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Piper stood up. To my left, Zoe dropped quietly from the lookout tree to the ground. She moved closer to where we sat in a circle around the ashes.
‘I heard they didn’t kill them all,’ Piper said.
Leonard stopped singing, but his fingers on the guitar never hesitated, the tune continuing to unfurl from his hands.
‘Is that what you heard?’ he said. The music played on. ‘Well, songs always exaggerate.’
He went back to the song.
They said there was no island
They said it wasn’t true
But they came for the island in their dark ships
And they’re coming next for you.
‘You’d want to be careful who’s listening, when you sing that song,’ said Zoe. ‘You could bring down trouble.’
Leonard smiled. ‘And you haven’t got trouble already, the three of you?’
‘Who told you about the island?’ said Piper.
‘The Council themselves are putting the word out,’ Leonard said. ‘Spreading the news that they found the island, crushed the resistance.’
‘That song you’re singing is hardly the Council’s version, though,’ said Piper. ‘What do you know of what happened there?’
‘People talk to bards,’ he said. ‘They tell us things.’ He strummed a few more chords. ‘But I’m guessing you didn’t need to be told about the island. I’m guessing you know more than I do about what happened there.’
Piper was silent. I knew that he was remembering. I’d seen it too. Not only seen it, but heard the shouts and whimpers. Smelled the butcher’s block scent of the streets.
‘No song can describe it,’ said Piper. ‘Let alone change it.’
‘Maybe not,’ said Leonard. ‘But a song can at least tell people about it. Tell them what the Council did to those people. Warn them what the Council’s capable of.’
‘And scare them away from getting involved with the resistance?’ Zoe said.
‘Perhaps,’ said Leonard. ‘That’s why the Council’s telling their version. I like to think my version might do something different – perhaps help people to realise why the resistance is so necessary. All I can do is tell the story. What they do with it is up to them.’
‘If we gave you another story to tell,’ I said, ‘you know it could be dangerous for you.’
‘That’s for us to decide,’ Eva said.
Piper and Zoe didn’t say anything, but Zoe stepped forward to stand beside Piper. Piper took a deep breath, and began to talk.
The bards put down their instruments while they listened. Leonard’s guitar lay on its back across his knees, and as we talked I imagined that it was a box we were filling with our words. We didn’t tell them about my link with Zach, but we told them everything else. We told them about the tanks, each one a glass case filled with terror. The missing children, and the tiny skulls in the grotto beneath the tank room at Wyndham. And the expanding refuges, and the machines that we’d destroyed with The Confessor.
When we’d finished, there was a long silence.
‘There’s good news in there too,’ Leonard said quietly. ‘About The Confessor. We passed near the Sunken Shore last week. She was from round there, they say, so there was a lot of talk about the rumour that she’d been killed. But I hadn’t dared to believe it.’
‘It’s true,’ I said, looking away from him. I didn’t want to see Leonard’s answering smile. He didn’t know the price Kip had paid for this good news. The price I was still paying.
‘And the rest of it – about the tanks. Is it really true?’ said Eva.
Leonard answered her before we could.
‘It’s all true. Hell on earth, it’s too far-fetched to make up.’ He rubbed at his absent eyes. ‘It explains everything. Why the Council’s been driving up the tithes and the land restrictions, these last few years. They’re pushing us toward the refuges.’
‘And do you think you could put it in a song?’ I said.
He reached down to place a hand on the neck of the guitar. ‘There’s a song in your story, that’s for sure, though it won’t be a pretty one,’ he said. He hoisted up the guitar, stroking along the top with his thumb, as if waking it gently.
‘Like Cass said: it’ll be dangerous, spreading the word,’ said Piper.
Leonard nodded. ‘True enough. But it’s dangerous for all of us, if word of the tanks and the refuges doesn’t spread.’
‘It’s a lot to ask of you,’ I said.
‘You’re not asking it of me,’ Leonard said. There was no music left in his voice as he spoke – his words were grave and quiet. ‘But you told me what you know. And now that I’ve heard it, I have an obligation.’
*
For hours, while I took my shift at the lookout post, I could hear Leonard and Eva working on the song. First they built the tune itself. The occasional word reached me: No, try this. Hold off on the chord change until the chorus. How about this? But mainly they didn’t talk. It was a conversation that took place in music. He’d pluck out a tune, and Eva would echo it, then play with it: varying the melody, adding harmonies. For hours they sat together, passing the tune back and forth between them.
Even when Eva had settled down to rest, Leonard kept working, adding the words now. He sang slowly, trying out different versions of the words. He was stringing them onto the growing melody like beads on a string, sometimes unthreading and rearranging. When Piper relieved me at the lookout post, I fell asleep listening to Leonard’s singing, the gravelled edge of his deep voice.
When I woke later, the moon was rising in the darkening sky, and Leonard was still playing. I walked down to the spring. The music followed me all the way to the water, which might be why Zoe didn’t hear me coming. I saw her standing close to where the stream burst from the rock, about twenty feet ahead of me. She was leaning against a tree, one arm wrapped loosely around it, her head resting on the trunk as she tilted her face upwards. She swayed slightly to the music that filtered through the trees. Her eyes were closed.
I’d seen Zoe naked, when we washed at rivers. I’d seen her asleep. I’d even shared her dreams, her sleeping mind a window onto the sea. But I’d never seen her as unguarded as at that moment. I turned away, as if I’d seen something shameful, and began to retreat. She opened her eyes.
‘Are you spying on me?’
‘Just fetching water,’ I said, lifting the empty water flask like a flag of surrender.
She turned back to the spring. When she spoke, she didn’t look at me. ‘There used to be a bard who came through our parents’ village, a few times a year. She played the violin like nobody you’ve ever seen. Piper and I were only tiny, then – we used to sneak out after bedtime to listen.’
She said nothing more. I hesitated before speaking – I was remembering her blade at my stomach, after she’d learned that I’d seen her dreams.
‘If you want to talk –’ I said, eventually.
‘You’re meant to be the expert on the future,’ she interrupted, striding towards me and grabbing the flask. ‘Concentrate on that. That’s what we need you for. Keep your nose out of my past.’ She knelt at the spring and wrenched the stopper out before filling the flask.
We stood facing each other. I watched the water drip from her wet hand, and I tried to come up with words that she couldn’t throw back at me.
Before I could speak, the music stopped suddenly. From up the hill, Piper was calling to us. Zoe strode past me and didn’t look back.
‘The song’s not finished yet,’ Leonard warned us, when we were gathered around him and Eva. A fog had descended with the darkness, and Piper had rekindled the fire. ‘It’ll change, too,’ he added, ‘as we travel, and as other bards take it up. If a song’s alive enough, it changes.’ I remembered the different versions of songs that I’d heard. The song about the blast, which changed from bard to bard, or from season to season.
Leonard began quietly, his fingers strumming a series of almost cheerful chords on the guitar. There was none of the intricate fingerpicking that had impressed me when he’d performed for us earlier. ‘I’ve kept it simple,’ he said, as if he could see me staring at his fingers. ‘If you want it to catch on, it has to be something that any bard could play, without fifteen fingers.’
As the tune went on, melancholy notes were slipped in like contraband, so that by the time they reached the chorus, the tune had soured. Eva’s melody parted from Leonard’s, her voice climbing to new and mournful highs, as his stayed steady and low. Their voices counterbalanced and resonated, until the space in between the notes was thick with longing.
There’s no refuge in the refuge,
No peace behind those gates.
No freedom once you turn to them
Just living death, where the tanks await.
They throw you in a cage of glass
Not living, and not dying.
Trapped inside a floating hell
Where none can hear you crying.
Oh, you’ll never be hungry, you’ll never be thirsty
And the Council’s tanks will have no mercy.
Oh, you’ll never be tired, you’ll never be cold
And you’ll never ever ever grow old,
And the only price you’ll have to pay
Is to give your life away.
They drive us to the blighted land
Then bleed us with their tithes,
And if you go to the refuge
They’ll take your very lives.
The taboo has been forsaken
Within the refuge walls.
The machines have been awakened
And the Council plans to tank us all.
Oh, you’ll never be hungry, you’ll never be thirsty
And the Council’s tanks will have no mercy.
Oh, you’ll never be tired, you’ll never be cold
And you’ll never ever ever grow old,
And the only price you’ll have to pay
Is to give your life away.
When Leonard and Eva had played for us in the morning, we’d whooped along with some of the fast jigs, and clapped after some of the pieces where Leonard’s fingers had been at their swiftest. But none of us clapped now. The last notes slipped away, between the trees that encircled us like a gathered crowd. Our silence was the song’s best testament.
I wanted to send something into the world that wasn’t fire, or blood, or blades. Too many of my actions in recent months were bloodstained. The song was different – it was something we had built, rather than destroyed. But I knew that it was still a risk. If Leonard was caught, the song would hang him as surely as any act of violent resistance would. If Council soldiers heard him sing, or traced the treason back to him, the song would wind itself around his neck sure as a noose, and it would be his dirge, and Eva’s. Their twins’, too.
‘It’s a brave thing that the two of you’re doing,’ I said to Leonard, as we were packing up the camp in the dark.
He scoffed. ‘People fought and bled, on the island. I’m just an old blind man with a guitar.’
‘There are different kinds of courage,’ said Piper, emptying a flask of water on the fire, to ensure no telltale embers remained.
We said farewell to Leonard and Eva when we reached the road. A quick pressing of hands in the dark, and they were gone, heading east while we went west. Leonard was playing his mouth organ again, but distance rapidly dampened the music.
Over the next few days I found myself humming the chorus as I sharpened my dagger, matching the blade’s rasp to the beats of the song. I whistled the tune as I gathered wood for the fire. It was only a song, but it took hold in my mind like the ragweed that used to take over my mother’s garden.
CHAPTER 8 (#ulink_31486f25-ae53-5c8c-aace-3ca018fcb9e5)
I’d never seen anything like the Sunken Shore. When we arrived, after five nights of walking, it was dawn. Below us, it looked as if the sea had crept gradually inwards, the land surrendering in messy increments. There was no clear point where the sea met the land, like in the steep cliffs that Kip and I had seen on the south-west coast, or even in the coves near the east coast’s Miller River. Instead there was only a jumble of peninsulas and spits, divided by inlets that grasped inland like the sea’s fingers. In some places, the land petered out into swampy shallows before giving in entirely to the sea. Elsewhere, low islands were humped with straggled grey-green growth that might have been grass or seaweed.
‘It’s low-tide now,’ Piper said to me. ‘Half of those islands will be under by noon. The shallows of the peninsulas too. If you get caught out on the wrong spit of land when the tide turns, you can find yourself in trouble.’
‘How does Sally live here? They haven’t allowed Omegas to live on the coast for years.’
‘See out there?’ Piper pointed to the farthest reaches of the broken coast, where the spits of land gave way to the water, a series of loosely linked islands barely keeping above the encroaching sea. ‘Right out there, on some of the bleaker spits, it’s too salty to farm and too swampy for good fishing, and paths are there one minute and gone in the next tide. You couldn’t pay Alphas to live out there. Nobody goes there. Sally’s been hiding out there for decades.’
‘It’s not just the landscape that keeps people away,’ Zoe said. ‘Look.’
She pointed out, further still. Beyond the scrappy spits of land, something in the water was glinting, reflecting the dawn back at itself. I narrowed my eyes and peered out. At first I thought it was some kind of fleet, masts massed in the sea. But they ignored the sea’s shifting and stayed perfectly motionless. Another glint of light. Glass.
It was a sunken city. Spires impaled the sea, the highest of them reaching thirty yards above the water. Others were barely glimpsed – just shapes at the surface with angles too precise to be rocks. The city went on and on, some spires standing alone, others clustered near to one another. Some seemed still to have glass in windows; most were just metal structures, cages of water and sky.
‘I took Sally’s boat out there once, years ago,’ Piper said. ‘It goes on for miles – the biggest of the Before cities that I’ve seen. Hard to imagine how many people must have lived there.’
I didn’t need to imagine. I could feel it, now that I was staring at the glass-sharpened sea. I could hear a submerged roar of presence, and absence. Did they die by fire, or water? Which came first?
We slept for the day on a promontory looking over the patchy welter of land and ocean. I dreamed of the blast, and when I woke I didn’t know where I was, or when. When Zoe came to rouse me for the last lookout shift before nightfall, I was already awake, sitting up with my blanket wrapped around me and my hands clutched together to quell their shaking. I was aware of her watching me as I walked to the lookout post. My movements felt jerky, and my ears still rang with the roar of the ravenous flames.
It was high tide, the sea had engulfed most of the furthest spits, leaving a network of tiny hillocks and rocks jutting out, so that the water was curdled by specks of land. The sunken city had disappeared altogether. Then, as the darkness advanced, I watched the tide retreat again. Lamps were lit in the Alpha villages on the slopes below us.
It wasn’t the underwater city that I was thinking of, as I watched the tide go out, the sea slinking away like a fox from a henhouse. I was thinking of Leonard’s passing comment that The Confessor had come from the Sunken Shore. Somewhere, only a few miles down the sloping coastline, was the place where she and Kip had grown up. She would have been sent away when they were split, but Kip had probably stayed on. This strange landscape would have been his home. As a child, he would have roamed these same hills. Perhaps he’d climbed up to this very viewpoint, and seen the tide go out, as I saw it now, more and more of the land being exposed to the moon’s gaze.
