and pushed him firmly down onto the mattress. “Until you’re well again.” She left.

After a while, he got up and tried the door; it was locked. Across the corridor and down a little was another cage much like his. A shaven-headed man sat in the corner of the cage, curled over on himself like a dry dead spider.

“Are they treating you, too, friend?” Arjun called.

The man jerked and spoke, his voice ecstatic. “Water-thing, tendrils
gripping,
you’re
marked,
you
glow
. Between two mirrors, smoke stung my eyes: a
wounding
. Many eyes’ fire, all round…”

The man raved on. It sounded like he had been touched by some god. Like Norris, only more so. Like himself, too, Arjun supposed. The man’s ranting was an ugly tangle of empty words.

Arjun felt weak, but clearheaded. He would
not
go mad.
Just another fever,
he thought.
The fever of my childhood lifted when I heard the Voice. I came across the world hoping to find it again. Now a second fever…and what now?

The touch of that ghoul in the canal was maddening, evil, filthy. But was the Voice any better? There’d been a moment when the river-god’s embrace had been like that of the Voice, and he would have gone willingly with it. Had the Voice driven him mad, stolen his soul,
scarred
him the way the Typhon nearly had? And the way that poor man in the next cell had been scarred? He couldn’t be sure that it hadn’t. His quest seemed insane. To have spent his life pining for the Voice seemed like madness. Perhaps the Voice was a thief of adoration the way the Typhon was a thief of lives. There were sirens in the seas, they said; why not in the mountains? He slept again, uneasily, guiltily.

The next morning, when Judith passed his food and water through the bars, he asked, “My clothes, Sister?”

“We burned ’em. I’m sorry. They was full of fever-water.”

“I see. I thank you, Sister, but I’m ready to leave now.”

“Just a little longer. There’s a lot of people in this city would be glad of a good bed!” She fussed quickly away.

In the afternoon, a group of young men came to watch him. They were thin and unshaven. Two of them wore glasses. They looked like seminary students, or perhaps poets. Arjun sat on his bed and shouted, “What? What do you want? What is it you think I can tell you? The thing in your canals is a
monster.
A
vampire.
Go feed
yourselves
to it, if you want to know what it’s like. It’s sick. This whole city is sick. Who would worship something like that? You should be
ashamed.
Go away. Go
away.
”

They kept watching him, smiling eagerly at each other.
That was all they wanted,
he thought.
Any kind of raving will do
. He turned against the wall and waited for them to leave him alone.

A
young woman woke him, rattling a silver cane across the bars of his cage. A long black coat of masculine cut, and pin-striped trousers, but certainly a woman. He remembered her from the meeting with Holbach. Olympia Autun, wasn’t it? Sister Judith hung back, staring at the eccentric visitor resentfully.

“Mr.
Arjun
of Gad! Good morning!”

“Good morning, Miss Autun. Are you here on behalf of Professor Holbach, or for your own entertainment?”

“The former. Arjun—may I call you just plain Arjun? I feel you’re part of the family now—Holbach has been very concerned about you. He’s said nothing to me for days except, ‘Olympia’—please do call me Olympia, Arjun—‘Olympia, where
is
that bright young man? What
did
I send him into?’ He blames himself.”

“How did you find me?”

“Hard work, persistent questioning, and rather a lot of money.”

“Is this really a hospital, Olympia?”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t it be? You were raving in the streets. From what I hear, you were bloody lucky to be alive.”

“Can I leave?”

“Ah now. That’s not so clear. The watch of the Mass How Parliament picked you up, and charged you—you were present physically, though perhaps not mentally—as a danger to the peace. Then they handed you over to the Nessenes, who—this is your story, right, Sister?—locked you up in this cage because you wouldn’t stop ranting about some river-monster.”

“He was god-touched,” Judith said. “Sometimes they’re dangerous, to themselves or others. It was for everyone’s good.”

“I am not dangerous, and no longer ill,” Arjun said.

Judith started to speak, but Olympia silenced her with a swish of her cane. “But you’re on display, Arjun! You’re an object of adoration. You lucky fellow!”

Most people in the city, she explained, never came into the presence of the gods. Not
personally,
mortal mind to divine presence. They heard about them from others. They went to churches and temples and listened to the stories. Sometimes they might see something far off in the distance, like when the Bird passed over a couple of months ago, or like the Fire you could see in the north. Some of them would enter into the Spider’s lottery, just to feel the touch, however remote. So whenever the Nessenes took in a man wounded by the direct touch of a god, raving and moaning about his experience, there was always an eager public to come and share in it. “They want to be close to you, Arjun. You and all the other poor wretches in here,” Olympia said, waving an arm at the other cells. “And they’ll pay for the privilege! And hardly anyone comes away from seeing the thing you saw, looking as bright and healthy and cheery as you do. So the Nessenes will hold on to you for as long as they can, won’t they, Sister?”

“Only until we’re sure he’s stronger,” Judith said.

“Yes, Sister, of
course.
Arjun, this is what they do. I suppose one can’t complain—it pays for the hospital.”

“I am very tired of this city and its gods, Olympia. This is madness. There was nothing in my experience a sane man would wish to share. Can you get me out?”

“Not easily. They’re holding you under the authority of the Mass How Parliament, by treaty with the Countess. They
do
have the power to keep you, at their reasonable discretion.”

“Tell Holbach: Shay’s dead. And he was no fraud. But I won’t tell you anything unless you get me out of here.”

Olympia looked amused. “There’s no need to play tough. Holbach is
paying
me to get you out of here. Arjun, Ararat is a city of many prisons. I have seen many of them, in my practice: this may be the gentlest of confinements, irritating though I’m sure it is. I’ll be back. In the meantime, try to make yourself boring; maybe they’ll let you go. Sister, show me out, please.”

A
rjun stayed in the cell for nearly two weeks, waiting for Olympia’s rescue. Sister Judith opened his cell every day to lead him to the bathroom, accompanied by a hulking male nurse. He didn’t talk to them. After a few days, he was strong enough to exercise in his cell, which lifted his spirits a little.

When the voyeurs came, he turned his back on them. A few of them kept staring anyway, as if some mystery would reveal itself in the folds of his gown, but most quickly moved on to the next cell, where a woman who had broken her back following the Bird lay helpless, whipping her head from side to side and crying.