unsuitableforadults

Stinking ale and the heat of bodies, the crush of a small pub in a closed society. We wormed in between people to find a place at a table, strange hands brushing up against our bodies, and surely some cutpurses or pickpockets. Furtive motions all around, transactions, passing notes, brushing lips against ears and whispers.

“Do you want… no, I suppose you don’t want anything.” Tobi asked.

“I’d like to taste it, actually.”

“It’s gone downhill mate.”

It was a tiny table packed between two old oak beams, under a stuffed deer head without eyes. Tobi watched the crowds for a minute, shaking his head, before he turned and said:

“Maggitch is dead.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. They hung him. For sodomy.”

“Okay.”

“We all know what it really was. Sodomite though he was. When Curacell was ousted, Maggitch wouldn’t sign on with the Gurelas. I wouldn’t expect them going after the University, but we’re not safe. Anyway they got him in a honey pot.”

The names were strange. Curacell was an outsider family I associated with granaries, and the Gurelas were landowners tied up with offshore vineyards. That same feeling again caught me up – as though I wasn’t disjointed in time, but in place.

“Do you lecture now?” I asked.

He nodded, stroking his beard. “I’ve got… it’s not Maggitch’s post. Well, more or less it would be Maggitch’s post. Nothing much changed. I imagine everything I tell them is a bloody lie, though?”

“I don’t know any better than you.” I took a little sip of the ale; ashy and sweet. “San Jorgo, that’s bad.”

He nodded. A grim little smile settled onto his face. “It’s all bad, old boy.”

“Hey, if you’ve got Maggitch’s post, does that mean you’ve got his luck with women?”

“Hah! Twice married, friend. And some of us have been aging all these years. After a while the urge, upon seeing a young girl, to jenny her senseless, fades quite sadly, replaced with the desire to fix her up with a nice young man with a solid line in milinery or some such. Or maybe to get her a good governess and teach her the harpsichord.”

She wasn’t my mother. A young woman, passing similar to my mother, dressed in the same bronze and white dress my mother would greet visitors in, and hidden in the same alcove my mother would hide in, ready to ambush a house guest with infusions or wine. And I realised it was Elsa, who had grown up.

I let the veil drop, and spoke.

“Excuse me.”

She started, suddenly seeing me beside the door, and pressed herself into the nook. “Bloody hell. I didn’t see you.”

“I’m very quiet. I’m sorry. Miss.”

“Missus.”

“I didn’t mean to presume. My family used to live in this building.”

“Servants?”

“We made good.”

“I see.” She pulled herself out of the alcove and flattened her pinafore. Her profile was my mother’s, but she had father’s hair, curled into a black mop, and familiar thick black slugs of her eyebrows. “I don’t remember you. What do you do?”

“I’m a salesman.”

“Oh yes. Well you can clear off.”

“I’m not at work. I really wanted to see the old place.”

“No.” She said. “No, thank you.”

That was that. What did I want from her? Nothing. And there was nothing that I could provide for her. So we parted. That was the last time I saw my family.

We walked along the city wall, ruined in many places. The last light of the pale sun fell between the spires and towers, splintering into haze and beauty and many shadows. The shadow of the city was cast for miles and miles into the snow and stones, almost reaching to the unnatural junction between the two fallen mountains. Whenever Ella stepped into a shard of light she would balance on one foot, raise herself up onto the tips of her toes, then step effortlessly forwards as if this was a normal way to walk.

“Did you train as a dancer?”

She nodded. “I was at the Black Light Theatre. On the corner of the Bundestrasse and Regelscourt.”

“My mother enjoyed the Black Light.”

She stuck a finger in her mouth and faked gagging. “God it was horrible. No offence to your mother. I thought I was always going to get a part in pantomime or a comedy or something, but no, not a chance.” She paused on one foot for a moment and looked at me directly. “Is your mother alive?”

I nodded.

“I don’t know what it’s like to be dead. I’m so curious. That’s not offensive is it?”

I laughed. “I could help you find out.”

She looked at me ascant. Perhaps she’d heard the joke before. I didn’t really know how many times she or the players had visited Draugrburg. I was still only just becoming comfortable in myself; and often I had the strong sense that other people knew my state better by description than I did by acquaintance.

“I think it’s quite peaceful here.”

We sat in the lee of a stretch of battlement, perched on the crumbled head of an ancient stone king, watching the unlife of the city carrying on as the short day ended. The sleepless dead lit torches, congregated around the fire fountains, put away playing dice and picked up musical instruments. Builders and renovators put away their implements and collected carts so they could bring the infirm out of their seclusion. Ella put her hand over mine.

“I don’t ever warm up.” I said.

“Prove it.”

We were both astonished.

“It was true, then.”

“Please don’t get into that. It’s tragically dull.” Discussing the particulars of undeath is exceedingly tedious.

“I’d almost forgotten you.”

“You had forgotten me, I’d imagine. I forgot you. In a practical sense.”

“Yes.”

“You were still there in my head, mind.”

Tobi had gained a long beard in the interval, which suited him, a fulsome bit of tonsorial extravagance I would not have guessed from his younger self. He was a Burgemeister of the city, married, with children, and a bastard he managed to keep quite secret. He was on an extended tour visiting some of his holdings. The trip to Samo-o was predicated on a large stake he had in some pirate ships which moored in the city.

“I’m also here to see the sights. I never had an opportunity before. The ruins of the Astropolo, the Kef’r agora. The palace of the first Sultan. The menagerie too.”

His paranoia seemed to have abated. Any uneasiness he felt with the state of the state, that too appeared gone. He seemed like a thoroughly productive, smooth merchant of Wittenberg. Perhaps these facts were connected.

Mother kept and bred Patron Hounds. As infants they were silver white with outsize ears: they grew black points to their muzzles and ears before their first birthday, and usually socks or stockings. Newborn pups were big and hefty, and they grew up even bigger. Their temperament was protective. They were little white knights. My brother was somewhat suspicious of them, but I had no problems letting the slobbery beasts chew on my hand or butt me to the ground for some tumbling.

Mother worked in a small kennel converted out of a stable. She didn’t train the dogs, but she chose the groom who did. She kept meticulous notes in a thick, leather-bound ledger, recording the pairs she was mating.

“Just the right amount of out-breeding, the best way to ensure there’s a little vigour in them. It’s what I’m always striving for. Can’t mix the temper, can’t lose the points, but you need a bit of vigour. That’s the secret to it.”

Everything had a secret to it. That extended across all aspects of life. When she greeted friends, you would hear something like:

“Don’t let them spend too much time at home. They get mopsy. Can’t have mother’s boys. Send them off, and often. That’s the secret to it.”

She was a prize breeder. Her best bitch, Queen Aspidelle, once dropped thirteen good puppies in a litter. The Doge received a pair from the litter as a gift on his eightieth birthday. They switched their allegiance from our family to the Doge’s throne very rapidly. My mother unlaced their collars and the dogs trotted gently across, then sat precisely in front of the Dogal seat. The old man beckoned her to come and kiss the ring. As she stepped towards him the two hounds, not half an hour before drinking bottled milk from her hand, growled, low in their throats. They growled softly as she knelt, growled louder when she took his hand.

“I was so proud. My little boys. They knew just what to do. They understood what a master was – they didn’t love me, they loved their master. Whoever that was. They caught it absolutely. And that’s the secret to it, I’m sure of it.”

“It’s a pretty miserable arrangement,” Tobi said. “Teeth, for example. Chunks of bone growing out of your palate and jaw, arriving in two painful waves throughout your life, tending to rot under the influence of poor diet for the poor or rich diet for the rich, and ultimately poisoning you. What a farce it is to have a body.”

“Pleasurable, mind.”

“Undignified. Without a body you could never be naked. Or ill, or embarrassed. An end to pregnancies and with that a practical end to, I don’t know, fifty in a hundred of all social disputes. Let’s not forget aging. Slowly coming undone, limbs seizing up on you, flesh turning to jelly, eyes turning to carbunkles. The whole thing is set to betray you. You spend a lifetime accommodating for its faults but it does very little to accommodate you. And then, it’s what makes you die.”

This conversation sticks in my mind because it was so typical of Tobi. Scouring one minute, playful the next. A tendency which could be infuriating. He would never return to the previous topic of discussion.

“I think we should infiltrate the women’s college. I think you could do a good job in drag for a few weeks before they noticed you.”

“Knowledge destroys the thing it loves.”

“What?”

I didn’t want to see a bunch of women at their ablutions, I said. He looked at me dumbfounded. I had missed the point.

“Have you found the Wachman text yet?”

We moved on.

He walked out into the small dirty yard that my mother ironically called “the orchard”, leaving me in the kitchen, baffled and young. Silena looked at me blankly, did not offer me any advice, and returned to the washing. I unlatched the door and went out after him.

Michel was standing in the tiny yard staring up at the section of grey sky between the close-packed buildings. He had his hands stuck into his pockets with great force, as if he was holding himself down to earth.

“You’re a judgmental creature.” He said, not looking down at me. “I mean that with a special philosophical significance, as well as literally.”

Many years later I researched what his special philosophical significance was. Just then, I said:

“I don’t want to be your enemy or anything, sir. I’m not trying to do that.”

“What I mean is, boy, you’re intelligent. You have the hang of grasping things. You form judgments about situations, which is as much as to say you can see a situation has occurred. These tendencies in you are mixed with an irritating childish faux-naivite that could lead you afoul of the real.” He pronounced “real” as “ray-al”.

I don’t understand entirely the motives of men who give lessons to children, the matter of which can only be learn by experience. In the case of disillusionment the bitterest lesson is also the only effective one. Michel’s lesson – what I gleaned of his lesson at the time – showed me that Michel was poor, and old, and paranoid a little, and not as sure of himself as he might be. It taught me that Michel saw the world as a place that would gobble up wise little children like myself: which, to me at the time, was patently foolish. I resented his need to sully any complement with a warning. There were many adults who could excuse a little brightness in a child. They, presumably, were also aware that life would do anything it could to dull that sheen: but they had the decency to leave it to dazzle for a little while.

The water all around me was heavy, heavy with cold and heavy with a stillness that had long endured. It stifled the ripples of my movement, implacable. The water in my lungs was heavy too. Heavy and dirty. It was strange to notice them again after such a long forgetfulness. And the dark also was heavy. The drifting of water plants, slow and strange, was the motion of black against black. But there was, in the distance, a faint glimmer, and I set off.

Pink things with newtish bodies and toothless mouths hung in the water and watched me, or flickered away between the long weeds. Sometimes there was a rush of movement beneath me and something would slither away across the lake bottom, stirring up the mud and mulch into clouds. Beetles and larvae propelled themselves in front of my eyes. I could walk, drunkenly.

The corpse had settled to the lake bottom in a posture of repose. The many limbs were beautifully arrayed, each one spread out across a clump of boulders or arcing around a copse of sunken tree trunks. The fine flagella that coated its underside floated in the water, moving very slowly like the weeds. It would settle slowly into the gravedirt here, providing strange nutrishment for the lake’s denizens, revealing itself gradually as a bald skeleton. The armoury lodged into its abdomen would rust and rot, the mouths and mouths of wounds would grow together in its decay and the bag of physical stuff would burst, or simply even dissolve.

I searched its edges, stepping between nails and claws, masses of gluteous flesh. Sticking out of its main mass at the juncture of a clump of limbs was a bristling tussock of spear hafts. I pulled myself up between them until I could sit on top of it and lodge my fingers between the chitinous plates of the hide. Then I pulled myself along its trunk towards the main head and the largest of the eyes.

Shrinda grinned as I took the first sip. I hadn’t been so tentative for years. I tasted, then drank. There was something like whisky in it, the savour of fire and sod and the spirit of dead wine. As the liquid slipped past my lips my skin began to burn. Everything set off with a blue spark, then a blaze of white and red that roared upwards for a moment, then settled down to a crackling flicker of orange red petals, growing and changing over my skin.

I found my jaw gaping. “Is this normal?” Shrinda laughed.

“Drink some more.”

In my firelight, Shrinda’s eyes dazzled. I noticed that they were mismatched today. Her left eye was hazel, set into smooth skin and lined with kohl, while the right eye was a pallid grey, hooded by a drooping lid and stuffed into a nest of wrinkles. Her young eye was excited – her old eye indulgent. I loved her more than ever.

We held hands, tightly, and Shrinda drank too, our two fleshes lighting like candles. The weak stars dazzled. It was a time to be undead.