Gears of the City (6 page)

The Lows were apparently kind to stray cats, some of which had made their toilet in the attic’s musty corners.

His numb left hand was bound in bandages that were grey and worn, but smelled freshly of soap and lye. It was extraordinary good fortune to have stumbled across any doctoring of any sort
whatsoever; on the other hand it was poor luck to have been maimed by a talking lizard, unless this was a
very
strange part of the city. Arjun was not sure yet whether he was a lucky or an unlucky man.

Ruth had thought he might be a thief. He was, Arjun thought, slight, and wiry, and silent; he might have been a
good
thief. He had a number of scars; perhaps he’d been a soldier—a bandit? Arjun thought not. No, he thought that he was an ordinary man, and those possibilities seemed too strange, too fabulous, too picaresque. They made him smile.

I Am Come Down from the Mountain to Tell You.
Perhaps he was a holy man. Perhaps he was a priest. That might explain the sense he had, floating at the edge of his memories, of some profound but indescribable
need.
That might explain why he looked at the city around him and thought: this world is not real.

He was quite sure he’d been a musician. He held up his right hand—his
good
hand—and flexed his fingers. They made silent memory-notes.

Arjun held up his left hand. Under the bandages, he still had his index, his middle, his thumb. A good enough tool for most employment, but worthless for a musician—
mute.
Numbness spread down his aching arm and gripped his heart. He knew that he had lost something, something irreplaceable; he could not be sure how much.

He heard the two women coming up the stairs.

They called you a ghost.

T
hey were sisters. There was a third, they said—at least Ruth began to say it, and Marta shushed her. This was on the third day of Arjun’s recovery, and he was clear in his head, and the pain in his phantom fingers was manageable; but he was tired, and weak, and did not press the matter.

The silence was broken by an ugly bird that settled on the sill outside the attic’s half-open window, and pressed its lumpy head through the crack. Its feathers were like dirty grey rags and its yellow eyes were strangely human. Its misshapen claws—there were bright rags torn from someone’s red dress stuck in them—appeared to be fumbling with dim intelligence to reach round the pane and unbolt the latch. “Faaakyu,” it sang. “Oi.”

Marta banged the glass against its head with an old book and it dropped away dazed into the alley.

“Horrible thing,” Marta said.

“What was it?”

“Just a bird. Don’t they have birds where you’re from?”

“Yes. Of course. It just reminded me of something.”

“Thunners, they call them. Nasty breed. Or Thunders. Or Thunderers.”

“Because of the noise they make,” Ruth said.

“Because they won’t stop fucking shouting,” Marta agreed.

“Oh.”

Marta bolted the window and turned back to Arjun. “You’re looking better, anyway. You can start thinking how to pay us, yeah?” And she squeezed her sister’s shoulder and briskly left the room.

Another bird landed on the sill, and peered through the window with a resentful yellow eye. Arjun decided to ignore it.

The attic was stuffed to the rafters with furniture and boxes and books; unsold stock. Arjun lay on an ancient sofa. Ruth sat beside him. The cushions were grey and hard. There was, however, a blanket, which was relatively clean. There’d been food—potatoes, cabbage, and carrots—no meat. The house was cold. These sisters were not poor—not by the standards of some places in the city—but they were far from rich by the standards of all but the most desperate quarters. Names of places and times and parliaments and dukes and churches slipped through the shadows of Arjun’s mind, too many and too fast for him quite to grasp them.

“Ruth, you called me a ghost.”

“Sometimes people come wandering down the Mountain. We’re so close to it here. They’re like you. They don’t know who they are or where they’re from. They come and go. They don’t really belong here and they go, soon enough. We try to be kind to them when they’re here. There are more than enough people who’ll try to be cruel.”

“Tell me again, Ruth, where we are. I am still forgetful. Do you have a map?”

“Boxes and
boxes
of ‘em,” she laughed. “Are you buying?”

“Ruth, where are we?”

She went downstairs; she returned with her arms full. “All right. Here’s a few of Fosdyke and environs. There’s not much call for them.

Who needs maps to see where they already are? We’re stuck here in real life and that’s bad enough.”

“Thank you, Ruth.”

There was nothing there that Arjun recognized. This was a place where the streets were straight and square: a grid, a cage. For the most part they had numbers, not names, though a few were named for the factory complexes they bordered, or the Combines that owned them. Zones of authority were marked out—Holcroft Municipal Trust, Patagan Sewer & Piping, Woeck Oil, Carlyle Syndicated, Standard Auto. Where other ages of the city might have had parks, they had
Undeveloped Area {Ownership Disputed)
or
Reclamation Zones
— empty space penned in by the cage of streets. In a handful of spots the maps
knotted
, the ugly gridlike regularity was interrupted, the streets tangled like still-living things. Ruth’s finger picked out Carnyx Street—”That’s us. That’s where we are”—in the coils of one such area. But those places were so few, and everything around them was so coldly ordered; it made Arjun think that this part of the city had to be very, very old, and very tired.
Condemned Area
—
Poisons. Condemned Area
—
Unknown.
This Age of the city was
very
old; poisons and worse things accumulated.

The glass on the window was yellow-grey and streaked with soot. The sky looked sick. A shadow intruded on the lower-left quarter of the skyline, half obscured and half abstracted by distance and by greasy shameful clouds—a shadow that might have been the Mountain. It seemed too large to be contained by the window’s pathetic frame. It seemed to press past its bounds. Arjun lay back so that he couldn’t see it anymore.

Ruth sat again. “Tell me what you remember, Arjun. About where you’re from, I mean; about other places.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.” He gave up trying to recall and in the same instant a name came to him. “I remember a place called the Iron Rose.”

“It sounds beautiful.”

“I think it was a prison.”

“I’ve never heard of it, Arjun. Where was it? If I bring you up the maps we can look for it together.”

“Let me come down. I feel much better. I want to move and work.”

R
uth found Arjun some old clothes, to replace his bloody rags. Grey flannel trousers of a straight stove-pipe cut; a plain shirt, with patches; inelegant contraptions called
suspenders
, which Ruth had to help him fasten. Everything sagged on him like an empty sack, like an old man’s face; the original owner had been shorter than Arjun, but fatter.

Ruth put a hand to her mouth and laughed. “The Dad was a fat man, there’s no denying it. You look like a boy in his dad’s suit.”

“Oh. Am I young?”

Ruth lowered her hand. She seemed unsure what to say. She shrugged and waved her hand to say
yes and no.

“Do you have a mirror?”

T
he Low sisters had two shops on Carnyx Street: Nos. 27 and 29. The establishments were connected by a bell rope. Arjun said it was a charming arrangement; Ruth shrugged.

Ruth kept shop in No. 27, where they sold a few books, but not many; Fosdyke’s factory workers were mostly illiterate. The bosses did not read. Their wives and daughters sometimes did, but they sent south for their reading matter and would not be seen on Carnyx Street, which was disreputable. Ruth sold a few picture books, most of which, to be honest, were illustrated smut. She also sold music; in dusty sleeves along the walls were black discs, deeply grooved, which Ruth said could by their spinning, by codes engraved in them, cause music to be played, on certain rare machines that weren’t manufactured anymore. If you were an enthusiast—and those, too, weren’t being made much these days—you had to assemble them for yourself out of junk parts and stolen wire and love.
Machines
, Ruth said, had been Ivy’s business, before … well, she said she’d talk about that later, maybe.

But mostly Ruth sold maps. It had been one of the Dad’s numerous little businesses; and it had been
his
father’s before him, and somewhere way back in the family line had been travelers, explorers, peripatetic wanderers of the city, lodgers in odd boardinghouses, consummate fakers of dialects, connoisseurs of exotic omnibus passes and indecipherable street signs. Now there was nowhere to go; everywhere in the city was the same. Same machines, same streets, same
houses, same factories, same owners. Now people bought the maps because they were little glimpses of other, better worlds; the Know-Nothings forbade their sale, but there was a steady, albeit small and cultish, demand.

Ruth sighed a lot as she spoke. She flitted from shelf to shelf looking for maps, dusty maps, brittle yellow maps, maps printed on hard cracked leather or carved into dark wood or woven into moth-eaten embroideries, muttering, “Iron Rose, Iron Rose. There’s a Rose Theater, here. There’s any number of Rose Streets. And here, this mark shows the Temple of the Seven Hundred Rose Petals. Isn’t that lovely? Were there temples where you’re from? They’re all gone, now. Ah, look here, where it says
Territories of the Ivory Rose.
I don’t know who that was. Do you?”

“I don’t.”

“Ivory Rose. Doesn’t that sound beautiful? I wonder if it was a woman. None of those people exist anymore. All of those places are gone, except on these old maps.”

“Do the people around here buy a lot of maps?”

“Some,” Ruth said.

“Not enough,” Marta said, appearing at the top of the stairs as if she were a sorcerer. (There was a connecting door on the second floor, between the stacks, that Arjun had not at first noticed.) “But we get by,” she said, hefting a small sack of vegetables for dinner. “We feed ourselves. The building is ours. We’ve always lived here. We answer to no one. We don’t have to toady to the bosses and we don’t have to wear ourselves out in any factory.”

“I’m very glad,” Arjun said.

They sat for dinner. There was a small circular table, on which elbows touched in accidental intimacy. Three chairs, three settings; Arjun wondered whose place he had taken.
Ivy’s?
There was a vague sense of absence, of incompleteness, which the sisters filled with talk.

Marta worked out of No. 29, she explained. She sold herbs, remedies, poultices, treatments. As she described her work, Arjun had a vague recollection of various wise women and cunning men he’d dealt with in the past, in other parts of the city. He recalled a sinister man in a room full of gimcrack stars; he recalled an old alchemist in a gold-and-black skullcap, in a high airy room full of brass birdcages. Ashmole? He recalled holding that old man’s velvet-sleeved wrist and demanding,
I need something to make me hear. Something to open my
senses. Even if you must blind me in recompense.
He did not recall the alchemist’s answer.

And anyway, there was nothing of those uncanny folk in Marta, who ladled out cabbage soup into three clay bowls and sat down to eat, vigorously, methodically.

Every morning, Marta said, she went out at dawn and gathered weeds from the waste grounds, moss from the canal sides, mold from the timbers of old sidings and sheds; whatever grew in the soot and smog of the factories, like the Dad taught her; mixtures for women in family trouble, salves for the raw wounds left by the loose rusty teeth of the factory machines. Cures for accidents of one kind or another. “Like yours, poor old ghost.”

“It was no machine that wounded me.”

“So you said. Lots of the ghosts that come down from the Mountain are missing something. Fingers aren’t so bad. You can still do most work. Do you remember who did it?”

“No. That is, yes; I remember. No, it was not on the Mountain. It was here, in Fosdyke. It was not quite a who, but a
what.
I was in the Museum—I
think
it was a Museum.”

Arjun paused to eat. He fumbled—his hand made him clumsy. It embarrassed him. He flushed and spoke too quickly. “Not so far from here. I ran for a while but not so far or for so long. Is there a museum here? I came to myself in the cellars, underground, in a storeroom or a prison room. There was a creature in there with me, in a cage; a kind of lizard, a kind of reptile, maybe, scaly and yellow-eyed, much, much larger than a man. Heavy and ancient and I thought slow until”—he raised his hand bitterly. “It spoke to me. It told me what my name was. It told me that this part of the city was called Fosdyke, and you agree, which is how I know that it was not a dream, unless you sisters are also a dream. It said that it could tell the future. It said that it was a kind of God. I think it wanted me to worship it, or at least to marvel at it, but I’ve seen more wonderful things, though I may not recall them just now. It smelled bad; it lived idly in its own waste. Its scales were dull. It looked stuffed until it moved. It was an ugly thing. Maybe it was wonderful once, long ago. It promised to tell the future if only I would touch it; to tell me what I was looking for, who I am, what’s missing from me; what sent me up onto the Mountain, if that’s really where I fell from, as you seem to think. I needed it so badly. I felt sorry for the
creature. I touched it. It did
this
to me. I think it started to speak, then, but men came—the men who were holding it, perhaps—and I ran. It told me to run. I paid a price for my prophecy and I was cheated. Does this sound mad? I don’t know this part of the city. Low sisters, what should I do?”