By Light Alone (41 page)

She looked up. The moon, almost full, was visible with preternatural clarity against the early day sky. It looked imprinted upon the blue like a seal of official authentication for the sky.

She watched.

The line of sunlight moved down the mountainside, slow, slow, superslow. Issa’s shivers had subsided. She watched the coming of the light with a mix of feelings. At first she was aware of impatience:
come along, hurry up.
Then she fell into a mood of rebuking herself: if only I had stayed on top of the hill, the sun would even now be soaking into my blood. Why did I come down into this valley? What fool’s errand did I think I was on? But, when she looked at the moon, those feelings went away. She began to feel a weird, potent sensation of
peace
slide into her soul. Before these last few days she had never been alone, not ever, in her life. There had always been somebody with her. It seemed a crowded sort of past. And it seemed to her now that there is nothing fearful in solitude. The moon is a goddess, and this is her song: I
have
nothing I
am
nowhere.

Presently the sun touched Issa’s head. She closed her eyes.

When she had enough energy she continued walking. She followed the road down out of the valley, and soon enough, with numerous rests, she came to human habitation. The road led down towards a lake, small visible sections of which were bright in the distance. But before Issa came to any buildings, she came upon people. The further down the road she went, the more people there were. Longhairs packed the roadside, or gathered in crowds on the east-facing hillsides – hundreds of them. The sight of so many people was oppressive. Some of them called after her, with questions, or lewd suggestions, but most simply lay there placidly. She passed a few structures: concrete sheds, and some walled spaces, all filled with longhair humanity: all the roofs teeming, all the doorways, longhairs in chairs or prone on the ground, their hair fanned out. Then, suddenly, she was in the town itself. Flat paved roads, buildings on all sides, and some bald-headed people in fine clothes moving jostlingly through the crowd. Turning a corner, Issa came upon a view of the lake – a great perfectly horizontal sheet of water, smooth as plastic, fitting with a pleasing neatness exactly into its slot amongst the hills. Away to the left an island was visible, with two sharptop towers upon it like rockets ready to launch, and a white temple.

The streets of the town ran down to the water, but the way was blocked by a barricade, with armed guards looking blankly about, or using their rifles as props, seating themselves on the stock and the barrel jammed into the ground. Issa rested on a step – it was in shadow, and so unoccupied – to observe the set-up. There was a gate. Various well-dressed, short-haired or no-haired people came and went, some displaying passes, some simply waving confidently at the guards. At this, the gate was opened and the people passed. Longhairs lounged, and gazed, but none of that kind went through.

Somebody came and sat next to her. ‘Hello,’ said this stranger. ‘What’s in your bag?’

‘Nothing,’ said Issa. ‘An empty water bottle. I was hoping to fill it in the lake. It
is
freshwater, the lake?’

‘Good luck with that!’ scoffed the stranger. ‘My name is Roxan.’

‘Mine is Issa.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Roxan. ‘New here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, you might get past the barricade: you’re pretty. But you’d have to shave your head.’

Issa looked at the woman. She was a few years older than herself, with wide-spaced, clever-looking eyes. But her face was quite badly scarred: two long downward lines on the left side, and scuff marks, buckles and weals in the skin on the right. The skin, drawn tightly over the cheekbones, revealed where the bone underneath had been chipped and pocked. It was in Issa’s mind to ask:
What happened to you
? But that seemed too personal a question for somebody she had only just met. So instead she said: ‘I wouldn’t last very long with a bald head.’

‘That’s right.’

They sat together for a while, watching people come and go. At one point, a policeman came up the hill towards them. He was carrying a long staff, which he used to clear away a dozen or so longhairs lolling on the sunlit side of the street. He spun the stick about his head like a Jedi, clearly very impressed with himself; but the action was nothing more sophisticated than battery – the noise of wood connecting with the stone walls, or with the more yielding heads of the people. Some shunted or shuffled away; some yelled or cried out. After they had all fled, the policeman sauntered back down the hill to the barricade.

‘They don’t want us going down to the lake?’

Roxan ducked her head. ‘Listen, Issa, if you really want to go down to the lake, you can go round the shore. It’s all fenced, to discourage us, of course. But crowds will push the fence over when they get thirsty enough, and you can usually get down to the waterside. They’ll come by soon enough to chase you away, and then you’ll need to be lively enough to dodge the bullets. But you’ve more chance there than here.’

‘Why don’t they want us down by the water?’

‘Cluttering the space up for the nice people – people with money, and their nice lakeside apartments.’ Roxan ran a forefinger up and down one of the vertical scars in her face. ‘They don’t want us anywhere near here. Don’t want us within a hundred miles of here. They’d like us to fuck off up into the highlands. But there’s no water up there. So we come down here. Every now and again, when the mayor can get hold of a Walker she’ll try and clear the town of all the longhairs.
Then
there’s lots of shrieking, and some bloodletting. But she can’t get hold of a Walker very often. She has to borrow it from Trabzon.’

‘What’s a Walker?’

Roxan looked hard at the girl. ‘You’re straight off the boat, aren’t you, my truelove? D’you
really
not know what a Walker is, or are you jesting with me?’

‘I don’t see why I’m not allowed to go down to the lakeside!’ said Issa, growing annoyed. ‘By what right do they prevent me?’

‘Right.’ said Roxan. ‘Are you for real?’

‘I’m only saying.’

‘
Fair
is Spartacist talk.’ This was said guardedly, with Roxan peering closely into Issa’s face. Issa stared back, ingenuously. ‘I’m thirsty,’ she said.

‘We’re all thirsty,’ said Roxan. ‘But what can you do?’

Issa didn’t like the sound of that. After a while she said: ‘I have a tin of beer in my bag.’

Roxan opened her eyes wide. ‘Where did you get that?’

‘Out of a fridge.’ Issa read Roxan’s expression as disbelief, and so brought out the tin to prove her possession of it.

‘You’re either very canny or very foolish,’ said Roxan. ‘To show me that.’

‘Maybe if I give it to the guards on the gate, there, they’d let me pass?’

‘Maybe they’d just take it, and beat you back with a stick.’

‘But I would give it to them as a deal,’ Issa explained. ‘The deal would be: I’d give them the tin of beer and in return they’d let me through.’

‘Deal,’ repeated Roxan, colourlessly. ‘You
actually
a holy fool? Or is this some complicated pretence on your part?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Why should they honour any deal? Particularly with a longhair? Put it this way: if they took the beer from you and then refused to let you through, what could you do?’

Issa thought about this. ‘I’m being naïve.’

‘You’re an odd mix of clever and dumb,’ agreed Roxan. ‘And what about me? You don’t know me. Why wouldn’t I simply take your tin, when you showed it to me?’

Issa thought about this, too. ‘I see what you mean. That was naïve of me too. But you
didn’t
simply steal it from me.’

‘No,’ said Roxan.

‘Why not?’ Issa asked, simply.

Roxan put her hands into her hair, and pulled the strands out tight, like zither strings. Then she let it go. ‘You see these scars, here?’ Issa nodded. ‘I’ll tell you about these scars. They mean I have no love for the rich.’

‘I think I see,’ said Issa, gravely, although it wasn’t really true.

‘Well,’ said Roxan, ‘you have honoured me with your trust. And if it’s the trust of a holy fool, well that’s an even greater honour. It would demean me to betray you. So here’s what I suggest: I know a man called the Nudnik. His name is Sergei, but we call him the Nudnik. He’ll buy the beer from us, I think. And if he gives us a little money, and we can buy a little water – why not? It’s your beer, so it’ll be your money and your water. But perhaps, if you’re truly a holy fool, you’ll share with me.’

Roxan led Issa up through a series of antique, narrow streets, bent with odd little twists and curves, like rickets. The sunlit side of each street was crammed with longhairs, so they moved through the cool of the shady side. Many of the buildings they passed were fortified, their doors blocked in with metal plates, barcodes of metal rods covering the windows. Most of the other houses were in varying states of dereliction. People thronged the roofs. They passed round a corner and up a staircase of wood so old and crumbly it reminded Issa of biscuit. Through an open door. Inside it was a dark, lengthy room, brushstrokes of sunlight on the floor at the far end where a shuttered window let in a little light. There was hardly any furniture and the place reeked of birdshit. But it was inhabited: for a man with a very strange hairstyle – a great sticky-up crest of hair, like a circle of metal embedded vertically right through his skull – was lying in the corner. Who would wear their hair like that? Neither enough surface area to make for good sun-eating, nor the ostentatiously shaved cranium of the high-status, hard-food man.

‘Here’s a girl called Issa,’ said Roxan. ‘Has something to show you.’

‘You’re Sergei, then?’ Issa asked.

‘I’m in love with her already,’ said the crest-haired man. His accent was heavy, as if he were chewing the words in his mouth as he spoke them. ‘She doesn’t think of me as a Nudnik. Uses my actual name!’ He was lying on a messy tangle of sheets, and spoke to them without getting up.

‘She’s got a tin of beer,’ said Roxan. ‘Will you buy it?’

‘And how did she obtain such a thing? Theft, is it?’

‘There’s only one way to get things in the world,’ said Issa. ‘It’s just a question of whether the thieving is large-scale or small.’ She was not happy with how squeaky and ordinary her voice sounded: how unlike a Preacher. But it was what it was. ‘When a longhair steals it’s theft. When a rich person steals it’s—’ And she wanted something to round the sentiment off grandly, but couldn’t think of the best word.

‘I see,’ said Sergei, getting to his feet. ‘You’ve picked up some Spartacist patter. Is that why you want me to buy your tin of beer? So you can turn a few cents over to the grand revolutionary reserves? Changing the world costs money, I suppose.’

‘We’re thirsty,’ said Roxan.

‘If you’re thirsty, why not drink the beer?’

‘You obviously don’t know much about
beer
,’ said Issa, unsure, actually, as to the status of the person she was speaking with.

At this Sergei began to laugh. ‘Little Spartacus,’ he told her, ‘I spent my twenties
swimming
in beer! I was pickled in the stuff, like an onion. Of course, not everybody likes onion. I don’t touch that stuff any more.’

‘We only want a few cents,’ said Roxan. ‘Or we’d swap it for, let’s say, twice the quantity of water.’

The Nudnik continued, supine: ‘Well if you’re thirsty, why not say so? You’re welcome to drink with me. There are some bugs in my garden you can eat, too. Stay. We’ll make a little bower of bliss for ourselves.’

Roxan was silent for a few seconds, and then laughed brashly. ‘Oh you’re not interested in
my
scratched-up old face, Nudnik.’

‘I love you both. But I love you
more
, Roxy,’ said Sergei. ‘Look at your new friend, the Little Spartacus: she’s so pretty, and so tall, she might be a rich kid from Stanbul who’s grown her hair out for a lark. But you’re the real deal, Roxy. You’re the irresistible lure of disenfranchisement.’

‘You want to stay here, Issa?’ Roxan asked. ‘You got somewhere else you’d rather be?’

‘New York,’ said Issa.

The two of them were silent for a while.

‘The city?’ Roxan asked.

‘Hey,’ put in Sergei. ‘You want to go to
New York
?’

‘Yes,’ said Issa.

‘How you going to get there, Little Spartacus?’

Issa hadn’t worked that out yet. ‘Fly?’ she hazarded.

Roxan and Sergei both laughed, as perfectly synchronized as if they had rehearsed it. ‘You spread your hair in a big wind, and away you go!’ said Sergei.

‘There are jets and geldarm, gelderms,’ Issa pointed out. ‘Jets.’

‘You gather a chip topped with money, shave your head and buy some rich-woman clothes, maybe they’ll sell you a ticket,’ said Roxan.

Issa saw what she meant. ‘I’ll find a way,’ she insisted.

‘
Why
do you want to go to New York?’ Sergei asked.

She hadn’t even asked herself this question before that moment. She thought about it. ‘It is,’ she said, the thought striking her with potency only as she put it into words, ‘my city.’