IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE SONG, and the song was all and the song was everything. Klade, happy though he always told himself he was, sometimes looked back on these unremembered days of his earliest childhood as a time of lost content. Slowly, within the song, he’d become aware of individual voices, presences, shapes. Ida’s hands, which were rough and giving. Then Silus’s voice, and the white shape of his face. Walls and ceilings, and light spinning through windows, and the clear image and scent, perhaps his first true memory, of Blossom standing over him above the bars of his cot, swaying and weeping and crying and singing through the broken petals of his face. For Blossom was the song as well, and the song was neither happiness nor sadness, nor was it hunger or warmth, but it was all of those things, and it was the rucked feel of his sheets as well and the Farmers lowing each evening to their cattle across the thistled fields. The song was the rubbery taste of a teat pushed into his mouth, and the hot gush of need which followed, although Klade knew that that was a later memory—something he’d made up himself in the times when he’d begun to explore Big House in which he lived, and opened a spill of bottles in Kitchen.
He was growing, changing, and time was passing, but the song was always there. It was bigger than Big House, or Garden, or the Woods into which he must never stray, for that was also where the Shadow Ones dwelt, and the song there was at its brightest and fiercest. The song is you, and the song is us, Ida would murmur in the way she had, which was different to sound or seeing. You, Klade, are the Chosen. Blinking. The dark geometries of her face. And so are we …
Chosen. Rambling amid the seedheads in Garden, picking the silvery bark off the trees, Klade swilled that word around his mouth just as he did the pebbles from the bed of the Impassable Stream which he sometimes sucked for their slick coolness. Chosen, he was Chosen. He liked the feel and taste of that. Chosen, Chosen, Chosen …! And so was this sun and so were these clouds, and so were the tiny mud-grey fishes which slipped away from his fingers in the stream. The water sang as well as it slipped sweetly cold through his fingers, and he sang with it, and laughed through the pebbles with which he’d filled his mouth. Standing up, he could see Big House, the crooked finger beckon of its chimney and the greyed panes of its windows. Garden wavered, delicious with the scent of nettles, and here came Silus with his white face and the odd draw of his lips which made trembling shapes in the air like the waft of the clouds. Klade tried to perform the same trick himself, but found that his mouth was still blocked by the hard glinting coolness of those pebbles.
The song changed and lifted him. The song pumped his back. The song was a spew of stones. Time, then, was passing inside the grainy windows of Big House, which he was on no account to lick with the swollen thing inside his mouth called a tongue and which Ida didn’t have. Then there were voices—winter voices, although he knew it all went back to the singing river and those pebbles. This, he’d now been firmly told, was to touch something. This, he’d been told, was to listen. This was taste, which again was different. And this, Klade, is colour, and this, Klade, is scent. There are your hands, fingers, which you must use rather than your mouth to explore, although the fire he was squatting before on his three-legged stool in Big Room had no fingers and was still touching him with warmth. The fire was good, but at the same time the fire was dangerous, and he was to sit here, but no closer, as he listened to the winter voices wafting through the door.
Even his name—Klade. Whenever has anybody been called such a thing?
That was Ida, whom he could hear with or without the door being open because she had no tongue and the sounds she made came only in his head.
‘Blame Blossom if you like—it was just the first noise he made. But he’s unique. Why on earth should he have a name that’s been used by someone else?’
But we’re making him too unique. You’ve seen how confused he gets. Things he can and cannot hear. We should never have said yes and gone to Saint Alphage’s …
‘You’re talking as if I had a choice, Ida. Whatever it was that Alice Meynell wanted, she certainly wasn’t going to let Klade grow up and live an ordinary life. You haven’t met her, Ida—not close up. She’s …’ Here, whatever Silus was saying—and he’d been striving recently, Klade had noticed, to use his mouth to say as many things as possible even though he found it awkward and it made a warm rain on your face—drifted into song, and the song was lost to him, as dark and strange and dangerous and enticing as the flames of this fire. We can’t give up on him, Ida …
But it’s just—I sometimes despair. Even though I love him so deeply. And even if we have no choice.
‘We must strive to be practical. That’s the thing which is most important. And probably also the hardest. Who knows what the future will bring—but he’s part of it.’
After all, who would have him now?
‘He’s perfect. He’s unique, and he’s ours. He truly is Chosen. It’s too late for regret. Think of how we came to this place, Ida …’
So much of that and many other things made little sense to Klade. But the world was growing, and so was he, and meanwhile he must study. Study tasted like spiders and dust. There was even a room for it, set high in a corner of Big House where the beech tree tapped the windows, and in summer you could hear the nesting swallow chicks chirruping as they learned their part of the song.
‘Now, listen. Say it slowly. Take your time. My name is Klade.’
Klade did, but Silus shook his head. Klade could feel even as Silus made his mouth into a smile that he was sad.
No…
‘I don’t want you to talk as I talk, Klade. Open your mouth properly. You shouldn’t slur or spit.’
But that’s …
‘I know, I know. It’s my fault. It’s the way I’ve been changed.’ The grey in Silus’s eyes, the song in his head, dimmed. Other aspects of the song—the birds, the tap-tapping beech tree—welled up around Klade. Ida was moving outside in Garden, and he knew that she was listening. Or not listening—for to listen you used ears; the part of the song which was sound. So perhaps not listening at all.
‘You should speak, I think …’ Silus said.
And perhaps not. Perhaps this is even more confusing. ‘Speak as you hear Ida speaking. In your head.’
With that clarity. ‘Does that make any sense?’
‘Yes.’
Ida, in Garden, snapped the dry stem of a teasel, the feeling of it mingling with that of her flesh.
Yes.
From then, it was easier. Klade was to make sounds in his mouth rather than inside his head. Like birdsong, yes, although we are not birds, Klade, we are the Chosen, we are the Children of this Age. And you are not to put stones in your mouth, no matter how cool and sweet they taste, or, even secretly, to lick the windows.
Then, with spring, arrived the fluttering things which smelled like the corner of the house where its walls bulged and the rain trickled in. Things which Ida would cup in her awkward hands or place on her rough lap and stare at for the longest time. They were called books and these, yes, Klade, are letters, words. They’re a special part of the song. With summer, the cows came charging into Garden and the Farmers escaped with them, mooing and chomping amid the hazy flies and trampling the nettles until the Ironmasters came in as well to shoo them off with the paddles of their big hands still glowing from the forge.
Summer was a good time. Summer was sitting with Ida on the old bench in the butterfly heat. Summer was for books. Summer was learning to read. She’d point a black finger against the grainy shapes. Cow. Bird. Then Dog—which was like Cat, but which he’d never seen until Ida showed him. How they laughed when she made it stand in the middle of his head and wiggle its tail! Yes, he soon knew these things, and the special shapes they made when you squashed them up like flies between these things called pages. But—man, woman? What is sad, Ida, about those words? And how do you spell Chosen?
Klade was, long before he discovered the phrase, a voracious reader. In fact, he was a voracious everything. He gobbled things up, and no longer just pebbles, for voracious meant eating without eating. Gobbled Big House. Gobbled the sun-flecked attic. Gobbled Garden all the way to the Woods where the Shadow Ones dwelt but not beyond. Gobbled the long space they called No Through Road, which went all the way to the Ironmaster’s Forge in the one direction, and absolutely nowhere in the other.
He loved to sit in the Forge’s mad heat and glow, with all the huffing of the furnace and the shouts and the clamour. There were two Ironmasters, with their flat red faces, their huge shoulders, their blistered, greying, clanking arms, but there might as well have been one of them. Like the image you saw when they doused the heat of their metals into the lovely, scummy surface of the water butts, they were joined in the heat and the glow and the steam. They made big sounds to go with their hammerings, but the words which came from their mouths were nothing like the ones Klade read in books, or that he was supposed to make. Ida told him that they were Endlessly chanting the spells they’d learned in their apprenticeship, which meant some secret and distant part of the song he still didn’t understand.
In a corner at the back of the Forge, near where the Impassable Stream laughed and rattled, Klade found huge sheets of words which had somehow escaped from the books Ida was showing him, and then been piled and tied and tightly squashed, and lived in by mice who’d left their mousy stains and smells. Fascinated by these browned pages, unpicking his way through holes and droppings, Klade discovered many words about these creatures called women and men, whom Ida and Silus and Blossom mostly called Outsiders when they called them anything at all, and who were not Chosen. They had things called Births. They had things called Marriages. They had things called Guilds. They had things called Deaths. Some of these Outsiders liked to have themselves squashed into pictures in these pages just like flies and dogs. They were always in shades of brown—the colour of mouse pee, in fact, even when mice hadn’t peed on them.
Einfell, he understood, was a particular place, and there were other places which lay elsewhere with names like London and Preston and Bristol where the bricks of many houses and the Outsiders themselves were all piled together and clambered over each other like the woodlice you found if you peeled away the walls of Big House when Silus wasn’t looking. Outsiders were everywhere.
There was this machine. It came from the nowhere end of No Through Road each Tenshiftday afternoon and into the Fold Yard beside the New Barn, which was where the cats lived. The machine had a face on its front with something like eyes which glowed with bits of sunlight when it was winter but otherwise were entirely blank. It spat and clucked, and there were these big letters down its side. A. Brown. Taunton. Grocers And Suppliers. Then, watching, watching through the weeds and the cobblestones, the side of the machine put out a wing as if it was a beetle in the sunshine, and Brown stepped out. Not all of Brown was brown, though. Bit of Brown’s face were very red, and there was sparse gingery stuff on his head which he kept rubbing. His eyes were red as well; and white, too, and blue. The cats came prowling and purring with their tails up around Brown’s legs and he tutted at them with what seemed like every last bit of his attention. The funniest thing was, Brown worked his mouth as he petted the cats, and clicked and licked with his teeth and tongue, and turned his head to spit out shining jets which sat there bright and bubbly on the cobbles and hung on the seedheads. Brown was so brown that brown was leaking out from him.
Klade edged forward. He touched the brown stuff and sniffed and tasted. Harsh and warm and tart. More like the paints he sometimes squiggled on bits of paper to try to make Dogs and Cats and Cows than anything he could make come out of his own mouth. Brown was looking at him. Rubbing the top of his head.
‘Well, I’ll be …’
‘Hello,’ Klade said, feeling proud of himself for doing so. ‘I am Klade.’
Brown’s brown tongue licked his brown lips and moved something brown he was chewing from the side of one brown cheek to another. The song edged and swirled about him in joyous loops, but never quite went inside. He was like a rock in the middle of the Impassable Stream. ‘By the sweet Elder,’ he said in a flat, brown, songless voice. ‘You’re young to be that way, aren’t you?’
I am, and you’re not Chosen.’
‘Course you are—it’s a lad, isn’t it?’ Without actually moving forward, Brown squinted more closely at Klade. ‘But no one would know from the look of you. Mama got caught, eh? Poor little bastard …’
Then Ida came, and so did Silus, and then the Ironmasters and the Huntsman as well, and several of the Chosen from the Far Village who were capable of being a help. Brown opened the bigger wings at the back of his machine. Things came out: cabbages and bags of sugar and flour and sea-potatoes but mostly tins and sometimes even fresh books which Ida cuddled to her chest and the song brightened around her for a while like the eyes of the machine which were called headlights and were powered by something called electricity, which they didn’t have in Einfell, but which was very important in the Outsiders’ world.
Ida sat him down on his stool beside the fire in the Big Room and laid out sheets of newspaper around him on which the mice hadn’t yet peed. She stroked his back, and the feel of her hands was like branches. The song, within Ida, was always happy and sad. It reminded him, in its highest reaches, of that part of the song which wafted from the Shadow Ones in the depths of the Wood; it was that lost and strong. When she took up the joined objects which were called scissors, Klade could tell she found them difficult to hold in her funny hands. The song went Snip, Snip as the air whispered around Klade’s head and tickled his neck. There was something else in the song, something from Ida’s memory like a bit of summer stolen by the headlights of Brown’s machine. Klade was sitting there, and Ida was cutting not his hair—alive or dead, remember the difference, although surely his hair was dead, or else cutting it would have hurt—but the hair of someone else, in a different room, and the hair had the colour of the memory itself, which was sunlight, in shining, golden curls.
I’m so sorry, Klade. Everything about you makes me think—
—Not sad or sorry. He remembered himself. ‘Tell me, Ida. I’m interested. What you’re thinking is Outside, isn’t it?’ He remembered one of the many labels of the tins he’d taken to reading. ‘Is it Floodgate Street, Deritend, where they make the powder for Alfred’s Custard, which is Every Housewife’s Best Dinnertime Friend?’
The scissors paused and he felt the tinkling rush which was Ida’s laughter, although the sadness beneath it didn’t go away. No, Klade, it’s not. It’s in York. Not that it matters. It might as well be Africa for all the difference it makes …
So he sat there and the scissors snip, snipped and the walls of Africa grew flowers which were like the flowers Blossom formed in the air but yet were drawings on paper, and the shape of the window and the smells and the sounds which came through it were entirely changed. This was a quite different part of the song to any Klade had experienced. The rainy growl and rustle of something called Traffic. Many, many voices, and Ida laughed with a different voice which was still hers and stroked him with softer fingers as, one-handed now, she snipped away the golden stuff of his curls. ‘Careful, careful, or I’ll snip your ears …’ The voice was and wasn’t hers.
The snip, snip of the scissors, the feel of Ida both here and now and in a far away place called York was sweet and dark to him. Snip, snip, and the way she studied him when the scissors had stopped and his hair lay fine and fallen about him was both golden and dark. An ache came in his eyes and in his throat and his belly, and Ida was all around him, warm as the sun and cold as the moon and so big that for a moment she was like the wildest of the Shadow Ones and there was nothing in her but the song. But Klade longed for some reason to press himself against her, to feel more than the branchy touch of her hands. He envied those books—the way she pressed them to her—and wished that she was softer, lighter, more giving. Lovely though Ida was, as beautiful as were all the Chosen, he wanted her to be something else.
The scissors dropped. Well, I think that’s finished. She scooped up the papers, ran her clumpy fingers through their scatterings and then, in a sharp rush of smell and smoke, tossed them all on to the fire.
Winter came. Rain beat the windows. If he looked carefully, Klade could see the garden all the way to the shimmery dark of the woods held in every drop.
‘That’s an optical effect,’ Silus told him. ‘It’s a bending of the light.’
‘Like a mirror?’
A pause. The rain went Drip, drip, drip. ‘Ah, but you haven’t seen a mirror. We don’t have those in Einfell.’
‘But lots Outside, amid the Browns?’
The gutters chuckled. ‘That’s true, I suppose. But they’re not Browns. I thought, Klade, we’d told you this already. Master Brown is just one particular man who does some of our deliveries. Brown is also a colour, but it just happens to be his name. We call the people who live outside Einfell in towns like Bristol or Taunton Outsiders. But that’s just because they live outside Einfell and we live inside it. Do you understand?’
‘Yes. York as well. And we are the Chosen.’
Drip, drip, drip. Chuckle, chuckle, chuckle. If Klade looked hard enough at the darkening glass, he could see Silus’s face captured in it, rippled and stretched like a clouded moon. He could almost see his own. ‘That’s right. But you shouldn’t spit as you talk, Klade—I thought we’d told you that, as well.’
The raining and the dripping continued, day after day, and Ida fed the fire in the Biggest Room with wet coal, which left everything hazed and smoked, and he helped her with the cooking. Sometimes, she would grow forgetful and just stand there in the smoggy light, her song drawn down and inwards like the swirls of the smoke. He had to remind her at these times when to do things, and how to do them. She cut his hair again, and this time her song was distracted and she did snip his ear. Klade was astonished. He was Red inside, not Brown, although he knew in reality he was Chosen, and he knew by now the difference between what you really thought in your head and what you could say with your tongue. Drip, drip, drip went the rain and the gutters couldn’t stop from laughing and suddenly there was an almighty crash as the roof decided to come down the stairs and the whole place was fuller than ever with the song in creaks and moans.
Some roofers came to fix the roof. Klade, who’d read many adverts for Building Services in old copies of the Bristol Morning Post by now, was tremendously excited. He watched through the thistles on the far side of No Through Road as they lifted ladders from their van. Smoke came streaming from the things they had burning on their lips. When one was thrown away, Klade combed the wet grass. Short and wet and white and stubby—he gave it a sniff, and nodded knowledge-ably to himself, for these guildsmen were definitely Browns.
He listened to their voices, that songless song.
‘How bad can it be, eh? Triple time on a Fiveshiftday. Just a roof, innit? But did you see that one—Jesus Christ… What a dump this place is! You’d never ever believe anyone actually lived here. And them things in that fucking wood. Fucking wafting about like stray bits of fucking washing …’
‘Excuse me.’
The roofers looked down at him from their ladders, grins frozen on their faces through teeth where were even brighter and sharper than the Huntsman’s until one of them spat them out into his hand and Klade saw they were the metal things called nails.
‘I was wondering if you might not be from Frandons of Frimley, who offer Services to all Kinds of Guilds and Reasonable Prices and Free No-Obligation Quotes,’ Klade said, pleased with himself for remembering the exact advert, and for not spitting once.
‘Come again?’
‘I was—’
‘Nah. You’re one of them, aren’t you? A little fucking troll. What d’you reckon, Eddie?’
Another roofer called Eddie peered down from a new patch of slate on which he was spread-eagled with a hammer. ‘Can’t be, can he? I mean, look at him.’
‘But—see, his wrist—he’s got no Mark. Old enough for Testing as well, I’d say.’
Klade looked down as well, studying the grubby off-white stretches of flesh where the veins met his palms and then holding them up for the two roofers to see as they balanced on the dripping roof and the winter sky poured in around them.
‘Or maybe it’s true. You know—all them tales. The bastard changelings really do steal our fucking babies. Just you wait ‘till I tell our Shirl…’
The men, turning away from Klade, went back to their work up amid the sky, and shouted at him soon after to get out of the way, you fucking freak, because it’s not safe down there. But their left wrists, Klade had noticed, all had the same small wound on their insides as if they’d all somehow caught themselves when they were cutting their hair or hammering. So, he noticed later on, did Brown and the other delivery men. He experimented with the same effect himself, Snip snip and some more of the fucking red came out of him, and Silus found him and spat all over his face as he told him he should never, ever, do that again, nor use that sort of language. He sent him away, and then came looking for him later to say he was sorry and that he sometimes forgot just how awkward things were.
‘The Outsiders,’ he said, ‘they have this Mark on their wrist which shows they’re not Chosen. It’s something we don’t have—or that we lose. And they don’t call us the Chosen, Klade. They have bad words for us. Words like the ones you were using. Troll and monster and sometimes—although this is not quite so bad; there are graduations even in these things—changeling. They fear us, and that’s why the roofers talked to you in the way they did.’
‘This Mark—where’s it from?’
A long pause. The song was oddly quiet and was mostly that new-roof smell, which was cut wood and raw stone. ‘The Mark comes from aether, Klade. It’s the same thing which makes us Chosen.’
‘What’s aether like? Is it like electricity?’
Silus considered this. The angles of his face were as smooth as a plate. ‘It’s best if I show you all the things that aether isn’t before I help you to understand what it is. After all, it’s time you learnt a little more about the world …’
Silus showed him the things called maps, which Klade had seen before in the adverts in newspapers—How To Find Our Showroom—but had never really understood. The blue, here, was water, and there was so, so much of it, and the green—and, yes, Klade, the brown as well—that was land. Klade touched his finger to the place to which Silus’s black nail had pointed, which was Einfell, then twisted his gaze out of the window and up past the tapping beech tree to see if he could see it coming down out of the clouds. Silus laughed at that. Sometimes, Klade …
Klade came to love maps. The blue water you couldn’t drink because there was so much salt in it. He liked the ones best of all where the whole country they lived in, which was called England, was made tiny. He loved Africa, which was dark in its heart, yet hot and bright under a bigger sun. The people were mostly brown there as well—but here, Klade, you’re getting confused. And remember when you asked about electricity, and I told you there wasn’t any here in Einfell?
It was a warmer day, and the study window was open and the song was full of birds nesting and the moss which was growing over the new bit of roof. Silus gave a chuckling sigh. His eyes brightened.
‘This, Klade, is the first thing I was shown when I was apprenticed as an electrician. Despite all that’s since happened, I still remember it now.’ He took out a rod of something he called amber, which was beautiful and heavy, and rubbed it whisperingly with a fabric he termed silk. ‘Now. Watch what happens when I pass it over these scraps of paper …’
Klade gasped in wonder. They lifted and danced like snowflakes.
He tried walking the other way down No Through Road where thin trees grew up through slabs and there were fallen things called lampposts. He felt all the life and colour seeping from him until he saw in the downhill distance a fence fierce with firethorn and the hills of Outside rolling beyond in cloudy haze, and strung with marching poles and lines as if the world were sewn up and would otherwise fall apart. He stood there, breathless. The song was scarcely in him, and he pitied these greys, these browns, these Outsiders, for having to live in this empty world which they had made. Pitied, but was also fascinated.
There was a Meeting Place which lay on the far side of the woods. It was a newsprint-before-the-mouse-pee-had-got-to-it sort of place, grey and flat and surrounded by a wide space of lawn which the Master Mower, who was generally best avoided, came out to cut on summer twilights, hands which weren’t hands spinning like the webs of insects in the trembling dusk. The song here was like the passage of water in winter when ice grew across the Impassable Stream, and Klade was borne on its arms as he stepped inside and smelled the Meeting Place smell, which was overpowering, and yet no smell at all. Shivery with excitement, he clattered along the corridors.
Sometimes, people were brought to the Meeting Place—Chosen or Outsiders, Klade; these things don’t always matter. But, always, they were in Some Bad Way. Once, there was a thing there called a baby, which was like the cats having kittens, which an Outsider had left at the gate. It spoiled the clean Meeting Place corridors with its songless mewing and off-sweet smell. Klade, looking at it, prodding when it stopped squawking until it started again, twisted it around by the wrist to see if it was Chosen. He still wasn’t sure. But he didn’t like the way so many of the Chosen crowded around it: how even the Huntsman brought lumps of meat which he laid red-blue and bleeding on the Meeting Place front step to be found there in the mornings, and which Ida told him to get rid of and wash away. He didn’t like the way how even the song from the Shadow Ones in the deepest part of the wood changed.
The baby had a face which was drawn up with fleshy webbing and only one eye through which it didn’t seem able to see. That in itself, Klade, doesn’t mean it’s Chosen. Some things just didn’t come out right, which was like the kittens again which Silus collected in a bag to drop into the Ironmasters’ butts because that was a mercy. The baby didn’t last long either, which was at least something, although Silus grew as cross with Klade when he said this as if he’d used words like cunt or witch or monster or you bastard fucking changeling.
Then came what Klade thought of as the Diving Man. From what he’d glimpsed of him, he looked like a picture he’d seen in the Bristol Morning Telegraph of a guildsman dressed in a huge diving suit topped with a portholed brass helmet, although the outfit had become part of the Diving Man, so that he seemed to have been made from rubberised canvas and brass and glass and bloody flesh and loops of strappy leather. The Diving Man, Klade learned, was nothing to do with the sea and had in fact been some kind of aether worker. He’d come from a nearby place called Invercombe, where so much of the stuff had got into him that he was bright at night and dark in the day, which was called a wyreglow. Klade was warned on no account to go near him—You most of all, Klade—but he crept up to the Meeting Place anyway, and peered through a gap in the door into the shuddering gloom where the Diving Man lay on his bed dripping and gasping through his porthole face as Blossom tried to sing his pain away. Dark and light tendrils of gas like bits of the Shadow Ones floated around him.
Klade was happy when the Diving Man left them to lie under the earth and the Meeting Place went back to its old, empty ways. There was a sense of lost purpose along its corridors which reminded him of the announcements he found in newspapers for Guild Open Days which he now knew from the dates had taken place long ago. He came often to wander there when he was sure no one else was about, and brought with him the new tinned drinks of which he was growing especially fond and was always asking Master Brown to bring in his van. They were called Sweetness, which was exactly what they were, and they were Made With Bittersweet which was a Product For A New Age. There was Ripe Raspberry and there was Honey Orange and there was Candy Apple and there was Mellow Tonic, and the lists of their ingredients in tiny print were something Klade loved to read as he sat in the corridors with his back against the cold white walls. He wandered afterwards with their sweet secret bitterness still filling his mouth through rooms dedicated to the sad Ages when the Chosen were chained and imprisoned and marked with a cross and a big letter C. He found the mottled prints and photographs of the Chosen in all their marvellous variety both comforting and fascinating. He experimented, with a puzzled excitement which reminded him of the feeling he got when he looked at the adverts for Hygienic Suspenders and Stays, with closing the creaky manacles around his ankles and wrists, although they were mostly so big they simply fell off him.
Then more Outsiders were coming, for their own Outsider reasons, and in that sudden, inexplicable Outsider way. And no, Klade, they’re not bringing any produce—least of all those blessed tins. And they’re not in Some Bad Way, either. Sometimes, they’re like us and they come here because they want to say hello just as you might go to visit the Ironmasters. These particular Outsiders were from York, which Klade had discovered wasn’t in Africa at all, but nevertheless struck him as a coincidence which he wanted to share with Ida until he felt the sad turbulence of her song and smelled the charcoal wetness of her face.
‘You should stay down at this end of the Meeting Place,’ Silus told him. ‘I want you well out of the way when they come.’
‘Why’s that—is it because they think we’re goblins and steal their babies although in fact they simply leave them at our gates?’
Silus’s breathing lisped and rasped. His eyes settled like a slow fog on Klade. I can’t get angry with you now. Please, just do as I say …
By now, Klade knew the doorways to slip behind and the corridors to duck along. Windows, especially, to peer through. And here they came. Outsiders. Big ones and little ones, with big and little voices and not a trace of the song, and holding on to each other as if they could scarcely see or had lost their way.
‘Come on, Stan. You said you would.’
‘Some bloody way to spend a Noshiftday.’
And here was Silus and here was Ida as well, fully dressed up in their big green cloaks and their hoods up so you could scarcely see them as if they were ashamed of being Chosen.
The one called Stan let out a barking moan. He said, ‘Jesus, Ida.’ Klade had a rough idea who Jesus was—he was dead, and important—and he knew his name was not a word you should use in that way.
I don’t know what to say. Were you my children—you’re so grown! Were you ever really mine? Is that you, Terry—whatever happened to your golden curls …
‘Christ, don’t do that—talking in my head!’
It’s all I can do. I have no—
Klade was surprised when Stan covered his ears with his hands against Ida’s song. Doing that didn’t even work very well with ordinary sounds, and it was obvious it wouldn’t stop Ida talking to you. But the whole scene went on surprisingly long, with a large amount of sobbing and howling from the Outsiders who were worse than the Farmers at milking time in the sounds they made. Klade didn’t particularly like these Outsiders—not with the way they were making Ida feel and behave. Silus’s lisp was getting worse than ever as well as he tried to Calm Things Down and created nothing but hiss and spray.
The Outsider called Stan eventually stumbled out of the Meeting Place into the grey light of the Master Mower’s fine lawn. Klade, curious, followed him through a side door and watched from around a corner as he wiped his face and looked across at the woods as if they were something terrible, although there would be no sign of the Shadow Ones or the Huntsman at this time of day. Then Stan made another barking sound and started laboriously coughing up lots of the stuff which was inside him, all of which struck Klade as surprisingly copious and colourful, considering little globs of brown were all Master Brown ever made.
Stan finished and wiped his mouth. He checked the thing on his wrist just below his Mark, which Klade knew was called a wristwatch, and his gaze trailed back towards the main door of the Meeting Place, then settled on Klade.
Klade just stood there. Stan just stood there for a while as well, his mouth going loose and tight and gulping like the fish in the Impassable Stream, and his face turning even more blotchy white.
‘Sweet Elder—this place is even worse than I thought…’ Stan coughed again, staggering away from Klade and spitting and hawking. Then he went back in through the shining doors of the Meeting Place, and Klade hid—properly this time—and then eventually he and the other Outsiders went away. This wasn’t the first occasion Klade had had a bad experience with Outsiders. He already knew that whatever it was about the Chosen which made them react was something which he seemed to have strongest of all; stronger than the Master Mower, even, which was saying something. Normally, he wasn’t bothered, not even by the things Master Brown said to him as long as he brought him his tins of Sweetness, but today he was upset in a way he couldn’t explain. Ida came to him as he sat on the empty edge of the desk in the furthest of the Meeting Place’s rooms, kicking the boomy metal of a filing cabinet. Her mood was wet and her mood was grey; the sadness leaking out of her like rain from the sky.
I’m so, so sorry. People can be so hurtful. In a sense, Einfell really is a haven—
‘Why else would we live here?’
He gave the filing cabinet another booming kick.
We all start as Outsiders, Klade. Being Chosen—it’s being caught in a spell.
Klade nodded. Boom, Boom went the filing cabinet with a hollowing of the song which was just how he felt. Boom. He knew all these things which Ida was trying to tell him. Boom. He stared at the wall. There were photographs there—but in this particular room they were not of the Chosen but of Einfell’s so-called benefactors and friends. Men and women. Guildsmen and mistresses. Ladies and gentlemen. Stan and Eddie and Mum and Terry. All those names they gave themselves. Fuck the fucking bastard cunting lot of them.
When you came here, Klade. When we first brought you here, we thought—
‘Don’t tell me! I don’t ever want to know.’
But—
‘—NO!’
Even as the afternoon was deepening, it remained bright in this room, with the windows kept clean here and the glass sheets of the picture frames shining so strongly that they washed away the photographs which lay inside in the pureness of their light. Klade studied each one, and the face in the glass which blinked and flinched in surprise was that of an Outsider, and was always the same.
Klade was growing. Klade, in his own different way, was changing as well. He helped Master Brown unload each shifterm’s produce mostly unaided, and stacked it himself in the so-called New Barn where the cats kept the rats away. Master Brown, whose first name was Abner, talked to him more easily now, and spat less often, even though he still chewed his wads of tobacco, which he told Klade was a filthy habit he should never acquire. Klade took a hand now in deciding what was ordered, especially the new promotions and the tins of Sweetness in all their surprising new flavours.
‘It’s all right,’ he would say when he saw a new face climbing from a van or wagon as he crossed the Fold Yard, for he’d now learned how to distinguish one Outsider from another with almost complete accuracy, ‘I’m really not what you think …’ He’d practised and refined that phrase and the smile he put on with it in the glass of the Meeting Place’s picture frames. He’d learned, in these moments of meeting and interaction, how to make the song fall quiet within him so as not to become distracted. For Klade understood now that he wasn’t like the Diving Man, who had been poisoned by aether, but that he was like that baby which had mewed and stank. Not that he’d ever been in A Bad Way, but he’d been left by his mother in some Bristol institution, which struck him as pretty much the same as being dumped at Einfell’s gates.
Sometimes, Silus or one of the other Chosen went Outside. After all, it was only a matter of climbing into the shining green wagon and hooking up the fine horses the Farmers tended. Still, it was a surprise to Klade when Silus came to him one morning, dressed in his best grey cloak, and announced that it was time that Klade also went.
‘Why?’
Silus made a sound which approximated to laughter. After all the newspapers you read, Klade!’ I’d have thought you’d have been desperate… ‘You should wear this.’ Silus was holding out in his white hands another cloak.
‘But won’t I… ? I mean—how will they … ?’
‘The thing is, you’re with me, Klade.’ You’ve seen how people react…
The horses were already waiting in the Fold Yard, and Klade was glad of his cloak as the carriage started moving and bits of Einfell began sliding away. Past the edges of the wood, which looked dark and homely and strange. Across the lawn, with the Meeting Place afloat at its green centre. Silus talked to the horses. His song was absorbed and strange.
‘Will you get those gates for me, Klade. You just lift that latch.’
Rusty metal complained. A wonder, really, that he’d never thought to do this thing himself. Then he was back in the carriage, and they were Outside. The hedges were green, and the road was long and flat. There were fields. Beyond, and sometimes closer, lay the neatly ridged backs of houses. A dog came scrabbling beneath a wooden gate. It was the first dog, out of the pages of books and Ida’s thought imaginings, which Klade had ever seen.
On that first and his other subsequent journeys Outside, Klade was struck just how similar everything was. How one field was square, and then so was the next. He wondered how the Outsiders understood which house to go in at night when they wanted to sleep, and how Silus knew which turn to take along these daunting lanes. The song had drained, was almost gone, and the silence was clamorous with the noise of the horses and the rattle of the carriage. Breath and heartbeat, the feel of his buttocks against the bench and his tongue lying trapped and songless in his mouth, and the dim focus of Silus as he steered. Other carriages now. Whole clusters of houses, their chimneys straight, not beckoning, their gardens like tiny fragments of field, and just as square. Windows as well, glass eyes staring. Some Outsiders looked and some didn’t, Klade noticed, as their carriage went by. Some twisted their heads and spat like Abner Brown and others pulled the little Outsiders to them and made shapes with their red mouths and signs across their chests.
There were, Klade discovered, snatches of the song to be heard Outside. One of the first came when they passed a forge, which was recognisable from its smoke and banging, and then from the salty singing of men—who were ironmasters, and yet had fleshy Outsider faces and hands. Klade felt a homesick ache. Then there came trills and cascades of other notes, abrupt and surprising, from places called guildhalls, and from the bustle of other workshops and mills and factories, and then as their carriage passed under the black lines which looped here and there on the long fingers of poles, where it was whispering and intense. Klade cocked his head and brightened as he saw another line knitting the space between treetops and sky. But the song here was different. Scarcely a song at all, but nevertheless surging pale and familiar. The hairs on his hand prickled. There were, he had learned, two types of pylon. There were those of the Telegraphers which bore messages, and those of the Electricians which bore electricity, and both were the pride and the emblem of their separate guild.
They reached Bristol. The song here was in the buildings as well, if buildings was what they were, for, torn out of the newsprint, unflattened and daubed with dimension and colour, they were extraordinary beyond Klade’s imaginings. And it was joined by shouting tumults of ordinary sound and guild-house bells. Outsiders were teeming here like woodlice, up and down the streets and in and out of the traffic, within which their small carriage was indistinguishably lost.
Things to be done that first time Klade went Outside on what Silus called Business, which, it transpired, involved settling the many bills which Einfell’s running of incurred and arranging for the organisation of the funds which had been established at the start of this Age. Klade learned how to brace himself as he stepped from their carriage, and remembered to pull up his hood. Cold shock of the pavement. Bodies, elbows and smells. Words hawked to the pavement by his feet in shining gobs. Troll. Bastard. Changeling. As he stood waiting for Silus to arrange for the keeping of their horses, Klade leaned to look above at the looping lines, both telephone and electric, at the advertisements from his newspapers made elephantine. Snowberry Sweetness. Mistress Bessie’s Water-Apple Pie. Then dark offices, walls and ceilings laden with ornament, and the song sometimes heavy and sometimes dim in the smoke-hung air as Outsiders called accountants consulted machines which were both far off and near and were called reckoning engines, which, Klade surmised, were quite different to the engine which drove Abner Brown’s van. In time, there were many things in this Outsider world which he came to understand. The gaze of the men behind desks which lingered on him when he wasn’t looking, then scurried away when he did. Tremble in the hands as they offered Silus a pen to sign. The breathing through the nose as if there was something bad they couldn’t resist smelling. Words muttered more quietly as they were leaving than they were spat on the street, but the same words nonetheless.
Fuck
Changeling
Witch
Jesus
The Lord Blood Elder
Troll
Silus took Klade to Clifton Dam. Here, the song was joined; aether and electricity—and water as well. As they stood on abutments high above the city, it arched out in streaming jets to fall far into the distant gorge. For long moments as he stood there, Klade didn’t feel lonely. The song here was almost as strong as in Einfell, but purer, sleeker, and the pylons marched off across the hillsides and his mind journeyed with them and his skin tingled in the charged, misty air. Silus was involved in debate over crackling sheets of plans, and the guildsmen were almost bowing close to him and had nearly lost the panic in their eyes. Klade wandered off along the thrumming gantry. He let his fingers stroke dewed loops of pipe above the marvellous drop. He even let his hood slip a little from his face as he looked down.
‘Hey, if it isn’t the freak-face.’
‘Freakiest thing about him is, he looks normal.’
‘Wonder if he’s got a dick, though.’
‘Did you see the other one. Face like a skull with the eyes still in it.’
‘Old Manny’s been of a tremble all morning.’
Klade turned to the source of these comments. ‘It’s all right. I’m not really what you—’
‘Can talk as well.’
‘Clattery pissings, I’d say.’
‘What sort of accent do you call that, mate?’
Two young Outsiders. Men—lads, really, for Klade could now tell these things—with sleeves rolled and their bodies slung with toolbelts. One had a cigarette behind his ear, and the other’s face was somewhat disfigured by red eruptions—although he certainly wasn’t Chosen. Klade could smell their flecky, meaty, Outsider breath on his face. He took a step back. The rail of the gantry nudged cold against him.
Fingers plucked his cloak. Klade was clothed underneath, but he felt naked.
‘Maybe he has got a dick—’
‘Wouldn’t know how to use it.’ The hand which had been tugging at his cloak made a downwards swoop. Its fingers tightened around a surprising part of Klade’s anatomy and gave a testing squeeze. ‘Poor bastard.’
‘Maybe we should shock him. See how many volts …’
‘Easier still. Let’s just have him over the edge.’
‘Upsadaisy.’
‘Bloody heavy for something made of fairy wishes.’
The sense of being physically surrounded by Outsider flesh was so strange to Klade that he was slow to realise that his feet were no longer on the gantry and that its rail was slipping beneath him. Soon, he was nearly hanging in space, although the hand which was no longer holding his crotch had left such a strong impression there that he could still feel it. He glimpsed the whole side of the dam, its marvellous walls which were the song made concrete, that endlessly falling water, and the places far below were dimpled and spumed. The fact was, it all felt oddly pleasant, and it was with a sense of regret that he heard shouts, and was jarringly dropped against the gantry. The lads dusted him down. With grins, they straightened his cloak. Just a bit of fun and games. No need to get upset. But on the way back to Einfell, Klade thought that Silus really did look as fearsome as the Outsiders sometimes muttered he did. He cracked the reins, was angry with the horses.
Klade made sure now that he received the most up-to-date papers: the Bristol Morning Post and the Evening Telegraph or the London Times, or the plain old Taunton Advertiser if there was nothing else. He read them top to bottom, main headline to shipping news. In many ways, he came to feel he could understand the world of Outside far better through newsprint than he could when he was actually in it.
‘You really shouldn’t be buying that stuff,’ Abner Brown told him one day out in the Fold Yard as a new generation of cats swirled around his legs and Klade carried off a two-dozen box of the latest flavour of Sweetness, which was Blackcurrant Dream, which he could almost taste already even though he had never tried it. ‘Nothing but chemicals—it’s doing good Bristolians and the sugar estates in the Fortunate Isles out of a job.’
By the time Klade had returned from the barn to pick up the next box, he’d already decided that it would be useless pointing out to Abner that he should simply cease selling the stuff if he objected to it. Outsiders were almost like the Chosen in their inability to see the obvious, and he knew what Abner and the other tradesmen’s reaction was when he ventured an opinion which didn’t support theirs. After all, he was just some changeling, and all the more freakish for looking like an Outsider—Will you listen to the child fucking goblin—even if he was Klade.
But still, it remained obvious to him. Even Silus had commented that the trust funds which had been set up on Einfell’s founding were no longer producing the income they once had. Money, to Klade, was a simple concept, based on the logic of adding one pound to another—or not, as the case might be. He understood about falling share prices as well, and also that if there was less profit people would inevitably be paid less, and would thus have less to spend, which was what the editorials in the Bristol Morning Post called a vicious circle. He saw the way things were going in the fact that Abner’s van had been crudely repainted to read Foresters’ Fine Supplies and then sanded off shortly afterwards so it didn’t say a thing. He saw it in Silus’s hissing complaints about making ends meet.
Now, when Silus went off to Bristol, Klade made himself scarce. Klade was far happier, he told himself, sorting supplies and taking them—the necessary food and odder requests—to the places in Einfell where the more ghostly and solitary of the Chosen dwelt. Sunny days or wet, he was like the Huntsman with his prey, leaving things on stained window ledges to be snatched away by approximations of limbs and hands, or at the edges of the woods through which the Shadow Ones swept and moaned like plays of stormy sunlight. Klade whistled to himself, which was something none of the other Chosen could do. Why, after all, would he need to go Outside, when he already knew so much more about it than the Outsiders did themselves? He was like the birds which looked down from those bird’s-eye views in advertisements of Our Factory with engraved chimneys swirling; he was like God the Elder who was supposed to hover somewhere far above the world’s maps. Klade whistled to himself, and walked on, entirely unafraid. And all the Chosen knew who was passing; even the wildest of the Shadow Ones changed their song. After all, he was unique. He was Klade.
Sometimes, a new one of the Chosen arrived. Some were so changed that they joined the Shadow Ones in the woods, or found a place in the Far Village. Others might stay in a Meeting Place room for a while to die there, just as the Diving Man had, whilst Blossom sang over them until they came to the end of their pain. But Fay was nothing like the Diving Man, nor particularly like any of the other Chosen, who were all as uniquely different as the spell which had caused them to become what they were. She wandered the landscape for some shifterms, dragging what remained of the ragged taffeta dress she’d been brought in until Silus sent Klade with something better.
‘Here you are …’
She jumped at his presence as if startled, even though she’d been watching him come through the dusk across the thistle fields as she crouched at the woods’ moss-hung edges.
‘I was sent to bring you these.’
She snatched them, sniffed them, backed away into the gloom, then edged forward and seemed at last to properly regard him with her frantic trapped-bird eyes.
Klade was unused to judging the Chosen by how they looked, but nevertheless the appearance of Fay was of interest to him. What little she wore could have been from a rain-stained advert for Ladies Particulars even if her neck and shoulders and arms and what might have been her bosom were joined in one pyramidal and unbreaking slope which peaked into a ridged crest which poked through the remains of her hair. Her hands, in comparison, were tiny, and her skin swirled, changed, darkened, beneath its moss and mud stains. Like the twilight, it had no particular shade. Perhaps she was destined to soon join the Shadow Ones, living out here in the cold and the rain. Perhaps she would die. But he’d brought some food along, a sticky sea-potato tinned in Taman’s Ketchup, Best Of All Brands. He held it out.
‘You’re to—’
Snatching, she scuttled off between the trees.
But she returned, next evening, to the same spot. And the next.
‘Where is this place? Hades?’
‘It’s called Einfell. Surely you’ve heard of it?’
Fay chewed loosely at another sea-potato and picked the dropped bits off herself with her tiny, filthy hands. The clothes she’d put on, the old ones and the extra ones, scarcely covered her. Even by Chosen standards, he saw that she was different to how he was between the legs.
‘Can you speak without talking?’
Full-mouthed, Fay shook her head. I don’t understand … Some never did. Ida said remembering—or not remembering—was the hardest thing of all for the Chosen. Day by day, he brought things to the place by the edge of the woods which Fay seemed to have made her own. Bits of blanket from the charity wagon. Corrugated iron and fencepost to keep out some of the rain. Nails to fix them with. He whistled as he hammered once they were out of his teeth. The bluebells were coming up in the woods behind her. It would soon be summer.
‘I used to live in Bristol,’ she told him, wiser and more confident now as they squatted in the low and rattly space he had made.
‘Can you show me?’
Fay reached a tiny hand over the mossy blanket. Her skin swirled. She touched him. He saw a house squashed between many others, filled with flames and pipesmoke and a sweet, talcumy smell. There were vases on a window ledge, and stairs covered in carpet, and no smell of rot. The evening after, she showed him again. Klade came to see, Fay helped him see, a Bristol which was brighter than the newspapers, and setter than the place he’d seen on his journeys Outside with Silus. Yes, he much preferred this place. In the Evening Telegraph now, there was Unrest, there were Lock Outs, there were Trials, there were Marches. There were disputes in the Editorials and the Letters Pages over the question of bonding, which some called slavery. But in the Bristol Fay took him to through the touch of her swirling fingers, there were no debates—there were only sunlit tram rides and cold drinks in the beer gardens of the Green Lattis. There were only the ships moored at Saint Mary’s Quay in fluttering forests and there was only Goram Fair, and candyfloss, which filled Klade’s mouth although it was something he had never tasted, and was almost better than Sweetness itself.
Yes…
Searching the barns and derelict houses for more things to make Fay’s spot more habitable as the thistle fields browned, Klade came to the place at the end of No Through Road where he had once stood, and gazed Outside. Just hills and trees and a hint of what might have been sea in the distance. Nothing had changed but the season’s light and the shapes of the clouds. Those telephone lines swooped so close to Einfell’s firethorned fence that they might have been considering entering. Silus had told him that they once had, and did so still by some subterranean route to an abandoned booth in the woods. If he stood close enough, he could even feel and hear their characteristic wheeze, which was like a door’s distant creaking. He laughed out loud, to think of the place the world might become, if Outside and Einfell were united, just as they were inside the dreams Fay brought him.
‘Are you sure, Klade,’ Silus asked him, ‘that you’re not bothering her?’
You must remember, Ida said, that memories are difficult.
And some greater doubt was also there, which they disguised from him even within the transparency of their song. But Klade was helping Fay relive her life, which was surely what she needed. He was her guide, and she was his. Picnics and the best Nailsea cider. Lanterns strung over the Green beneath the careering stars swaying with the brassy thump of the oompah band.
It was full summer and beyond. Whistling, a new piece of canvas sheeting tucked underarm as waterproofing for whenever it finally rained, Klade crossed the shimmering fields and rapped on the corrugations of Fay’s shelter. Not that he needed to, for she always squatted in this dark place which he had made for her beside the summer woods. She didn’t seem to notice the heat, any more than she noticed the smell.
‘Silus says you should move with us into the Big House. There are plenty of spare rooms.’
I’m still not sure …
Fay shuffled and scratched. More than with any of the other Chosen, there was the Fay of the song to Klade now, and then there was the real Fay. The two in his mind were almost entirely separate. Yet at the same time, under this baking iron roof, he could still see almost the young Outsider woman she had once been. In the shape of those hands. In the shadow slope of her chest and thighs. Her flesh swirled, and she brought dreams when she touched him, but Klade was more and more conscious that Fay had once been, and partly still was, a woman.
You look …
She touched his face, leaning forwards.
Human …
She’d asked him before for a mirror, but there were no mirrors in Einfell apart from the polished glass picture frames in the Meeting Place, which Klade didn’t need Silus to warn him that Fay was best kept away from.
‘I used to think I was a Brown.’
Brown? No, Klade, you’re pale, you’re dark …
Her hot fingers traced his hair, his lips, his sweat-damp cheeks. Wonderingly, they shaped his ears. His heard himself give a low chuckle. ‘Brown was just something I once thought. It’s hard to explain …’
Still, the cloudy fingers explored. Grasshoppers chirruped outside and the tin heat bore down, but Klade felt cold and sad and warm. The feeling reminded him somewhat of the times when Ida had cut his hair. There was that same delicious sense of being the focus of the song, but there was something stronger as well. Sour honey taste of bittersweet in his mouth and a straining in his groin. He laughed again, his voice high. He had to pull away.
I’m sorry …
‘No, Fay. Don’t be. It’s me.’ My voice—my body. I’m changing as well.
But I have an idea.
‘Oh?’ A tremor in his voice. ‘What?’
You can be my mirror, Klade.
And she reached out to him again, and Klade’s eyes unsaw the toadish creature squatting before him in the noon-lit shadows of her fetid lair. Instead, framed in gilt, far brighter and more real than anything he had ever witnessed, sat a young Outsider—a woman, with long tresses of ebony hair which she was combing with a shining silver brush and humming as she did so through red lips which smiled a secret smile; amused as only such lips could be at all the happy foolishness of the world. Bare at the shoulders. A fire-lit shine to her breasts. Perhaps she was wearing something below the mirror’s reach. Perhaps not. She would have been perfect, Klade decided, either way.
The hot stink and the shambles of the place beside the woods.
Fay had drawn back.
That was me.
Silus expressed surprise when Klade insisted that he wanted to visit Outside again. I thought you’d lost interest… Then Klade explained what it was that he wanted to see, and all Silus’s surprise was gone. But he was still resistant to the idea.
‘You read the papers, Klade. Don’t you know Bristol isn’t that safe nowadays?’
‘Half a million people live there. How unsafe can it be?’
‘I’m not even sure that the place we brought you from is still there, Klade. Nor that we’d be welcome.’
‘Haven’t you always told me that it’s important for the Chosen to try to understand what they were?’
Silus inclined his head at that, but not with any particular acceptance. There was a wordless weariness, a resignation, to this part of the song. But still, he agreed. Ida’s flesh had dried out and stiffened like pinecones in this heat, and Klade could feel her pain back in the Big House as the Farmers brought the horses and their meticulously polished wagon into the yard. The cloak he’d worn before was now too small for him, and this bigger one felt itchy and odd. Why should he have to hide himself, when he was Klade, and it was a warm day, too close for these thick clothes, and hard even to breathe?
The smell of leather and horses. The road’s hot tar. The air was turbid even as they passed the songless fields, and swirled dark with the sourness of industry as they approached the city. Bristol, today, truly was the non-colour of newsprint. Silus’s ongoing song of regret was part of this metropolis as well, unravelling like the gutters and the limp lines of washing. The sun dimmed with a smell like hair cast upon a fire. Shouting people swept by, and the sides of the carriage were rocked and banged. Then uniformed men were standing in the middle of the road where smoke uncurled.
‘Whoa! What have we got here—fairies! You really should go back, mate. Can’t be responsible for freaks.’
But Silus was insistent. With a songless glace towards Klade, they moved around the barricade as the horses tugged unevenly across fallen glass and banners. Down a side street, several buildings were in flame and someone was swinging by their neck from one of the lampposts. The song of the city today was darkly shapeless.
They climbed into quieter streets where, amazingly, the sun came out. There were gardens now and glimpses of Bristol below in a swoon of fumes.
‘This is it, Klade.’ Silus wiped his raw wet lips. ‘This is the place you said you wanted to see.’
The horses were calmer now, but Silus’s feelings were infectious even when he did his best to disguise them, and Klade could tell as they climbed down that he was afraid. But this was such a peaceful place. There was a long wall with spikes of rosebush showing over it, a rusted wrought-iron gate with the sign which spelled, in twists of metal and a few caught leaves, St Alphage’s Refuge for Distressed Guildswomen.
‘It’s never been in the newspapers. It’s not that sort of place. Klade.’
The path to the house was overgrown with spillages of sallow and lavender and the windows were shuttered. It had never struck him before that there were many different qualities to the songless silence of Outside, but this one spoke of long emptiness. And the gate was chained and sealed with the kind of device Klade knew would hurt him with a spell if he tried to open it. Whatever business this place had been engaged in had ceased many years before.
‘You didn’t know it had closed?’
‘We never kept in touch. It was an arrangement, Klade—an agreement.’
‘How convenient.’
‘It wasn’t like that. Girls used to go to Alfies—’
‘Alfies?’
‘That was what people used to call this place. Girls, women, used to come here if they were expecting a baby which they didn’t feel they could raise. You can’t imagine how difficult the Outsiders make life for someone who has a child outside marriage. Usually, the children were adopted by what is termed good families. Always, and as with you, their origins were kept rigorously secret. There was nothing disreputable about the place—at least not outwardly.’
‘My mother came here to have me? What was her name?’
‘I don’t know, Klade. The whole point of Alfies is—was—that the child was given a new start.’ The slate wiped clean. ‘I think she was a maid working at a place called Invercombe. I’m not entirely sure. But your father was certainly much more highly guilded.’
‘They abandoned me?’
‘I don’t know. It’s quite possible they both imagine you’re dead, if they know you exist at all…’ Alfies was a place of secrets, Klade.
‘And I’m one of them?’
I suppose you could say that…
Beyond the house, the grainy bowl of Bristol expanded and fell in shimmers of smog. This was so, so far from the city of Fay’s dreams.
‘Something happened long ago, Klade. Between me and a woman. A greatgrandmistress. I should never—should never have allowed myself to get involved with her. But I did. I did things, Klade, which were wrong. I betrayed the people who trusted and needed me most of all. Becoming Chosen changes many things, but it can’t change regret. And when Alice Meynell came to me again, when she came to us, at Einfell, I found that I was still in her debt, despite all that she had done to me.’
Through Silus’s gaze, this woman, Alice Meynell, smiled a knowing smile at Klade with eyes which were both bright blue and colourless.
‘She asked that we adopt you, Klade. I think you were the child of her son, who was called Ralph and had been ill for some years. And we really had no choice. The Chosen aren’t powerful, Klade, and the settlement she gave us was generous. The high-guilded are their own kind of Chosen, Klade. You can’t possibly fight them …’
Klade nodded. The world he had come from was like this city which roiled and burned in his throat. It was browned newsprint and the burrowings of unwritten things which happened beneath the pages like the bad words he’d taught himself not to think. Unwanted offspring—bastard; and wasn’t that the real meaning of the word? Stupid, really, to have expected anything else. The Chosen were as blind as the Outsiders.
I’m sorry, Klade. I should never…
They climbed back into the carriage and drove back through Bristol. One of the sugar factories had gone up in flames, and Klade’s throat was dry, his eyes ached.
‘I always thought it was a lie,’ he said, ‘when the Outsiders said you stole their babies. Now, what am I supposed to think?’
Back at Einfell, Klade slumped down in the hot haze of the barn. The smell of Bristol’s burning was still on his cloak. He threw it off and stared at the boxes of stores. He read their comforting tales—addresses of factories and competition medals—as he experimented with varieties of ways of expressing his situation until he’d finally boiled it down to its essential dregs. You’re the unwanted child of some nameless maid, Klade. You’re sired, Klade, by some guildsman who probably doesn’t even know you were born. All these years, he’d probably been wiser than he’d thought in accepting Silus’s wariness. Lies weren’t something which existed in Einfell, but then neither was the truth. The cats came prowling and purring around him. Stroking them absently, he felt the dig of their claws.
Reaching for the tin opener he kept in here, he levered triangular holes into the top of a tin of Cherry Cheer. The fluid was salt-warm as pebbles on the bed of a dry stream until the sweetness of it finally kicked in as it gushed over his teeth and tongue. He sucked a dribble from the corner of his mouth, and ran his finger around the rim of the tin and offered it to the nearest malnourished tabby, which licked it all away with precise, tickly roughness. He tried to remember the names Silus had used. Alice-something, he’d said. Meynell, wasn’t it? Which meant that she was his grandmother, although Silus had danced lightly around the subject as if he’d feared that he might fall through into something else entirely if he settled on it for too long. But she was high-guilded; one of those faces you saw in the Society Pages. Alice Meynell. It almost sounded familiar. That smile, that face, and her son, whose name was perhaps Ralph, and who’d possibly been staying in a house called Invercombe, and who’d impregnated a nameless maid. Klade found another tin of Ripe Raspberry and the kittens swarmed needily around it as he drank.
He’d noticed before that one of the pleasing contradictions of drinking Sweetness was that it made you feel more thirsty. Previously, he’d always been too frugal to succumb, but he was in a reckless mood on this late, hot afternoon. The bright tops of the tins flashed cool and enticing, and there was nothing he could do now but puncture them and lift their warm metal lips to this mouth. Klade’s lips were gummed. He belched. The cats crowded around him in their fur heat. Yes. He was Klade, and he was the song. Finally, the tins emptied and his throat raging, he stumbled from the barn. The sky was the colour of Blackcurrant Dream, with clouds of Fizzing Lemon stranded around the sunset. He wandered on up No Through Road. He was the song and the Sweetness and the light. He was bittersweet itself, and he’d have whistled if his lips weren’t so sticky. He crossed the thistle fields where the air mazed with late insects and swallows. He rapped, tum-ti-tum, on Fay’s corrugated roof, then squat-walked his way inside.
As always, a darkening concentration of the sheeny dusk, she was there.
‘I’ve been Outside, Fay. I tried to find out how I became.’
She scratched, stirred.
‘I’ve been to the place Silus calls Bristol. Although I much prefer the city you take me to.’
What are you, then, Klade?
‘I’m a story no one seems to be bothered to know the whole of—or is too ashamed. I came as a baby from somewhere called Allies.’
Alfies …
‘You’ve heard of it?’
It was the place our schoolmistresses said we might go to if we didn’t behave. I didn’t believe it was real, though. Any more than I really believed in Einfell, or Hades …
‘And here we are.’
I’m sorry, Klade.
‘No.’ He shook his head. Bastard fucking changeling fairy. ‘Please don’t be sorry for me.’
And I’ve been thinking as well, Klade. I remember more and more of it now—the time before I was changed.
The roof had been basking in the sun all day. Now, it creaked and squealed as it cooled with a sound like that the house martins were making as they swooped the thistle fields.
Do you want me to show you?
Hungry for a better Bristol than the one he’d visited today, Klade let Fay touch him with the moist tips of her swirling fingers, and opened his mind to her song.
You feel different today, Klade. Not just the way you’re thinking.
‘I’ve been drinking Sweetness.’
Ah—I remember that as well.
Remembered also the flocky glitter of the room where she had slept and lived, where she had brushed and rebrushed her ebony hair. Fay’s skin had gained an extra layer of sensitivity in those long hours as the shining handle pulled and swept. She could feel the sparks; crackling surges of lazy light which hung in the air. Fay loved her bedroom, which she’d made her own in many small ways. The pictures on the walls, which she’d collected whenever her fancy was taken as she wandered the markets. Egypt or Thule, other climes and Ages. The mirror’s bevelled glass gleamed so highly in the light of the tasselled lampshade that it reminded Klade of the pictures up in the Meeting Place. But now all he saw was the red of Fay’s lips and the shine of her bosom and hair.
‘You’re beautiful. Do you know that?’
Fay shook her dark and sparkly head, but not in negation. It was hotly dark now; as hot and dark as it would ever get, which was hottest and darkest of all inside Fay’s hide here at the edge of the woods in Einfell. The vision in the mirror, the softly glowing hair and room, vanished as the hands of the changed creature who was with him withdrew.
I’m sorry, Klade. I don’t remember anything more—not even what guild I belonged to. Stupid, really.
‘What happened was just an accident, Fay. A misjudgement, at worst. That’s the thing to remember about being Chosen. It could happen to anyone.’
But didn’t, did it? It happened to me. You don’t understand. How could you?
She was just a sense of breathing, and Klade was breathing hard as well, the airless heat pouring in and out of him. His mouth still tasted of Sweetness and the powdery softness of Fay’s old room. The song was in him now. It was there as strongly as he had ever felt it. But changed. It turned and joined, a secret unfurled like an airless breeze across his bunched and sweating limbs. The song the need to feel, to know, to touch, to understand. It was glimpses of Fay as she turned and pouted. It was her red-lipped smile as she presented herself in the mirror.
Klade stirred. He felt as he had felt when Ida used to cut his hair. He felt as he had when the apprentices had tried to tip him over the Clifton Dam. He felt as he’d done when he’d lifted those heavy shackles in the Meeting Place’s exhibition rooms and tried them around his wrists and arms. He felt, as well, like those long times of looking at the adverts for Ladies Particulars in the back pages of the Evening Telegraph, with Fine-Stitched Fabric stretched taut against secret flesh. He felt as he did when he rubbed himself and the stuff which came out seemed for a moment as if it might be purest aether, but then pooled salt-leaden and stickier than Sweetness in his palm.
‘Fay.’ This time he reached out. ‘Please—I want you to show me …’
He moved. Fay skittered, and her hands scrabbled against him. He grabbed them.
No…!
‘You don’t understand.’
Pressing down, he gripped the trembling slopes of her flesh, imagining one Fay and finding another, and then another still, a tumbling arrangement of limbs and resistances which he was determined to unravel. He’d seen the animals that the Farmers kept. He’d seen the cats, the kittens, and he’d read what little there was to be found about the ways of the flesh in newspapers. He touched ridges, hollows.
Fay fought, bucked. Her song was an outraged scream in his head. Only the dulling of the Sweetness made it bearable. If it hadn’t been for this heat, this darkness, perhaps he’d have stopped. But he couldn’t. Couldn’t. She drew away. The roof clattered in a raw rush of metal.
Stop!
There was Fay, crouching and mostly naked. Her flesh was like the moon’s, cast over with cloud. She was the Chosen and he wasn’t, and her eyes were trapped in pure fear. Klade gasped, his sight pulsed. Stickiness seeped across his belly.
‘I’m so sorry Fay.’ He moved towards her, wanting to atone, but her fear rent the air and bit through the last residue of the Sweetness. Uselessly blocking his ears, stumbling out, pushing through the litter of the den, Klade staggered away.
He spent the night crashing amid undergrowth. Stings and scratches flayed across his limbs, and at some point it began to rain. He tilted his head up and let the heavy drops fill his mouth, wishing there was more of it to wash everything away. Dimly, in the dark and on through the dawn, he could hear Silus’s voice, and Ida’s song, calling hopelessly for him.
The rain didn’t last. As the morning ungreyed, Klade found himself standing once again at the edge of the thistle fields. Rain had pooled in twinkling furrows across the dents in the corrugated roof of the shelter he’d made for Fay. He peered inside. Nothing. Fay had gone to hide deep in the woods with the other Shadow Ones. Perhaps that was where she’d always belonged.
Careful to avoid the Big House and the Ironmasters’ ringing, gleeful shouts, Klade lumbered back along the edge of No Through Road. He’d never felt so remote from the song. He reached the place in Einfell’s fence where the landscape of Outside rolled away and the cables stitched the hillside close to the firethorned fence. Where did he belong? Outside—or here? More likely, he was the fence itself, harsh and heedless and destructive. He considered climbing it, blooding himself snip fucking snip on its thorns until his body was nothing but Marks. The hills shimmered, gold, yellow and green. Then something, a wave, a tremor, swept across the landscape. Quietly thunderous, it passed west to east, blazing in the telephone lines, roaring with power and aether and electricity, bowing the corn.