I

ANIN

Jonathon Bridge pressed the buzzer beside the imposing iron gate and waited. He had never been so near to The Fortress before. For most of his life the white, glittering structure on the hilltop had simply been a historical fact. There, like his mother had been there. In the glare of sunlight it shimmered and levitated above the city. Now, up close, Jonathon saw that the whiteness of the exterior wall was created by a mosaic of mother-of-pearl and mirror. The tiles fractured his face and reflected it back, in pieces.

“Mr. Bridge?” A voice crackled through the intercom beside the gate.

“Yes.”

“We’ve been expecting you. One moment, please.”

There was a wheeze, then a groan, as if a mighty machine were firing up. The gate unlatched and opened an inch or two.

“You may enter.”

Jonathon hesitated. He turned and looked back down the steep hill to the city. Somewhere out there in the tangled motherboard of freeways and skyscrapers, bright lights and cubicles, was his office. And his home. It would be a long time before he saw them again.

He shouldered the gate wider and entered a small grassed enclosure. The gate clanged shut behind him, making him start.

A few birds pecked at the ground, undisturbed by his presence. “Walk towards the door directly in front of you,” said the disembodied voice.

Jonathon looked for its source but could find nothing.

The door opened before he reached it, and a slim, androgynous figure bowed in greeting. This person, Jonathon thought, must be an electii.

“Welcome.” The figure stood aside to let him enter the hallway, which was long and high and lit only by muted globes set into the ceiling. The dense air seemed to part as he inched forward, reforming behind him. He heard a blip and looked around.

“Metal detector,” said the electii. “Keep going.”

The closed doors on either side were black slabs cut deep into the wall. Jonathon passed maybe a dozen doors until he came to an open room. He stepped inside, squinting into the gloom.

The electii entered, softly, behind him. “Once your eyes have adjusted, you will observe that there is a wicker basket in the corner. Place your clothes, jewellery and personal effects into the basket. When you have disrobed, I will position you for examination. Take your time. There is no rush.”

It took a moment for Jonathon to make out the basket against the wall, then he slipped his silk-lined jacket from his shoulders. He flinched slightly at the recent memory of five women arrayed against him, his jacket hoisted before them like a standard. He folded the jacket gingerly, as if it might bite him, and placed it in the basket. Cufflinks, wallet and keys followed, then his belt, shirt, underwear and pants. Lastly, his shoes and socks. He placed the shoes sole-upwards on his bespoke trousers.

Naked, he returned to the centre of the room and waited. The electii came towards him and Jonathon noticed the peculiar sound—

An outrush of breath and a vigorous rubbing of hands, then the electii took Jonathon’s elbow and guided him to the wall. “I need you to stand spread-eagled, taking your weight in your fingers.”

Jonathon listened closely to the electii’s voice but could not say whether it was male or female. It bothered him, the not knowing. He spread his long, elegant fingers against the wall and tipped himself towards it.

The electii probed at Jonathon’s ankles and moved upwards; thorough and practised hands searched for contraband, weapons or messages. Jonathon heard the stretch and slap of a rubber glove being forced onto a hand and braced himself. The questioning fingers eased down the moist slice dividing his bum cheeks.

“Take a deep breath, Mr. Bridge.”

Jonathon exhaled and clawed at the wall a little as the electii’s finger probed his rectum.

“That part is over,” said the electii, as if Jonathon were a small child at the dentist, “but stay still.” There was the stretch and slap of the glove again as it was removed and discarded. Jonathon breathed in and out as soundlessly as he could. The electii squeezed his balls and turned them in half-circles one way and then the other. What, Jonathon thought, could possibly be hidden in there?

The hands moved upwards, probing his abdomen, his underarms, his shoulderblades.

“Excuse me,” the electii said, pinching Jonathon’s nostrils four times in rapid succession then delving into the folds of his ears.

Jonathon had many questions for the electii and if he wanted to ask them, it had to be now. He knew from his reading that there were no electii beyond The Veya Gate and, even if there had been, questions were forbidden past that point. But somehow the very intimacy the electii had forced on him just now made him uncharacteristically shy.

“Thank you,” the electii said formally. “Please stand at ease.”

At ease? Jonathon nearly laughed out loud. Mate, you’ve just been knuckle-deep in my arse.

“Here.” The electii removed a gown from the wall and handed it to Jonathon. “Run it through your hands, get used to the feel of it.”

This was masjythra, a fabric made and worn only at The Fortress. It felt like the metal mesh of a purse his wife had once owned, but incredibly light. It also felt strangely animate, as if it might slither away if he dropped it.

“Let me help you,” the electii offered.

A head taller than the electii, Jonathon bent down so that the garment could be dropped over his head. The electii smoothed the fabric across his back and shoulders. Nothing happened for a moment or two, and then the gown pulsed and slid across his torso, melding to his folds and hollows. Jonathon swore in surprise under his breath.

“You get used to it.”

The gown stopped mid-thigh. Jonathon tested his range of movement, stretching his arms above his head and raising up on the balls of his feet. He bent to touch his toes—or his knees, rather. The garment moved with him like a skin, emitting the clinking-ice sound he’d heard earlier. He turned away and gave his balls an experimental scratch. He felt strange outside the confines of his underwear. Untidy. He scratched himself again.

“Reach around behind your neck,” said the electii, “and locate the hood.”

Jonathon pinched the material where it met the base of his skull and pulled it away from his body. It yielded after a microsecond and he slipped his hand beneath it. He pulled out a length of material and draped it over his head. The metallic squares twitched then traced his skull, leaving his face exposed.

“If you are ever in Her presence,” the electii said, “you must immediately place the hood on and leave it on unless She tells you otherwise.”

Jonathon turned his head sharply. “When will I see Her?”

“Impossible to say. Maybe soon. Maybe never.”

A wild violence flashed through Jonathon’s blood. He wanted the definitive. A yes or a no. AC or DC. You chose this, he reminded himself.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Bridge,” an apologetic clearing of the throat, “but I’m going to have to take your wedding ring, too. No personal effects are permitted.”

Jonathon placed a protective hand over the gold band. You chose this, he reminded himself again. Not too long ago he’d thought choice was a straightforward proposition. Now he knew better. He circled the wedding band with his thumb and index finger but couldn’t pull it past his knuckle. From the shadows, the electii offered him a small saucer. He dipped a finger in. It was oil, probably the same oil the electii had used to ease his (or her?) finger into Jonathon’s rectum.

The oil loosened the ring, and he was able to pull it over his knuckle and slip it off. The white strip on his ring finger glared in the darkness.

“Give the ring to me, please.”

As Jonathon handed the ring to the electii he couldn’t help saying, “Take care of that.”

“I will,” the electii said kindly.

When Jonathon and his wife had first discussed having a baby, Adalia said she thought the electii were lucky, in a way. “At least they get some choice in the matter instead of having male or female foisted on them.” Jonathon hadn’t wanted an argument so he’d just shrugged.

“This is where we say goodbye,” the electii told him. “I can’t accompany you into the second chamber. Go back to the hallway and continue walking away from the entrance. Enter the next open door you find, which will be directly in front of you. Good luck, Mr. Bridge.”

“Thank you. Goodbye. And good luck to you, too,” he said, though he didn’t know what the electii would consider lucky.

Jonathon returned to the hallway, turned left and shuffled towards the chamber. The doors continued on either side of him, locked and completely silent. Did they house other supplicants, come like him to make a fresh start of things? He’d read all the literature he could find on Vaik civilisation, but it was scant on practical details. Ahead of him he saw a chink of light around a door. He pushed it open (it was surprisingly heavy) and was dazzled by the brightness on the other side. He held his hand between his eyes and the light for a few seconds, then lowered it, slowly.

He was in a rectangular room where swirls of red and blue tiles chased each other across the walls. Large windows the shape of bishop’s hats framed the lapis lazuli sky. The room was perfumed with something sweet and grassy. A brass samovar and red glass goblets stood on a table beneath one of the windows.

“Would you like tea?”

Jonathon turned towards the voice. A woman gave a slight nod in greeting then poured from the samovar. She gestured towards one of the plump cushions dotted across the floor.

“Please, sit down.”

Jonathon lowered himself awkwardly to the ground, monitoring the stay of his hem. He wasn’t as limber as he’d once been. Long lunches and immobile hours in front of a computer screen had reeled in his joints. The woman watched him coolly. When he was seated on the cushion, she passed him the goblet of tea.

“Should I keep the hood on?” Jonathon asked her hopefully. She smiled, amused. “I’m not The Woman, so you may remove the hood if you so choose. How is your tea?”

He took a sip. It was hot and sweet with an aftertaste of aniseed, nothing like the bitter black coffee he usually drank.

“I tend the gardens between The Dryans coast and the eastern buildings. You are assigned to me.”

Assigned?

She wasn’t Jonathon’s type; that is to say, she wasn’t pert-breasted and young with burnished salon-skin. Her long auburn hair fell in messy waves down her back and she was pale, almost reflectively so. Jonathon vaguely wondered how she kept her skin so white under the sun in the gardens. He found it impossible to guess her age. Perhaps late thirties, perhaps early forties. Around his age. He couldn’t imagine fucking her.

“Lift up your masjythra.”

“What?”

Her brows arrowed above her flinty green eyes. Jonathon rested the goblet on the ground beside him and lifted the robe to his upper thigh.

“Higher.”

He kept lifting until his cock and balls were in full view. He had a strong urge to stand up so he could suck his stomach in and flex his thighs. The way he did with the poodles. Instead he sat there obediently, holding up his gown for a stranger’s forensic observation.

“You can lower the masjythra now.”

Was she impressed? Disappointed? Bored? Her impassive face gave nothing away.

“We take very few supplicants, and those we do, we have to be sure can adapt to life here. I’ve read your file.” She paused to take a sip of tea, then held his eyes with her level gaze. “Your wife is pregnant.”

This didn’t seem to be a question, so Jonathon didn’t reply.

“Your wife is five months pregnant. You will miss the birth of your first child. Does that trouble you?”

“Yes.”

“Does that trouble your wife?”

“Yes.”

“So why are you here?”

You have my file, he thought. You probably know the reasons better than I do.

“I want to be a good father,” he said. “I don’t know another way of doing that. Becoming that. Better I miss the birth than the rest of her life.”

She inclined her head to one side. “Her? Your file doesn’t specify a gender.”

“We don’t know the baby’s sex. For some reason I think of her as a her. Anyway, it sounds much better than ‘it.’”

“You want to be a good father. Why don’t you go to prenatal classes? That’s what most men would do.”

“I’m not most men.”

“That’s what most men say.”

Jonathon grew impatient, as he always did when people were cryptic. He reached up to adjust his tie, his habit when annoyed, then remembered he wasn’t wearing one. The masjythra shifted around his collarbone.

“My wife wanted me to come,” he said flatly. “It was the only condition on which she’d take me back.”

The woman gave a dismissive wave of her hand. “A poor reason. It lacks conviction on your part. Acting on someone else’s wishes won’t be enough to sustain you here.”

“I’ve been accepted, haven’t I?”

“Yes. You have. But this is your last opportunity to reconsider. Once you pass through The Veya Gate and into The Fortress proper, there’s no going back. You see out your time. One year. I urge you to think better of it.”

He shook his head.

“Your relationship to the Vaik and your status here will be unlike anything you have experienced before. It is almost impossible to give you an accurate analogy of your relationship to us. I can tell you what you, and we, are not.

“The Fortress is not a jail, although you will be held under guard if you break our laws. You are not a prisoner, but your movements, your time, your labour will be almost entirely regulated. The Vaik will direct when and what you eat, when you sleep, when you rise. Every eleventh day you will have half a day to spend according to your inclination and wishes. This is known as ‘the half.’ You are free to roam around a prescribed area of the grounds. On all other days the spaces you inhabit and what you do there will be directed by us.

“Perhaps the most difficult thing to grasp about your relationship to us is the nature of your submission. While you stay with us you are to obey all Vaik commands and you are forbidden to ask questions of us unless explicitly authorised. But we are not in a master-serf relationship. You are not chattel, and our obligations to you are as strong and binding as those you owe to us. When you come to us it must be in a state of willingness to empty yourself out and entrust yourself to us. Without that trust your supplicancy will be futile. You may as well return to your life right now. Your subjectivity must be given to us freely and entirely. We will keep it until you return through The Veya Gate. We will not return it beforehand under any circumstances.

“You will see and experience things that will be strange to you, that may offend your notions of what is good and right. But you have offered your will up to the Vaik, and you are our vessel. You must learn to hold yourself in a state of suspension, which is not at all the same thing as apathy. Some men think they can come here and close themselves off for a year, fold into a pocket deep in their souls and then unfold again at the end of their time. This serves no one. It is a trick, a deceit to hold power while pretending to cede it.

“Whatever your male friends may have told you, we are not in a relationship of subordinates and dominants. Our authority over you is real and entirely tangible. There is no safe word you can utter that will make the power flow differently between us. We have dungeons here. Whips and chains. But they’re not props and The Fortress isn’t a sadomasochistic theatre.”

Her mouth twitched slightly. “We have had supplicants in the past who were,” she paused, “misinformed about our culture. The reality came as rather a shock.”

“Well,” he said, “to be fair, there’s not a great deal of credible literature on the role and place of supplicants in Vaik culture. I went looking for it. Almost no one who’s been a supplicant writes about it afterwards. I assumed that silence was part of the contract.”

She shook her head. “We impose no prescription on what supplicants do or say once they leave The Fortress. How could we? We have no jurisdiction outside the perimeter wall and would have no way of enforcing it if we did. I suspect the silence derives from the difficulty of translation. I have lived in your world, so I know how difficult it is to draw comparisons. I can’t tell you ‘life here is like x or like y,’ because it’s not. You will find the same thing when you leave. You’ll meet very few people capable of understanding what you will understand in a year’s time.

“That’s probably the most difficult thing for you to grasp: the Vaik way of seeing is not your way of seeing. You are not a tourist and this is not a cultural exchange. You will learn to see through our eyes, but this will take time and experience. Until then, you must let us inhabit that place where your will would otherwise be. Even when it grates against what you believe and what you think you know. Our relationship to supplicants has been codified over centuries. What you now enter is an ancient rite, recognisable in one form or another for more than a thousand years. It will be helpful to remember this history, to trust it. The Vaik are dependent on this tradition, too. Without it, we could not reproduce and our way of life would be gone after a generation.”

Ah yes. Reproduction. As a teen, Jonathon had been like other spotty boys whose glands were spurting new and strange urges into his body. They had fantasised about life in this world of endless oestrus and ceaseless yes.

As if summoned by some secret signal into which he had not been initiated, two women entered the room. Unlike the woman to whom Jonathon was assigned, both were what Jonathon thought of as Vaik prototypes: tall and lithe, brown-skinned with hay-coloured hair and high, wide foreheads. They looked at him intently, almost accusingly.

“Are you ready to begin?”

Jonathon nodded.

“I will recite the terms of your confinement at The Fortress. These Vaik bear witness. At the close of each question I will ask you if you consent. Your answer will be ‘I consent.’ You will then be required to sign a written contract. Do you understand?”

He nodded.

“You remain in full possession of your will until you enter The Veya Gate. From then on you will be a vessel of submission to me and to all the women of The Fortress. You will obey every command, request and direction given by a Vaik once you pass The Veya Gate. The only circumstance in which you may question any command, request or direction so given is where two or more commands, requests or directions contradict each other. You consent to this?”

“I consent.”

“You are forbidden from having any contact with the outside world. Any attempt by you to send unauthorised communication outside The Fortress by any and all means, including through other residents and inmates, will be severely punished. Persons beyond The Veya Gate are free to write to you provided that the letters are written in ink. No typed or printed material will be allowed. All letters will be security screened and read by the Vaik. They will be passed on to you at our sole discretion. You consent to this?”

“I consent.”

“You will remain at The Fortress for one year. This timeframe is non-negotiable, regardless of any change in your circumstances. Do you consent?”

“I consent.”

She gave a barely perceptible frown at his answer, as if she had expected better of him. “You understand that if your wife dies in childbirth or you are diagnosed with a terminal illness the period of your tenure does not change?”

The two Vaik who were bearing witness glanced at each other, then back at Jonathon. He had the distinct impression that his interlocutor had veered off script.

Adalia had seen him off that morning, her hands pressed against the just-rounding belly that contained their daughter. “I’m proud of you,” she’d whispered. How he’d hungered to hear that.

“I consent,” he said.

“Your records indicate that your sexual health is sound. We undertake that you will leave The Fortress in the same state of sexual health. Once you pass through The Veya Gate your body becomes our responsibility. We will meet all your physical needs: food, clothing, bedding, hygiene and medicine, should it be required. We direct the uses of your body at all times. You consent?”

“I consent.”

“There are limits to the uses to which your body will be put. You will not be subject to immoderate physical force. You will not be exposed to substances that could permanently imperil your health. You will not be required to labour beyond fourteen hours in a twenty-four-hour period. Do you consent?”

“I consent.”

“You are permitted no sexual contact with non-Vaik inhabitants of The Fortress unless expressly requested by the Vaik. You consent?”

“I consent.”

“You understand that among the inhabitants of The Fortress are men who have been declared isvestyii. They may be part of your assignment, may sit at the same table with you—in short, will pass their days with you. You are expected to show them the same courtesy you extend to others. You are forbidden from raising your hand in anger to any inhabitant of The Fortress, including Vaik, isvestyii, national servicemen, residents and supplicants. Do you consent?”

“I consent.”

“You relinquish all parental rights to any child or children you conceive in The Fortress. You have no right to a confirmation of paternity and should you suspect paternity you will seek no contact with any such child or children once you vacate The Fortress. You have no responsibility—pecuniary, legal, filial or moral—towards any such child or children. You consent?”

“I consent.”

“Once you pass The Veya Gate, all questions to the Vaik are forbidden unless expressly authorised. The use of questions to elicit information, initiate conversation or seek direction is not permitted. What you need to know, we will communicate to you. Do you consent?”

“I consent.”

“You are to address the women of The Fortress as ‘Mistress’ unless they give you their name. If a Vaik gives you her name, it is generally a sign of great favour. My name is Mandalay. I tell you this because you are assigned to me. You will obey every woman in The Fortress, from the smallest girl-child to The Woman.”

Jonathon immediately looked up. “When will I see Her?”

“I suspect you’re going to struggle with the prohibition on questions, Jonathon Bridge. That’s not for me to say. Drink your tea.” Mandalay took a sheaf of papers lying next to the samovar and signed. Jonathon had half-expected a quill and ink but she passed him a simple silver ballpoint. “Take your time. The contract is a faithful representation of what we have discussed.”

Jonathon scanned the contract, then signed and handed it back to Mandalay. Something velveteen and warm slipped through his blood. They’re drugging me?

Mandalay appeared to have read his thoughts. “It’s only temporary. For security purposes. You will remember nothing from the point of The Veya Gate to entering your quarters. This is your last opportunity to ask questions.”

“The electii I met earlier.”

“Yes?”

“Man or woman?”

“Yet to be decided. Perhaps both. Neither. Anything else?” He wanted to know how the question was decided, but this required a turn his mind couldn’t make. Instead he asked her how long she had been at The Fortress.

“Twenty years.”

“And where”—his tongue and head were growing heavy—“. . . where were you from?”

“The Green Sea Isles.”

He used to be good at geography.

“That’s a long way,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Have you seen The Woman?”

But Mandalay didn’t answer, or perhaps he didn’t ask. When he woke he had no memory of emerging from The Veya Gate and arriving at his quarters. The last thing he remembered was taking the final oath at the imposing white obelisk.

I submit.

I submit.

I submit.

When he woke it was dark. The only light came from the moon pouring through the arched window open to the night air. His room was small and bare and dominated by the large square bed. The bed was built into the wall on two sides and easily large enough for three or four people. It was soft and warm, inviting him to slip back into the luxuriant siren call of the drug. For a minute more, Jonathon yielded to the floaty blankness, then he hurled himself upright and swung his feet from the bed to the floor. The sudden movement made him dizzy. He dropped his head to his knees and took deep breaths.

His tongue felt furry from the aniseed tea. Someone, perhaps Mandalay, had placed a jar of water on the rustic wooden table next to his bed. He drank it greedily. His masjythra had been removed; he saw it glinting from a hook on the wall. Jonathon counted slowly backwards from twenty then stood up and shuffled the few steps to the window and looked out.

His quarters were several floors above the ground. He could hear, though he could not see, the seabirds cawing beneath. To his right he made out a curve in the perimeter wall—still pearlescent in the moonlight—before it disappeared into the darkness. Beneath the birdsong was the rush and gurgle of the tide and the low murmur of air through the small vents in the floor.

He turned from the window to the four square metres that would house him for the next year. On the table was a laminated card that appeared to contain a map and some instructions. Besides the bed and the table, the only other furniture was a low, three-legged stool. The walls were white-washed stone; the floor was timber, smoothed by the years and the polish of bare soles. He dropped to his knees and explored the room with his fingers, familiarising himself with the lee of the boards, the placement of the vents and the hollow thud of cavities in the wall. He didn’t know, exactly, what he was looking for. A power point, perhaps. A secret tunnel chiselled by the previous inhabitant that might lead him to the outside world.

He sighed, then drew himself back onto the bed. He closed his hand on his cock and gave it a perfunctory tug. He didn’t feel remotely aroused but wanted to pretend that his life would go on as normal, his routines undisturbed. He pictured a breast. A thigh. Tight round buttocks. But the images shimmered and dissolved. Frustrated, he tugged harder. Jureece, naked and supine, flew across his mind. Jonathon’s hand fell onto the bedclothes, his cock limp. He curled like a sea urchin and buried his head in his hands.

One year. Your choice.

He fell asleep, then woke to a chime pealing through The Fortress and a low bustle of activity coming from somewhere below his quarters. He rose from the bed, took the masjythra from its hook and threw it over his head. The tiny metallic squares pinched the hairs on his chest and arms as they cinched to his body.

His water jar had been refilled. It unnerved him: the idea that someone, probably a man, had come into his room while he slept. He took the jar and stood at the window.

The sky was still pink-streaked in the post-dawn. Far below him men in different-coloured masjythra walked in single file in the direction of the chime. When they’d passed, Jonathon leant out of the window and tipped the jar over his head. It took him a moment to recognise the tang in the air as salt. It had been years since he’d been this close to the open sea. He’d forgotten the way it left a film over his skin. He needed coffee, badly.

He picked up the laminated card on his bedside table. It told him where to find the toilets and water stations. Jonathon followed the directions to the urinal and released a stream of pungent, greenish urine—probably the drug. Like his quarters, the bathroom was clean and spare. There were no mirrors.

Out in the hallway he paused, homing in on the chiming noise then turning towards it. At the end of the corridor he came to a staircase that zigzagged at a gradient just sharp enough to make him concentrate on his footing. He followed it to the level ground and fell into step with another man wearing the same coloured masjythra as him.

Mandalay had told him not to ask questions of the Vaik, to wait to be addressed, but did that apply to the men? He looked at the man next to him, ready to nod a greeting if given the opportunity. But the man kept his eyes on the ground. Jonathon peered closely at him. He was younger than Jonathon, no more than thirty. Why was he here? It occurred to Jonathon that he might be isvestyii. What had he done so bad, so young, to warrant that kind of punishment?

The ground-floor corridor opened onto a wide, sunlit verandah. The young man turned and, in the sudden flash of light, Jonathon saw the other half of his face. He sucked in his shock. The man’s face appeared to have melted on one side, his milky eye dull.

As if sensing Jonathon’s gaze, he turned his other eye onto him.

“This way,” he said.

Jonathon followed him into a long, low building filled with the sound of clanking cutlery. Men in masjythra sat in rows on rough-hewn benches at wooden tables. Most were intent on the steaming blue bowls in front of them.

Jonathon flexed and balled his hands by his sides. Coffee. He needed coffee. He looked around for a percolator. An urn. Sachets of low-rent fucking instant.

On their last holiday Jonathon had taken Adalia to a resort high in the mountains. It was a two-day drive. Their oak-panelled room overlooked an orchard and in the afternoon it was suffused with the scent of cherries. There was a plunge pool and sauna on their balcony. At breakfast they had two dozen types of coffee bean to choose from. The beans spilled luxuriously, dark and glossy, from labelled sacks. Vanillin. Chocolate-infused. Brandy-simmered. Macerated-in-pear. He scooped measures of the hotel’s signature cherry-coffee and took it to the waiter for grinding. He walked carefully back to their table with the steaming mugs, milk and sugar in both. He’d asked the waiter to coif Adalia’s froth into a heart.

In the dining hall, the scarred man directed Jonathon to a spare seat at one of the benches. As Jonathon sat down, he tugged the masjythra as low as he could, so low it pulled tight at the front of his neck. A blue bowl was placed in front of him, and a smaller bowl to the left. He picked up the small bowl and sniffed it hopefully. Tea. He took a sip. It tasted grassy, not like the sweet aniseed tea. From behind him someone ladled porridge into the larger bowl. He had little appetite, and even less for this sticky concoction of oats and milk.

“Eat,” urged the scarred man, although he didn’t look up. “You’ll need it.”

Jonathon spooned the mixture to his mouth between sips of tea. He made a rough calculation of how many men were in the hall: fifteen tables, ten or eleven seated at each, plus the dozen or so servers. A hundred and seventy odd men, some of whom had to be isvestyii. The rest were a mixture of supplicants like him, national servicemen and a few—a very few—men granted permanent residency. Could they take The Fortress if they wanted to? Had anyone ever tried?

The Vaik sat outside on a large terrace at round tables, enjoying the mild spring sunshine. Men in ochre-coloured masjythra delivered platters of fruit and pastries to them. Did they get coffee? Jonathon saw Mandalay among them, conspicuous by the long red hair spilling from under her hat and by her pale, reflective skin. She was peeling an orange and laughing at something one of the other women had said.

Jonathon shifted on his chair. The rough wood chafed his balls. Just what he needed. No internet. No coffee. Splinters in his dick. He half-choked, half-snorted his spoonful of porridge. Next to him, the scarred man shot him a warning glance.

“Sorry,” Jonathon spluttered, pressing his balled fist into his chest to dislodge the porridge.

“Eat,” the man said again.

Jonathon moved the food mechanically from bowl to mouth, bowl to mouth. It wasn’t that it was bad, but he hadn’t eaten breakfast in years. He subsisted on black coffee in the mornings. Maybe a doughnut if a poodle—junior analyst, he corrected himself—brought him one.

The gardens, Mandalay had said. That would make Adalia laugh—him, who could barely keep his office cactus alive.

He looked again at the Vaik. Mandalay wore a loose, white diaphanous gown that ran to her wrists and ankles, and a floppy green hat. She and her companions were cut sharp against the blue sky, as if they’d been superimposed on it. The women ranged from their late teens to their nineties. No girl-children were present. The very oldest had wiry white hair in braids down to her waist. She sat in a wheeled chair decorated with brightly coloured patches of silk. Three women stood to look over a schematic being explained by a seated Vaik. There was an easy physical intimacy between them evident in the way they leant chins on each others’ shoulders. Most of the Vaik had the brown skin and straw-coloured hair of the first women of The Fortress, the natives of this place. But there were others, foreigners like Mandalay.

Were any of them The Woman?

Jonathon studied them surreptitiously. She was said to be ancient. Ageless. Perpetually youthful. Dark. Light. Slender as a reed and the embodiment of voluptuous. There were so many stories about The Woman that she could have been all or none of the women taking their breakfast on the terrace.

Mandalay caught his eye. He dropped his head and reached for his tea. His hand shook slightly.

Midway through breakfast, one of the women came into the hall and took up position on a podium. She wore white like Mandalay, so perhaps she was gardens, too. She leafed through a leather-bound volume on the lectern and began to read out loud. When Jonathon was younger, much younger, he’d had a gift for languages. There was a time when he would have understood a lot of what the woman was saying; before he became a numbers man. Now, he picked out the odd word. Sea. Woman. Work. Sex. He’d always liked the sound of the Vaik language—its sonorous, long vowels that dipped suddenly into a sibilant rush. It made him think of a soprano who broke off mid-song to swear vengeance against a dozing audience member.

Another chime signalled an end to breakfast. The men in the blue masjythra moved through the hall collecting bowls and placing them on trolleys. The women disappeared.

“Follow me,” the scarred man said to Jonathon. “I’m gardens, too.”

“How did you know I’m gardens?”

“Silver masjythra all work outdoors. You’re too tall for the quarry and your hands shake too badly for masonry.” The man nodded towards Jonathon’s hands. “Cigarettes?”

He shook his head. “Coffee. Black coffee.”

“You’re in for a rough few days.”

Yes, he thought, three hundred and sixty-five rough days, to be precise. “I’m Jonathon.”

“I’m Daidd.”

On leaving the dining hall they continued along the verandah in the opposite direction to the sleeping quarters. The outside wall was decorated with the same pearl-and-mirror mosaic Jonathon had noticed when he’d entered The Fortress. Glossy ferns spilled from multi-coloured glazed pots along the timber walkway. After a few hundred metres the verandah dropped away to an orchard.

Daidd reached up and pulled a handful of cherries from a tree.

He chewed them then spat out the pips.

“Five more days. Maybe six. Then we’ll pick them.”

At the close of the orchard they met six men in silver masjythra. “Let’s go,” said Daidd. They shouldered heavy canvas sacks between them; gardening tools, Jonathon guessed. The ground sloped downwards past neat rows of grapevines. They were travelling east, away from the sea. The gardens stretched all the way to the horizon in front of him. He had always known that The Fortress was vast; everyone knew that. But now that he was within its walls, the sheer scale of it amazed him. They trudged on for an hour, and the horizon came no closer.

At a signal from Daidd they dropped the sacks. The men fronted a large rectangular field overrun with weeds. Along three sides were low stone walls in need of repair.

One of the men bent down and gingerly examined the weed. “Goosen’s Trial. You’re fucking kidding me.”

“We’re clearing it,” Daidd said.

“With what?”

Daidd raised his bare hands then pointed to the sacks. Mandalay appeared from behind him, silent as a cat. The men picked various implements from the sacks and set to work.

“Jonathon,” said Mandalay, “come with me.”

He followed her to the wall flanking the field on its far, long side. She reached for a canvas bag hanging from the stone masonry, fluted at one end and fed from a coiling white tube that disappeared over the wall. She unstopped the cork and water trickled to the ground.

“Drinking water, pumped straight from the aquifer. Drink plenty of it, especially during your first couple of weeks. Dehydration can creep up on you. Come this way.”

They walked to a square window cut into the wall. Jonathon peered out then stuck his head through. A vast chute connected the window to the quarry beneath.

“At the end of the day,” said Mandalay, “all of the Goosen’s Trial you’ve picked needs to be thrown down this chute for incineration. If you leave it out, even overnight, it will take root again and the day’s labour will be lost. Any large boulders can be thrown down here too.” She removed a smooth blue stone from the pocket of her billowing white dress and dropped it into the chute. It clattered earthwards. “The tunnels run directly to the east quarry. We reuse the boulders. Some are used to fortify the wall, others are crushed for cement or ceramics.” She turned back to face the field. “As it gets warmer out here, the snakes become more active. If you disturb one, keep your footing and slowly raise your left hand. Can you whistle?”

Jonathon pursed his lips and made a tuneless whistle.

“It will do. Hold your stance and keep your hand raised—this makes you look like the aggressor. A Vaik will come and remove the snake, or Daidd will do it if we’re not available. Understood?”

He nodded.

“There’s sunscreen in the sacks. Put it on at least three times a day. Okay, get to work.”

Jonathon lathered himself with sunscreen then rummaged through the tools left in the sacks. All his life he’d been surrounded by beautiful gardens, but he didn’t have a clue what it took to make them so. He chose a gaff and a trowel and joined the men in the field. The day was mild, but within minutes he was drenched in sweat. It ran in small rivers from his dark hair along his temples and into his eyes. No sooner had he swabbed it than it was back, stinging his eyes and loosening his grip on the tools. He tried placing his hood on but it just made him hotter.

“Here.” Daidd rummaged in a sack and threw Jonathon a rag. Ignoring the black looks from the others, Jonathon crossed the field to where the water bags hung on the wall. He released the cork, drenched the rag and ran it across his face, noticing how white and delicate his hands were. Office hands. He manoeuvred himself underneath the water bag, took a long drink then tied the wet rag around his head. It dammed the sweat, a little.

He returned to his post, wedging the hook under the weed, trying to find the angle from which he could lever it out of the ground. He pressed on the handle of the gaff but misjudged the weed’s resistance. He overbalanced and went sprawling forward.

“Fuck,” he muttered, spitting out dirt. He rose onto his haunches. The man in front of him was bent over, exposing the I branded onto his upper thigh. Instinctively, Jonathon recoiled. The man stood up, sucking at the tender flesh between thumb and index finger where the sickle-shaped thorns of the Goosen’s Trial had embedded themselves. He sucked at the bitter poison and spat it onto the ground. He turned and caught Jonathon’s eye.

He knows, Jonathon thought, He knows that I know.

Jonathon returned to the weed. Goosen’s Trial was notoriously tough. It could run for kilometres in one direction then double back like a diabolical ball of yarn. It curled around large boulders and tree roots and stuck tiny spikes into anyone foolish enough to try to uproot it. Jonathon altered his footing and attacked the root again, acutely aware of the isvestyii standing metres away. “Isvestyii” was the Vaik word for the unredeemed, literally “self dissolving to nothing.” Jonathon did not want to think about what the man had done.

The gaff was useless; it kept bending under the ropey shoots. He threw it down and decided to copy some of the other men who were pulling at the weeds with their hands. He curled the coarse vine around his palm, trying to avoid the thorns and their slow-burning poison. He thought of Adalia and their unborn child floating in her belly. He’d left them alone—unprotected—against men like the isvestyii. He tightened his grip on the vine, ignoring the hot rash flourishing from his fingers to his elbow. Not that he’d offered much in the way of protection. He was almost never there. Long hours. Long lunches. The poodles.

Maybe he was what Adalia needed protection from. He pushed back against the thought, tugging on the root. It yielded unexpectedly, and he fell backwards onto the soil. He saw himself as if from above, an upturned turtle. Adalia’s great protector.

Daidd extended a hand to pull him up. Once upright, Jonathon tugged his masjythra down. He watched how the other men were tackling the weed. Some favoured digging it out; others tugged and pulled, pivoting to find the angle of least resistance. All had fiery red welts on their forearms.

After a few hours Daidd told the group, “Enough. We eat now.” Daidd picked up a sack and walked towards some fruit trees in an adjacent field, brushing dirt from his arms. He gestured for the assignment to follow. Jonathon straightened and kneaded the small muscles in his lower back, which were in spasm from their sudden use. His wrists were inflamed and his legs shook. Trying to mask the trembling in his body, his weakness, he followed Daidd.

He joined the men under the leafy canopy as they made seats of the knuckling tree roots, his back against the trunk. The isvestyii sat a little apart from the group on a patch of scrubby lawn. Daidd opened the sack and handed around chunks of bread and cheese. Something rumbled, low and insistent, in Jonathon’s stomach. It took him a moment to understand that the sensation was hunger. Real hunger. He tore the dark bread apart and wedged the cheese inside. The bread was chewy and the cheese sharp.

He surveyed their progress. Between them they’d cleared perhaps three or four square metres, if that. The Goosen’s Trial they’d ripped up was piled onto a bed of rocks. Already the roots were nosing downwards, seeking the soil.

Soundlessly, Mandalay appeared over the rise with a woman Jonathon hadn’t seen before. She was a tall blonde, as black as Mandalay was white. They reminded him of opposing pieces on a chessboard. Mandalay stepped towards him and without a word turned his hands over in hers. His palms were puckered and blistered. The small holes where the thorns had bored were weeping a gelatinous white substance he hadn’t known his body could make. His hands shook; underneath the morning’s exertion his body still remembered coffee.

“Make sure you tend these tonight,” Mandalay said. “I’ll have some mistaelnet ointment left on your table. Heat it with a candle, then rub it on. It will sting, but it will stop the bores becoming infected.”

Jonathon nodded. He was aware of his own smell, keen and acrid. He wanted to upturn the water flask on himself. Mandalay dropped his hands and turned to the rest of the group. She said something in Vaik, and two of the men—Daidd and a strapping dark-haired man—stood and followed her and the other woman. Jonathon thought they would go to the edge of the field to assess the morning’s work but instead they disappeared over a rise in the grasses.

“Where are they going?” he asked, forgetting himself. Four pairs of eyebrows raised themselves for answer. Feeling foolish, he took another piece of bread and cheese and settled himself on a gnarled root.

Lunch was finished in silence. The only sounds were the flutter of birds come to eat the bugs upturned in the field and the occasional mewl of pleasure from beyond the grasses.

The afternoon brought the sea breeze and the salt gnats. They nestled into the hairs on Jonathon’s legs, arms and pubis, and gorged themselves on his sweat. Once bloated, they fell to the ground, leaving behind an unbearable itch. He scrabbled at the air, trying to catch the little fiends, but for every two he swatted, ten found the moist folds of his scrotum. He tried to resist scratching, knowing that would just make it worse.

Sweat and dirt formed a grimy carapace over his skin. Bending and digging had shocked his long-dormant muscles awake. His sores and his rash burned. He wanted to scream. And claw at his hair and upturn the pile of weeds and swing a punch at the isvestyii. He thought longingly of his air-conditioned office. His ergonomic chair that felt like a second, more perfect spine. The poodles who would happily trip away to make him a coffee if he asked for one in his smiling, sorry-to-be-a-bother way. Instead he was here, broiling and itching and reeking like a shagged goat with no relief in sight. He walked away from the group to compose himself. It wasn’t even the end of the first day and he wanted to renege, recant.

Daidd was beside him, saying something in Vaik that Jonathon didn’t understand.

“What?”

“Aeraevest.” Daidd placed his fists in front of his chest. “It’s the word for the sentry posts at The Fortress that face the sea. The first line of defence. It also means watchfulness of self. You need to learn it if you’re going to survive here.”

It was on the tip of Jonathon’s tongue to say “Don’t you know who I am?” or to issue some threat about what he would do when he got out. Only a dim understanding that this would be a fatal display of weakness held him back. This effort of silence from a man used to being heard sent the blood hammering through his head.

“Come with me,” said Daidd.

Jonathon trudged after him across the field to where a section of the stone wall had collapsed. Daidd pointed to the tumble of stones. “Pick those up.” He took four deliberate steps to the side and pointed to the ground. “Put them here.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Move them. Now.”

Jonathon felt, rather than saw, Mandalay watching him. He picked up a smooth white boulder—hard and tangible in his wounded hands—and stumbled with it to the spot Daidd indicated. He could barely see for the red mist across his eyes. He turned back to collect another stone, and another. He didn’t feel his feebleness or his caffeine addiction or the itching bites or the sweat that menaced the weeping sores on his hands. There was just his rage spending itself in the slow transference of rocks from one pile to another.

The sun was going down by the time the men packed their tools and trekked back towards their quarters. Jonathon plodded along, dazed with exhaustion. His feet mechanically kept time with a long, low chant sung by a couple of the men. When the seabirds whirled overhead, he knew that they were close.

Just before the final approach, they stopped to let a paired line of schoolgirls pass. One of the girls reminded Jonathon of Adalia. She had the same impish grin and ruddy cheeks. To his surprise the girl smiled, showing her dimples, and raised her hand in greeting. Delighted, he smiled and waved back.

“You know what they do with the boy-children?” The isvestyii had sidled up to him. “They slit their throats as a sacrifice to their god.”

“The Vaik have no god.”

“Then where are they?”

“Where are what?”

“The boys.”

Jonathon turned so he was looking the isvestyii full in the face. “Fuck. Off.”

Daidd led the men to a roofless wooden building at the far end of the cherry orchard. Each of them removed his masjythra and handed it over to men in red at the entrance who in return provided each worker with a large cup, a ball of soap and a nailbrush. Inside the bathhouse they stood three men to a barrel of fresh water. Jonathon plunged his cup to the bottom then upturned the water over his face and neck. It was cool and crisp and immediately, deliciously, salved the itch of the salt-gnat bites. He dipped his cup again and again, oblivious to the men around him. When his body was dripping he set to it with the brush and soap.

The brush shredded the little blisters that had formed on his skin like bubble wrap, and the soap stung the bores left by the Goosen’s Trial. Still, the feel of the water, flushing away the filth, was ecstasy. He dissolved the tracks of mud and salt winding through the hair on his arms and legs and attacked his earth-packed nails, the salt rind around his ankles.

Wordlessly, Daidd handed his brush to Jonathon and indicated that he was to scrub his back. Jonathon hesitated.

When he’d moved back in with his parents after Adalia had thrown him out, he’d whiled away his days at their kitchen table, drinking. One day his father had entered the kitchen, seen Jonathon, and panicked. The urge—writ large across his face—was to step backwards into the hallway and pretend he and his stricken son hadn’t made eye contact. But they had. Jonathon’s father walked towards him and reached awkwardly for his shoulder. He rested his hand there for a second or two, then turned and left the room.

That was Jonathon’s last memory of physical contact with a man—aside from the electii, potentially.

Jonathon recalled earlier in the day when Daidd and the dark-haired man had followed Mandalay’s summons over the rise in the grasses, the sounds that had reached back to the resting men. Jonathon’s cock stirred at the memory. Hurriedly, he threw cold water on his groin and devised a complex mental equation.

Daidd was tall and wiry. If he’d had any fat when he entered The Fortress, he’d long since lost it to labour in the fields and the sexual demands of the Vaik. His stark tan line followed the dip and weave of his masjythra. The contrast between the dark and light parts of Daidd’s body brought Mandalay and the other woman, her black complement, striding towards Jonathon again. Seven sevens are forty-nine. Forty-nine times seven . . . carry the six. Jonathon ran his brush along Daidd’s shoulders, the skin shivering at the cool water and the bite of the soap. He cut the surface of the barrel again, frothing now with bubbles and soap scum. Threehundred and forty-three. Jonathon tried to remember the words Mandalay had issued to Daidd and the other man. Shi veistai? Shy vestyi? Would he recognise them if Mandalay, if any of the Vaik, issued them to him? Daidd and the other man had followed the two women, expressionless. Did this happen every day? Was it always Daidd and this man, or did Mandalay choose differently every time? The square root of thirty-six is six.

Some of the men here, a few at least, must be gay. Were they also “assigned”? Or left to their own devices? And what about the Vaik who were gay or asexual? Jonathon wished he’d asked Mandalay when he’d had the chance.

Daidd turned a little so Jonathon could scrub the other side of his back. His waxy scars coursed from his face down his neck and into his clavicle.

“Does it hurt?” Jonathon asked. “If I scrub it?”

Daidd shook his head. Jonathon ran his brush over the melted skin that even the salt gnats had no taste for, then rinsed it with water from his cup.

Daidd turned. “Thanks.” He raised his brush as if to scrub Jonathon.

Jonathon’s instinct was to refuse, but would that be thought suspect? A case of protesting too much? He couldn’t help but notice how large Daidd was. His long penis hung slackly, even insouciantly, from his body. Was that why Mandalay had chosen him?

Jonathon’s face was completely blank as he turned around and yielded to the cold water and hard bristles. He shuddered as the brush shredded a fresh hive of blisters.

Mandalay had been inscrutable when she’d examined his groin. It was hard to imagine that she’d remained so when observing Daidd.

For as long as Jonathon could remember, The Fortress had been the subject of smutty boys’ locker-room jokes. “Pussy Prison,” they called it, but quietly. The laws against Vaikray—speaking ill of the Vaik, and criticising or usurping Vaik laws and ways—had been repealed for a long time and had not been enforced for even longer, but Jonathon had still thrilled to the jokes. Sometimes, when drunk and emboldened, his friends concocted farcical schemes to be declared isvestyii and locked inside Pussy Prison forever. If that’s punishment, I’ve been a bad, bad boy. But for all that, few male citizens elected to do their national service within The Fortress. What man, after all, wanted to serve women?

Jonathon winced as the soap met his weeping skin.

“You’re done,” Daidd said, dousing him with water.

You chose this, Jonathon reminded himself.

“What do you know about choice?” Adalia had demanded during her inquisition. “These women. The—what do you call them? Poodles? You think they’re sucking you off in the photocopying room because they can’t resist you? Do you know what it takes for these girls—and they’re not much more than girls, Jonathon—to be accepted into a program at a firm like yours? Years of slog and study and luck. Some of these girls, the ones from poor neighbourhoods like The Dryans, are carrying the weight of their whole family’s expectations on their shoulders. So tell me, when you and your cronies let them know what’s expected—what’s required—how much choice do you think these girls have?”

Adalia’s anger, like her happiness, like all her moods, was intensely physical. He could smell the salt weltering in her eyes. She went pale from fury, making the natural rouge on her cheeks stand out like muddy boot prints across her face.

Daidd, Jonathon and the others left the barrels and walked outside to a tiled area where they were hosed down by the men in red. At the end of the walkway, one of them handed Jonathon a rough towel and a laundered silver masjythra that snaked around his body until it fit. He felt good, unbelievably good, to be clean.

From the bathhouse they proceeded to the dining hall. As soon as he sat down Jonathon was overcome by fatigue. It moved over him like a warm, irresistible wave. He jerked awake just before his head hit the bowl of stew in front of him. For a second, before the sleep rolled back from his head, he was in his chair at work. Pleasantly drunk, waiting for his brain fog to clear before he went home to Adalia.

“You’d better eat,” Daidd urged him.

Jonathon thought he wasn’t hungry, but after the first spoonful his belly stirred, then roared. He dropped his chin to the lip of the bowl and gobbled up the strings of meat and the dumplings. Then he upturned the bowl and drank, gravy trickling down his chin. Daidd pushed a plate of bread towards him; he ripped a piece off the loaf and wiped the bowl clean with it.

Were the Vaik sitting outside on the terrace? Did one of them read from the leather-bound volume on the lectern again? He couldn’t have said. His world had compressed to a pinpoint of exhaustion and hunger.

By the time the serving men began collecting the bowls it was dark. The rest of the men scraped the benches back from the tables and trudged towards their quarters. They walked shoulder to shoulder but didn’t speak; each man was intent on the square wedge of downy luxury waiting for him before the chime signalled the start of another day.

Mandalay had left a small jar of green balm on Jonathon’s bedside table, beside a stub of candle and a single long match. The mistaelnet. He struck the match on the dry stone wall and held it carefully against the candle. He gouged a ball of balm from the jar and held it next to the flame, then rolled it, softening, into his palm. It stung, as Mandalay had said it would. He worked it into the weeping holes on his palms and fingers and the soft webbing between thumb and index finger. It smelt vaguely familiar. Of camphor and something minty. Perhaps his mother had rubbed something similar onto the bruises and scrapes of his childhood. But no—his mother wouldn’t have done that.

Jonathon blew out the candle, pulled the blanket against his chest and slept.

Before he’d come to The Fortress, time had been a tangible entity. It was a commodity he could measure and cost. Time roped one thing off from another so each meeting, each deadline felt quantifiably different. At The Fortress, days and nights bled into each other. Jonathon woke to the same chime each morning and sat at the same rough pew at the same rough table next to Daidd for breakfast. He used the same tools he’d picked from the canvas sack that first day, preferring their known limitations to the effort of familiarising himself with something new.

Every day he tussled with the Goosen’s Trial. Its stubborn refusal to yield, or to yield only at the point where his toppling over was a certainty, seemed personal. Vines would converge from opposite directions of the field, bringing the men close enough to collect each other’s sweat. If the isvestyii was in the cluster, the others would wordlessly fall back, leaving him to it. Otherwise they’d swear and elbow and tantrum, Daidd often taking men to one side to move rocks a short distance and then move them back again. The close of the day was marked by the foul smell of Goosen’s Trial burning in the quarry below, and the slow trudge to the bathhouse. Washing Daidd, and being washed by him, became routine by dint of repetition. Remarkably quickly, Jonathon lost the capacity to say whether something had happened yesterday or a week ago.

Pain was a constant companion. Bending down to uproot the weed meant there was an auger at every joint boring through bone and muscle. His back was the worst: standing upright released a hundred little fireworks across his spine as each muscle failed to compensate for the weakness in the others. He was constantly adjusting himself in search of perfect, painless equilibrium. The only time he was pain-free was when he lay perfectly still in bed at night and exhaustion rushed him. He had never known such swift and perfect carriage to sleep.

Sometimes, when he was elbow-deep in a tangle of weed and the sweat stung his eyes, his mind wandered to names for his child. He would like for her to have a Vaik name. Later, when the child was old enough, he would tell her that as she had been forming in Adalia’s womb he too had been enclosed and reshaped. He’d tell her how he’d learnt to clear fields and drunk water from a sack hanging on a high stone wall. How he’d gone to The Fortress to learn to be her father. It pleased him to think that he had a story he could tell now. His own story, and the baby’s. Adalia’s too.

But no. Adalia had her own story.

One day he stood up from the dirt to stretch his back when he noticed that the white band on his ring finger had turned the same colour as his limbs. He raised his hand and stared. His forearm was tanned and dirt-matted and his fingers almost the same colour as the soil. Mesmerised, he turned his hand to study his palm. It was crosshatched with scars from the thorns. The pads under his thumbs were callused and rough. He lifted his hand so close to his face that he smelt the faint menthol from the mistaelnet ointment under the dirt. He brushed the grime from his fingers and blinked to focus his eyes. All trace of his wedding ring was gone.

What he looked forward to most was the close of the day when they sometimes crossed the schoolgirls on their way back to quarters. The ruddy-cheeked girl always waved to him.

“Hello there!” she’d say. “Did you have a good day in the garden?”

“A very good day, Mistress, thank you,” he’d say, as if they were playing a game in which she was his feudal overlord and he a tenant farmer. In some ways, he supposed he was. She’d wave again and move off. The men stood still to let the girls pass. Jonathon watched them for as long as he could before returning to his assignment, trudging slowly along the road.

He was never the last man to turn, though. That was the isvestyii, and the expression he wore as he followed the girls with his eyes over the horizon made Jonathon’s stomach lurch.

“What did he do?” Jonathon asked Daidd one day when they had both made for the water bag at the same time.

“I don’t know what you’re referring to. And you need to get out of the habit of asking questions.”

Jonathon jerked his head towards the isvestyii, who was standing a little apart from the rest of the men in the nearly cleared field.

Daidd hesitated, then pulled the stop on the bag and tilted his head to the water. “I don’t know.”

You do know, thought Jonathon. You know very well. You’re just not telling me.

Every eleventh day was the half. They’d leave the field after lunch, before the salt gnats blew in, and return to quarters to bathe and eat. Then they were free to wander about the grounds as long as they didn’t venture further than the orchard at one end and The Veya Gate at the other. The red masjythra were stationed at both points, just in case. A few of the men spent the half clustered beneath the shade in the orchard playing board games. Some dozed nearby. Most, like Jonathon, lay on their beds listening to the seabirds cawing below. The half made him anxious. The sudden cessation of order and routine felt like running into a barrier at top speed. Thoughts crept into the vacancy. Fears.

When he returned to his room one half, there was an envelope on his bed. It was a sharp white rectangle against the green of his blanket. His name was scrawled across the front in Adalia’s distinctive, swirling hand. He stood still, staring at it. His limbs were leaden, so heavy they might break through the floor to the foundations and down, down to the slow-pulsing magma beneath. He stood like that for a few minutes then extracted himself, finger by finger, from his inertia. Once in motion, he couldn’t stop. He paced between the doorframe and the open window, never taking his eyes from the envelope. Panic made his hands clammy. He wiped them on his masjythra, which had become restless too, and prowled the stone floor in his bare feet.

Jonathon knew he could pick it up and throw it out of the window unopened. Let it sail down the soft blue air to beneath the perimeter wall where a curious bird might collect it and carry it out to sea.

Only Adalia could break him. Only Adalia could tell him that—after all, after everything—she did not want to be reconciled. She would raise their baby alone. Without Jonathon’s, what had she called it? Corrupting influence.

He saw it all now.

She’d already changed the locks before the bizarre interrogation at The Arbour Room. His stuff was still in boxes at his parents’, ready for a return trip to his marital home that was never going to happen. It would be easy to effect the paperwork in his absence. His mother had tried to warn him.

He backed against the wall, as far from the vile envelope as he could get. He would go mad, locked in here for another ten months, without the promise of Adalia and the baby waiting outside the gates. Did Adalia know that? He could hardly blame his wife if she had become vengeful. Her lack of jealousy and malice seemed to him now not the response of a woman who had known her own worth, but a strategy. She had lulled him to security, pushed down her rage until he was imprisoned and powerless to arm himself against it.

He took a deep breath and crossed the room in two steps. He sat on the bed and tore the envelope open. His breath came in ragged bursts.

The envelope contained a card. He screwed his eyes tight shut, then opened them. The card was a photograph of sorts. Against the green-black background a little human floated towards him. Underneath, in her swirling, looping hand, Adalia had written “stay strong, my love” and alternating crosses and zeroes. Four of them. The pressure in his chest released, drawing the breath and the tears out of him. He pressed the ultrasound to his chest and closed his eyes in relief.

After a moment or two he opened his eyes and studied the photograph. The first time he’d seen a scan he’d struggled to believe that the prawn-like creature, barely discernible against the static, would become a child. It was a featureless blob arrested in a white sack. But this photograph he held in his hands was undeniably of a baby. His baby. The foetus faced straight onto the camera, holding a thumb to its lips. The eyes, nose and fingers were clearly visible. Jonathon pored over every detail. Was he foolish to imagine he traced a likeness, something of Adalia’s grin on the child’s face?

He was foolish. Decidedly foolish. But he didn’t care. He laughed aloud and the sound echoed along the hallways. He tucked the ultrasound under his pillow and left the room. He needed to be under the big dome of the sky to make room for this big feeling in his chest. He tripped along the corridor, past the rooms of dozing men and down the zigzag ramp to the

Now, he felt exhilarated. He strolled along the verandah in the opposite direction to the one he usually took. The glossy green ferns overspilt the pots and trailed across the timber floor. The verandah ended in a row of steep steps from which a cobblestone path branched out in three directions. Nearby but unseen, a Vaik was singing, low and sonorous. He wheeled around but couldn’t find the source of the song.

He decided to follow the middle path. It snaked beside some small, squat buildings of pearl and mirror. He walked on until he came to a group of buildings that looked like slabs of butter piled on top of each other, the higher ones slightly smaller than those below. The slabs had the same bishop’s hats for windows he’d seen in the room where he first met Mandalay.

The schoolgirl poked her head out of a window on the topmost floor and hollered down to him, “Hello there.”

“Good afternoon, Mistress.” He shaded his eyes to look up at her. He wished he had a hat so he could doff it. She was leaning far out of the window. He worried she might fall and wanted to tell her to go back inside.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Just wandering about the grounds.”

“Oh yes,” she said, leaning even further out, “it’s the half, isn’t it?” He nodded and instinctively raised his arms to catch her, lest she fall.

“Wait there. I’ll come and let you in.” She disappeared and after a moment opened the wooden door for him. “Come in, then.”

Jonathon hesitated. Was he permitted in this building? Was it the girl’s home? Mandalay’s words came back to him: You will obey every woman in The Fortress, from the smallest girl-child to The Woman. He stepped across the threshold into a wide hallway.

“This way.” The girl led him up two flights of stairs. On their way he glimpsed rooms empty of furniture but with the walls entirely covered in murals. He wanted to stop and look at them but the girl took the stairs two at a time, her feet flashing white under her skinny legs. He smiled to think he would have struggled to keep up just weeks before. “In here.” She walked into a broad, sunlit room much larger than it had seemed from the outside. It had murals like the others. The floors were of polished oak and strewn with sketchpads, crayons and pencils. “This is a Story-Keeping House. Let me show you what I’m doing,” she said, taking his hand and leading him to one of the sketchpads. “Sit down.” He lowered himself to the floor as she held a picture up to her chest. “See.”

He looked at the picture and then at the mural directly behind it. In the mural, a sentry post sat atop a long slice of wall dividing the sea. What had Daidd said they were called? Aeraevest? The sentry wore an ankle-length green dress, dark like the sea beside her. She was intent on the horizon, her slender fingers folded around the barrel of a spyglass. In the far distance, a sailing ship was just visible. Whether it was friend or foe was impossible to tell.

“I may have taken a few liberties,” conceded the girl. In her picture she had accurately rendered the sentry post and the Vaik, but her sea was alive with brightly coloured fish and coral. “Historian Teacher says I need to be faithful to the murals if I’m to be a Keeper of Stories. But who’s to say that underneath the dark water we can see, there aren’t starfish and anemones and seaweed that we can’t?” She dropped the picture to the floor and looked earnestly at Jonathon. “I mean, they could be there, couldn’t they?”

“They could indeed, Mistress.”

She grinned, making her dimples look like quote marks around her mouth. Then the sunshine disappeared and her face darkened. “Historian Teacher says just to paint what’s there.” She affected a snooty, authoritative air. “A Keeper of Stories sublimates her own desires to the story. She recognises in herself a responsibility to the past and to the future. She opens herself up as a conduit between these two points.” The girl was a great mimic, and Jonathon fought the urge to laugh. She picked up a pencil and made some corrections to the sentry’s dress. “Can you draw?”

“No, Mistress.”

“Paint?”

“No.”

“Don’t you like to?”

“I don’t know, Mistress. I’m not sure I’ve ever really tried.”

“Well, try now.” The girl ripped a crisp sheet from her sketchpad and wheeled it across the floor to him. “Use this.” She handed him a thick lead pencil.

When he held it in his fingers, he immediately began to tingle with the urge to write Adalia’s name. Maybe he could even write to Adalia. He glanced at the girl, her hair falling over her forehead and covering the light spray of freckles across her nose, as she concentrated on her drawing. Could she get a letter out for him?

Jonathon drew a line. The lead was silky over the smooth paper. He attempted a fish, open-mouthed and blowing bubbles. Then the prow of a boat, so he could have the pleasure of writing Adalia’s name along it.

“Do you know this story?” Without looking up from her drawing, the girl pointed to the mural behind her with her spare hand. Jonathon looked again at the dark water and threatening skies. “The sentry is Eshtakai. She lived a long, long time ago, back when only the Vaik could be sentries and The Fortress was much smaller than it is today. The sentries lived in tiny rooms dug into the perimeter wall underneath the lookouts. They watched the sea all night and most of the day, sleeping in forty-minute shifts. Eshtakai was looking across the ocean when she saw a ship on the horizon. She climbed the ladder to the top of the lookout and lit the warning pyre. Soon, there were lots of ships on the horizon, coming faster and faster. When they were within range of The Fortress they dropped anchor and started firing lighted arrows over the wall.

“The Vaik still used thatched roofs in those days so their houses caught fire and burnt down. The men on the ships came ashore in small boats, looking for places to set their ladders and get over the wall. They laid siege to The Fortress for days. More ships came, ships with canons. They punched holes in the perimeter wall, and the Vaik worked around the clock to patch them up.

“But Eshtakai had a plan. When the men came to the wall, trying to find a way over, she slipped into the sea and swam out to the fleet. She swam from ship to ship until she found the supply galley. She pulled herself over the ropes and hid behind a barrel until she could make her way to the kitchen. The supply ships were crewed mostly by women. Young women and girls from villages far across the sea who kept watch over the preserves and doled out rations to the soldiers. Some of the women had been snatched from their homes and pressed into service. So night after night while the ships assaulted The Fortress, Eshtakai braved the cold water and came aboard the supply ship to talk to the women. Those women whispered to the women onboard the other ships, the ones who emptied chamber-pots for fat admirals and trimmed beards and picked seaweed out of the nets—and worse.

“One night there was a terrible storm, the sort that happens every ten or twenty years here. The ones the Vaik call sestyatesh. The seas were roiling and the men thought that was why their stomachs were heaving. Even the men who hadn’t stood on dry land in years were bringing up their stomachs. They barely noticed the servant women urging them to take the tonic they’d prepared.

“The women tossed the dead men overboard for the sharks. The ones who survived into the next day were declared isvestyii and taken into The Fortress. Those women were the first foreigners to come to live at The Fortress. We still have one of their ships in the playground near my school. I love to pretend that I’m Eshtakai prowling around the deck looking for the women.”

Jonathon had a hundred questions for the girl: did she live with her mother? What happened to her brothers? Did she know who her father was? Instead he said, “That’s an interesting story, Mistress.”

“Eshtakai was very brave, don’t you think? I mean, with the sharks and the cold water and the canon fire?”

“Very brave, Mistress.”

“My name is Ulait.” She sat up, very straight and solemn. “I give you permission to call me by my name, which is Ulait.”

“I’m honoured to know your name, Mistress,” Jonathon chose his words carefully, “but, begging your pardon, I would prefer to keep calling you ‘Mistress.’”

Ulait spun her drawing away from her on the wooden floor. “I don’t mind,” she said. “Let me see your drawing.” Jonathon pushed his scribble towards her. She turned it the right way round and pored over it. “Well,” she said brightly, “it’s really very good for a first try.”

“Thank you, Mistress.”

“Fewer dolphins and treasure chests than mine. Historian Teacher would be pleased.”

“I think your teacher would have her work cut out with me.”

“What did you do—before you came to The Fortress, I mean?”

“I was an executive for a large software company.”

“What did you execute?”

“I was in Strategy, which is all about setting the direction for the company. I decided which products to develop, which markets to pursue. What kind of workforce we needed.” He thought, guiltily, of the selection panel he’d sat on for the junior analysts, back when he still called them poodles.

Ulait wrinkled up her nose in thought. “So if your company was at war, you’d be one of the officers who looked at maps and moved models of tanks and soldiers around on it and then told everyone where and when they had to go and fight.”

“I guess so.”

“Did you have to do a lot of studying to get your job?”

“I did, Mistress.”

She sighed. “Historian Teacher says no worthwhile endeavour comes free of hard work.”

“I think she’s probably right.”

Ulait looked up from his drawing to the murals wrapped around the walls. Her face was elastic, a dozen expressions telegraphing her fast-moving thoughts. “I work hard. At least, I think I do. I know every story in this building and all the buildings in the northeastern sector. I can draw most of them from memory. But, I don’t know.” She bit her lip and thought for a moment. “It’s like my mind picks up the story and takes it somewhere it isn’t supposed to go. Like the wind blew it away and set it down in a place I hadn’t been before. So before I know it, Eshtakai is swimming with dolphins or The Fortress is on a spaceship and I,” she sat up straighter and mimicked her teacher again, “have not been faithful to the story.”

“You have imagination,” said Jonathon. “Perhaps you’ll paint your own pictures or write your own stories.”

“Hmm. Historian Teacher says that’s all very well. But if all this is destroyed, who will re-create the stories about who we are?” Jonathon began to ask why that would happen, then corrected himself. “It’s very unlikely that this would be destroyed. No one has attacked The Fortress in three hundred years. Chances are everything here will outlive me and even you by several centuries at least. Anyway, there’s always room for new stories. Look.” He pointed out a bare rectangle on the wall. “One of yours could go there.”

Ulait laughed at him. “That is a story,” she said. She stood up and positioned herself before the painting immediately to the left of the blank space. It was of a naked man, his back to the viewer, strapped to a post. Black cord bound his hands behind him. His body was rigid; he seemed intent on the dark water creeping up the beach towards him, and the hint of darker shapes within.

“The man is isvestyii and The Woman has decreed that he will be put to death. He drowns. Or the sharks eat him. Then,” Ulait moved in front of the bare rectangle, “he dissolves to nothing.” She waved her arm at the space. “That’s what this is. Nothing.”

“Nothing,” Jonathon repeated. “It’s a difficult concept to get your head around. Even nothing has to be made of something.”

A cloud moved across Ulait’s face. “One of the men in your assignment is isvestyii.”

“Yes. I know.”

“He makes my stomach go cold.”

The hairs on the back of his neck prickled. “He cannot hurt you, Mistress.”

“I know. But I don’t like him. I wish The Woman would call him, like the man in the painting.”

Jonathon stared again at the painting. He entered through the back of the man’s head and looked through his eyes. He heard the rush of the waves up the shore and their ever-lessening retreat. Heard the seabirds squalling from their posts on the perimeter wall, preparing to spar for the juicy scraps left by the sharks.

“I wish she would too, Mistress.”

Jonathon returned to the residential quarters just before the gong sounded for dinner. He washed his hands and splashed his face, then took the zigzag path down to the verandah. There was a subtly different energy among the men on the half. They weren’t as dulled by exhaustion as they normally were. They’d had time to look about them. To think.

The dining room was louder than usual. Something like conversation had broken out above the clatter of the serving bowls and the low rumble of the trolleys delivering food to the tables. Jonathon directed his steps towards his table and the rough wooden pew where he sat next to Daidd. He very nearly walked into Daidd who was standing stock-still in front of it.

Only one man was seated at the long table. The isvestyii, his hands clasped in front of him on the table, was staring straight ahead. The men who usually sat at that table, who Jonathon knew by sight, were banking up behind and around him. The blue masjythra pushing the trolley of food had stopped too, uncertain what to do. He ladled stew into a bowl but placed it out of reach of the isvestyii.

Wordlessly, Daidd took up position at the narrow end of the pew where the isvestyii was seated and gripped the plank. Other men followed.

“On three,” said Daidd. “One, two, three.”

As one, the men lifted the heavy pew and tipped out the isvestyii. He banged his chin on the table then fell to the floor. Jonathon heard a scuffling noise, then the isvestyii crawled out from under the table and took off, scuttling among the tables.

Daidd, Jonathon and the other men sat down and ate.

Jonathon pulled at the weed, sensing for the slight give that meant he was attacking it from the right direction. He’d been in the field since just after sun-up. Summer was nearly upon them and they had to get the seed in the ground. They had a matter of days to clear what remained of the Goosen’s Trial and the boulders, plough the soil and repair the stone walls.

He eased off, gently testing the vine with his index finger as a man would test for weight on the end of a hand reel. Satisfied, he tightened his grip. The thorns ate into the back of his hand, but his skin had become tougher and he barely winced. There was the satisfying thud-thud-thud as the vine punched from the soil. He wound it round his hand and kept pulling until its green turned white. He unwound it and picked up a shovel, digging for the dense, matted bulb that followed a few feet from where the vine changed colour. He found the bulb easily, then took a trowel and dug around it, careful to lift out the ball in its entirety.

Daidd and one of the other men were heaping up the threads of vine on a wheelbarrow and ferrying them to the wall to tip into the quarry. The burning tyre smell was heavy in the air and would not shift until the afternoon breeze. Jonathon collected up his strands of Goosen’s Trial and walked directly to the quarry chute.

He’d been looking for an opportunity to speak to Daidd all morning, but they were paired in different groups. Mandalay had put Jonathon with the isvestyii. They barely spoke or looked at each other, but Jonathon was acutely aware of his presence and tried always to position himself to the other man’s back. But sometimes the Goosen’s demanded a change of direction, and Jonathon couldn’t be sure where the isvestyii was. It gave him the same sick feeling of claustrophobia he’d had as a child when playing hide-and-seek with his older brothers, the darkness in the cupboard closing in on him. He could never be sure if he wanted to be found or not.

Every time Jonathon took the ultrasound into his hands and traced the outline of the growing form, Ulait’s words recurred to him: He makes my stomach go cold.

The other men didn’t speak much to the isvestyii, but then, they didn’t speak much as a general rule. The field absorbed the bulk of their energy and most habituated quickly to not speaking unless spoken to.

Daidd tipped the barrow of weeds down the chute then paused to wipe the sweat from his face and stretch his back. When he made for one of the water bags, Jonathon followed. He glanced quickly at the rest of the men, making sure they were out of earshot.

“The isvestyii. He likes little girls.”

Daidd wiped the water from his mouth and said nothing.

“He’s dangerous,” Jonathon said.

Daidd shook his head. “The Vaik have been handling his kind for centuries. They know what they’re doing. Anyway, there’s no opportunity for him to be alone with the schoolgirls. Besides, it’s not worth the risk. Death, for certain.”

“The Woman already has the power of life and death over him. You may as well get hung for a sheep as a lamb.”

Daidd looked across the field to where the isvestyii was trying to haul a boulder from the ground. He sat on his haunches and pulled, the strain showing on his face. His balls hung slackly through his masjythra.

“He broke into a school.” Daidd’s voice was low. “He broke in armed with a gun, a rope and a jar of vaseline. He found a classroom of ten-year-old girls. Shot the teacher dead. He tied up and raped three girls. One died of her injuries.” Daidd spat onto the ground. “Hard to imagine anything worse than that. If The Woman was going to have him executed, she would have done it already. If he so much as puts a foot wrong, it’s the stake on the beach and he knows it.”

“You’re assuming he’s capable of making a rational deduction and controlling his impulses.”

“He is. Everyone is. It’s what The Fortress teaches.”

“What about the girls?” It was the first question Jonathon had asked in a long while. It sounded harsh and abrasive, as though he was waving a knife in the air.

“There’s no opportunity to be alone with them.”

“Not true.”

Daidd raised a questioning eyebrow. Jonathon was about to tell him how he’d met Ulait alone in the Story-Keeping House but decided against it. “We cross the children at the end of the day.”

“Yes. We cross them, the whole assignment. He’d have to manoeuvre to be alone with them.”

“I don’t think we should wait.” It was only when the words were out that Jonathon realised what he was proposing. He looked down at his brown, thorn-pocked hands, startled. Could he really kill a man? Did he have it in him?

“Be careful,” Daidd whispered. “Only The Woman has that power. You steer close to Vaikray.” Daidd turned and walked back to the field and the remaining clumps of Goosen’s Trial.

Mandalay came at lunchtime to check their progress. She spoke briefly to Daidd then strode out, barefoot, into the field. She scooped up a handful of earth and picked through it, then smelt it, before crumbling it between her fingers. She dusted her hands off, placed them on her hips and considered the wide expanse of field.

Jonathon chewed his bread and cheese as she paced. She must know about the isvestyii. The details Daidd had given him were enough to jog his memory. The man had been married, with three children. He’d lived out in The Dryans—the sprawling, working-class mess on the other side of The Fortress wall—held down a job and had no prior criminal history. “He was a plumb normal guy,” the neighbours said (don’t they always say that about monsters?). “He’d come over for barbecues on holidays. His kids played with our kids in the backyard. He cleaned his car, followed football. There was nothing odd about him. Nothing at all.”

Jonathon remembered the vaseline: a single grotesque detail that made the story stand out from the procession of violent sex crimes reported in the press. The isvestyii had left for work in the morning with the gun and the rope tucked into his backpack. He had stopped at a shopping centre along the way and bought a flat white to go and a tub of vaseline—large. For my eczema, he’d told the shop assistant. The school he chose was in the good part of town. Jonathon’s part of town. That was probably why it was such big news.

One of Adalia’s colleagues had written a series on sex crimes in the city, around the time Adalia and Jonathon first talked about having children. Adalia wept when she read about the case. “You have to be so brave to be a parent,” she said. “So brave.” Jonathon found the case repugnant too, but he let go of it easily enough, replacing it with other transitory bits of news. It didn’t lodge in his gut and give him a sick feeling in his throat, make him want to claw at his skin till he drew blood. The way it made him feel now.

The isvestyii sat not three feet away, eating bread and cheese and idly plucking at the grass. He looked up to find Jonathon staring at him. They locked eyes. Jonathon wanted to find that behind the man’s eyes was an abyss: a rank, dark cesspool. But he looked like any other man.

The isvestyii glanced away first.

Jonathon lay awake that night. It was the first time since he’d come to The Fortress that sleep hadn’t claimed him easily. Despite the day’s exertions he felt restless. Wired. He got up from his bed and moved to the window. It was moonless, so the perimeter wall was a dark slice against the night. The seabirds slept. Somewhere along the corridor came the occasional cry of climax. That and the rush and retreat of the ocean were the only sounds.

Staring out into the darkness, he thought of the second story Ulait had told him. About how an isvestyii, once put to death, dissolved to nothing. The Vaik had no god and worshipped no supreme beings, but they did believe in the infinite nature of life. For them death was simply a transubstantiation of energy, not its end. The same way boiling water will turn to steam, each passing life was absorbed into new lives, the trees, the air.

But for isvestyii, death was not just an end, it was a reversal. Isvestyii passed nothing on, transformed nothing, were absorbed into nothing. Where there had been energy there was less than nothing: a negative. Isvestyii were allowed no burial, monuments or obituaries. Their wives could expunge the marriage from the official record, censoring the years by fiat. Children could nominate a new father or apply for a fresh birth certificate, the name of the offending parent blanked out.

Jonathon tried to think it through. The isvestyii in his assignment had three children. Each one was a unique splicing of their parents’ genetic material, their parents’ parents’ genetic material and a chance soupçon of the freefalling energy of the deceased. What happened, then, when a parent was declared isvestyii? Did those cells turn themselves off? Blank out like light bulbs, leaving airy spaces in the soul? Jonathon had always feared there was something insubstantial about himself, as if half his descendants had been declared isvestyii and he was so light he could float away. He’d felt a vague discontent for as long as he could remember. It made him snarky, even aggressive. “Edgy,” his friends said. “Arsehole,” said others. He’d played up to it, dropping sardonic bombs into conversation to see which fuses would take and where the glass would shatter.

Looking into the answering darkness, feeling the salt carapace reforming on his skin after the late-afternoon scrub, Jonathon confronted the possibility that he had no self to dissolve, and that being declared isvestyii would make no difference.

No difference at all.

There was a carnival atmosphere out in the field. Mandalay and seven of her companions had come to observe the last of the planting. “Mallow-root,” Daidd had told him: the sugary, spongy fruit with large purple flowers. Adalia liked it with jam and custard.

The cleared and fresh-ploughed field gave Jonathon a bodily satisfaction. It hummed in his muscles and through his blood. His exertion had produced the apple-crumble earth, picked it clean of the choking weed and forged the shallow holes for the mallow-root seeds. In a few days the seedlings would wend their way up through the soil, and in a few months the mallow-root would be on plates and in bellies. It gave him a feeling of accomplishment unlike any he’d felt before, and he was—by most standards—an accomplished man.

Two blue masjythra had accompanied Mandalay and the other women to the field, heaving a large wooden basket between them. Jonathon’s stomach had groaned when he’d seen it. Although there was ample food at The Fortress, it was unvaried. Sticky porridge and tea for breakfast. Wedges of cheese with chewy bread for lunch. Stew and bread for dinner. Jonathon was beginning to forget the bitterness of coffee, the astringency of wine. As for chocolate, he half-wondered if it was something that really existed or if his mind had conjured it in the twilight between asleep and awake.

“Come.” Mandalay handed out burlap bags and watering cans. The bags were divided into two pouches. She showed them how to clip the pouches around their masjythra, then took a seed from one pouch and held it up for them to see. “This is a mallow-root seed. A healthy seed has an unbroken husk around it like this one. Discard any seeds where the husk is broken. Take three seeds and drop them lightly into a hole. No more than four seeds in any one hole because the roots will strangle one another. In each hole also drop one of these tablets.” She held up a small green pill from the other pouch. “It helps to combat the salt. You need to pair up. One for the seeds and pills, one for the water.”

Jonathon immediately turned to Daidd, who nodded his agreement. Jonathon strapped the pouch around his waist, the way Mandalay had shown him. It cinched his masjythra, making it ride up an inch so he felt the silky air against his groin. A surge of blood ran to his cock.

The pairs of men took up position at the bottom of the field and began methodically working their way upwards towards the wall where the water bags were hung. Jonathon picked out seeds and an anti-saline tablet and dropped them into the shallow holes. Then he covered them with a thin layer of soil, pressed lightly on it with his foot and moved on. Daidd paused and upturned a slow trickle of water onto the seeds.

Mandalay and the women threaded through the dual lines of men, Mandalay explaining aspects of the planting to the other Vaik. Apprentices, Jonathon thought. They wore brightly coloured diaphanous gowns that fluttered about them as they moved. A couple of them took their shoes off and held them dangling by their sides as they followed Mandalay. They wove in and out between the men, pressing close to observe the drop of the seeds, the position and depth of the holes. They were so close that Jonathon felt the brush of their hair on his arms. He caught the scent of sandalwood that trailed them and was grateful that the vile smell of burning Goosen’s Trial was gone from the air.

A sudden gust of wind, unusual for the morning, blew Jonathon’s seeds away as he dropped them. They landed a few centimetres wide of the hole.

“You missed,” said one of the women. She bent to retrieve the seeds, picking them carefully from the soil. Jonathon was acutely aware of how close she was to his cock. She smiled up at him, a knowing smile, as if she’d divined his thoughts. She stood, dropped the seeds into his pouch, then reached under his masjythra. “Scattering seed,” she said playfully. “Tut. Tut. Tut.”

Jonathon froze. He felt himself bulge in her warm hand. She moved it up and down his shaft, alternately gentle and insistent. The lines moved on around him. He felt Daidd hesitate. The woman’s eyes held Jonathon’s. She was brown-eyed and honey-haired with square, strong shoulders and dark skin. Her translucent yellow gown gave her a golden glow. If there was a Vaik prototype, it was she.

Jonathon entered a sensory echo chamber where all his thoughts and feelings were amplified. He felt the warm sun on his face. The salt rind thickening on his arms. The still figure of Daidd by his side. The absurdity of it all: a man, frozen in a field, forbidden to move while a beautiful stranger played with his cock. All the while lines of men planted seeds as if nothing about this were out of the ordinary.

But nothing about The Fortress was ordinary, and Jonathon had no psychological reference point for what was happening. Given the choice, would he stay here to be fondled by this woman? Or would he dash her hand away, pull down his masjythra and storm off?

“Come here.” The woman summoned Daidd. She dropped Jonathon’s cock and addressed herself to the other man. “Take off your masjythra.” Daidd did as he was told, lifting the garment above his head and dropping it onto the freshly ploughed earth. The woman forgot about Jonathon and stared at the naked man beside her.

Daidd looked like two different men who had been carved up, then pressed together. There was his poor, shattered half-face and shoulder with its candle-wax surface; he was a man children would stare at and adults would pretend not to see. But downwards . . . He could have been a sculptor’s masterwork. He was interconnected lines and indents, angles and arcs: a study in human geometry. His tan line served to focus the eyes on his taut abdomen, the blur of his pubic hair and the long, thick penis stirring against his thigh.

“You’re magnificent,” said the Vaik, and it was as if she’d casually upturned the contents of the watering can onto Jonathon’s groin. His cock slunk back between his balls. “Untie me,” she commanded him, gesturing to the strings on her gown. Jonathan fumbled at her throat, waist and wrists. “Take it off.”

He lifted it over her head, then, unsure where to put it, folded it in front of his groin.

“Come here.” She circled his head with her hand and clamped him to her breast. He opened his mouth for her nipple and sucked. “Good,” she whispered. “That’s good. Daidd, play with that magnificent instrument of yours.”

She knows his name, thought Jonathon. He flicked her nipple lightly with his tongue, then closed his teeth over the erect point. Not hard, just enough for her to feel their imprint.

“Go down,” she said, breathlessly, pressing her hands against his shoulders. He lowered himself past her large brown nipples and soft abdomen. He dropped to his knees, brushed her hair back with his fingers and parted her upper lips. As he brought his tongue towards her clitoris he noticed the rest of the assignment approaching from the other direction. They had reached the upper end of the field and were planting another row on their return.

He clasped his hands around the woman’s buttocks and drew her closer. He smelt her desire through the scent of sandalwood.

As the lines drew equal with them, some of the women stopped to watch. Two of them clasped hands and disappeared behind a thicket in a neighbouring field. Mandalay and the men continued on, dropping seeds and anti-saline tablets into the soil.

The woman gasped as Jonathon’s tongue probed her. She clutched his hair between her fingers, giving him instructions. “A little slower . . . Hard for a few strokes, then pull back . . . Good.” She moaned, then addressed Daidd: “You’re to fuck me now.” She straightened Daidd’s masjythra on the ground and settled on all fours. “Slow at first, the way I like it.”

“Yes, Mistress.”

Jonathon stood up and joined the other women, watching. He’d seen people fucking before. A few times he and one of the other guys from work had wound up in a hotel suite with a couple of pood—junior analysts. Once, he’d even shared a girl with a colleague after a hellishly boozy night at a conference. They were cocaine-fuelled binges he’d gotten off on. This was different. Daidd moved in and out of the woman, doing as he was instructed, his knees in the soil. She tossed her honey-blonde hair over one shoulder and played to the gallery, arching her back, pouting and mewling. The women around him were intent on the scene. Some stroked themselves through their gowns. Jonathon felt ancillary. It was a strange and unsettling feeling for him, who was used to being at the centre of things.

“How is it for you, Daidd?” The Vaik turned her head towards him.

“Good, Mistress.”

“Reach around and play with my clit.”

Daidd eased all of his considerable length into her, laid his stomach flat against her back and reached for her, his hand disappearing behind her thigh. She closed her eyes, concentrating on her own pleasure now. The gallery could take care of themselves. After a few moments of stillness she began thrusting her hips backwards.

“Sit up, Daidd. Grab my hips. Fuck me hard.”

Daidd moved in and out of her, the unscarred profile facing Jonathon. He was concentrating. His jaw was set, his eyes unfocused in the way of people carefully monitoring some internal mechanism. What was he thinking about, Jonathon wondered. Not coming? Staying hard? Or did he think only of the Aeraevest?

The woman cried out, shuddered, then dropped to her elbows. Daidd held himself perfectly still, his big hands lightly draped on her hips. She drew her long hair back from her face, winked conspiratorially at the collected Vaik and eased herself off Daidd. He continued to kneel, his large, twitching cock pointed towards the end of the field like a weathervane uncertain which way the wind was blowing. She stood up, shook herself and then stretched tall, her cheeks flushed.

“Thank you, Daidd,” she purred.

He nodded slightly, still not moving.

“Oh, Daidd,” she cried suddenly, “you’re in the dirt!” She gave him her hand and he rose to his feet. She bent and dusted his knees off. “Sorry, Daidd. I didn’t realise.”

“It’s nothing, Mistress.”

“You should have said something.”

“I was,” his mouth twitched a little, “preoccupied.”

She smiled. “Oh, Daidd, what would we do without you?” She threw her arms around him, then kissed him gently on the cheek. Jonathon felt a stab of something very like envy. She retrieved her gown from him and dropped it over her head. “Come,” she said to him, “we’ve got some planting to finish.”

When the seeds were tucked away in the ground, they opened the baskets and set the food out on blankets near the knotted trees that had served them as seats for the season. The mere sight of the food made Jonathon feel drunk. There were fat bunches of dark cherries and slabs of cured meat. Roasted chicken drumsticks, a leg of ham and wedges of cheddar. A chocolate cake with cream (he hadn’t imagined chocolate after all!) and—perhaps most incredibly—draughts of apple cider made at The Fortress. It fizzed on Jonathon’s tongue and tickled his nose. The bubbles were aerating his brain. He might float away.

The Vaik shared in the feast, sitting among the men and discussing the progress of the planting. The two Vaik who’d disappeared into the next field giggled as Mandalay pulled leaf litter from their hair. Root vegetables were growing in the western gardens, corn and maize in the north. Leafy greens and beans were going into beds in the south. Now that the mallow root was in, Jonathon’s assignment would be moving on. It was becoming too hot to labour out in the field, and they would be given summer work, though none of them had yet been told what. The uncertainty made Jonathon feel slightly anxious.

He shaved some more ham from the leg then, utterly sated, leant his back against the tree trunk and closed his eyes. His eyelids reflected the dappled light of the canopy. His limbs felt heavy and liquid, as if he’d been drinking Mandalay’s aniseed tea. One of the women began to sing, a low dirge in Vaik that the others took up. He drifted off to sleep, lulled by the tune and Daidd’s softly spoken explanation of the words. It told of a field that refused to sprout no matter what the women planted or how carefully they tended the soil. Eventually they stopped trying to coax anything from the field and used it as a cemetery, the final resting place for the stillborn, the miscarried and the babes who didn’t live past two moons. Overcome with sadness, the field began to grow trees that no one had ever seen before: slim, silvery birches with bowed branches that trailed blue-green leaves to the ground. The Vaik called them weeping trees.

When Jonathon woke it was to the afternoon breeze and the salt gnats. The Vaik had decamped. The men were picking over the last of the food and trying to rouse themselves to collect the gardening tools and begin the long march back to their quarters. Jonathon massaged a crick in his neck.

The isvestyii was holding a mug of cider and staring out at the field. His eyes were cold and hard. “Why do we do this?”

No one answered.

He turned from the field towards the assignment. “Why do we do this?”

“Do what?” said Daidd flatly. Jonathon winced under so many question marks.

“Play at being serfs for these girls. There are enough men to take The Fortress and put an end to this bullshit. We could do it. Or are you all too pussy-whipped to see how pathetic you are?”

“There’s no ‘we,’” Jonathon said. “There’s us,” he gestured towards the assignment, “and then there are cunts who rape children.” The rest of the men murmured their assent.

The isvestyii looked down at his feet.

Jonathon closed his eyes to return to the peaceful state brought on by the food and the cider. It took him a moment to understand that the isvestyii was addressing him.

“. . . hiding out from a debt? Or one of your secretaries finally make a complaint about your extracurricular expectations?”

“Shut it,” said Daidd, “before it gets shut for you.”

Jonathon nestled further into the tree roots that cradled him. “Let him ramble, Daidd. No one’s listening.”

There was silence for a time. Jonathon was on the edge of sleep when the song the isvestyii was singing crept around his torpor and fingered the nerve underneath his breastbone.

I got a job I can dangle

I got long lines of coke

I know the people you need to sleep with

I got rich man’s rope

Jonathon was on his feet and barrelling towards the isvestyii, the red mist so thick across his eyes that he didn’t see Daidd intercept him and plant his shoulder into his solar plexus. Daidd held his palm against Jonathon’s chest, his arm straight as if he were directing traffic.

“Stop,” he commanded.

“You’re protecting that? That—” But Jonathon didn’t have a word contemptuous enough.

“I’m protecting you.” Daidd held Jonathon’s gaze. “You took an oath. You swore not to raise your hand against anyone at The Fortress. Even that.” He jerked his head at the isvestyii.

The other men were stirring. They’d caught the scent of blood. The isvestyii raised his hands, mock innocent. “I didn’t do nothing.”

Jonathon pushed Daidd’s hand away and tried to shove past him, but Daidd blocked his way. “Don’t do this. He’s not worth it.”

“Just minding my own business and he comes at me wanting to start something,” mumbled the isvestyii.

“Aeraevest,” said Daidd. “Say it with me.”

“Aeraevest. Aeraevest.”

Jonathon moved the rocks in his mind until he felt the anger slip from his body. Slowly, Daidd loosened his grip on Jonathon’s arms. During the long march back to their quarters, Jonathon incanted the word in time with his steps.

Until he met Adalia, Jonathon didn’t know that most of the women he knew tittered rather than laughed. He heard Adalia before he saw her.

He was at a party, crowded into the kitchen with some of his cronies, beer in hand. The light was low, so low that you couldn’t be sure if the person leaning against the opposite wall was someone you knew well or not at all. Black-and-white clad waitstaff shouldered through the clusters of people, bearing trays of canapés and vol-au-vents. Jonathon’s friend broke off his long and rather dull story about a new account he’d acquired to pull some nibbles from a circulating tray, and that was when Jonathon first heard Adalia. Even in the throng of people and with loud, pulsing bass throbbing in his ear, he heard her. Her laugh was utterly infectious. It rumbled through her and poured out like a flock of joyful, cheeky birds. He heard the laugh and it made him smile.

“Who is that?” he asked his friend. His friend, also smiling, didn’t know. “Excuse me.” Jonathon pushed his way out of the kitchen and set out in search of the laugh. Soon enough the peal rippled through the house again. Jonathon followed, homing in on it.

“Jonathon!” One of the poodles accosted him. She threw her arm around him and planted an extravagant kiss on his cheek.

He surreptitiously wiped her raspberry lip gloss away. “Hi. How are you?” What was her name?

“Good. Really good. Isn’t this a fabulous party? I almost didn’t come. I’ve been nursing a hangover for most of the day. Work drinks got a bit out of hand last night. But,” she raised her flute, “hair of the dog and I’m right as rain. Oh look, there’s Andy. It’s so dark in here I didn’t see him before. Must go say hello.” And she was off.

Jonathon waited for the laugh but it didn’t come. He felt suddenly murderous towards the poodle. Maybe the laugh had gone home. Or was sad. Or kissing someone. I’m being ridiculous, he thought. But still he had a keen and unnerving sense that he’d missed a key assignation and his life would now continue on a different—fundamentally wrong—trajectory. Later, much later, he would wonder if the feeling had more to do with the square blue pill his friend had given him and that it had been unfair to hold Adalia responsible for his later disappointment. But for that moment, he stood still in the crowded apartment, listening intently.

There it was again. He followed.

In his memory she was standing in a pool of light. Rationally, he knew that this couldn’t be right because the apartment was so dark. Still, that was how he remembered it.

The laugh was neither tall nor short, fat nor thin, pretty nor ugly. She was wholly and utterly herself. He watched her from across the room. She took a canapé from a tray, nodding vigorously at her companion as she ran the cheddar and sausage through her teeth then idly poked at her gum with the pick. At one point she drew her arm across her body and scratched her elbow, her pleasure in the dissipating itch writ large on her face. Everyone around her looked as posed and cold as a mannequin.

Jonathon approached her and the man she was talking to. As he entered their personal space the man raised a quizzical eyebrow.

“Hello.” Jonathon thrust his hand towards her; she took it. “My name’s Jonathon. Jonathon Bridge. I understand if you have reservations about ‘Bridge’ and want to keep your own name. But I’d like for our children to have hyphenated surnames. I’m thinking two girls and a boy. No cats, though. Everything else is up for negotiation but I’m hopelessly allergic to cats.”

She looked at him, nakedly evaluating whether he was funny/ charming or arrogant/​​alarming, then she burst out laughing. That laugh. It trilled through him.

“My last name’s Draw,” she said. “How’s that for a max-power surname?”

“Draw-Bridge? Really?”

“Not really,” she sighed, “though I’m beginning to wish it was. My name’s actually Fullbright. Adalia Fullbright. This is—” But the man she’d been speaking to was gone.

“Fullbright-Bridge. Or Bridge-Fullbright. They both sound pretty good, don’t you think?”

They danced. Somehow in that cramped apartment with chattering people standing shoulder to shoulder and waitstaff turning side-on to squeeze through, they contrived a space to dance. Her dress was backless and when Jonathon put his hand on her bare skin he felt a sympathetic current.

The filter between Adalia and the world was large-grained. When amused, she laughed. When sad, she cried. Even her sloth was magnificent. The days that she decreed to be “pyjama days” were spent propped up on the voluminous pillows that covered her bed watching old movies on her enormous television. She kept boxes of expensive chocolates for just such occasions, so by the end of the day they were rolling around on silvery wrappers. They drank amaretto—a pyjama day drink, according to Adalia—and ordered takeaway, even answering the door to collect the pizza in their pyjamas. They’d break off the movies to make love, the foil fluttering around them.

Adalia gave the most lascivious blow jobs Jonathon had ever known. She liked to make him stand up, then throw a cushion on the floor. Then, never taking her eyes from his, lower herself to her knees. She’d lean back slightly, and slowly, very slowly, unbutton her shirt. Her skin was creamy white most of the time, but flushed red when she was turned on. Or angry. She removed her bra then leant back even more so he could enjoy the roundness of her gorgeous breasts with their large brown nipples. He’d never experienced anything as erotic as Adalia’s gaze as she took him in her hand and guided him into her mouth, all the while locked onto his eyes. It was intense, unsettling and filthy. Sometimes, he had to close his eyes and gather the pieces of himself back together. When he opened them again, her knowing brown eyes would be there, unblinking.

He’d first told her he loved her when she had him in her mouth. He hadn’t realised he was going to say it, hadn’t even considered what it meant. Her gaze simply extracted the words from him the way cyanide will separate dirt from minerals. When he said it, a smile played at the corners of her otherwise occupied mouth. She ran her tongue between her upper lip and him, her eyes powerful, self-satisfied. Hungry. He came immediately and she drew back, releasing him from her mouth so he blew all over her waiting face.

The experience had been strange, even faintly troubling. He’d come on women before in that way, a couple of times through misfire and once or twice deliberately with the poodles. But he’d never felt so powerless before. It was like Adalia drew something from him that he wasn’t sure he wanted to hand over. She led, and he followed. Or was towed. In those utterly unguarded moments of his purest pleasure, when she locked onto his gaze, he knew that he could conceal nothing. Adalia looked through and into him. Her psychic sonar bounced off his inner walls, transmitting the cavernous spaces inside him.

The absence.

When Jonathon took Adalia to his brother’s wedding, his friends and family half-suspected him of playing a joke.

Adalia sashayed out of her bedroom wearing a shiny black gown. It was fitted around the bust where drawstrings barely contained her ample bosom, clung tight to her generous hips and belly, then flared out into a fishtail at her ankles. Iridescent blue sequins sewn onto the underside of the fishtail glowed like scales. She didn’t say “Does this look all right?” or “How do I look?” but “How awesome is this?” Then she performed an unpartnered tango up and down her hallway, teeth clenched against the stem of an imaginary rose. When she turned, her skirt flashed in a shimmer of pearl and indigo.

He introduced her to the wedding lineup as “My partner, Adalia,” enjoying the flicker of disbelief in his mother’s eyes as she’d taken Adalia’s hand and said hello. “We’d hoped to meet you before now, Adalia,” his mother added, her tone implying that, had Adalia been vetted, she would not have made it onto the guest list.

Adalia, unruffled, had subjected his mother to her bone-crushing handshake and said, “Yes. I’ve been remiss. Terribly so. I work all hours. But that’s no excuse, is it? I’ll invite you to lunch soon, I promise.”

“That would be lovely,” came from his mother’s mouth, but her eyes said something different.

The guests were bunching behind them, gifts under their arms, eyeing off the trays of champagne on the other side of the pleasantries. They were waiting to shake hands with the bridal party, make their offerings and sink under the evening’s anaesthetic of free-flowing wine, rich food, and expansive grounds with their little grottos and groves where—who knows—a pretty girl (or pretty by candlelight) might take a tumble with you before you poured yourself and your wife into a taxi and fought the city traffic for the oblivion of your own bed.

Jonathon felt all this pressing into his back. The stone that had lodged, hard and pitiless, in his gut since boyhood grew colder and weightier.

“Jonathon, are you all right?” His mother’s cool fingers reached out and pressed his hand.

He looked at her face, all sharp angles and pink flesh needled taut. He reached for Adalia’s hand. “I’m fine. Better than.” And he stepped out of the line across the smooth wooden floor to their seats, never loosening his grip on Adalia’s hand.

Her eyes darted over the room, drinking it all in. “I want to know everything,” she said, “all the sordid family secrets. Spare me nothing.”

“You see that man over there? The one with the purple flower in his buttonhole and the cummerbund trying to give him a waistline?” Adalia nodded. “That’s my Uncle Jaspar. My mother’s brother. I caught him in bed with one of the cleaning ladies when I was thirteen or fourteen.”

Adalia turned her bright liquid gaze on Jonathon. “You’re joking?”

“No. They were going at it in one of the guestrooms. I can show you the room if you like.”

“What did you do?”

“There was a long pause where they looked at me and me at them. Then I reversed out of the room, closed the door and went about my business.”

“Did you tell your mum?”

“God no. She’d have had a fit.”

“So what did you do?”

Jonathon’s fine mouth twitched. “I told my Uncle Jaspar I was short on cash. He gave me two hundred dollars. Told me to spend it wisely. I said it would do. For a start.”

Adalia blinked. “You blackmailed him.”

“I said I was short on cash.”

“And how long did this cash-flow problem persist?”

“Till college.”

Adalia burst out laughing. “You’re an extortionist. I’ve fallen in love with an extortionist.”

Jonathon hailed a waiter and relieved him of an open bottle of champagne and two flutes. He filled them, then clinked his against Adalia’s. “I’m a maximiser of opportunity.”

“You’re shameless.”

“That, I concede, is true.”

He watched Adalia watching him. He knew she was half-horrified. Panic flickered in her eyes even as she laughed and shook her head at his confessions. But the part of her that loved stories, that made her a good journalist, was hooked.

“Let’s dance.”

The doubt lifted from her eyes as they moved to the dance floor. Adalia loved to dance. She threw herself into the music, seemed to know every song. A bubble of people formed around her, bobbing like corks in her energy.

“Come on,” she pleaded, when Jonathon collapsed in his chair, “get up and dance with me.”

“I’m done for.” He loosened his tie and wiped his brow with a napkin. “Let me recuperate. You go. Rejoin your admirers.” And she was off, twirling and grinding under the glittering lights. He’d lose sight of her, then catch a flash of blue and there she was, bringing up a conga line or waltzing with one of his uncles—though not, thank god, Jaspar.

His mother lowered herself into Adalia’s seat. She sat, straight-backed, wineglass in hand, surveying the dance floor. Jonathon studied her profile. She seemed to him to have barely changed from when he was a boy. The same smooth, inscrutable face beneath her finely plucked eyebrows. The same tawny hair, shampooed to a high sheen, dried and straightened to an effortless bob. He knew that the wine in her hand was warm. She wouldn’t relax until the speeches were done, the cake cut, the official photographer finished for the night. Till then she would glide about the room, repairing uncomfortable silences and administering water to the sots who couldn’t be trusted not to rekindle old arguments.

“Are you pleased, Mother?”

She tapped her shell-pink nails on her glass and considered. “She lacks . . . gravitas.”

Jonathon followed his mother’s eyes to where Adalia was dancing. “I wasn’t talking about Adalia.”

“Oh. You meant?”

“The wedding.”

“The wedding. Yes. It’s all gone off remarkably well. If we can keep your Uncle Jaspar from groping the waitstaff, I think we can claim it as a success.”

“Do you think he’ll be happy?”

“Who?”

“My brother.”

“Oh, Jonathon. The things you say.” She shook her head and took the tiniest sip of her wine.

“Would you like me to get you a fresh one?”

“No. I’m fine with this.”

“So do you?”

“What’s that?”

“Think he will be happy?”

She turned her slate-grey eyes on him, looking very much as if he was a hand of cards she could do nothing with. “Jonathon, please. Don’t start.”

“Don’t start what? I’m genuinely curious to know what you think.”

“Yes,” she said, as though through a mouthful of shards, “yes, I think he’ll be happy.”

Jonathon looked over to where his brother was dancing with his new bride. He seemed happy enough.

“I hope you’re going to behave tonight, Jonathon. This is not the time to play your favourite role of family malcontent.” She smiled brightly, patted him on the knee and threaded her way through the tables, scattering greetings and compliments.

“I hated summer camp,” Jonathon said to her retreating back, the shimmer of her perfume. The armful of roses on the table.