The House of Storms (39 page)

He’d never known that Ida had worked in sugar mills before her flesh had changed, and it was usually to such industries that they were taken. The huge silos with their peeling names. Bolts and Kirtlings in Bristol. Fripp & Eddington elsewhere. Not that sugar was processed any more in such places, but its sticky smell lingered in the air; a lesser sweetness mingling with the salt-bitterness of the new chemical processes in ways which were achingly reminiscent of Sweetness for Klade. The sugar cane which now got through the French blockades was too precious to waste on mere food, just as cotton, which was equally scarce, would never be put to the trivial use of making cloth. They, and the pulp of trees and the grindings of mines and the efflorescence of stable walls, had all become part of the crucial business of making explosive. It was Ida’s job to sing to the vats as they churned and spewed and boiled, to place her ruined hands on hot rims and dodge swirling pulleys and listen to their mindless song and teach them and their masters how they might work more productively. These factories with their broken wheels and blocked chutes were so messily unlike the neat views Klade had once studied in newspaper adverts. Sometimes, filled as these places now were with explosive—and these were the worst visits of all—they’d simply blown up, and he and Ida had to wander through their ruins searching for precious amulets and boilerplates amid the bits of bodies.

Ida was getting no better, and her minders often grew infuriated with her slowness and the slippery bleedings of her burnt-toffee skin. She told Klade that she’d always hated her work in the Confectioners’ Guild, and had only gone back to it when her Terry went to school because she and Stan had needed the money. Not that it mattered, not that anything mattered, and her song, even when she applied herself to the machines, grew weak and was threaded with pain. One morning, in a dim shed against the door of which their current minders had leaned the weight of a lawn roller to prevent their escape, Klade awoke. Yet another Christmas had gone, and it was spring again, and the West was as far away as ever from victory, which was infuriating, considering all the efforts he and Ida and everyone else had made. He listened to the bird-song, and enjoyed the absence of the ghosts of Ida’s pain which usually echoed in his limbs. He hoped there’d be windows in whatever car, wagon or carriage they were taken in today, and seats for them to sit on. He hoped they’d give them food as well as water for breakfast, and he hoped that lunch wouldn’t be just stale slops. But the song really did seem different today. It was faint—but it was filled nevertheless with an invigorating sense of release. He shuffled himself around the broken pot shards towards Ida to share this news. She was lumped against an uncomfortable collection of rakes, and Klade prodded and shook her for some time, puzzled by her songless stiffness, until he finally realised that she was dead.

Klade knew that he had an hour before their minders came to shove and shout at them to get going. There’d be trouble, then; the minders always grew angry and unhappy if anything got broken—so how would they feel when they found Ida like this? His mind, as he shuffled around a spill of old deckchairs and Ida’s ruined face stared back at him, was filled by urgent, practical considerations and he began to push against the door. A crack slowly edged into light and birdsong. Klade kept pushing. Then, in a rush, the door was open and Klade was out. Klade was running. Klade was away.

The sun was up now, there were spiderwebs of noise and light in this place called Droitwich, and Klade scrambled beneath a hedge just as a Western soldier came down the narrow decline, kicking aside sundry followers, telling them to get the hell out of this place. But the man’s heart wasn’t in it and the guns were already calling to each other. There were whistlings overhead, drifts of smoke, and the smell of new earth. Klade soon found himself alone, and the war-song was all about him now, in smells and spells and smoke. Hot, steaming air rose nearby from a crater which glowed about its edges with the festering brightness of residual heat and aether, and Klade wondered why he was ever drawn to such scenes after he’d escaped from that shed and what remained of Ida. Partly, he supposed, it was the song of battle. Partly, as well, it was the bittersweet smell of high explosive. He’d been drawn to its backwash, where there were near-deserted towns with larders and shops which still had the odd tin of Sweetness for him to hack open with shards of shell or stone. He’d come across his first followers romping in a graveyard and drinking hymnal wine. They hadn’t minded his lisping voice and odd accent. They’d laughed when he said he was from Einfell and one of the Chosen, even when he showed his unmarked left wrist. They’d offered him the brimming red chalice they’d been passing between them, and Klade’s head filled with visions and song. Even in the aching, retching aftermath, he’d been happy to join the followers; to share their belonging of not belonging.

The followers didn’t really feast on the bodies of the fallen after the battle as some people claimed. Neither did they mutilate them—or at least very few did. They pilfered, it was true, and some claimed they were the son of the Elder flown back down to Earth, or that they were Marion Price and could heal with their touch. Others, perhaps the commonest of all, were wives or mothers looking endlessly for husbands and sons. Some, even, were Chosen: Klade recognised the signs, although, and as was usually the way, most seemed not to notice themselves, and died or disappeared before the process of changing was properly done.

Boom Boom.

Klade ducked and turned. Things whistled around him. There was smoke everywhere. Men lay sprawled in the mud of battle. Maybe there would be ghostgas. For all that the soldiers feared it, Klade quite liked the changed visions it brought. A beast lumbered by; a ravener, twice man-height, tusked and bellowing. There was a smoky belch—a mine—and then there was only meat and no ravener at all.

‘Look look look look look …’

Klade did the obvious thing, and looked. One of the other followers, her clothes tinkly bright, was scuttling up. He dimly recognised her, and submitted to the pull of her arms.

‘Look—you’ll get yourself killed.’ She drew him along a ditch into a more covered place. Klade peered out through the half-buried gap in a low wall. Something whistled over them, and a tree flew up, boiling and fizzing with sap. Its branches ignited.

‘Just wait here, shall we? Be nice and safe …’

Klade wasn’t so sure, but he couldn’t be bothered to disagree. This not-botheringness was part of the song of battle. It was like the Bonny Boy; one of those verses he forgot when he wasn’t actually hearing it. His fellow follower settled herself down. In the stark light of the flaming tree, her attire looked particularly impressive, for she had adorned the greyish rags of her clothes with a large variety of insects. Anything from the tiny husks of the bugs Klade found stirring on his own body to the huge, clanky, colourful carapaces of dragonlice which infested the munitions camps. Some, indeed, Klade thought from their continued stirring as the flaming tree began to fade, might still be alive.

‘Quite some battle, this eh? Biggest we’ve yet seen.’ The woman—the Beetle Lady, he remembered she called herself—blinked at him through eyes kohled with weariness and smoke. ‘Who d’you think’ll win?’ Klade shrugged.

‘I think we’ve had it, personally—I mean, the West…’ Klade nodded. Disloyal though he knew it sounded, he was easily bored now by such military talk, and another ravener was bellowing too close by for comfort.

The Beetle Lady leaned forward. Rummaging through insect veils, her fingers snagged at the torn edges of a newspaper clipping. It was of a familiar head and shoulders, and just at that moment the guns roared her name.
MA-RI-ON.
‘Knew her, I did,’ she breathed as another shell shook the ground. ‘Long ago, when she was a girl…’

The ravener had passed by, but Klade still felt a sense of something imminent as the words poured from the Beetle Lady’s mouth like a tumble of stones. Over the battle’s roar, she told him how she’d once lived in a place called Luttrell, doing the necessary social rounds with her doctor husband until one summer had been brightened by the arrival of a senior greatgrandmistress and her ailing son at a fine nearby house. The house was called Invercombe, and the place had been so perfectly beautiful that the Beetle Lady much regretted that she hadn’t visited more often when she could, especially as it was now ruined.

The battle-song had fallen quiet immediately around them, but was raging everywhere else. They were at its quiet unbeating heart, and now, creeping around them in pale tendrils, furrowing the mud and brightening his visions, came tendrils of ghostgas.

‘Look, listen—the thing I keep forgetting, the thing I haven’t told you, is that Marion Price had this
theory.
It was a way of looking at the world which made absolute sense of it. Even this battle, here and now, and these …’ The Beetle Lady clattered her insect cloak, which seemed to Klade now to be chirruping and crawling with the ghostgas. ‘If I could just
remember.
How
did
it go?’ She cocked her head. ‘It was all about life and about death as well, and how they both mattered as much as each other and they fitted together in a perfect tapestry …’

Both Klade and the Beetle Lady grew less and less coherent as the ghostgas glowed and day and the battle drew on. She told him how she and her husband had been posted to tend the wounded at the start of the war, which should have been fine and interesting work, for her hobby was insects, and she’d never encountered so many of every conceivable shade and variety—the maggots, worms, flies, lice, scorpions, wasps, fleas, dragonlice and beetles which thrived on war in a way which humans seemingly didn’t.

By now, the big guns around them had mostly quietened, and all that was left was the rattle of small arms, the occasional light
bang
of a grenade, the screams of the wounded. All signs that the battle was ending, and that the remaining enemy positions were being tidied up. The only question, Klade thought as this woman continued to mutter and ramble about her old, lost life, was, who’d won?

Bang.
Screams, and soldiers’ voices. Klade peeked over what was left of their wall. The ghostgas had faded, but it was hard to tell how much of the rearranged world he now saw out there was real and how much was some terrible vision. A head lay nearby, and a scorpion-thing was plucking at the frayed flesh of its neck. Flies, the great black swarms which somehow appeared at the end of every battle, were shading out what was left of the light.

Bang.

The Beetle Lady chuckled. ‘Told you the Easties would win, didn’t I? Don’t think they’ll be that impressed by the likes of us, though. Look—perhaps I should show them this …’ Again, she produced that ragged newsprint photograph. ‘I could tell them that I knew Marion Price …’

‘Everyone says that.’

‘Ah, but I
did.
You haven’t been
listening,
have you? Knew her at that lovely place called Invercombe. Surely you’ve heard of it. It’s on the channel down from Bristol, and not so very far from Einfell. Ah, so you
have
heard of
there
—all those stories, eh, of changeling sprites and gremlins? Marion Price wasn’t anything special then, just a maid, but pretty enough, to be sure. And she was with that poor ill lad—did I mention him. Now what
was
his name? Something posh and big-guilded anyway, an Easterner for sure. Not that he was a bad sort, and they became what you might call an item. Even heard that she might have got in the family way with him.’

‘Family way?’

‘You know.’ The Beetle Lady mimed an outwards curve over her moth-winged belly. ‘Although everything was going wrong by then already, just as it seems to have done ever since. Doubt if the poor thing ever survived. Now, what
was
that boy’s name? And then there was his
mother …
’

But Klade was hunched back and scarcely listening, suddenly shivering inside what remained of their brick and earth shelter. Followers were unreliable witnesses to their own daily existence, let alone what had happened years ago but still, even as the footfalls and gunshots of the victorious Eastern soldiers grew close, he felt that here—in the Beetle Lady, and her stories and her buzzing, stirring clothes—was some essential truth. A maid—some high-born lad—and a place not far off from Einfell. Even the name, Inver-something. Hadn’t Silus said that to him as well?

‘Tell me again,’ he whispered. ‘Was it really …’

But the soldiers were blocking the holes in the bricks with their boots and guns.

‘Up you get.’ The Eastie with the highest rank, who had one eye which roved and blood shining down his front to which many flies were clinging, smiled down at them. ‘Turned out quite nice in the end, didn’t it?’ The other soldiers chuckled, and one of them cocked his gun, but then the Beetle Lady flapped herself up and waved her clattering arms.

‘Look, listen, look …’

She muttered something more, and the flies swarmed about her. For a moment, their cloud grew so dense that Klade couldn’t breathe or see. ‘Don’t know who I am, do you?’ she shouted in the buzzing roar as the soldiers stumbled back from her. ‘Look—I’m Marion Price, you fools! Can’t you see?’ Then, still beaded by bluebottles, she started singing in a voice which was so keen and beautiful that even Klade for a moment believed.

As she pirouetted covered in gleaming insects, the Beetle Lady looked oddly beautiful. She could have been anyone—saviour or nemesis—in the hot evening light, which gleamed towards the clustered roofs and junctions of a nearby station. The soldiers glanced at each other uneasily.

‘Lying, ain’t she?’

‘’Course she is …’

But their guns were lowered. The soldiers turned to their corporal as, swaying, arms upraised, the Beetle Lady still sang.

‘Guess we
could
keep her. Put her up there in that engine shed for a spot of interrogation. Least until morning.’

‘You don’t reckon?’

‘Bit old for that…’

‘We’ll see how cold it gets, eh?’