What Lot's Wife Saw (4 page)

The band members gathered in the courtyard, hurriedly buttoning their jackets, dragging their music stands and getting their instruments out of their cases. Their salute was not particularly synchronised. I clasped my hands behind my back and sent them a menacing look. The lines straightened at once, caps were adjusted to the regulation angle and stands placed firmly on the ground. I inspected the ranks of men and found their boots polished and not a single button missing. The green Consortium epaulettes had been brushed and were spotless. I raised my chin as a signal for the rehearsal to commence.

We started, as usual, with the French
minuets, gavottes, romances
and the
rigodons
of Provence. We continued with the Italian,
tarantella
and
pavanes
, then a few
tangos
, and in deference to the Spaniards,
flamencos, sarabands
, and
boleros
followed. We try to keep our very diverse colonists happy by presenting a balanced programme. Then,
uleli
and
sopski
for the Bulgarians,
hora
for the Moldavians,
Bihor polca
for the Romanians,
chardas
for the Hungarians, the melodies from Mt Aimos, with their pipes, percussion instruments and tambourines for those from the South Balkans and
sufi
music for the Middle Easterners.

After about half an hour, I heard the sounds of a lock being turned from the entrance of the tower. I surmised that the last night patrols had returned and that the armoury guard was locking up the ammunition. I made a circular motion with my finger so that they would continue rehearsing and I climbed up the tower to see what ammunition had been spent. Nine tranquillising darts were missing, which meant it had been a rather quiet night. On their signed reports, the guards who had fired their weapons would note the name and occupation of the victims – all cyclists. The cyclists have proven themselves to be the most lax at taking their pill. I would wish to underline this and I have repeatedly emphasised it in numerous reports to Governor Bera. I decided that I would have to inform Dr Fabrizio, as Head of the Infirmary, that the cyclists are suffering increasingly from fits and it is high time a few firm recommendations about pill-taking were made. Beyond these written reports and these simple observations, I am not allowed to do anything.

My orders are such, Your Excellencies, that I am limited in the scope of what I can do, so I am not always as effective as I would like to be. My purpose is not to produce reports and gallivant in ceremonies but to see to the safety of the Colony. You have built it in the shape of a crescent so that it could have the strange sea in front of it and the impassable desert behind. Thus you have ensured that it would have excellent defences from external incursions, but what about the threat from within? Not forgetting, of course, that over these recent years, the Suez Mamelukes, that accursed tribe that sprang up from the sand after the Overflow as if they had been spawned by the disaster itself, have somehow managed to cross the desert and to encroach on our northern borders. Pint-sized, ashen-skinned, insect-limbed, murderous Nomads. Lord knows how they manage it! Without water, without camels, without weapons apart from their knives, they crawl up to the saltworks and steal salt by the handful. We have permission to shoot them on sight so that isn’t an issue, but we are not allowed to shoot our own people, not even to roughen them up a little to teach them a lesson, just to put them to sleep with darts, and therein lies the root of many of our problems. Pill-shirking colonists can be every bit as dangerous as those Mamelukes, I would like to make that very clear.

After supervising the locking up of the weapons, I climbed the metal staircase to the circular walkway at the top of the tower. This served as the observation platform. Young Batourim was on sentry duty, notorious for his absentmindedness, and I wanted to make sure that he had his binoculars trained on the desert, as he should, rather than wavering towards the band in the courtyard.

The Guardhouse Observation Tower only partly covers requirements, but at least the Governor had thankfully acted on my request for building modifications and we raised the floor level by a few centimetres. These were only half-measures, of course, since the real problem was the location of the building rather than the height of the tower. It has no view of the southern quarters which house the cyclists, the dockers and the salt-workers, and are where most of the disturbances arise. The Guardhouse is built northeast, on the edge of the aristocratic Hesperides quarter, a few blocks from the Governor’s Palace. With our binoculars we can see Bera’s servants scrape the salt off the headless statues in the garden and off the windows of the bedchambers, but not the docks, the unruly quarters or the western part of the desert. Without wishing to gainsay your architects, the Guardhouse should have been built more centrally, so that it could oversee the entire Colony and not just to spy on the Governor’s garden. Not to mention that the latter features a further distraction when her Ladyship wanders about scantily dressed, something she has taken to doing, knowing that there is a guard on duty in the tower.

So I ascended to the top of the tower and found Batourim with his glasses squarely in the direction of the Lady’s windows. A sharp smack to the back of his head did wonders for his angle of vision. He immediately swivelled towards the desert, but found that I was standing in the way when his binoculars fetched up against my buttons.

“Captain Drake, I have the honour to inform you that not a single sand dune has shifted position,” he said foolishly.

I waited for the band to play the finale of the tango and lifted the binoculars from my sternum with Batourim glued to their other end.

“Batourim, have you ever seen a Suez Mameluke?”

“No, Captain.”

“Exactly, since he would slit your throat before you see him. He breathes for days under the sand waiting for your attention to waver, and he strikes like a snake and beheads you before you can flutter your eyelids. Your only hope is to detect him from afar with the glasses, aided by their nonsensical insistence on wearing colourful robes that make them stand out against the dunes and shoot him. Three weeks without leave!”

Batourim was upset at his penalty since he was already serving a previous term and now wouldn’t be visiting the bars on Solidarity Street before November.

“The shutters hadn’t opened yet, in any case,” he sulkily protested.

I looked towards the Palace. I could see some servants sweeping the stairs of the salt that the wind had blown in and others polishing the handle of the main gate. The bedroom shutters remained firmly shut. Knowing, as I do so well, the routine of that mansion, I wondered why the Lady had not yet embarked on her daily gymnastics or, in other words, the shedding of clothes and preening in front of the window. Batourim had been punished for nothing. I left him to swallow the bitter pill I had administered and leant over the railing to enjoy the band playing below. I noted that the trombone had definitely improved since last time. In the middle of a waltz by Strauss, one of the Governor’s favourites, which always gets him dancing with the Lady at soirées, I heard Batourim mutter warily, “Strange, Captain Drake …”

I waited patiently for Batourim to finish his phrase, knowing that the lad always gave voice to what was on his mind, no matter how many days’ deprivation it might cost him.

“… Judge Bateau is running like a madman down the street, wearing his gowns.”

He was not wrong. Bateau was running or, at least, was attempting to run towards the Palace. With the wings of his black gown flapping, he looked like a dizzy crow that had forgotten how to fly and was stumbling about, out of its element. The Judge never goes anywhere in his gowns unless he is on Green Box transporting duty on Thursdays. Who knows where he had been boozing all night and why he had forgotten to get changed. I grabbed the binoculars off Batourim to get a better look. Bateau was weaving, still managing to collide with various pedestrians but in danger of being run over by the passing berlingas, which charged down the streets, warning bells ringing madly. His hands slapped his cheeks several times and he kept up a furious monologue. I assumed the incorrigible Spaniard was inebriated again. His weakness for alcohol was incompatible with his position as well as the trust the Governor placed in him but I couldn’t bear to watch him being humiliated. I rushed down the stairs, dashed into the street and caught up with him at the square. I rapped his shoulder and he jumped so violently that I had to grab him by the waist to stop him falling.

“Have we hit the bottle again, Judge Bateau?” I demanded severely.

His face was drained of colour as he grasped my uniform and stared at me without recognition. I shook him and as his head tossed about, he managed to hiss through clenched teeth, “Governor Bera … at dawn … you realise, Drake? We’re doomed!”

His eyes shone and I couldn’t make out whether he was terrified or satisfied or both. I, on the other hand, was so shocked by the news that I was completely unable to speak.

Colonist’s File No.: 03452150

Place of Birth: Danilovgrad, Montenegro

Position: Orthodox Priest

Administrative Level: B1

Adopted Name: Montague Montenegro

… One can walk the Colony from one end to the other in a day and a night if in possession of a strong pair of legs. Those are its dimensions. Built on the mouth of the rift, it is often shaken by small tremors – sometimes I can see the chalice slide diagonally across the Lord’s Table during services. Instability is a part of life in the Colony, perhaps the only thing you can rely on.

The air is stifling, laden with the aromas of the salt. The exhalations of the saltworks mist up the atmosphere with such large, almost visible droplets that clothes never dry, we go to bed wet and we wake up soaking. Bathing and laundry are futile exercises, simply an exchange of one coat of liquid for a different one. There’s no sense of seasons here, just burning sun and sandstorms, heat and suffocation. The wind whips but cannot cool you. The naked skin of the earth is arid, treeless and barren, featureless, like an eggshell. Neither fish nor fowl nor even snake nor scorpion condescend to walk on it.

How then, could you imagine, Your Excellencies, that this prefabricated state which was colonised in desperation and despair, could thrive? A bunch of broken-hearted castaways from vanished homelands and uprooted lives, left clinging onto a hostile reef. It would take uncountable tons of sand to bury their memories and umpteen degrees Celsius to cauterise their guilt. In the accursed womb of the violet salt, I have lost, wretch that I am, my faith. I minister to my congregation in the name of the Consortium, in its name I pray and I submit to its mercy.

I’ll write a full account of what I did on Thursday, the 20th of August, and may Your Excellencies judge me. It would no longer serve any purpose to keep what transpired secret, especially in the light of what followed. That Thursday, at seven in the evening, Ali, my black servant, entered my bedroom and whispered that there were some salt miners who had come looking for me for the usual reason. What that meant was that there had been another death in the galleries, and I was being asked to circumvent the regulations and to read the funerary service over the body. I could see through the window that the violet cloud was rapidly smothering the Colony, so I wouldn’t run the risk of being seen. I shoved my Bible under my robes, wrapped Ali’s cape around my shoulders to camouflage myself and carefully ventured from the villa.

By the time I’d reached the southern quarters, the fog had thickened and rendered the cape superfluous. In any case, no resident of Hesperides would ever be found in these dangerous, southern quarters, especially on such a foul night. I stood by the statue of the Happy Worker, waiting for a signal. The statue had remained headless since the carnival night when Lady Regina had dressed up as Salome and had demanded from the Governor the heads of all the statues in the Colony. Lacking a head, it was exceedingly difficult to tell whether the Happy Worker was indeed happy. Judging from the angle of his arms that drooped downwards (in anticipation of the welling up of the precious brine), it gave the impression that he was hoping the earth would swallow him up.

A long time passed in the statue’s company, with me rendered sightless by the fog. I rarely venture forth without Ali, only when, as then, I am engaged in illegal activities and I have no wish for him to share the blame. A pair of yellow eyes was the first indication that someone was approaching. Then the salt miner led me by the hand and delivered me to a second, and he, likewise, to a third. I was content to have this relay guide me to my destination since, working in the bowels of the Colony like earthworms, their eyes could see through the fog. In the darkness of night they descend to their galleries and it’s night again when they emerge. Years pass without their getting exposed to the sun, and that’s why their skin is pale, in antithesis with ours, which is baked. In their homes they refrain from lighting lamps, not to injure their untutored eyes. They hang by ropes from the crater’s rim and descend kilometres under the surface of the earth to open channels with their shovels to help the salt-bearing water reach the drying pans. The channels clog up fast, as the salt crystallises and the shovels must work incessantly. There, in the throat of the underground maw, where the tremors are very strong and the rasping sound the salt produces is like a giant’s laboured breath, they’re tortured by hallucinations and the hungry mouth draws them in. If they’re not quickly hauled back to the surface, they abandon themselves to the belly of the beast, quite willingly it seems. They’re pushed over the edge of madness by the fumes. They part the rope by gnawing at it with their teeth and, having been liberated, they slip away into the abyss. Such deaths are not uncommon, but they are hushed up and are denied proper funerary rites. It is not permitted to bury a body in the Colony’s soil, only to incinerate it, because the chemicals of decay would corrupt the salt-bearing horizon. If the deceased had been religious, his workmates secretly called on me to say a few words. I sidestep the relevant rules and do it. This was one such occasion.