The House of Storms (31 page)

Now, when Silus went off to Bristol, Klade made himself scarce. Klade was far happier, he told himself, sorting supplies and taking them—the necessary food and odder requests—to the places in Einfell where the more ghostly and solitary of the Chosen dwelt. Sunny days or wet, he was like the Huntsman with his prey, leaving things on stained window ledges to be snatched away by approximations of limbs and hands, or at the edges of the woods through which the Shadow Ones swept and moaned like plays of stormy sunlight. Klade whistled to himself, which was something none of the other Chosen could do. Why, after all, would he need to go Outside, when he already knew so much more about it than the Outsiders did themselves? He was like the birds which looked down from those bird’s-eye views in advertisements of
Our Factory
with engraved chimneys swirling; he was like God the Elder who was supposed to hover somewhere far above the world’s maps. Klade whistled to himself, and walked on, entirely unafraid. And all the Chosen knew who was passing; even the wildest of the Shadow Ones changed their song. After all, he was unique. He was Klade.

Sometimes, a new one of the Chosen arrived. Some were so changed that they joined the Shadow Ones in the woods, or found a place in the Far Village. Others might stay in a Meeting Place room for a while to die there, just as the Diving Man had, whilst Blossom sang over them until they came to the end of their pain. But Fay was nothing like the Diving Man, nor particularly like any of the other Chosen, who were all as uniquely different as the spell which had caused them to become what they were. She wandered the landscape for some shifterms, dragging what remained of the ragged taffeta dress she’d been brought in until Silus sent Klade with something better.

‘Here you are …’

She jumped at his presence as if startled, even though she’d been watching him come through the dusk across the thistle fields as she crouched at the woods’ moss-hung edges.

‘I was sent to bring you these.’

She snatched them, sniffed them, backed away into the gloom, then edged forward and seemed at last to properly regard him with her frantic trapped-bird eyes.

Klade was unused to judging the Chosen by how they looked, but nevertheless the appearance of Fay was of interest to him. What little she wore could have been from a rain-stained advert for
Ladies Particulars
even if her neck and shoulders and arms and what might have been her bosom were joined in one pyramidal and unbreaking slope which peaked into a ridged crest which poked through the remains of her hair. Her hands, in comparison, were tiny, and her skin swirled, changed, darkened, beneath its moss and mud stains. Like the twilight, it had no particular shade. Perhaps she was destined to soon join the Shadow Ones, living out here in the cold and the rain. Perhaps she would die. But he’d brought some food along, a sticky sea-potato tinned in Taman’s Ketchup,
Best Of All Brands.
He held it out.

‘You’re to—’

Snatching, she scuttled off between the trees.

But she returned, next evening, to the same spot. And the next.

‘Where is this place? Hades?’

‘It’s called Einfell. Surely you’ve heard of it?’

Fay chewed loosely at another sea-potato and picked the dropped bits off herself with her tiny, filthy hands. The clothes she’d put on, the old ones and the extra ones, scarcely covered her. Even by Chosen standards, he saw that she was different to how he was between the legs.

‘Can you speak without talking?’

Full-mouthed, Fay shook her head.
I don’t understand …
Some never did. Ida said remembering—or not remembering—was the hardest thing of all for the Chosen. Day by day, he brought things to the place by the edge of the woods which Fay seemed to have made her own. Bits of blanket from the charity wagon. Corrugated iron and fencepost to keep out some of the rain. Nails to fix them with. He whistled as he hammered once they were out of his teeth. The bluebells were coming up in the woods behind her. It would soon be summer.

‘I used to live in Bristol,’ she told him, wiser and more confident now as they squatted in the low and rattly space he had made.

‘Can you show me?’

Fay reached a tiny hand over the mossy blanket. Her skin swirled. She touched him. He saw a house squashed between many others, filled with flames and pipesmoke and a sweet, talcumy smell. There were vases on a window ledge, and stairs covered in carpet, and no smell of rot. The evening after, she showed him again. Klade came to see, Fay helped him see, a Bristol which was brighter than the newspapers, and setter than the place he’d seen on his journeys Outside with Silus. Yes, he much preferred this place. In the
Evening Telegraph
now, there was Unrest, there were Lock Outs, there were Trials, there were Marches. There were disputes in the Editorials and the Letters Pages over the question of bonding, which some called slavery. But in the Bristol Fay took him to through the touch of her swirling fingers, there were no debates—there were only sunlit tram rides and cold drinks in the beer gardens of the Green Lattis. There were only the ships moored at Saint Mary’s Quay in fluttering forests and there was only Goram Fair, and candyfloss, which filled Klade’s mouth although it was something he had never tasted, and was almost better than Sweetness itself.

Yes…

Searching the barns and derelict houses for more things to make Fay’s spot more habitable as the thistle fields browned, Klade came to the place at the end of No Through Road where he had once stood, and gazed Outside. Just hills and trees and a hint of what might have been sea in the distance. Nothing had changed but the season’s light and the shapes of the clouds. Those telephone lines swooped so close to Einfell’s firethorned fence that they might have been considering entering. Silus had told him that they once had, and did so still by some subterranean route to an abandoned booth in the woods. If he stood close enough, he could even feel and hear their characteristic wheeze, which was like a door’s distant creaking. He laughed out loud, to think of the place the world might become, if Outside and Einfell were united, just as they were inside the dreams Fay brought him.

‘Are you sure, Klade,’ Silus asked him, ‘that you’re not bothering her?’

You must remember, Ida said, that memories are difficult.

And some greater doubt was also there, which they disguised from him even within the transparency of their song. But Klade was helping Fay relive her life, which was surely what she needed. He was her guide, and she was his. Picnics and the best Nailsea cider. Lanterns strung over the Green beneath the careering stars swaying with the brassy thump of the oompah band.

It was full summer and beyond. Whistling, a new piece of canvas sheeting tucked underarm as waterproofing for whenever it finally rained, Klade crossed the shimmering fields and rapped on the corrugations of Fay’s shelter. Not that he needed to, for she always squatted in this dark place which he had made for her beside the summer woods. She didn’t seem to notice the heat, any more than she noticed the smell.

‘Silus says you should move with us into the Big House. There are plenty of spare rooms.’

I’m still not sure …

Fay shuffled and scratched. More than with any of the other Chosen, there was the Fay of the song to Klade now, and then there was the real Fay. The two in his mind were almost entirely separate. Yet at the same time, under this baking iron roof, he could still see almost the young Outsider woman she had once been. In the shape of those hands. In the shadow slope of her chest and thighs. Her flesh swirled, and she brought dreams when she touched him, but Klade was more and more conscious that Fay had once been, and partly still was, a woman.

You look …

She touched his face, leaning forwards.

Human …

She’d asked him before for a mirror, but there were no mirrors in Einfell apart from the polished glass picture frames in the Meeting Place, which Klade didn’t need Silus to warn him that Fay was best kept away from.

‘I used to think I was a Brown.’

Brown? No, Klade, you’re pale, you’re dark …

Her hot fingers traced his hair, his lips, his sweat-damp cheeks. Wonderingly, they shaped his ears. His heard himself give a low chuckle. ‘Brown was just something I once thought. It’s hard to explain …’

Still, the cloudy fingers explored. Grasshoppers chirruped outside and the tin heat bore down, but Klade felt cold and sad and warm. The feeling reminded him somewhat of the times when Ida had cut his hair. There was that same delicious sense of being the focus of the song, but there was something stronger as well. Sour honey taste of bittersweet in his mouth and a straining in his groin. He laughed again, his voice high. He had to pull away.

I’m sorry …

‘No, Fay. Don’t be. It’s me.’ My voice—my body. I’m changing as well.

But I have an idea.

‘Oh?’ A tremor in his voice. ‘What?’

You can be my mirror, Klade.

And she reached out to him again, and Klade’s eyes unsaw the toadish creature squatting before him in the noon-lit shadows of her fetid lair. Instead, framed in gilt, far brighter and more real than anything he had ever witnessed, sat a young Outsider—a woman, with long tresses of ebony hair which she was combing with a shining silver brush and humming as she did so through red lips which smiled a secret smile; amused as only such lips could be at all the happy foolishness of the world. Bare at the shoulders. A fire-lit shine to her breasts. Perhaps she was wearing something below the mirror’s reach. Perhaps not. She would have been perfect, Klade decided, either way.

The hot stink and the shambles of the place beside the woods.

Fay had drawn back.

That was me.

Silus expressed surprise when Klade insisted that he wanted to visit Outside again.
I thought you’d lost interest…
Then Klade explained what it was that he wanted to see, and all Silus’s surprise was gone. But he was still resistant to the idea.

‘You read the papers, Klade. Don’t you know Bristol isn’t that safe nowadays?’

‘Half a million people live there. How unsafe can it be?’

‘I’m not even sure that the place we brought you from is still there, Klade. Nor that we’d be welcome.’

‘Haven’t you always told me that it’s important for the Chosen to try to understand what they were?’

Silus inclined his head at that, but not with any particular acceptance. There was a wordless weariness, a resignation, to this part of the song. But still, he agreed. Ida’s flesh had dried out and stiffened like pinecones in this heat, and Klade could feel her pain back in the Big House as the Farmers brought the horses and their meticulously polished wagon into the yard. The cloak he’d worn before was now too small for him, and this bigger one felt itchy and odd. Why should he have to hide himself, when he was Klade, and it was a warm day, too close for these thick clothes, and hard even to breathe?

The smell of leather and horses. The road’s hot tar. The air was turbid even as they passed the songless fields, and swirled dark with the sourness of industry as they approached the city. Bristol, today, truly was the non-colour of newsprint. Silus’s ongoing song of regret was part of this metropolis as well, unravelling like the gutters and the limp lines of washing. The sun dimmed with a smell like hair cast upon a fire. Shouting people swept by, and the sides of the carriage were rocked and banged. Then uniformed men were standing in the middle of the road where smoke uncurled.

‘Whoa! What have we got here—fairies! You really should go back, mate. Can’t be responsible for freaks.’

But Silus was insistent. With a songless glace towards Klade, they moved around the barricade as the horses tugged unevenly across fallen glass and banners. Down a side street, several buildings were in flame and someone was swinging by their neck from one of the lampposts. The song of the city today was darkly shapeless.

They climbed into quieter streets where, amazingly, the sun came out. There were gardens now and glimpses of Bristol below in a swoon of fumes.

‘This is it, Klade.’ Silus wiped his raw wet lips. ‘This is the place you said you wanted to see.’

The horses were calmer now, but Silus’s feelings were infectious even when he did his best to disguise them, and Klade could tell as they climbed down that he was afraid. But this was such a peaceful place. There was a long wall with spikes of rosebush showing over it, a rusted wrought-iron gate with the sign which spelled, in twists of metal and a few caught leaves,
St Alphage’s Refuge for Distressed Guildswomen
.

‘It’s never been in the newspapers. It’s not that sort of place. Klade.’

The path to the house was overgrown with spillages of sallow and lavender and the windows were shuttered. It had never struck him before that there were many different qualities to the songless silence of Outside, but this one spoke of long emptiness. And the gate was chained and sealed with the kind of device Klade knew would hurt him with a spell if he tried to open it. Whatever business this place had been engaged in had ceased many years before.

‘You didn’t know it had closed?’

‘We never kept in touch. It was an arrangement, Klade—an agreement.’

‘How convenient.’

‘It wasn’t like that. Girls used to go to Alfies—’

‘Alfies?’

‘That was what people used to call this place. Girls, women, used to come here if they were expecting a baby which they didn’t feel they could raise. You can’t imagine how difficult the Outsiders make life for someone who has a child outside marriage. Usually, the children were adopted by what is termed good families. Always, and as with you, their origins were kept rigorously secret. There was nothing disreputable about the place—at least not outwardly.’

‘My mother came here to have me? What was her name?’

‘I don’t know, Klade. The whole point of Alfies is—was—that the child was given a new start.’
The slate wiped clean.
‘I think she was a maid working at a place called Invercombe. I’m not entirely sure. But your father was certainly much more highly guilded.’

‘They abandoned me?’