CHAPTER SIX

So begins your education.

The extreme reluctance with which Minith helps you is almost comical. Every time, she undertakes to demonstrate by expression, tone, and body language that she has a great many more important things to be getting on with. She is, after all, Isadora’s chief assistant. The entire rest of the staff dances to her tune. But as it is her Mistress’s wish, she does help you.

You discover soon enough that there aren’t enough years in a human life for you to catch up with the science. You struggle through books intended for young students, and while Minith swears that the keys to the universe are concealed within, your fingers are too clumsy to fit them to the lock.

“The Brink,” you tell her. “That’s what I need to learn about.”

She’s startled. You’ve bearded her in the kitchens, the rest of the staff sitting down to breakfast. You’re both keeping your voices low through some implicit agreement that what you’re about shouldn’t be the gossip of the house.

“Not these amino-acids and base-pairs and pee-aytch.” You’re frustrated with your own limitations, hulking over her without meaning to, though she doesn’t even deign to move back. “People. I want to learn about people and what they did. Real things.”

Her contempt is back again, but this time you weather it. You know, in your own way, that you’re right. It’s not the actual technicalities of the science that matter, for you. It’s the decisions that led to them. You’re all about the big picture, and you’ve become aware that there is a very big picture indeed, buried in the history of the world, and everything in your life seems to have been thrown up to hide it.

“Histories,” Minith says, as though it’s a dirty word. “Apparently we have recruited a humanities student.”

You continue to weather her passive aggression, and to keep a rein on your own more active kind. “And?”

The and manifests as a stack of books beside your bed that evening, and you resume your research. They’re still dry and difficult and full of words you have to look up. Full of pictures of men and women in odd clothes. Of those close-packed buildings, and sometimes those vast crowds. And it’s complicated because at the time nobody called it the Brink, of course. It was just then, to them. Just the way the world was. And it was bad, no doubt. People were starving, in various parts of the world. People had no clean water. An overabundance of humanity, and no ogres at all. Based on these histories, easy enough for Isadora or Minith to argue that the world now is so much better. Peace, as Her Ladyship said, and plenty.

It will be a long process, your pursuit of truth, but you are to be on Isadora’s staff for over six years, and despite Minith’s early opinion of you, you have a sharp mind and work hard. You will never master the science, but over the months your reading improves so that you need to look up strange words less and less. You plumb the pages of ever denser and more complex volumes to track down your quarry.

You have other duties, of course, because while Isadora far prefers to be closeted with her own work, the social demands of being an ogress still clutch at her. And none of the Masters would travel without staff to take care of their needs, and she always brings you with her, as her closest attendant. As a pet, you are aware. A performing monkey. And yet she is fond of you. When you attend her, some evenings, she invites you to talk about what you’ve learned. You speculate about what happened, and she smiles and shakes her head and encourages you to continue with your books.

Books are what prompts one memorable trip, in fact, when you’ve been in her service for a year or so. Isadora has a need for certain volumes held in the collection of another ogre, and furthermore she requires some new books created. Volumes lost to time, she tells you, but retained in electronic copy. And while she could read them on a screen, a method that you no longer think of as ogre sorcery, she prefers physical books. And, being the Baroness Isadora Lavaine, she is in a position to have them printed at her order.

You travel to a city by train. She has her own private carriage, and you believe she has chosen this manner of approach specifically to watch your reaction. Because it is a city like those in the books you’ve been reading. There are tall buildings, five, six storeys high, lining one side of the tracks. You see high chain-link fences with metal thorns on top, and narrow streets, and beyond them the chimneys of the factories and power stations. And people. Hundreds, thousands of people, all crammed into those buildings. There are women and children staring out dully at the train as it passes. Laundry hangs from great heavy strings overhead. In every window you see a woman at work: peeling, scrubbing, preparing food, darning. The men, Minith tells you, are in the factories. Or else they starve, because this is what she calls a ‘company town,’ and if you don’t work then the company won’t sell you company food in exchange for the company money they pay you for your toil. It is one of the ogres who owns the company, and its food and money and factories that Isadora is going to see.

There is the usual soiree, where a score of ogres gather together in a vast room and drink and talk. And there is a feast, an ogre’s feast. You are behind Isadora’s chair as usual, enduring the remarks of the other ogres about your unusually robust physique. There are some ogresses there who even eye you in a predatory fashion. Thus far, at least, Isadora has not commanded you to her bed, or even tried to seduce you – as though an ogress would need to. The possibility has been in your mind more than once, though, and you’re not sure what you would feel about it, should things tilt that way.

And then the main course comes out, after seemingly endless confections of fish and pastry and meat, and it’s defaulters’ pie, whatever that is. A vast tableau of crust with bubbling gravy and meat underneath, and the ogres tucking in greedily and complaining that one end of the table or other is hogging the best pieces. And you do not understand and just stand there like a good servant, even though you see some of the other humans there – the Economics, as Isadora calls you – blanch. And only later does Minith cruelly explain that this is the last refuge of families with no work, or who fall foul of debts, or who cannot afford medicine, or have some other burden that regular wages will not lift. That, worst comes to worst, there is always something a human can sell, that an ogre can make use of. And Isadora eats with the same gusto as the rest and you remember that.

On the train back, staring out at those grey houses and the grey people who live crammed up in them, you have questions. And Isadora’s happy to indulge you. Minith sits across the carriage, eavesdropping and doubtless resenting every moment her Mistress spends with you.

“Why all this?” you ask, gesturing out at the city with its sharp fences and close-packed windows. “There is so much land outside. There’s food. The whole point of the Brink was that there would be more land and more food. Why do they have to live like this?” And more, the words tumbling out into an abyss with that dreadful defaulters’ pie waiting at the bottom. “Why debts and wages and… things being expensive so people can’t afford them, when science can make so much?”

Isadora’s smile tells you it’s a good question. “There’s a theory held by the worthies who run the company – glorified boys’ club that it is. They say that their workforce must be kept in such artificially straitened circumstances, with shortages and competition, or they wouldn’t work. If you let the Economics be comfortable and happy and free of fear and want, then what if they just sat at home and did nothing? They say that unless you force people into a position where they must work or starve, no work would get done.”

You think on that, and on what you’ve learned so far about Isadora’s discipline and its foundations. “Have they proved this theory?”

Isadora raises an eyebrow.

“That’s what you do with a theory, isn’t it?” you press. You feel as though you’re about to say something stupid at any moment, but the idea is so obvious. “Have they tried feeding and making people happy to see if they still did the work?”

Isadora laughed, and at first you think you have been stupid, but she’s laughing at her peers, whom she plainly doesn’t think much of. “You know,” she says, between guffaws, “I don’t think they ever tried. Funny, that.”

Back at Hypation you throw yourself back into your reading, and you remember the pie and the gusto, and there’s a particular goad at your back, now, driving you on. It’s an old thought, one that you can’t imagine your father or the pastor or any of them, back in that insignificant little village, ever harbouring. It’s watching Sir Peter arrive in his motorcade to receive the goods and tithes he never worked for, and everyone treating the visit as though it’s such an honour. It’s sitting in church hearing how God ordered the world to place a few on high with everyone else becoming the doting and obedient subjects of their benevolence, and being asked to agree that it was right. It’s Gerald Grimes taunting you, and Theo the hound-master hunting you through the woods, not only because he’s stronger and has the dogs, but because the world is designed to make him so. Who made the ogres, and how did they become lords of all creation? Because you read those histories of the Brink times, and all humans are standing shoulder to shoulder, and none in a monstrous shadow.

Injustice is what moves you. Injustice, that you were born to serve and scrape and, at the worst, go into a pie, and the ogres were born to rule and to gorge. And Minith keeps bringing the books with a sneer, safe in her position as Isadora’s majordomo. No pie for her, after all, so why should she care?

And you find one book, written in a painfully dry and clinical style, talking of protests and riots, at the changes being mandated by what they call governments and corporate boards. People complaining at having their children changed, even though the world was at stake. In the book, it’s cast as selfish and wasteful that anyone should resist such patently necessary measures. It was written post-Brink, after all, when these things had been accomplished and it only remained to justify them.

It was voluntary at first, you read. Those who signed up for the Economic Measures and allowed themselves and their genetic line to be modified were rewarded. They received some additional benefits from those who ruled. Later, they were stripped of whatever benefits they had unless they gave their consent. And the writer of the book applauds everyone who took that selfless step, to make their offspring into less wasteful, less angry, less space-consuming creatures. For the solution to being on the Brink was a whole suite of alterations. You already know that enquiring scientific minds like Isadora’s can’t leave well enough alone, and there’s always something else to fix. So the old world turned and there was a new generation of perfect children who couldn’t stomach meat, who were slower to anger and slower to argue. Happy people, the book insists. People without so much waste, without all that needless consumption. A race of people the world could support more readily. And from here on you’ll understand, when Isadora says ‘Economics.’

And in the end it came down to force and laws, and camps for those who hadn’t consented to be part of the programme. With regret, the book insists. With care, with love. Camps, mandatory alteration, prisons. All with the best will in the world. All over the world. Because it was unthinkable that, others having made the necessary sacrifice, the selfish could live on unaltered. That, the book insists, would be unjust.

There is no mention of ogres. And you are picturing some rogue laboratory, some maverick scientist – whom you imagine with Isadora’s face – deciding that they can make other improvements to the next generation; siring a brood of huge, dominating monsters with a taste for human flesh; unleashing them on an unsuspecting world that could not resist them.

You visit villages much like your own. Isadora, like most ogres, owns land, though she has lesser ogres to oversee it for her. Still, sometimes her presence is required and she reluctantly drags herself away from her work to do the tour. You stand in her retinue as she is greeted and feasted and fêted by one insignificant hamlet after another. You feel embarrassed by all those people, their bright ribbons and their singing children. Because to them this is all the world is, and you know they are a mote of dust in the world’s eye. You are ashamed that your own origins are mirrored in their monkey capering. And when you look round you see Minith sneering at you, because she hasn’t forgotten you’re just a peasant either.

Over the years, you become practically the house’s librarian. Not of the science texts, which are still impenetrable, but Isadora has thousands of books on other subjects. You know that some are fictions, but others are histories and geographies and accounts, and you have combed these so thoroughly that you can lay your hands on any given volume someone asks for. Other staff actually come to you with questions. You are no longer the big, dumb yokel from the sticks. And Minith watches. She sits in on your conversations with Isadora, jealous still, no doubt, writing away at her own notes while you talk. She has lost her early contempt of you but maintains a distinct distance. Some people, you think, can never be won over.

And you are starting to become frustrated in your own search, because it’s been years now. You’ve ransacked the library, and the bitter truth is that there were things the historians never wrote down. There is a shape in the middle of what happened at the Brink that nobody directly addressed.

You even talk to Minith about it, in the absence of any other options. She gives you a strange look and says, “Why do you think that is?” and you realise this, too, is part of the test. And she leaves a book by your bed – Minith being the one other person who knows the library as well as you have come to do – but it’s one of the fictions, and what’s the use of that?

One evening, two generals come to visit Isadora. They are big ogres, overstuffed in colourful uniforms blazing with gold braid and medals. They arrive on the backs of enormous horses and cuff and swear at Isadora’s grooms. They have swords at their belts you’d need two hands to lift, and spurs jingling at their booted heels. Isadora plainly thinks they’re ridiculous, but at the same time apparently they’re powerful amongst the ogres. One is a duke, a very high rank indeed. They have come to discuss their requirements for the war.

You weren’t aware there was a war, but apparently there is, and these two generals are currently losing. You attend your Mistress and hear them tutting over the ceded territory, the fallen soldiers. “Better stock,” one says, “better weapons. We need an advantage, your ladyship, so naturally we come to you. Fine mind, eh? One of the best.”

“The best,” Isadora says, but quietly. It’s plain these two clownish creatures are important, and she’s on her best behaviour about them. Their moustaches bristle. Their staff look cowed and you’d bet those bright red coats conceal bruises and whip scars.

After they’ve gone, Isadora throws her entire staff at whatever the new project is. You ask about the war, but other than the general impression of appalling destruction and loss of life, nobody has time to talk to you about it.

Without anyone to act as your sounding board, you find yourself adrift in a morass of histories that are dancing about something in the past. In frustration, you take yourself off to one of the house’s further rooms with the fiction book and read that. It is set around the Brink, you see, some romantic drama of the rich and powerful who were putting into place the changes that would save the world. Probably Minith thought it was factual, you think derisively. And yet you read it, not – you tell yourself – because you really care about any of those non-existent people, but because when you stop, your mind nags at you about what might happen next. Will the angsty daughter be happy with that troubled scion? Will the old uncle die, and who will inherit the house? And all through the narrative, the substrate on which all those fake people stand, is the story of the Brink. How the people of the world must be changed, if they are all to live in it without devouring everything like a plague of locusts (you have to look up what a locust is). The hard decisions made by those powerful people, about altering the very book of humanity. Making it a less expensive volume to print, so the conceit of the old writer goes. Cheaper inks. Fewer pages. The paperback edition.

At no time do any of those characters step from the page to tell you what happened, but somehow the writer does. And there is a spin to the words, when talking of the Brink and What Was Done. So that, though they never have their characters say ‘This was a terrible thing,’ their choice of phrase invisibly coats the scenes with a sense of guilt and shame.

You look up ‘hardbacks’ and ‘paperbacks’ and page count, and disentangle the writer’s metaphors of a printing industry that no longer exists in that form. Fewer pages, they said. The concise pocket edition of humanity.

You understand where the ogres came from, after that.

And then you go to war. Not, thankfully, as a soldier, but Isadora must travel close to where the fighting is, to deliver her new inventions to the generals. She doesn’t relish the task, displaying not even her usual ill temper at being dragged from her work but a particular dread you’ve not seen before. But her retinue travel with her, of course, you included. You go by train, one carriage for you and the one behind loaded with reinforced barrels of whatever it is that she and her staff have been cooking up. There is little talk. The trains pass through miserable-looking villages, each consisting of the same house over and over in long terraces. You see children there playing soldier games, or else they are actually being taught how to be soldiers. They have sticks over their shoulders and march back and forth. These are the villages that the generals own and they only have one use for their people. The war needs bodies. When the rails run out, you travel in big armoured cars, stuffy and dark and cramped. You meet actual soldiers. They are just staff dressed in a different uniform, these ones bright red like poor copies of the generals’ own. You have seen pictures of soldiers from before the Brink. In the photographs they wore drab earth colours so they could not be seen. In even older pictures they wore bright colours like these, though, so that they could. So that their generals could look across a battlefield and see immediately where everyone was and who was on which side. Since the visit of the two generals, you have been reading up on war. Many of the soldiers don’t look that much older than the children you saw from the train windows.

Soon the cars are lumbering and juddering over land that looks like the war in the photos, churned up into mud and pockmarked with holes. The soldiers still look like those in the old paintings, though, even though their bright colours are smeared with mud. You are approaching what they call the Forward HQ.

The generals are there, the two from before and a handful of others. They have a big table that has been painstakingly modelled into a map of the war, and scattered over it are thousands of little figures of soldiers in different colours. Isadora and her staff are forced to wait while some great moustache-bristling discussion is held between them, about how to stem the recent reversals. The war is going very badly. Without some new advantage, it may be lost entirely, and then where would everyone be? You want to ask that exact question, but it’s abundantly plain that the generals are not like Isadora and would not appreciate a mere Economic questioning them.

At last they turn to Isadora and demand that she tell them what she’s brought. The gas in the barrels and the drugs in the canisters. To affect the enemy in new and lethal ways; to empower their soldiers to fight on without fatigue or fear. The generals are delighted. This could be the turning point of the war! Their opposite numbers won’t know what hit them. Victory by the end of the year, what, what?

Because there’s nobody else, it’s Minith you’re forced to ask. “Who are we fighting?”

“We aren’t fighting anyone,” she says derisively, but then she relents and says, “If you went about thirty miles that way, you’d find another building like this one.”

“Right.”

“And in there, you’d find another group of generals and another map table. Only I think that lot wear yellow, or maybe it’s blue.”

“Ogres?”

“Masters, yes. Of course.” She’s watching you carefully.

“Well then… what’s the war about? What started it?” You’ve read your histories, about the complex skein of causes that wars arise from. “Why are the ogres fighting each other?”

But Minith is looking at you pityingly. “They’re not,” she says. “People are fighting each other. Because the Masters like their wars.” Seeing your blank face, she says, “You know when Her Ladyship plays cards with her peers, Torquell?”

You nod.

“It’s like that. Just like that.”

That evening, the generals retire to their smoking room for brandy and – yes – cards and talk about how splendid this new phase of the war is going to be, and they insist Isadora accompany them, jostling over who gets to take her arm. You end up with the staff, again, only the local staff are all soldiers. Minith talks in a low voice with one older man, and you go wandering.

There is a lot of war detritus here, outside the battle proper. You get a young recruit to show you around. There are barracks where hundreds of soldiers are trying to sleep, packed in like goods in a train carriage. There is a hospital, where what seems almost the same number of soldiers lie in the same close conditions, only there are less of them – less of each one, mostly. Fewer legs and arms. And you think about that. There is an armoury where the guns are kept, because the soldiers aren’t allowed to carry them until it’s time to go off to battle.

You think a lot about that.

You meet an officer, standing outside the hospital. He’s a surgeon as well, you discover, and his name is Bradwell; Captain Doctor Bradwell. He’s smoking, which is something all the soldiers do. It helps with their nerves, he explains. Most of the soldiers have just looked at you dully, but Captain Doctor Bradwell has questions. Where do you come from? What’s the work like there? You tell him of Her Ladyship’s service, and then you tell him about the mean, filthy peasant village you’re embarrassed to have come from. He listens as though you’re describing paradise.

“But all good little monkeys, no doubt,” he says. “Never a thought of us and what we go through?”

“They don’t even know,” you confirm. And then add, “But I do, now.”

You lock eyes, him looking up at you, and there’s a moment of connection. “Don’t forget us,” he tells you, and you won’t. “Tell them about us,” he says. You won’t do that either, but perhaps you’ll do something better.

Later on, there is a commotion. Shouting from the room the generals have retired to. And then a quick gathering of staff, Minith running up to drag you away from your increasingly interesting chat with Captain Doctor Bradwell.

Something has happened and you’re leaving. There’s already a car waiting and Isadora standing beside it. Her fury is writ large on her face, but a fury she can’t give rein to. You’ve never seen her in a position where she can’t just do whatever she wants.

Not a word, in the jolting car ride back to the train lines. In the distance you hear thunder, and then realise it’s the guns of the war.

In the train, Isadora drinks. She gets through a bottle and a half before she even speaks, and then she banishes most of the staff to the far end of the carriage, has you sit beside her, and only Minith left within earshot.

“Fucking war,” she says. “Fucking little boys with their toys.” For all that she’s been making new toys for them.

“Did they… take advantage?” Minith asks, very precisely. For a moment Isadora’s eyes blaze hatred at her trim little majordomo. Then she sags massively and shudders. You were trying to keep up with what happened, between her and the generals, but even back in the village you saw this sort of thing play out. A woman and a man, and the man strong or important enough that he’s hard to say no to. Not a lever you ever applied your own weight to, though opportunity certainly tempted you. And you’d heard that both Gerald Grimes and Sir Peter had a reputation for just such things, although back then you’d never have even thought to criticise such dealings. They were the ogres, after all; the Master in his castle, et cetera. But you never dreamt that such strata of power existed even amongst the ogres, or that such a grand personage as Lady Isadora could find herself in a position where she couldn’t say no.

She drinks some more, trying to wash away the memories, and then she leans into you. And you’re strong enough, by then, to prop her up, and for a while she just rambles about how much she loathes the generals, collectively and individually, and what a waste the whole sham-war is. Although evidently she just feels it is a distraction from the true search for knowledge; she doesn’t much go into the absent limbs of the hospital or the haunted look in Captain Doctor Bradwell’s eyes. She talks about the ‘proper use’ of the Economics, the rational duties of a responsible owner. And then she prods you in the chest and demands, “Have you worked it out, then? All your reading. You must have, by now.”

She’s not really expecting an answer, already having you refill her glass, but as you hand it to her you say, “Yes.”

Her eyes sparkle with sudden interest, a slice of her old mischief. “And?”

And you tell her where the ogres come from. Or rather, that they never came from anywhere. That all those histories of the Brink, lovingly detailing the hard decisions made by the powerful people, about how they would save the world, omitted one key element: that they excluded themselves from those measures.

“When it’s consumption of resources that’s the issue,” you say, “then ‘economic’ just means smaller. That’s us. You stayed the same.”

She’s smiling, and partly it’s the ‘good boy’ response to a pet who can perform a new trick, but there’s her old slyness there as well, because you’re almost right, but there’s one piece of the puzzle left over.

“A handful of genes to control height and size,” she murmurs, slurring a little. “Easier than you think. A handful of genes to control diet, which proteins can be digested, which can’t. That’s trickier. Your father still enjoyed a boiled egg and a glass of milk, probably. Some bloodlines still do. Not”—she belches—“an exact science, quite. A handful of genes to lower testosterone and other truculent hormones. More manageable, eh? All to save the world from the teeming hordes. But you haven’t guessed it.” She sounds like a spoiled child who didn’t get a pony for her birthday. “I was sure you’d have worked it out by now.”

And you’re blank. You’ve dropped your grand revelation, but apparently that’s not it.

When you get back, you spend plenty of time staring at the books, but the last secret isn’t in there. Nobody wrote a book about you, after all. And all the while, what you saw in the war zone is festering in you. What you saw in the slums around the city. And, scrape down far enough, there’s your own personal experience. The dogs, and Gerald, and your father. And the strange thing is, despite it all, you do like Isadora. And you can tell yourself, she’s better than the others. She doesn’t whip her staff. She treats them well and brings out the best in them. If you had to be any ogre’s pet, then there would be no better Master than her.

But that If. A word that would have been unthinkable back when you lived in the village. Unthinkable in your early years as Isadora’s tame peasant. But you’ve read now. You understand about the Brink. It’s true, as the pastor always said, that the world was ordained this way. But not by God. And with God out of the equation, that leaves room for the question, What if it wasn’t this way?

And one evening, Minith comes to the library, leaning in the doorway as you tread back through books you’ve already exhausted, needling through the haystack to find what you missed.

Your glower only amuses her. You’d have thought she’d approve, finding you here burning the midnight oil amongst these pages, but apparently that’s just more food for the contempt that never really left her.

“You’re so blind,” she tells you. “You’re looking two hundred years back in time and you never see the here and now. You missed dinner, didn’t you?”

You did, and you’re hungry. Sheer stubbornness is keeping you at this fruitless study.

“Go ask the cooks to heat you up something,” she tells you imperiously, and then adds. “After all, nobody else will have had it.”

You blink at her. There’s far too much mockery in that smile for her words not to mean something beyond the obvious.

“Tell me,” you demand, but she won’t. She just says, “You never watch the cooks at work, do you?”

You eat. You sleep. Next day you watch the cooks as they make lunch. Your lunch, and the staff’s lunch. Separately. Every meal for years, this has been going on, but you were always too good for the kitchen. Why would you ever have sat there, a volume unregarded on your knees, watching them make food for the staff and Her Ladyship and for you? And mostly you eat what the staff get, but with an added ingredient. A little of what Isadora has, minced up and baked into whatever’s going. Meat from her own table. Nothing but the best.

And you remember a word that was used, a handful of times long ago, when referring to you.

You go back to the library and, for the first time in many months, look up the meaning of something in the dictionaries. You search out the definition of atavism.