The Factory Trilogy 01 - Gleam (16 page)

Too eager
, Alan thought. Any moment now the frenzy would descend and drive the meathead right on through. This was no planned, co-ordinated attack; no way would Daunt send these foamers out on an actual kidnap mission. Probably the encounter was pure chance; they were most likely one of several gangs out gathering supplies for her.

A blade flew out from the combat, spinning wildly into the void, and Churr’s berserker turned his head to watch it go, his empty hand still moving as if nothing had happened. Churr sank her own steel into the man’s neck and then used her foot to push him off the knife and off the bridge before stepping around and stabbing Spider’s opponent in the side. He screamed, and then he too was falling headlong towards the distant river. The third berserker was already sprinting away, his frenzy lending him an unnatural speed. Alan nearly went to throw his knives, but stopped himself. He’d only miss. The man ran
and ran until he reached the concrete cliff, and then he started pulling himself hand over hand up the rope.

‘Back to Daunt, no doubt,’ Spider said, panting.

‘Let him go,’ Churr said. ‘He doesn’t know anything.’

‘He knows where we are,’ Alan said, ‘and that we killed two of her men.’

‘Will he know
who
we are?’

‘What route does Daunt take to Dok?’ Alan asked. ‘Are we on it?’

‘I don’t think so. I don’t think Daunt has a
route
, as such. It’s more of a relay, a chain of buyers and sellers. She uses local communities where she can, and bikers, transients, you name it. Her people do the bit at the dangerous end – in Dok itself – and safeguard the rest of the trade.’

‘And it just works? Nobody messes her around?’

‘No.’ Churr ran her tongue around her teeth, still staring at the man climbing the rope in the distance. ‘Well, not until now.’

Once over the bridge they roared across a concrete plain, the roof of something, blank but for cracks and weeds. Alan always thought he’d been comfortable with the scale of their habitat, but he felt monstrously exposed beneath Satis and Corval and the stars here, when they came out. He had known Gleam was big, but had never realised it was big enough to accommodate such expanses of nothing. Nora called this place the ‘Oversight’. They all came to smell of engine fumes, but he thought it was preferable to the scent of stale sweat. That night they built a fire of uprooted sunwort and redgrass, though it burned dismally, and Alan picked at Snapper and sang a song about the golem army that some believed built Gleam. He made some notes in his lyric book about there being magic in the stone itself, but nowhere else.

Eyes lay on his back and moaned softly as the night sky turned. Spider worked on new tattoo designs. Nora had unrolled several scrolls and sat with her back to the
others, her work illuminated not by the firelight but by an uneven chunk of white stone that worked in the same way as the reservoir globes they used in the Pyramid. ‘This particular light has certain qualities I require for my maps,’ she explained. ‘Firelight is good for some Mapmakers, but not for me. We all work differently.’ Alan didn’t know if she was making a map or reading one, but he presumed the latter as from behind she was motionless. But later, when he saw her hands, they were black with ink, or something like it.

After Nora was done working each evening she would lie down behind Churr, who was often restless, and wrap her arms around Churr’s waist, and then Churr would quieten and sleep like a dead croc – apart from one night, when Nora and Churr whispered long into the small hours. Churr’s voice was louder, and she was crying. Alan thought that they thought he was asleep.

‘I don’t want to be that way any more,’ she was saying. ‘I don’t want to live in the dirt, eating nothing much and what there is is either stolen or bought with stolen bugs.’

Nora was murmuring assent or platitudes, or maybe no words at all, just soothing sounds.

‘I don’t want to steal from the rich any more,’ Churr continued, ‘I want to
be
the rich. I don’t want the crumbs, I want the loaf. I’m not like my people any more. I’m like you, Nora. I’m like you.’

And when Alan did sleep, he slept badly. He woke repeatedly, the sound of a baby crying in his ears.

In the morning it was Churr who found the detachable metal cans built into the body of the bike she shared with Spider, and in between them, hidden deep inside the body of the bike, weapons. Upon investigation, the other bikes were also found to hold such a cache. The cans were empty for now, but still … The weapons included chains with handles, knuckledusters of gruesome design, gnarled cudgels sprouting razor blades, slingshots, and – inside Alan’s bike – a small crossbow.

‘Who’d be best with this?’ he asked. ‘There’s only one quiver of bolts. We shouldn’t waste them.’

‘I have never used one,’ Nora said, ‘and Eyes is blind.’

‘Aye, lass,’ Eyes said. ‘Thanks for that.’

‘I’ll take it,’ Churr said. ‘I had one of those once. Lost it at cards. Give it to me.’

‘I think Churr is probably a better shot than me,’ Spider said. ‘What about yourself, Alan?’

Alan felt disinclined to give the weapon to Churr but he could not justify keeping it himself, so he handed it over. Churr strapped it to her back, climbed onto the bike and motioned for Spider to sit behind her. She kicked the rest up, coaxed the machine into life and sped away.

Clouds of dust came up behind their bikes on their second Oversight day and the engines sounded sick. Nora assured them that she would get them to fuel before the fumes were gone. The bikes had bulky tanks designed for deep Discard foraging, she said, and they would be okay.

It wasn’t only the bikes that were running on empty, though. Already the companions were down to chewing plants, though Nora was scornful when Eyes complained. ‘I have lived half my life like this,’ she said.

‘You keep talking about your life as a length of time,’ Eyes said between grimaces, his leg bloody and his eyes raw, ‘but even when I could see, I couldn’t see that your life has been as long as all that.’

‘I am thirty-two years old,’ Nora said.

‘Aye, but by whose calendar?’

‘I believe the Mapmaker calendar is not significantly different from that which you used in the House, which itself is not dissimilar to the Pyramid Year Clock,’ Nora said. ‘Built on sun cycles, all.’

‘You never have thirty-two of our years,’ Eyes said.

‘People have thought me a child all my adult life,’ Nora said, ‘and it grows more wearisome with time, not less. Now, Eyes, I will put this gently on account of your various conditions: shut your fucking pipehole.’

Spider laughed uproariously at that, which put Eyes in a right sulk. Spider had the highest spirits of all of them, but then, he had survived on little more than whisky, smoke and hallucinogenics for as long as Alan had known him – ever since Spider had put that first tattoo on Alan’s shoulder: the Black Pyramid set against a broken skull that rose like a great bad moon. Alan thought it doubtful that Spider had much of a functioning stomach behind all that hair, inside that knot of dried-up organs and
leathery sinew. His insides probably looked like a rack of meat hung up for curing.

Alan could not stop thinking about food.

Nora pointed out the petrol tank as the sun neared the horizon. It was a black cube shimmering against the reddening sky. ‘It will be manned,’ she said, ‘but they might help us out for a song or two.’

‘Will they survive it?’

‘We approach the tank, or we give up the motorcycles.’

‘It’s not like they’ve got nothing to barter.’

‘You think our green-eyed friend is interested in petrol?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know how it’s tracking us, or if it’s tracking us. I don’t know what it is.’

Alan did not admit that he had seen it in his head during the brief snatches of sleep he’d achieved the previous night. He did not say that he’d heard its infant voice carrying across the plain, or that its nature was somehow familiar to him.

‘We can’t give up the bikes,’ he said firmly. ‘Not with Eyes the way he is.’

‘To the tank, then.’

What Alan had thought was the whole tank turned out to be just one end of it protruding from the stone. A black metal cube with edges of about twenty feet, a riot of green, yellow and purple grasses growing thickly from the small gap between it and the ground. Alan was
actually excited to notice a few decent-sized snails sheltering amongst the foliage.

There was a ladder on the side of the tank.

‘Hello?’ Alan shouted up.

‘Back away,’ croaked a voice. ‘Back away.’

Alan looked up to see a hunchback, wearing goggles, crouching on the top of the cube. She looked more like a giant toad than anything, dressed as she was in a shapeless green waxed cotton coat, the kind of attire you didn’t often see out in the open, given the heat. She was pointing an old blunderbuss down at him.

‘Back away,’ the woman said again.

‘We mean no harm,’ Alan said, holding his hands up.

‘Nobody ever does, do they? Nobody goes around all, like, I’m gonna
harm
you.’

‘How does this work? Do you barter? Do you serve only the biker clans?’

‘What you got for me? What you got for me, eh? Let’s see what you got.’

‘Bartering, then?’

‘Show me what you fuckin’ got!’ She jabbed the blunderbuss in Alan’s direction. ‘No more talk!’

‘We can play you a song,’ Alan said.

‘What good’s a fuckin’ song gonna do me? That a joke?’ A sudden shriek of laughter. ‘That a joke? I’m gonna eat a song, am I? Gonna drink your lovely voice?’

‘We’ve got drink,’ Alan said. ‘Eyes – give the good lady your flask.’

Eyes looked towards Alan, his gaze unfocused. ‘No,’ he said.

‘Eyes, come on.’

‘I’m going to die soon, Alan,’ Eyes said. ‘Let me finish my whisky.’

‘You’re not going to die.’

‘I am.’

‘You are not.’ Alan dismounted, strode over to Eyes and wrenched the flask from his pocket. ‘Here,’ he said, turning and holding the flask up to the woman. ‘This flask for us to refuel completely.’

‘What’s in it, eh?’

‘Whisky.’

‘But what whisky,
what
whisky? Is it good whisky? Is it the good stuff? Or is it nasty bathtub shine, eh?’

‘It’s good stuff,’ Alan lied.

‘And is it full?’

‘No. But it is made of silver. And it’s heavy.’

The woman was silent for a moment. ‘Throw it up then, quick – come on, throw it up here for old Mother Margo to have a look.’

Alan was about to throw it, then he changed his mind. ‘I’ll bring it up,’ he said. ‘The cap’s loose.’

‘Wait, wait, wait – what else?’

‘We’ve got some bugs,’ Alan said. ‘Not many, mind.’

‘I’ll have ’em,’ said Mother Margo. ‘All of ’em.’

‘Do you need anything else?’

‘Handsome fella over there – you got gold hidden in all that beard?’

‘I’ve got two chains around my neck,’ Spider said. ‘But we need some fuel before we agree on anything else.’

‘Gather the bugs, songbird, and come on up. Just you on your lonesome, like. We’ll talk terms. And take them damned knives from yer boots. I’m ugly but I’m not a fool.’ Mother Margo disappeared from the edge of the tank.

Alan nodded. ‘Bugs,’ he whispered to the others. ‘Hand them over. I know everybody’s got some.’

Spider took a small pouch from behind his beard and shook out a handful. Churr withdrew a couple from a pocket sewn to the inside of her black vest top. Eyes shook his head. He was shining with sweat and as white as some of Nora’s parchment.

‘I don’t have any,’ Nora said. ‘Mapmakers don’t use them.’

‘Come on,’ Alan said.

‘I don’t have any. Take this.’ Nora handed him a small pink crystal. ‘Not very valuable but conducive to rest.’

Alan threw his last five bugs into the small collection, dropped his knives onto the ground, then climbed the ladder.

There was a small wooden hut on top of the tank, bleached grey. Mother Margo settled herself into a chair by its door and took off her hat. Her white hair was short
and curly. Her goggles were home-made from bottle bottoms and some kind of gut. Her mouth rested open, not closed, displaying what teeth she had left. They were pointed, but not filed; it was as if she had nothing but canines, all pointing in different directions. She waved a hand at the metal tank on which her home was built. ‘Put it all down, then,’ she said. ‘Spread it all out like.’

Alan did as she demanded and stepped back.

‘Not enough for all the tanks,’ she said after a moment. She plucked a snail from out of a fold in her coat and examined it. It retracted its horns and retreated into its shell as she brought it close to her goggles. ‘I want that hairy lad’s chains an’ all, and then you can fill all the bikes right up.’

Alan nodded. ‘Thank you. I’ll go and tell the others.’

‘Wait.’ Mother Margo levelled the blunderbuss at Alan and then threw the snail into her mouth. The shell crunched as she bit it and juice spurted from between her lips. Alan looked away as he waited for her to finish her snack. When he looked back she was wiping brown fragments from her chin. ‘Maybe I’ll have a song or two after all. Gets awful lonely up here, it does. Traders come and go but they don’t hang around any longer’n they have to, and they don’t offer nothin’ but food.’

‘Food’s important, though.’

‘Yeah, but …’ Mother Margo raised her gun. ‘Just sing a fucking song, all right?’ She spat more shell as she spoke.

‘All right,’ Alan said, raising his hands once more. ‘All right.’ He swung Snapper around. ‘He’s not at his best,’ he explained. ‘The heat, the conditions—’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘Can I shout to the others?’

‘Yeah, go on then.’

Alan shouted down, ‘Spider, throw me your chains. I’m going to play a song or two up here. And start filling the tanks up.’ He turned back to Mother Margo. ‘I need a moment to tune him,’ he said, indicating Snapper.

‘Them’s down there’ll need this t’release the valve.’ Mother Margo pulled an unusually shaped spanner from her pocket, and threw it over the side of the tank. There was a clatter and a curse from below. Then she started undoing her voluminous coat. ‘You know any baby songs?’ she asked.

‘What, like lullabies?’

‘Yeah, like lullabies.’ Mother Margo withdrew a small wooden box from inside her coat and took the lid off. She held up the box so that he could see its contents more clearly.

He tried not to recoil.

Inside the box were little bones, and a little human skull. The skeleton was surrounded by dried flowers and scraps of bright cloth. ‘My daughter,’ Mother Margo said. ‘Birthed her alone up here, tried to feed her, but I didn’t have much milk, did I? Not here, not on my diet. Didn’t have much water. Didn’t see any traders for a long time. I woulda taken her elsewhere but for havin’ her did for my
back good and proper – couldn’t barely walk. She didn’t starve but I couldn’t keep her strong, not strong enough to fight off whatever got her. I dunno what it was. A sickness, some dirt, I dunno.’ She rocked the box. ‘Couldn’t do much for her but talk and sing. She liked the singing, she did. Still sing to her sometimes, but my voice ain’t what it used to be. Too much weepin’ and wailin’!’ She cackled. ‘We’d like a song from you, though, singer, if yer could.’

Alan stared in horror at the skeleton. From out of the reaches of Gleam drifted the faint cries of a baby.

‘Yeah, I could,’ he said. He ran his fingers over Snapper’s strings, unable to look away from the box. Mother Margo had Nora’s crystal in her hand. She placed it in a small hollow beneath the skeleton’s lower jawbone.

Alan swallowed. ‘So,’ he said, ‘what song would you like?’

‘I don’t know their names,’ Mother Margo said, shaking her head. ‘I remember some tunes, you know.’ She hummed tunelessly. ‘I remember some tunes like that from my own ma, but I don’t know the names.’

‘I know them from my mother, too,’ Alan said. ‘My mum and dad, they were in a band. They’d get them all round to practise in the house. I used to live in Modest Mills. They’d come round in the afternoon for just a couple of hours, but then they’d stay and play all night, and I’d sit in the corner and watch. They asked me if I wanted to play something. I always said no. I said … I said to them … you’re too loud. I won’t be able to sleep.’