Far North (20 page)

The head sat on a raised plinth at one side of the square and faced directly east, into the sunrise and out over the old city. As the sun rose higher, the square grew more dazzling bright – three or four acres of blinding, virgin snow. No wonder that bronze head was squinting.

I could see by the tracks in the snow that the prisoners had used the square to orient themselves. It must have been the clearest landmark on the maps they carried. There were tracks entering it at different points on two of its four sides, but all of them exited the same way: westwards, past the two block posts that marked the separation between the new city and the old.

The tallest building in the old city was probably no more than ten storeys or so, but through the spyglass I could make out some on the other side of the block posts that were twice or even three times as high. There was something so heartless and sharp about their shape: plain, straight sides, grey as granite, unadorned with any detail – nothing to tell you they’d been built by a race of men. And even the biggest of those was dwarfed by a blue, metal crane which stood beside it, like a huge headless bird.

You’d think somehow a city would miss its people, that at least it would look incomplete without a line of washing or two, someone idling on a street corner, some children hurrying to school. But Polyn 66 looked no more short of people than a cemetery does. It was perfect just how it stood, all concrete and right angles, and governed by that giant’s head.

To tell the truth, I think the city would have been a little spoiled if it had had people in it. Humans limp and loaf. They slouch, don’t walk in straight lines, spit on the sidewalks. The city I could see through the glass looked like it would stand to attention for eternity.

 *

The snow cover was pretty general, but here and there were tufts of brown grass that were tempting to the horse. I couldn’t let her eat anything like that in case it had leeched up poison from the soil so I muzzled her with a feed-bag to keep her from grazing.

I had half a sack of kibble for her which would also take the edge off my hunger, but when that ran out I didn’t like to think how I would keep us both fed. I could eat the horse if it came to it – it wouldn’t be the first time – but it would be a long walk home.

As I scoured the old city for something to melt snow in, I was struck by how orderly it had all been left. Windows were mostly intact. Front doors were shut and padlocked.

On the road back to the bridge was a big yellow mansion. Its front door lay off its hinges, all warped and swollen by the weather. Rags and broken furniture were piled up in the opened passageway. I’d seen similar sights enough times over the years in Evangeline to recognize where someone had broken in looking for firewood.

It was a grand old building with two pairs of columns holding up its portico and the number 1897 laid in tiles beneath it. I found a shower curtain, a pair of rusty ski-poles and the remnant of a fire at the foot of the stairwell.

My first thought was that one of the prisoners had decided to disobey his instructions and shift for himself, and I went on up the stairs half-expecting to run into him. But when I found him in the apartment on the first floor I could see he wasn’t one of ours.

He lay on his front on a big Turkish rug wearing the same fetters on his feet as ours had. I was afraid to touch him, so I turned him over by hooking his arm with an umbrella I found in the hall cupboard.

I’ll never forget how light he felt. It was like a shell with no snail in it. I could only turn him so far, because something on his other arm had suppurated and glued itself to that heavy carpet, but there was no meat left on his face and by the look of it he was a year or two dead.

In the bathroom, I found the remains of a killed pig. That pig might have been what did for him. Mushrooms are the worst food to eat in a poisoned place because their roots are so high and widespread, but pig is scarcely better since mushrooms are what they feed on.

The staircase led up five storeys where there was a second, narrower set of stairs that gave out onto the roof. The light off the snow was dazzling after the gloom inside.

I fell to my knees and licked snow melt right off the slates.

 *

The rooftop commanded a view out towards the river. From it, I could clearly see the block post on the bridge and figures moving beyond it. Through the spyglass, I was able to tell the men apart, and I could watch them idling around their camp. They had a small fire going, so they must have found some clean wood somewhere. I knew their heads were hurting from the slow way they dragged themselves about.

Towards eleven, the first prisoners began appearing on the approach to the bridge. I didn’t see them arrive, because I was too busy melting snow from the roof in a pail. The lack of food in the Zone didn’t worry me so much, but without water, the horse and me would die in a couple of days.

The second or third time I went up on the roof I saw the guards had changed into white one-pieces with hoods and masks to cover their faces.

It was hard to keep track of numbers. The guards all looked identical, and the prisoners had been made to sit in rows on the side of the bridge nearest to me.

One by one, they were called forward to hand over whatever they’d found. They stood up, laid down the things they had, and then crossed over to the other side.

When they were done, one of the guards came forward and hosed down the pile of dropped objects with a fumigator he wore strapped to his back. It was a weird-looking thing, something like a cross between a weed sprayer and the smoke machine we used to use to put a hive of bees to sleep.

I was all caught up with watching it when the first shots rang out. The next thing, a couple of the prisoners had broken free and were trying to get back across the bridge, but they could only manage a slow, loping run because of their chains.

There was a volley of shots and one of the prisoners fell down. The other kept going for ten or fifteen yards more. He didn’t fall flat. He slipped down and died upright, but on his knees, like a man at prayer. I’d never seen anyone die like that before. You wouldn’t think gravity would allow it.

The temperature began to drop again as night drew on. The eaves stopped dripping and the slush in the roads hardened into ice.

I’d stabled the horse inside the stairwell, but I was planning to spend the night outside where the air was cleaner, and I could keep an eye on the guards.

From the roof, their fire was a tiny yellow spark in the blackness. The city was so still that an indistinct grunt or laugh occasionally carried all the way across the river.

In the last hour before sunset I broke into an apartment on one of the upper storeys to get a blanket.

The place had been left in perfect order: there was a vase of dried flowers, a pair of sofas with antimacassars, a glassfronted case of books in Russian, a dusty television, a standard lamp with an old frayed wire.

The bed in the main bedroom had been stripped, and on it sat two zipped bags of sheets and blankets. A photograph, a clock, and a copy of the Bible lay on the bedside table.

The second bedroom was half the size of the first and held a single bed.

On the cork board next to the dressing table were photographs of a dark-haired teenager. In some she was ice-fishing, in others eating cotton candy, and standing in the glass bubble of a huge ferris wheel in a city I didn’t recognize.

Even after years of standing empty, there was something sweet in the air of that room: some faint smell of dried roses behind the mustiness and the rat and roach poison that had been so conscientiously laid around the skirting boards.

I found the girl’s diary in the second drawer of the dressing table. It was all in Russian, but I knew what it said without having to read it. I could tell that it warned off snoopers with threats and spells. It rated the boys in her class for their promise as lovers and husbands. It charted the monthly cycles that were the first proofs of her womanhood, and it looked forward impatiently to a future that was already dust. I knew because I’d had one just like it.

In the story of Goldilocks, the little girl sneaks into a bearden, eats the animals’ food, and finds a place to sleep. That night, I felt I was that story in reverse: a stinking, scarred bear, reeking of blood and gun-smoke, turning up in a world of clean sheets and flowers.

Sitting on that bed, I felt some part of me emerge the way a snail does, soft and flinching, reaching up to the sunlight with its tender horns.

So little of my life was human – at least, not human in the way the girl who had once lived here would understand it.

I thought about Ping, and if her baby had lived: maybe I could have made her a room like this one, and lost myself in the turning years, knowing I’d dug my patch, and fixed my house, and loved the people I was supposed to.

The bronze head in the square spoke of a race with grand notions, but my bet is that all most people ever wanted was this.

In the drawer where the diary had been stood a jar of cold cream, the cream inside all stiff and waxy with age. I smeared a finger-full on my wind-burned lips. The taste of it numbed my tongue the way soap does.

I put the jar and the diary back and slid the drawer shut. It stuck, and as I jerked it free, I heard something rattle at the back. I drew it out: a perfect oval, flat and heavy, that sat in my hand like a turkey egg. It was so cool on my palm I took it for a paperweight at first, until the fading sunlight showed the etched shapes on its upper side that told me it was a memory stone.

 *

Around three that morning it started to snow again. It can’t have been the sound that woke me up, because there was none. Maybe it was the change of light in the room. It poured out of the sky like feathers from a split pillow – big warm-weather flakes.

It seemed to double the starlight as it whirred down past the glass of the bedroom window. I came to consciousness on that girl’s bed, watching it fall, and I felt a kind of peace in me. It made me glad that this scaly old world still has so many pretty things in it.

I must have drifted off again. Next thing I knew, the horse was hollering, and I was halfway down the stairs shouting at whoever it was to get gone, with my gun cocked and my eyes still barely open.

There was a mess of snow in the hallway and someone had tried to unfasten the horse’s bridle. They had fled at the sound of me yelling.

I swung myself into the saddle and chased out after them.

It turned out there was only one. I followed the tracks he had left as he laboured through the snow with his chain on. I’ve hunted down some men in my time, but this one didn’t take much catching. He was all broken with the weather and the short rations. The best he seemed able to do was to huddle in a shadowy alleyway and pray I mistook him for something else in the darkness.

He waited and waited, hoping I’d pass along. Thinking of the plague and the withered man in the apartment, I didn’t want to get too close to him, but I had no intention of leaving him be, either, so that he could make more trouble.

After what seemed like a foolishly long time, I shouted out to him that if he didn’t show his face, I’d kill him as a stranger, and sleep no worse for it, and then I broke and closed the breech of my gun with a snap so there was no mistaking my intention.

He shuffled forward out of the darkness on his knees and begged me not shoot. When he looked up at me, the first flush of dawn in the sky behind me lit up his face. It was Shamsudin.

He squinted up at me and said my name as though it was a question. His voice was croaky and thick with thirst.

Telling him to wait where he was, I went and fetched one of my pails of water for him. He clutched it in his arms and put his face in the bucket to drink. Between gulps he raised his head and sat with his eyes closed, panting with relief and fatigue. The water dripped off his beard and back into the pail. When he offered the bucket back to me, I told him he could keep it.

I guess I was pleased to see him alive, though I had no desire to let him near to me. It could have been Charlo or my own pa in that place and I still would have kept upwind of him and ten yards between us. I didn’t believe that the guards would have killed those for nothing, or go to all that trouble with their masks and suits because they felt like it. Tolya knew more about the Zone than I did and he didn’t trust to luck to stay healthy.

Shamsudin asked me about the others.

I said the guards were waiting on the other side of the river and as far as I knew all the prisoners but him were dead.

That seemed to surprise him less than I expected, then I saw that he had fallen asleep. His face looked old and hollow and the skin of it hung in baggy folds.

I whistled him out of his slumber. It was cold enough that he would never come round if he slept there.

He stumbled after me groggily. I led him to the stairwell and covered him with a heap of bedclothes from the apartment.

 *

At dawn, I went up to the roof to watch the sun come up over the city. It lit the glass in the distant windows of the second city – gold and bronze, and some the greenish-blue of cut ice.

I took the memory stone up with me and laid it down so it could drink in the sunshine for a few hours and come to life. It looked even prettier in the daylight, bright and shiny as a knife-blade. It had an ebony screen. There was some tiny writing on the front in Russian and a row of buttons marked with symbols that I couldn’t recognize. They moved with a faint click at the lightest touch. On the back were written the only words I could understand: Made in China.

 *

The guards struck their camp and headed off an hour or so after sunrise. They moved slowly along the eastern bank of the river. I lay on my belly and followed them with the glass. They had just enough animals for the journey back. The sleds were loaded up with the things that had been brought out of the Zone.

All the bodies had been left where they had fallen. The one that had died on his knees had keeled over in the night. The others lay piled under the fresh snow too far away for me to count them, even with the glass.