Gears of the City (43 page)

But there were happy memories, too—under the pipes in the south corner there were the Dad’s old charts and maps and models of trains and trams and tracks. Ruth had been maybe nine years old when he’d turned his attention to the trains. He’d built the tracks and drawn up the charts to puzzle out the mystery of the inputs and outputs of the city’s factories, to determine what kind of business the city did with the Mountain. Of course, Ruth hadn’t understood much of what he was doing; but he was jolly about it, as he sometimes was when he was on the edge of a breakthrough. He laughed
and encouraged the girls to admire the little trains, which he made himself, and to come with him on weekends to spy across wire fences and weed-strewn lots at the hidden railway sidings. An adventure! Ruth remembered how they’d once run away hand-in-hand from the station guards …

And the clocks, heaped in the corner! Ruth remembered how the Dad’s fascination with the times of trains and trams had given way quite naturally to a fascination with time itself. He’d scavenged quite a collection of old timepieces, which Ivy proved to have a talent for repairing. The cellar ticked and hummed and frequently buzzed, rang, or chimed. He would sneak around at night, avoiding the Know-Nothings, to nail up his clocks in odd places, at either end of Carnyx Street, and then Fosdyke, and then farther afield; and he checked them nightly and came back to the cellar and made notes of anomalies. That lasted a few months; at its height, Marta had to remind him to eat. When he worked on the clocks he’d been mean and cramped, complaining that the girls distracted him. Time was a burden to him.

It felt good to clear out the cellar. It was good to sweat, and ache, and work. It was good to be done with the ghosts of the past; it was a new world, now.

They kept the old stills, and the dusty bottles of home-brew. That night they welcomed their neighbors into the cellar, and they drank together while the bombers went over. In the morning, when they emerged, Mrs. Rawley’s vacant house was reduced to shattered bricks and timbers, and the street was grey with ash and cinders.

N
o one went to work, and the factories were silent. The Combines that had dominated everyone’s lives for as long as anyone could remember suddenly seemed irrelevant.

While they huddled in the cellar, Marta said to her neighbors: “This isn’t going to be over anytime soon. We need to fend for ourselves. We need to start stocking up food.”

Thirty men and women marched on the Holcroft Packing & Bottling Plant on R Street, Ruth and Marta in the lead, Marta carrying a list of demands, and a petition demanding that
in light of the crisis, Holcroft recognize the legitimate necessities of the public and release sufficient food from stores to …
Ruth expected a tense scene; she was
half ready for violence. As it turned out, there was only one guard left at the Plant, and he’d received no orders for days. Marta shrugged: “How are we going to do this, then?” The guard’s face broke into a grin and he unlocked all the doors for them. They left with wheelbarrows full of flour, rice, tinned and dried meat. The guard was so relieved to be told what to do that he followed them home.

T
he Museum had been cut in half, its west side smashed open. Its cellars were exposed to the sky, then flooded. No magic left there. Those childhood dreams were erased all at once. Half of the places where Ruth and Marta and Ivy had played were gone. As children they’d reinvented those streets, renamed them, made them fabulous. Now they were broken, reconfigured, and the new map held no meaning for her.

Ruth could have just walked away and kept walking. Only Marta kept her anchored there.

M
eanwhile the Know-Nothings drilled with rifle and pack in the ruins of Holcroft Square. They’d gotten new uniforms from stores—black and grey, blotched for camouflage. They looked very serious and dangerous.

They looked
happy.
Suddenly they were needed; suddenly everyone loved them.

When some one hundred of them gathered at the Terminal to pack onto the omnibuses and go north, to strike back at the Mountain, even Ruth joined the cheering crowds. She watched them go, trailing off up the hill, the bus rattling and bouncing on the cobbles, the horses straining, and she thought how
young
the soldiers looked, how handsome.

For a moment she allowed herself to believe they might succeed. But they never came back. Nor did the next lot.

When they started recruiting regular folk, Ruth cornered her friends and said, “Don’t go. It’s not so easy to find your way to the Mountain. You won’t come back.” They didn’t listen. They didn’t come back.

She’d seen those grey-black uniforms before—the new uniforms
the Know-Nothings went to War in. Those nameless and haunted ghosts who’d come wandering down the Mountain, year after year for as long as she could remember, lost and confused and scarred, mumbling or sobbing about the War that was to come— they’d worn those same uniforms.

What happened to those who went up on the Mountain? The Mountain stood outside of time, outside of the city—she’d always understood that. Those who were thrown down might fall
anywhere.
Ghosts, loose in time, haunting their own lives. The War was a closed circle. It was hopeless to fight back.

She wasn’t sure whether anyone else understood that or not. She didn’t like to talk about the War much. It was over soon enough, anyway. There were no more Know-Nothings to send, and no one who was left wanted to go. The bombers came every other night, then once a week, and then hardly at all. They’d made their point. Walbrook, to the south, was in ruins, but Fosdyke was mostly intact; it could have been worse. It was time to start rebuilding.

T
he Combines were gone. And the Know-Nothings were gone, and the police, and even the post offices. The omnibuses no longer ran. The factories sat uselessly, with no one to operate them. People hid in their homes. They went pointlessly to their old places of work, and hung around outside the locked gates, waiting for … what? They didn’t know. Someone to tell them what to do. That was the power of habit; that was the weight of the city’s long history.

Marta and the others re-formed the Carnyx Street Committee. Zeigler’s place was taken by old Mr. Sedrich, who’d worked in the brewery, and young John Coulter, who’d been with the Black Masks, before the War. The Committee worked out a system of rationing for the food they’d taken from the packing plant. The Committee incorporated Ezra Street and Capra Street and Leather Street, which had no leadership of their own—and so they took over the warehouses at the end of Capra Street. What saved them from starvation in the first months was the vast and pointless overproduction of the city before the War; the warehouses the Combines had left behind were stacked high with canned food. Water was more difficult—they incorporated R Street, and took
over the canal that ran along it. At night Fosdyke’s people huddled like moles belowground; the Committee worked out a rota for use of the cellars and sewers. The Committee cut a deal with the workers who’d seized the tannery at the end of Leather Street, the refinery on the hill, the stockyards at T Street. They took over the armory the Know-Nothings had left behind on 220 Street. They carved up the waste-ground and the vacant lots and the backyards and the scant scrubby parks, and they began tentative experiments in farming.

Fosdyke hadn’t been much troubled by Gods. They heard rumors. Refugees from the Ruined Zone said that the wastes of Walbrook were haunted by the howling of the Dog. Salisbury, to the south, was said to house the temple of the Horned Man, in an old brewery, and the streets were said to run with whiskey—a few brave souls struck out from Fosdyke south across the Ruined Zone to join the revels. Bargees came down the canals from Thibaut, in the northwest, and reported that the waters there were now …
strange
, and that some of the barge families had given themselves over to the worship of the thing that lurked in the depths. One day a white Bird of immense impossible size and beauty came curving in a lazy arc over Fosdyke, and the morning sun sparkled through its white feathers, and left light like snow all through the rain-wet streets … But Ruth was working down in the storage basement of the old Holcroft Infirmary on 109 Street, cataloguing the abandoned medicines and supplies, and missed it. “Story of my bloody life,” she said.

By the end of the second month, the Committee (now the Committee for the Emergency) ran pretty much everything in Fosdyke. People spoke of it in the vague terms they’d used to speak of the Combines—”The Committee’ll take care of it.” It was a sprawling, complex thing, hastily engineered, an unstable coalescence of all the fragments of power left behind by the collapse of the old order, and it was hard to say exactly who ran it; but it worked, up to a point. Marta had been named the Secretary of Minutes, and buried herself in meetings and paperwork at the Committee’s Temporary Headquarters, in the old Terminal building on S Street. She appeared to be as much in charge as anyone was.

By the third month, the new world had started to seem normal. The bombers came infrequently—and there were now watchers on
the tallest rooftops, and a system of bells and alarms to warn people to go below. Sometimes some mad cult out of the Ruined Zones— the Night Watch, the Dog’s Men, the Lamplighters—would make small annoying incursions, but not often—Fosdyke was well defended. The rebuilding had become routine. A few of the factories were running again. The farms showed promise. People went back to work. In the first days after the War Ruth had gone scouting with lamp and knife in hand through dark abandoned warehouses in search of food and supplies. Now she worked in an office, bookkeeping, cataloguing the Committee’s food distribution efforts. It was tiresome work. At her desk her mind began to wander again.

She kept glancing up at the Mountain. That name Arjun had spoken—
Shay
—kept running through her head. Before they went up some of those doomed soldiers—drunk, proud, hysterical—had let that name fall from their lips.
Shay. Big secret. That’s what the higher-ups say. King of this City. Been too long in the shadows, pulling strings. Gone too far. Time to settle the fucking score. Big secret, that’s what they say. Give us a kiss, love, come on, we go up tomorrow.

D
o you ever think about the dead?”

Marta sighed and rolled her eyes. Ruth put a hand on her arm. “No—I mean it.” They sat across from each other at the table in the kitchen of the old house. It was dimly lit; candles and oil were rationed. Marta rarely came back to the house, and when she did they were rarely alone—Ruth now shared the house with four refugees from Walbrook. Marta looked severe, tired. She was starting to get fat—stress, desk-work, bad food. Ruth was drunk, Marta sober.

“I
mean
it,” Ruth said. “Out there—in Walbrook, how many thousand? In Bara, how many? Those were places where people lived and worked. Now they’re dark all the time, and they’re fucking haunted. How many people?”

Refugees came to Fosdyke. The survivors of the Ruined Zones. In their fear the city’s people packed together for warmth like cattle, leaving great stretches of the city bare of life. They told horror-stories. Streets on fire, men and women like puppets jerking in the red light. Streets where white dust still hung in the air, weeks after the bombs, making ghosts out of everyone who stumbled through. Bodies in a bomb-crater plague-pit. Hunger and madness. They
never told their stories twice—they quickly learned that no one in Fosdyke wanted to hear that stuff.

Marta put her hand on Ruth’s. “Let it go, Ruth. Let it go. We’re rebuilding as much as we can.”

That was what the Committee always said—that was the Committee speaking. Rebuild! Eyes front, face the future! The catastrophe was kept at bay, outside the borders. The wound was denied. The horror, the loss of it, surfaced only in nightmares, in the black jokes that Fosdyke’s workers made, constantly, almost obsessively—because
everyone
was sophisticated now, everyone understood irony and absurdity and the shortness of life.

“All that darkness out there,” Ruth said. “We can’t make it right. We can’t bring them back.”

“Whoever said we could? We have to look after ourselves, now. We’re still living in the surplus of the old world. It can’t last forever. We have to build, we have to …”

“You
like
this.”

“I’m good at it, Ruth.”

They sat in silence for a while.

Ruth said, “Do you ever think about
why?”

“There aren’t any answers down here. What happened, happened. We just have to live with it.”

“Don’t you ever wonder what happened up on the Mountain”— Marta winced at the word—”whether they did something up there, made something angry—Arjun, Ivy. Marta, what if Ivy did this? What if we did this?”

Marta snarled. “It’s not
my
fucking fault.” She hit the table. Breathing deeply, she avoided Ruth’s eyes. “Let it go, Ruth. Let it go.”

“I can’t, Marta. I need to know. Who’d do something this cruel? What kind of world works like this? It’s too cruel—it doesn’t make any sense. I need to know what happened.”

“You sound like the Dad. You sound like Ivy. Before they
left.
Fucking go
on
then.”

Marta’s bodyguard came into the room and coughed discreetly— she had business back at the headquarters of the Committee for the Emergency. Marta left without saying another word.