The Sea Hates a Coward (6 page)

Stumbling over, toes stubbing brutally against the riveted decking, Schneider waved his arms and panted for the other corpse to stop, before he realised there was no cannibalism occurring. His friend was bent over, holding another zombie in their arms, and repeatedly saying the word “Aroha” into its face. It knew their name; it was trying to wake them.

Rather than interrupt, Schneider watched, and waited for any explanation of what was going on. The two dead people were wearing the same clothes—or at least the remnants of them. They had the same sucking chest wound. And, looking closer at the forearm his companion had clamped alongside that of the prone zombie, the same tattoo. It was a brusque, military job on the inner wrist, a sword in black ink superimposed on a stylised image of a ringed world, somewhat duller than it would have been on living flesh.

“Aroha!” urged his companion. “You remember? Stay still, you told us. The railgun was charging. It got the shot off, you know, after you went down. The railgun!”

“The railgun,” echoed the slumped form, like somebody trying to remember a dream.

“Burner division. They managed to get it to fire again! A hundred drums it took them, but they got it to fire again. Took the whole gate down, when it did. Made enough room for a pithecus charge. You did it, Aroha. You bought them the time.”

The sun glowed on the two tattooed wrists. “The siege,” croaked the cadaver, then rattled for a time, as if searching for a word. “Mouana.”

“Yes!” hissed Schneider’s friend. “It’s me! It’s not over. They got us, but they’ve brought us back. Do you remember...” Mouana continued, gesturing at the hole in her chest, and then at the other zombie’s.

The answer was a long moan—the waking moan, all too familiar to Schneider from the flensing yards—that echoed around the flaking hangar and brought echoes from the dead elsewhere on the pile. As he looked around, he realised more than a handful of the heaped dead were dressed in the same maroon rags, had the same wounds.

The siege. The besieging force. The Blades of Titan, the baby-eaters. The largest of the mercenary armies that had encircled Home since before his grandfather had been a boy. They were here, same as he was. He had laughed with one of them. He had dragged them away from a shark’s jaws, despite everything their barbarian army had inflicted on his city and his countryfolk.

He had never seen the enemy up close before. The city walls were high, and strictly off-limits to civilians, a great sheltering hand of concrete and masonry that kept the ever-present threat of the siege abstracted to a distant rumble. One of Schneider’s drinking mates, who had drawn a service ticket and spent a summer manning a gun on one of the Eastern scarp sections, said there was bugger all to see anyway: for the most part, the enemy spent all their time under cover, in the miles of jagged trenches, flak silos and gun nests that surrounded the city like an infested sore.

Once every so often—sometimes three or four times over a season, sometimes not for years at a time—there would be a big push for the city. It generally began unannounced, with the splashing of overshot artillery against the sky-shield followed by the thunder of the distant guns. Sometimes a squadron of the city’s triremes would fly out over the parapets, and sometimes a district next to the wall would be evacuated for a day or so, but it was rare that the fighting would intrude any further on daily civilian life. Even the defence itself was conducted largely by the city’s own legions of mercenaries, with just a token levy drawn by lottery from the general populace to act as a reserve.

In general, the siege was felt more as an emotional presence, an ever-present national claustrophobia. From time to time it would assert itself through the occasional taking of an uncle, a colleague, a grocer’s assistant one barely knew.

In fact, the only time Schneider could remember having seen the face of the enemy had been on a midwinter afternoon, after an attempt by the city to break through the siege and link up with an allied army had led to a week of particularly heavy action. The city had come under heavy enough bombardment to see shells push through the shield more than once, and for two nights in a row the sky had been lit bright orange by the fires of a distant armour duel.

When it was all over, a stream of prisoners—the remains of two full enemy regiments, the news sheets had said (they had been less clear on whether the breakthrough had been successful)—were led to the top of the wall above the immensity of the Farmer’s Gate and turned to face the city they had spent the season trying to capture.

Schneider had been part of the crowd gathered to watch as the soldiers, many of them sagging from untreated wounds, looked out over the sprawling factories, the teeming docks, the bulbous immensity of College Hill with its cavern of boiling fat. The wall’s defenders stood behind their enemy counterparts, close as lovers, looking at the same view with their faces set in grim pride.

“This is what you will never have,” came an amplified voice from atop the wall, as the sun glared coldly at them from its descent into the western sea.

“This is all you get,” said the voice, and the day’s last light glinted red from the points of a thousand sabres, as they punched forwards through the prisoners’ chests.

Watching as Mouana cradled her commander in the light of a different sun, rising above a different, despairing world, it became utterly clear where all of those prisoners, and every prisoner captured during the long years of the siege, had ended up.

By the time Schneider’s mind caught up with itself and asked what in the world he was doing among the prisoners of war, he found his hands were already one step ahead, checking his chest for a blade’s exit. But there was nothing, just a clammy linen shirt and prune-wrinkled grey skin beneath. There was, however, something on the back of his hand. It was caked in filth, and faded by the ongoing death of his skin, but its form was unmistakable: the outline of a tobacco pipe, painted in livid scar tissue.

Other sights had brought images of the past slowly to mind, like tea diffusing from a bag, but this one smashed into him like a haymaker from a Bull Aug. After all, it had been one of his last.  

CITIZENS OF THE CITY
, the text had proclaimed below the image of the blazing pipe.
SISTERS AND BROTHERS in the COLONIES. We have PLAYED THE FOOL LONG ENOUGH. WE’VE BETTER THINGS TO DO than keep THE VAULT full of FAT... JUST ASK
OLD KING PIPE!

The words, hurriedly printed on rough brown paper, were spilling all over the floor as the constable emptied a gutted almanac onto the library floor. Behind her, two rough men standing among the overturned shelves of the agricultural research section were picking out one book after another, prising them open to check for more pamphlets. Dust billowed; the city hadn’t maintained fields for decades, and the racks of books on fertiliser efficiency and irrigation technology had been badly neglected.  

Until, apparently, they had become a repository for seditious material.

“It’s nothing to do with me!” Schneider had gasped, as they had fastened the cuffs. “How would I know they were there? I’m not a Piper!”

The maddening thing was, while he remembered saying the words, he had no idea whether he had been lying or not. All that came to his mind were the averted glances of his colleagues, the slews of exclamatory handbills on the floor, and his own frantic protests as he was dragged out of the stacks, past the front desk, and into the snow.

He remembered garbled fragments of a trial, his dad crying like a kid, the dumb certainty that things would all somehow work themselves out, that things like this didn’t happen to people like him, even as the hairs on the back of his hand shrivelled blackly away from the branding iron’s glow.

Then there had been a night in a cell, the livid brands on the hands of the two men and the old woman sharing it with him as they sat up through the night. And then the chamber, with the steel walls, where he had been all alone, a magistrate looking in on him through a little glass portal. A weird cold smell had come into the air and he had blacked out, and that had been the end of his life.

CHAPTER SEVEN

T
HAT WAS IT,
thought Schneider, after a moment of utter blankness. That had been his death. Truth be told, there was nothing too distressing about the event itself—compared with the screaming nightmare of waking up again, it was not such a bad thing to carry in his head. If anything, it only served to make everything that had happened before less real—the memories were like reading somebody else’s diary, looking through their photographs and guessing how they might have felt at the time. Looking at it that way, he was really just a very intimate spectator to somebody else’s death.

Frankly, everything felt easier to deal with if he imagined he was something entirely new, grown into the architecture of someone else’s memories like a hermit crab curled up in the skull of a marmoset. When he looked at it like that, imagined the man whose memories he was reading had just vanished in that chamber, everything seemed less shit by comparison. After all, if Schneider had died and he was something new and weird, then this was all he had ever known.

At the very least, he thought, this all explained why the city courts had been based in the same building as the Ministry of Fisheries.

It was all quite a shift in perspective. He only became aware of how long he’d been standing and staring when Mouana, long since finished explaining things to her commander, addressed him.

“You’ve remembered
him
dying, haven’t you?” she said. “It helps when you remember.”

“Yes, I think it does,” he whispered, letting his gaze slide across the drift of restless, lychee-eyed cadavers, each one writhing in the grey blankness between being one person and another.

All of a sudden, the disgust and antipathy he had felt when recognising Mouana and Aroha as Blades was gone; the hatred felt alien, as incomprehensible as eating stones. For a start, the citizen whose city had been besieged by them was long dead and gone, as were the soldiers who had taken part in its assault. Whatever they were now, they shared in common the fact of their existence—the fact they had been killed, reanimated and enslaved by that same city.

In any case, putting philosophy aside entirely, he was strongly beginning to suspect that even in life, Schneider had not been that emotionally engaged with hating the enemy. For some people it had been something to sing songs about while deep in their cups, or to mutter darkly about over boiled huss. For him, it had been a lukewarm conviction at best, something understood on an intellectual level rather than felt.

Whether this was because he had been a political dissident (of all the things not to remember, this was particularly frustrating), or whether it was because he’d grown up reading books of war poetry that rattled on about the essential humanity of cannon fodder everywhere (there was no doubt about this), he had no idea.

Whatever the reason, he felt desperately glad to have the company. Still, he found himself utterly speechless when Aroha, whose eyes and voice had taken on the firmness of lucid undeath with remarkable speed, asked who the hell he was meant to be.

Unsure for a moment himself, he was just working his black-baked lips around the initial consonant of his old name when Mouana made a practical intervention.

“He started it,” she said. “He woke me. He’s going to lead a revolt here.”

Well, whyever not, thought the man who had been Schneider. If he had been a political subversive rather than a librarian, this was exactly the sort of thing he would have dreamed of doing. And if he hadn’t, then he had every reason to be one now. And anyway, leading a slave revolt had to be better than lurching around waiting to fall into some machinery or a pair of hyperfaunal jaws.

“Yeah. I am,” he said, as casually as a corpse can really say anything.

And he felt it, more than he had felt anything since being dead. Even more than he’d known, looking up at the emerald glower of the bridge tower during the night, that this dreadful machine had to be stopped. Killing people would be one thing, but putting diminished life into their corpses to keep them working was quite another.

Even going by the brutal logic that some crimes deserved a worse punishment than death, inflicting that punishment on a fresh consciousness stuck in a dead brain was a new level of barbarism. Whatever the metaphysical situation, whoever he really was, this was not something he ever wanted to happen to anyone else.

“So what’s his name?” asked the commander, putting an end to the metaphysics.

“Wrack,” he said, telling himself it would be easier for newly-wakened tongues to pronounce, and very definitely choosing to forget that Schneider had always felt he had a much cooler second name.

Whether he was feeling a surge of adrenaline, or just the ghost of one in whatever counted for his nervous system, the sluggishness had left his limbs: the hunger had been replaced by a yearning that was more than physical.

They were looking at him. Or at least towards him. Registering on some viscous level of cognition that their fellows were having a conversation—were saying real words to each other—the faces of the zombies in the pile were turning towards them like blind fungi following a gibbous moon. They might not be listening, but they were on the cusp. How much would it take to get them to accept their surroundings, to remember their names and their deaths, to get angry?