Irregular Verbs (7 page)

Louverture closed his eyes. “As you say.”

“Will you join us, Louverture?” Trudeau said, his attention back on the maps on the desk. “We can use another man, especially tonight.”

“Is that an order, Commandant?”

There was a long pause; then Trudeau very carefully said, “No, Officier, it isn’t. Go home and get your rest—go quickly, and show your badge if anyone questions you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Louverture went down the stairs, pushed through the gardiens assembling in the lobby; noticed Pelletier, saluted him. Pelletier did not answer his salute; perhaps the boy did not recognize him without his cap and uniform, and at any rate he was talking to the gardiens stagières around him. Not wanting to interrupt, Louverture stepped outside.

The sun was nearly down, but the air was still hot; Reason’s torch cast a weak shadow on the number eight. Heading for Danton Street, Louverture saw a man approaching across the square. He was wearing a dark wool suit, despite the weather; a top hat and smoke-tinted glasses.

Louverture looked the man in the eyes as he neared, trying to read him; the man cocked his head curiously and gazed back at him. The two of them circled each other slowly, eyes locked. When they had exchanged positions the man doffed his hat to Louverture, his perfectly calm face creased with just a hint of a smile, and then turned and did the same to the statue of Reason. Louverture knew that look: it was the one Allard wore while measuring a skull. The man found an empty bench, sat down and waited, as though he expected a show to unfold in front of him at any moment.

The bells in the Cathedral of Reason rang out at eight o’clock, and the sodium lamps in the square faded to darkness. The lights were going out all over town; Louverture did not suppose he would see them lit again.

The boy was called Calx. He did not remember his real name.

He was not sure how long he had been at the House. He did not know how long it had been since he had seen his parents; their names, too, were long gone, scraped away by toil and hunger. But he remembered their faces, and his bedroom with the biplane wallpaper and the Elmo sheets—and he remembered the Gnome with the Silver Key.

The little man had appeared at the boy’s window one night, when his parents thought he had gone to sleep. He had told the boy that there were people who needed his help, and he could have an adventure besides. All he had to do was take the silver key and open the door at the back of the linen closet.

The boy had not known there was a door in the linen closet, but sure enough when he went to check it was there. He had stood for a long time in the hallway, staring into the dark interior just barely lit by the hall nightlight. The floor chilled him through the feet of his flannel pajamas and he thought about going to get dressed, but he did not know just what you should wear on an adventure. Would he need boots? Should he wear a jacket, a sweater? Surely they would be able to give him the right kind of clothes when he got there—and besides, he had a feeling that if he went to his room the door would be gone when he got back.

The key, a funny long knobby thing that was not at all like his parents’ keys, fit snugly into the keyhole and turned smoothly. The boy pulled sheets and towels out of the closet, tossing them to the hallway floor to clear the way. There was no handle but the door opened anyway, a crack of light surrounding it and then brightening the whole closet. It was bright on the other side, too bright to see what was there with eyes that had been straining to see in the dark.

Squinting, the boy climbed up into the closet and squeezed through the narrow doorway. He was so excited he did not even notice the door closing behind him.

On this day Calx had been scouring shields. There was only one way to do it: first you had to pull off any stones that had been stuck to them, and the larger clumps of earth; then with a wire brush you took off the mud that was stuck right to the surface. Mrs. Marmalade would only give you one bucket of water for the whole job, no matter how many shields you had to clean or how much you pleaded, so you had to save it for the very end, parcelling it out in spit-drops. Then it was time to scour them, taking red rust off the iron shields and green rust off the bronze ones; for this there was coarse sand and again, finally, as little water as possible. It was hard work, because most of them had been in the ground a long time, but there were worse jobs. It kept you inside, and you were alone except for the strange reflections that sometimes danced in the torchlight on the polished bronze shields.

He could see his own reflection, now, in the shield he had just finished cleaning. His wild hair he recognized—it had sometimes grown that way at the end of a summer, when it went months without being cut or even brushed—but the gaunt, jagged face was not the one he had known from school photos or seen in the mirror while brushing his teeth. He reached up to his cheek, felt the three scars that ran across it and remembered the day he had received them.

The first things he had seen on coming through the door that night had been a great grey-white rabbit, twice as tall as he was and dressed in a checked waistcoat, and a hedgehog the size of a large dog who was wearing an apron and a ruffled cap.

“Hello,” the rabbit said, in a voice like the people on the English TV shows the boy’s father liked to watch. “I’m Mr. Jacoby, and this is Mrs. Marmalade.”

“Hello.” The boy pulled himself fully out of the small passage and straightened up. He looked around, saw a room with grey stone walls and a low ceiling. There was a stone hearth in the far wall, where a fire was burning low: the floor was cold, much colder than it had been at his house, and he was suddenly very conscious of being a small boy in his pajamas. “I came because—the Gnome with the Silver Key said—”

“Mrs. Marmalade, take this boy to the dormitory please,” Mr. Jacoby said. Turning to the boy he said, “We’ll get you to work in the morning.”

Mrs. Marmalade walked over to the boy, whuffling with each awkward step. She smelled of earth and rotting vegetables. He felt a sudden shock of fear as she looked up at him and he saw her face more clearly: it was not a human face at all, not a storybook face, but just a hedgehog’s face with beady eyes and sharp teeth. Lice were crawling on her hairy snout, and every now and then her long pink tongue darted out to draw one into her mouth.

“I’ve changed my mind,” the boy said, turning around to get back into the passageway. It was gone, the rough stone wall showing no signs it had ever been there. “I don’t think I want to go on an adventure after all.”

“Let’s get you off to bed,” Mr. Jacoby said, putting a paw on the boy’s shoulder. “It’ll all seem better in the morning.”

The boy shrugged off Jacoby’s grasp. “I want to go home,” he said, his voice cracking as he began to cry. “Do you hear me? I want to go home.”

He was thrown into the wall by the creature’s paw, and raised a hand to his cheek to feel blood running from the deep scratches there. He had not known rabbits had claws.

There were other boys there, boys who had been brought here as he was, and in time he learned a bit about why they were there. There was a war going on, that was clear, though none of the boys knew anything about who the sides were or what the war was about. The House was a good way away from the front, but not so far that it was not occasionally rocked when one side or the other started blasting.

The war had been going on for a long time, so long that the whole country around was a cemetery—some graves the tombs and barrows of the honoured dead, others filled-in trenches where men’s bodies lay where they died. The boys’ job was to search these graves for weapons and armour that could be used to equip the men at the front. Sometimes these men would pass through the House—though they were not all men, and not all of them were even things Calx could have imagined if he had not seen them. He had learned to avoid them all, no matter how friendly they acted or normal-looking they looked: they lived in another world, one more brutal even than the House.

Each day every boy was sent to work for either Mr. Jacoby or Mrs. Marmalade: Mr. Jacoby supervised the boys who searched the graves, while Mrs. Marmalade oversaw the keeping of the House. At night the torches were put out and the boys allowed a few hours’ sleep, but more often than not they would stay awake a while longer, savouring the only time they had to themselves. Sometimes there were fights, as boys lashed out at each other for the slights and insults of the day. Other times they would stay awake and talk, trying to preserve what memories they could of their other lives. Most often they talked about how they had come to the House.

A boy called Skell was talking tonight. “It was a little blue mouse that got me,” he said. “Told me my parents weren’t my real parents, said I was really missing royalty. I was supposed to be the High Prince of the Vespertine Kingdom.”

Calx rolled over, trying as every night to find a position in which he could not feel the stone floor beneath him. “I never even asked,” he said. He sat up and looked around at the other boys: the low fire in the mess room outside cast enough light that he could see their outlines, like shadows. “The Gnome with the Silver Key just said come with me, we’ll have an adventure.”

Rufus laughed. He was one of the biggest of the boys, with red hair and freckles, and the nearest thing Calx had to a friend: they had each defended the other more than once in barracks fights, and it was Rufus who had taught Calx to keep his distance from the visiting soldiers. “Hard sell, you were,” he said. “Mine had me at ‘Hello.’ I never supposed there was anyplace worse than home.”

In the morning the boy went out with Mr. Jacoby. They had to leave early, before sunrise: with the more recent battlefields nearer the House picked clean, they had to range further away to the bogs, a country of streams and damp earth that had been burial grounds since long before the war. In his right hand, as usual, Mr. Jacoby held a tarnished gold fob watch; the other held the end of a long silver chain. The chain was a leash, its other end looped around the neck of a wight.

“The wight’s sniffed out a spell, down there somewhere,” Mr. Jacoby said. There was a dark pool that might have been a flooded pit grave, or else a blast crater. “You pull it out and bring it back.”

Calx’s eyes flicked over to the rabbit, then at the creature whose leash he held. You couldn’t look directly at a wight: they had no shape, only movement, like gesture drawings done in charcoal. They were trackers, used to sniff out forgotten magic in the old battlefields—not to mention wayward boys.

“We’ll be waiting for you at the House,” Mr. Jacoby said. He glanced at his watch and then turned, loping away at an unhurried pace and followed by the chained wight.

Calx peered into the pool. Its water was opaque in the near-dark, but he knew there must be a dead person in it whose arms the wight had found. He took a moment to find a dry spot near the pool and then pulled off his shirt and pants, folded them carefully and placed them in the lower branches of a willow.

He dipped his big toe into the pool, regretting it immediately; then he closed his eyes, took a half-dozen deep breaths and then jumped feet first into the water. It was even colder than he had thought, and he shuddered as he pushed his hands up against the water, forcing himself deeper. He counted in his head, steamboats for seconds the way his mother had taught him, to know when he should give up this attempt. Before long, though, he touched something solid, freezing mud squeezing itself between his toes. He crouched down and began to feel around the bottom of the pool, looking for whatever it was the wight had scented. There was something hard beneath the mud, armour or maybe a shield—though that probably meant there were weapons as well; he would have to retrieve them all before he could go back to the House.

His fingers found the round edge of a shield, and he began to pry it out of the mud when something brushed his arm. At first he thought it was only a branch, but a moment later he felt it closing around his wrist. Blind in the darkness, he felt in the movement of water a shape rising up out of the mud; something that felt like needles roamed over his chest, searching for his neck.

Calx let out a gasp and it rose in a stream of bubbles. With his left hand he reached for the arm of whatever it was that had grabbed him, but there was no moving it: he might as well have been trying to shift a tree trunk as it moved upwards towards his throat. He forced himself to count to keep calm, one steamboat, two steamboat, while his other hand dug desperately through the muddy ground for a weapon.

He felt a hot pain in his palm, drew his hand back and then immediately reached out again to find whatever had cut him. The hand was at this throat now, not that he could breathe anyway. He cut his hand again, running it down the blade until it found the hilt; his fingers, numb from the freezing mud, scrambled to get a purchase on the weapon. Three steamboat, four steamboat . . . Finally it pulled free and he swung it at the arms that held his wrist and throat. The water slowed the blade, but by finding the space between the arms he was able to get enough leverage to cut at them.

Immediately the hands released him; as quickly as he could he drew the sword close, so its point faced straight out and its pommel touched his heart. Then he drove it forward with as much force as he could muster before launching himself upwards. There was no air left in him to make him buoyant: unable to stop himself, he opened his mouth and breathed in a mouthful of water. He felt phantom touches on his ankles as he rose, afraid with each kick that the hands would grasp him again, but finally he broke the surface. He pulled himself to the shore, kicking furiously to get himself out more quickly, and then puked the rank bog water onto the ground.

And then it was over. The water of the pool was smooth, as though nothing whatsoever had happened. He felt an urgent need to pee; he let out a bitter laugh—he was still conditioned by a dimly remembered rule against peeing in pools—then turned back to the water. His hand, though, wouldn’t let go of the knife. Awkwardly he used his other hand, sending the spray half into the water and half on the shore, and then held the knife up to examine it more closely. It was maybe a foot and a half long, with a slight curve to the blade, and despite its time in the water the steel still shone. The edge was wickedly sharp: the cut it had made in his palm was nearly a half-inch deep, though it was no longer bleeding. The hilt fit into his palm snugly, like a prop sword moulded to the hand of an action figure.

With difficulty he put on his shirt—cutting his right sleeve several times as he tried to pass the sword through it—and then his pants. He looked around. It was only a few hours since dawn, but the sky was already a dull grey: the sun had been used up in some great spell earlier in the war, and now like any other vet it rose unsteadily for a few hours each morning before settling back, exhausted, onto the horizon.

As the terror and excitement of what had happened ebbed he felt he could not take another step, never mind walk the miles between here and the House. Better to play dead, then. There was no question of actually fleeing—where would he go?—but enough boys actually did die on these jobs that Mr. Jacoby would usually wait a day or two before sending the wights out after you. There would be a beating at the end of it, of course, but it would be worth it for a day and a night or more of nothing but sleep.

Calx looked around, casting a suspicious glance at the still surface of the pool. The spot where he had left his clothes would be the most comfortable place to sleep, but it was too exposed: aside from the wights, there were any number of things that roamed the battlefields, and even this far from the front he might still be hit by a falling blast. He wandered around for a few minutes until he found a stretch of muddy trench where a stream had been dammed or diverted, and then crouched down to make sure it was deep enough to hide him. Out of reflex he lay down on his right side, but the knife in his hand made that impossible. He rolled over and curled himself up, the blade held tight to his chest like a teddy bear.