Gears of the City (35 page)

Things were different now—she looked different to him.
He
was different. When he’d first seen her, he’d had no memories of himself. She’d been the first and only woman he’d ever known. The thin thread of his life had depended on her. He’d imagined her as a kind of Goddess—her and her sister—they’d loomed in his mind larger than the city.

Now he saw things with new eyes.

Now he realized how fragile she was. In fact she was very nearly as fragile and desperate as he was himself.

What absence, what loss denned her?

He realized that he knew almost nothing about her. Until now he hadn’t known what to ask.

She said, “… what?”

“I was thinking.”

“You had a strange smile.”

“Did I?”

“Yeah. You’re different, now, you know.”

“How?”

“Less like a ghost; more like a person.”

“Ah.” Maybe. He
still
didn’t know what to ask.

She poured the wine and adjusted the music every so often. She seemed to feel this was how things were done. Maybe it was. Every possible way for men and women to interact was the way it was done somewhere in the city.

What kind of lives did people live here? What kind of life had she lived?

After everything he’d seen, what kind of man was he?

He started to tell her about his God, the music, the Mountain, his travels. Then he stopped. He felt ridiculous, out of place. They discussed the weather. Later he told her about his God anyway and she listened with what seemed like interest. He didn’t know what normal people talked about. There was a silence, which he found pleasant. They sat side by side on the bed, and moved closer. The
music-machine required constant winding. They let it wind down. It hissed, scratched, stopped. The room was cold so they made love under musty woolen blankets.
Made love
—her words. Was that how things were described here? Outside a great and ridiculous weight of birds shuffled and scratched and shat on the roof, and pressed against the windows as if they wanted to be near, as if they were lonely and lost. They made a noise like rain.

T
he Know-Nothings started work before first light, as the first whistles blew. The Square was full of a cold fog that muffled the sound of boots stamping, men swearing, hammers crashing, glass smashing, and wood splintering. The dawn shift was low-ranking men who still had regular jobs to go to. They resented the work. They half-arsed it. Who’d have thought the old Museum had so much crap in it? They staggered under the unwieldy weight of a whole gallery of paintings—the moon, as seen over a dozen different skylines, blank or haunted by the faces of a dozen different Goddesses. They warmed their hands by the fire till it chased off the fog. A few cold and bored protesters from Carnyx Street watched them. One of the protesters knew two of the Know-Nothings from school and they shared cigarettes. The dawn shift could have been chased away bloodlessly—their hearts weren’t in it. But by the time Arjun and Ruth were awake, and Brace-Bel had been slapped from the hangover he’d somehow acquired, and the Black Masks had rolled up at the Low sisters’ door—five men, carrying a variety of guns, and three of them already half drunk—it was too late. Midmorning: the dawn shift had been replaced by harder men. Maury had come to take charge.

B
y the time Arjun came into the Square, Maury’s men had finished with the paintings and were moving on to rocks—Moon Rocks, Mysteriously Carved Rocks, Highly Magnetic Rocks, Miscellaneous Rocks—which they sledgehammered to powder.

Half of Carnyx Street turned out to swell the protesters’ numbers. Rumors had spread.

“Zeigler,” Ruth sighed. “Can’t keep his mouth shut.”

Arjun stood at the back of the crowd, his face obscured under a borrowed hat. Marta moved among the crowd and led the children away, and the elderly.

The stone fingers of petrified saints, the ebony eggs of the phoenix, radioactive core-rods—all shattered and swept into the corner.

And by the time that was done, a man from Holcroft Municipal Trust was there. He wore a well-cut black suit, a bright green waistcoat, and gold-rimmed spectacles. He affected heavy black boots in a show of solidarity with the working Know-Nothings. He strutted back and forth giving orders and encouragement for a while. He took a couple of swings with the hammer, and received obligatory applause from the men. He kicked and swore at the handful of ugly ragged thunderers that came to squat on the rubble and peck for shiny remnants. Then he settled back to stand beside Inspector Maury at the edge of the Square watching the proceedings with a sour expression. Every few minutes he glared over at the protesters and muttered something to Maury as if calculating the costs and benefits of a massacre. On the one hand he would clearly be happy to silence the protesters; on the other hand he clearly wanted an audience for his very public display of destruction, and these dregs were all that was available.

“That’s Wantyard,” Ruth whispered. “He gave a speech a few days ago. He’s a big man at Holcroft. I don’t know why he’s still hanging around here.”

The Know-Nothings had reduced the rocks to dust and were starting to carry out the Museum’s great heavy brass abaci and calculating-machines. Arjun’s heart clenched as he saw Wantyard lean in to talk to Maury again. The two of them seemed to reach an unpleasant agreement. Maury called three of his men over and gave orders. Wantyard settled back against the wall of the Chapterhouse, and smiled in eager and bitter anticipation.

“They’re running out of things to break,” Ruth said. “They’ll do the Beast soon. Now that we’re all here to see.”

“Yes.”

“Then it’s time.” She was more confident than he was.

“It certainly is!”

They both started at the sound of Brace-Bel’s voice. He stood behind them, fat and sagging in his borrowed brown overalls, but the expression on his face was resolute.

Ruth shoved his shoulder. “What are you doing here? Don’t you mess this up, Brace-Bel.”

“Just stay out of the way, Brace-Bel.”

“I will not. I do not shrink from conflict or crisis. And I do not trust your mumbo jumbo. My precious Ivy’s life is at stake. I shall search for her myself.”

“Brace-Bel …”

Brace-Bel elbowed his way sideways through the crowd and a moment later was gone from sight, as if he’d vanished.

“I hate that man,” Ruth said.

“Another reason to move quickly. Before he does something to give us away. “

“Wish me luck, then.”

R
uth crossed the Square, stepping through ashes and rubble. The Know-Nothings dropped what they were doing and watched her warily. She unwound her green scarf nervously from around her neck as she walked, and raised her hands to show they were empty.

Arjun watched her approach Maury and Wantyard. She’d wanted to give them one last chance. He couldn’t see her face as she spoke. He saw Maury telling her to get lost. As she walked away her eyes met Arjun’s and she shrugged.

Arjun turned away from the crowd and headed down the alley behind the building to the south of the Chapterhouse. He climbed up on boxes and up onto the rusting fire escape. He turned around and around up the iron stairs and ladders until he was out on the broad flat roof, which was like a thick forest of grey feathers and beady eyes. The chimneys and the ancient wire aerials groaned under the weight of the birds. The floor seethed and churned with them.

They fixed their eyes on him. As he stepped onto the roof they hopped aside to clear a path. They began to shout and babble. It was nearly human speech. Their aggression had been replaced by a desperate need. Their harsh throats piped; they tried to sing that
Music
he’d taught them. They made a dreadful cacophony. They
fluttered around him adoringly as if they expected him to teach them something vitally important. What were they remembering? They reminded him more than ever of lost children.

“Are you ready?”

A shudder passed across the shrieking mass. Some of them took to the air and circled.

“Do you remember what you were? What you could be?”

The mass rose slowly, swelled into a dark cloud. There were distant cries of alarm from the Square below.

One of the birds hung in front of Arjun’s face. Its ugly wings were hardly beating; whatever held their twisted bodies aloft was not natural. It held something sharp and bright in its grubby claws. Arjun was suddenly afraid; he had no control over the process he’d started. They had begun to remember their other selves—and there were places in the city where these dangerous creatures were better, but there were places where they were so very much worse, and who knew what they might choose to recall?

It cocked its head and made a hissing noise that sounded like
Silk.
Then the swirling mass carried it away.

Arjun looked down over the edge of the roof.

Far below, the Know-Nothings emerged from the Museum’s towering double doors, dragging on ropes a wheeled pallet, on which the Beast’s immense cage rested. It emerged agonizingly slowly. It must have weighed a ton; Arjun had no idea how they would get it down the steps. Inside something heavy and coiled flinched from the sun. In sunlight its scales were the hideous green of rot or mildew, of rusty pipes and flaking paint. A single great yellow eye stared out. It seemed to catch Arjun’s gaze. He couldn’t read its animal expression.

He shouted, “There’s the cage! There’s the prisoner. There are the gaolers!”

He gestured like the conductor of an impossible orchestra and the birds descended.

F
rirst they circled the air over the Square like leaves caught in a whirlwind, calling out to each other, sometimes breaking and recir-cling against each other in waves and sudden squalling back-drifts. They gathered numbers. They gathered speed. They seemed to be
gathering their memories. They were still unsure of their purpose and some of them shrieked out affirmations and others negations. They scattered tattered shadows on the Square below. Their grey feathers caught the sun and
sparkled.
Many of them clutched scraps of bright fabric and metal—their knives and razors. They were a carnival crowd. Some of their shouts and caws were something like laughter.

Arjun turned and turned down the fire escape. He was still on the other side of the Hall of Trade when the first shot rang out, and he didn’t see who fired. At first he thought the noise was the percussive clanging of the stairs under his own feet. Thoughts about memory and perception and magic and power occurred to him but he had no time to entertain them. He dropped into the alley from the foot of the fire escape and nearly broke his ankle.

When he came out into the Square again it was like looking into a blizzard, or into a kaleidoscope. The birds flocked to and fro brighter and brighter, and the Know-Nothings and the Museum were both barely visible.

The protesters had fled the Square; they sheltered in the alleys and watched in awe.

The birds called out in joy and surprise at their own beauty and strength and numbers. More birds joined the flock every minute as their brothers and sisters shrieked to them of freedom and memory and beauty.

Almost as an afterthought they tore into the Know-Nothings, they beat against the bars of the Beast’s cage. The cage! The gaolers! They shrieked with righteous hate.

They flocked thickly past Arjun and shouted in his face but they didn’t harm him. He shivered at the touch of their wings. He was thrilled and afraid; the perfect moment of recall could not last forever.

… and suddenly it was over. The birds broke apart like a reflection of the city in a dirty puddle, shattered in waves by a single step; when the moment passed it passed utterly. They scattered, as if suddenly embarrassed, into ones and twos, patternless, purposeless, squawking and shitting. They were too badly debased. Unable to bear the vision of what they might have been, they fled; down alleys, behind chimneys; they vanished over the rooftops, filling the
sky for a second with strange clouds. It hurt to watch them go. Arjun thought:
if I were stronger, if I were wiser, I might have brought them fully through …

Then they were gone, leaving the Square bloody and mucky and feathered; leaving the job half done and the prisoners not yet liberated.

The Know-Nothings sprawled on the ground, crouched with their arms over their heads, huddled together as if for warmth. Their hands were bloody and torn. Their faces bled, some from scratches, an unlucky few from blinded eyes. They stumbled as they rose. Some were still screaming.
I’m so sorry
, Arjun thought,
not again;
and
please forgive me;
and he felt sick at his own hypocrisy, because he remembered now that he’d done cruel things before on his path through the city, and always forgotten them and moved on.

And then he forgot his guilt, seeing the Beast thrash in its cage. The birds had somehow, between them, in their vast surging numbers, bent the bars, in an attempt to break the cage. It seemed they’d half lifted and then dropped it. It now lay on its side, halfway down the Museum’s marble steps. The Beast was forcing its huge head through the bent bars. The Beast’s huge shoulders violated the cage’s unhinging structure and the metal groaned and snapped. The creature’s jaw hung open and it made a constant hissing sound like steam escaping from an engine. Its long red tongue lashed the air hungrily. The creature was much larger and leaner than it had seemed in the cellar. Its thick neck stretched revoltingly and bulged with the effort of expansion and birth. Another bar broke noisily loose.

Brace-Bel

Later, as Arjun and Brace-Bel hid in the darkness of their bolt-hole, Brace-Bel would breathlessly recount his adventures in the Museum. He explained that he had always, in his strange life, been the villain, or worse, the laughingstock; but he’d ventured into the enemy’s lair in search of his true beloved like a hero of the highest and most chivalrous romance. His purpose had been pure as the purest knight’s, because he expected
nothing
from Ivy, nothing at all. He became what he was always meant to be. It was
laughable
, humiliating, but also superb …