Part 16 (1/2)

There must have been thousands left in London, but fear had made most of them prey-creatures, who came out at night and moved in furtive bursts. Sholl thought very little of them or about them. There were a few others, more like him. He would see them very occasionally: men and women becalmed in the war's aftermath, standing without fear on roofs or wandering as if beyond caring by the edges of parks or rivers or darkened shops. He had seen enough of them die to know that not everyone with a similar insouciance to his own was safe from the enemy's Looking for Jake, By China Mieville attack.

And there were soldiers. Command had broken down almost instantly with the onset of fighting, but a few units survived, and persisted. In these late days they could be almost as dangerous as the invaders. In some places they had combined forces: in others they fought amongst themselves. They exchanged fire over control of some half-looted Sainsbury's, or an Esso petrol station. They might burst into view suddenly in a dust-bleached jeep pinned with guns, bursting out of the sh.e.l.l of a car park in their battered khakis, performing sweeps of an area they were trying to ”secure.”

They would level their guns at anyone human they saw, and shout at them to get down. Their intentions remained decent, Sholl suspected, or at least not malign: they were still trying with an imbecilic tenacity to defend London. He had even seen them in small triumphs. They rattled bullets into flocks of ravenous doves, spattering the pavement with the little hand-creatures and sometimes even saving the doves' intended prey. Even more powerful enemies fell to the soldiers, sometimes. They had brought down some of the flyers in the first weeks of fighting, had several times seemed to kill (it could be difficult to tell) what must have been imago commanders. But the logic of defeat-and they were defeated-had fragmented them.

The soldiers made themselves live in a future where they had won. They experienced each second as a memory, preemptively. The rat-people, in contrast, the Londoners become vermin, lived only in a present that terrified them. Sholl did not know where in history he lived, he and the few others like him. He felt uncoupled from time.

In some parts of London, the soldiers seemed to feel the pressure pulling them toward warlordism, and they fought it with inappropriate bonhomie. They would lean out of their fortified warehouses or bas.e.m.e.nts, and yell cheerfully at any of the terrified and starving citizens they saw, inviting them in. In earlier but still recent days, Sholl had spent time with a unit camped out in Russell Square, in what had once been a dormitory for overseas students.

The soldiers had made it into barracks, pasting their schedules and rotas on its noticeboards, on top of handbills for skiing trips and Italian lessons. They leaned out from upper floors and shouted at the few terrified locals, wolf-whistling the women.

They had tried repeatedly to contact some central command, some bunker or committee, but their superiors were gone or silent. Including Sholl, there had been four civilians with them, whom the troops had mocked with good humour, and tried to train. The commanding officer was a young Liverpudlian who had spent most of the day grinning at his troops, but whom Sholl, walking at night, had heard in the small hours trying to raise Liverpool on his radio, weeping into the static. ”f.u.c.ked if I know, mate,” he had said on the day Sholl left, as if Sholl had asked him a question.

There were squads camped out in grand houses in Kensington. They seemed cowed by their surroundings. They could not relate to the cool private gardens or the streets' tall white facades.

Even where the war touched the architecture, where it was scorched or bullet-pocked, or where the attacks of the enemy had changed its material into something new, the areas seemed sedate, and the soldiers uncertain rather than pugnacious.

Looking for Jake, By China Mieville In Bermondsey the remnants of some regiment were bivouacked in Southwark Park. Sholl had been impressed with that. The invaders, as well as the doves and other scavengers that had spilt out into London with them, concentrated their attacks on streets and backstreets. For the most part, Sholl had observed, they avoided parkland. But despite this, and the seemingly obvious advantage that might have offered them, most of London's soldiers ignored the green s.p.a.ces.

Sholl wondered if the training in ”urban warfare” had trapped them, if they could not relate to their task if they did not have side streets and deserted buildings in which to retreat.

He had approached the Bermondsey encampment, therefore, hoping to find something other than these neurotic everyday routines. He did, but it was no more useful to him. Machine guns had shredded the bushes beside him as he approached. He had lain where he had thrown himself, half-hidden by a tree that he knew would provide no defence from another such onslaught. ”f.u.c.k off, ” had come an amplified voice. Some figure in camouflage, just visible beyond the bombed land that surrounded the camp, standing on a crippled tank with a megaphone to his lips. ”f.u.c.k off out of our park you f.u.c.ker.”

Sholl had retreated. The mud craters that surrounded the soldiers, he had realised, were not evidence of some hard-won battle against the enemy: they were as far as terrified Londoners had reached, trying to join the panicked, paranoid troops, and where they had been destroyed.

It had taken him a month to find the right people. He had travelled by day in his bus, when it had still moved, and then on foot, ignoring the dangers. Sometimes he heard fighting, between Londoners and the enemy, or human bands, and sometimes it was close, but usually a street or two away, around a corner, out of sight.

Sholl kept an AZ map of London on him always, and amended it as he learnt about the city's changing shape. He blocked out those areas he would not go: the imago strongholds; where the gangs were; the savage new communities where even human intruders were accused of being vampires, and burned or beheaded. In the rest of the city, Sholl made notes. Itemising what he found, he tried to track down, to antic.i.p.ate, where certain other things might be. He was not searching randomly: he had a plan.

Where a building was gone or ruined, he crosshatched it out in black. Where it was made into something new, or where a new thing had appeared, he stuck numbered red crosses: he added a legend in tiny script on the inside front cover, naming what he saw.

#7, he had written, for the structure that now dwarfed the Brixton Prison. Jebb Ave. filled withsomething like cuckoo-spit. Funnel-tower still rising-threads snagging chimneys. Somethinginside moving.

In white dabs of Liquid Paper, Sholl marked and numbered the camps of London's soldiers.

He watched them from the top deck of his bus, or from surrounding buildings, through binoculars. He made notes about them, too.

Looking for Jake, By China Mieville #4: 30 men, one tank, one big gun. Morale v. bad.

On four occasions, from as far away as possible, Sholl had watched the soldiers fighting. Once their enemy had been another human unit, and the exchange of fire had ended with a handful of dead on each side and desultory shouted curses. Watching these desperate men and women wrestling with their shaking weapons and churning each other into meat-froth had broken Sholl's reserve and shocked him, and made him tremble.

The other three times, the battles had been the result of some bizarre incursion of the enemy.

Once, the humans had managed to retreat. Twice, they had been wiped out. And those times, though the carnage was no less b.l.o.o.d.y or loud than when humans killed humans, Sholl had watched it with detachment. Even when the invaders had spun away through s.p.a.ce just past him, so that he felt them, ignoring him, s.h.i.+mmering and cleaning themselves of blood.

It had taken Sholl a month. Days watching the soldiers doing their recces through the brick ruins of London, even here and there rescuing people-men and women half-eaten by doves, distractedly maimed by invaders. In the evenings Sholl would lock the doors of his bus and by torch read the books he had looted.

(His library was mixed. He was surprised to discover a renewed appet.i.te for fiction. Mostly, though, he read and obsessively reread books on physics, which he worked through trying to understand what had happened to light, and puerile military guides called SAS Survival and Extreme Combat. He had a collection of Soldier of Fortune magazines, which he still regarded with contempt, even as he read them. The science he found terribly hard, but he had worked through doggedly, and had been surprised to find himself understanding. He took in the science and the survivalism stolidly, as medicine.) It had taken Sholl a month, picking his way through the dwindling safe routes of the city, avoiding imagos and the gangs, watching soldiers, to find a group with the shades of self-consciousness, of purpose but uncertainty, that he was looking for. A group close enough to the enemy.

Like the Bermondsey soldiers, the troop that Sholl approached were quartered in parkland. They were much more secure, though, in the thickets in the south of Hampstead Heath. Sholl came up the trails of Parliament Hill, with London behind him. It was not very far before three sentries rose from scrubby bushes and halted him.

The frightened young men roughed him a little and rummaged in his rucksack, and when they had decided (according to what science Sholl had no idea) that he was not vampire, one of them ran and returned with their commanding officer. Sholl had watched the troop several times, from the rooftops of Gospel Oak, and he recognised the man by his grey hair and his bearing.

They met in a copse a little way from the path, not hidden but out of immediate sight. Sholl was held by two young soldiers, who gripped his arms without much purpose. Their officer faced him, and over the man's left shoulder Sholl could see down and across London, all the way to what had been the Post Office Tower, then Telecom Tower, and was now something else Looking for Jake, By China Mieville altogether: a distorted beacon in the killing fields of central London. This late in the afternoon, there were regular sounds of fighting, gunshots and small explosions. Lights glimmered in the city. Flocks of doves spasmed over the bombed-out and imago-corroded roofs.

The officer nodded sharply at Sholl. ”Come to join us?” he said.

”I came to ask,” said Sholl, ”whether you'd join me.”

Let me start again.

It was a humiliation and a punishment.

(I am out of practice in my own voice. It is the cla.s.sic danger for the operative under cover, for the spy, to lose track of where you end and the role begins. I would like to use our original voice, but for ease and speed I will stick to what I have used for so long.) (Although in fact, of course, that voice that my people use, that I now find so hard- -is no more ours than this. It is nothing but evidence of our bars. It was our prison argot, it was our slang, and while we used it-forced as we were-we forgot our own mountain language.) It was a humiliation and a punishment. I would not want to minimise that. We have told stories and stories about our imprisonment, for centuries. But for a long time, it's true, our chains were loose.

We were trapped, and what we had wanted, what we had fought for, was lost to us, but for thousands of years we had the run of our prison-mostly. We were banished: but there are worse things. We could shape things, we could make our place ours, and become what we wanted.

Except beside the lakes, where we could always see siblings trapped in communion with you.

And where, sometimes, we were called. Water was our worst degradation and punishment.

If you drank from your crude bowls it was not so bad. One little part of us would momentarily be crushed into the ba.n.a.l shape of your mouth, but we were free beyond those few inches and could gesticulate hatred at you. But when you leaned over the lakes, and entered them, we were pinioned to you, trapped into our mimicry, gazing dumb up at you. We knew when you were approaching the water, were forced to you, nodding from our world through the water into yours, silent and powerless, visual echoes.

Even then, we could strain against it.

As the water moved our forms were freed a little, and could warp with hatred. Enter the water, we would think fiercely, our new faces mumming your stupid thirst, get into the water, and when you did and shattered its surface, we became halfway free. Still sutured to you by threads Looking for Jake, By China Mieville we could not break, but as the lake's surface burst into drops, so did we. We could strain against your shapes.

For a long time after we lost our war, water was our only torment.

Then you learnt to polish obsidian, and trapped us in its black sheen. Its hardness made us cold, and fixed us without even small ripples of freedom into your likeness. But still you could only show tiny parts of us at a time, and you could ossify only our faces. And then, though our borders were fixed, the dark stone gave us a more subtle freedom, one that could unsettle you.

Though it fixed us in unfreedom like amber, when you looked in the obsidian you saw, not yourselves, but us, watching, with our loathing. Obsidian revealed us as shadows.

Carbuncle, you used, and phengite, and emeralds and lead, and copper, tin, and bronze, and silver, and gold, and gla.s.s.

For thousands of years you trapped us imperfectly, and each of your jails gave us our little freedoms. We glowered from the dusk of black stone. When we were cast in bronze, we made ourselves relish the burnish that you gave our skins, knowing it disguised us. We rejoiced in rust, and as our bodies pa.s.sed behind its imperfection we warped luxuriantly. Verdigris and discolourations, and scratches and pockmarks gave us licence, and though we were constrained, we could also play.

Silver was the worst. Jewellery we could bear. The little multiples of us you made in the facets of your gems, the strange elongated bodies we became in your rings were fleeting, and so strange to you, and so unnoticed that we had the s.p.a.ce to play. But in the silver and specula you caught us.

A few of us who suffered the ignominy of whole walls of silver, in the high homes. The speculatotis paria corporibus: mirrors equal to the whole of the body. We were racked on the preening of the Roman rich.

What you cannot know is how it hurt.

For we who are not, or were not, our bodies: we, for whom flesh is, or was, only one possible clothing. We might fly or invert ourselves through the spines of gra.s.s, we might push ourselves into other ways of being, we might be to water as water is to air, we might do anything, until you looked at yourselves. It is a pain you cannot imagine-very literally, in the most precise way, you cannot know how it is to feel yourself shoved with a mighty and brutal cosmic hand into b.l.o.o.d.y muscle. The agony of our constrained thoughts, shoehorned into those skulls you carry, stringy tendons tethering our limbs. The excruciation. Shackled in your meat vulgarity.

We cursed the slaves that lifted your mirrors, in those early days, cursed them and envied them their freedom. Our hate smouldered. We watched you as you watched yourselves. We held your eyes with ours, those eyes you forced us to wear. Until there were more and more of the larger mirrors, and you introduced us to a new shame, as the polished silver became so very slowly more common, until not every glance into it was an occasion, and you might enter your room Looking for Jake, By China Mieville (snarling us with shocking violence to you) and glance at us and then turn away. And we would be made to turn, and look away from you, at nothing, so that we could not even hate you to your face.

Sometimes you slept near your mirrors, and held us in place, in pain, with even these insufficient eyes closed, tied to your stupor for hours.