Secrets and Lies

 “The issue, Minister,” said Dink Lightly, “is that the diaries you’ve provided for the book—”

“My personal diaries, yes.” The Minister famously disliked listening to anyone else speak for longer than a few minutes.  Dink, his ghostwriter, was coming to terms with it but he still had to avoid sighing in frustration that the Minister was clarifying a point that was obvious to everyone in the room.

“Yes,” he said, mentally sighing instead.  “Yes, those diaries. The issue is that they contain, well, confessions.  Of crimes.”

“Everyone makes mistakes,” said the Minister cheerfully.  He grinned at Dink with his best campaign smile.  “I think we used that a slogan last year, in fact.  You can put that in the book.”

Dink forced a smile onto his face and reached for his notepad.

“Ah, before you write that down, Mr. Dink,” said a nasal voice to his left.  He couldn’t help but think of a weasel trying to be human whenever he heard that voice.  “That slogan, Minister, was the one we trialled to explain the increase in the number of people being sent to prison.”

“Ah,” said the Minister in the tone of someone being reminded of something unpleasant.  “That was not our greatest success, right?”

“Far from it, Minister,” said the weasel.  Dink tried to remember that the man’s name was Jacob, just in case he had to offer an opinion.

“So probably only a third-rate success,” said the Minister sounding thoughtful and apparently having only heard what he wanted to hear.  “I think the book should—“

“Focus on the top-tier successes,” said Jacob.  The Minister glared at him for a few seconds and then nodded.  “Ok, don’t use that quote.  Or save it for the sequel maybe.”  Dink glanced surreptitiously at Jacob who shook his head fractionally but firmly.  Dink wrote down some words at random to appease the Minister and wondered how much longer this would go on for.

“Right,” said the Minister.  “That’s all then, right?”

“Ah,” said Dink, but the weasel laid a cold, clammy hand on Dink’s wrist and spoke over him.

“Not quite, Minister.  The diaries, as this young man,” and Jacob smiled at Dink in a way that made him want to vomit, “is trying to tell you, contain details that are not in the public interest, though the public would likely be very interested in them.”

“What?”  The Minister could be disarmingly blunt when he wasn’t actually interested in what was being said.

Jacob took his hand off Dink’s wrist and Dink narrowly avoided shuddering in relief.

“The diaries state that you broke the pandemic rules,” said Dink.  “Repeatedly.  And inventively, in some cases.”

“Those rules didn’t apply to me,” said the Minister.  He looked at his watch.  “I’m on the news in five minutes and I’d like to watch it.”

“They did,” said Jacob smoothly.  “And finding out that you’d broken them would put you on the news rather a lot Minister, but not in any way you’d like to watch.”

“Well change the law, then,” said the Minister.  “Have them not apply to me, since I’m the Minister and I’m running the show here.  How is this difficult?  Why am I having to listen to this?”

“Changing the law retroactively would require Parliament to be told all the details,” said Jacob.  “Which might endanger your chance of re-election.”

“Oh.”  The Minister frowned and adjusted his position on his chair in a way that suggested he had been about to stand up and leave no matter how the conversation went.  “I need to be re-elected.  At least until I can make this position hereditary.  So… just don’t put that bit in the book.”

Dink found himself writing down hereditary? and wondering what the Minister was on about.  A moment later Jacob took his pen out of his hand and carefully scribbled over hereditary until only the question mark was left.

“The problem, Minister,” said Jacob, “is that under the rules set out for the writing of these books for government officials the ghostwriter must report any evidence of criminal activity if they come across it.”

“Well done,” said the Minister, smiling warmly at Dink.  “I shall act on it at once.  Is that done now?”

“Not to you, Minister,” said Jacob.  Dink thought he sounded wheedling now.  “To the police.”

“Good Lord,” said the Minister.  “Haven’t I abolished them yet?”

“Legislation is in passage,” said the weasel with a smile that Dink felt showed far too many teeth that were far too white.  “But realistically it would be better to submit the evidence to them and then have them decide that there is no crime to investigate.  A little work with the Official Secrets Act after that and we can cover this up for a hundred and fifty years, by which time no-one will care.”

The Minister gave the weasel the side-eye.  “And how do they decide that?” he asked.  “What’s it going to cost?”

“It used to be a peerage,” said Jacob.  “In the good old days.  You’d just knight the Chief Constable or give his wife a modest title, one that comes with a small stretch of land, and be done with it.  But under the current circumstances… you’re probably going to have to give up on abolishing the police force.”

“No!”

“Hear me out, Minister, at least.  There is an alternative.”

“I won’t have these plebs trying to prosecute me!  They’re persecuting me enough already without changing the damn letters around!”

“Indeed, Minister, though can you truly say they have no cause?”  Jacob didn’t wait for his boss to answer. “Instead, let’s have the police force report into you directly.  They will be placated by the legislation to abolish them being dropped and we’ll slide their reporting lines under you as part of amendments to other bills. A little bit of PR work and we can change the M from meaning Metropolitan to Militia, I should think.”

“The M?”

“As in London Metropolitan Police: LMP, Minister.  We can make it London’s Militia Policing.  And it will your own private army.”

Dink reached for his pen to note that down but Jacob removed it and, without once looking at Dink, snapped it in half.

“Capital idea,” said the Minister.  “They’ll have a hard time arresting me if I’m giving the orders, right?”

“Precisely, Minister.”

Descending the mountain

 Garret clung to the rockface, the tips of his fingers white with the effort and long-since numb.  His feet were half-on, half-off a narrow ledge and his toes were starting to ache with the strain of holding himself in place.  He was trying to edge along the ledge to the next patch of cliff-face where he could actually stand but Samara had stopped in front of him and he was biting his tongue to prevent himself from demanding what the problem was now.

The crumbling of the path ahead of them had turned out to be a much bigger problem that he’d expected; when they’d turned around to backtrack a little and find another way down they’d discovered that the steep slope they’d been descending was unclimbable.  The loose scree that they’d carefully nudged aside with their feet coming down was impossible to avoid when going up, and it just slid from under them and dumped them unceremoniously on their arses, unpleasantly close to the drop.  Or plummet, considering it was definitely far enough to the steppe below to be fatal.  Samara had cursed a blue streak, letting go some of the rage she had for the path crumbling in the first place and conveniently not letting Garret ask any more questions about whether the whole situation could have been avoided if she had been more trusting.  Then she’d glared around her as though the cliff and the sky and the mountain were somehow conspirators against her and sat heavily down and sighed as though she was carrying the weight of the whole world on her shoulders.

“Am thinking: is time to climb,” said Efimov looking over the edge. Garret, who didn’t have vertigo or a particular fear of heights did not join him; the view was spectacular but made him feel uneasy.  There just wasn’t quite enough space on their path to stand back and feel secure in his opinion.

“There’s no chance we could fly instead?”

Efimov looked over at him and grinned, a light dancing in his eyes that made Garret more uneasy than looking at the drop to the ground.  “Ah flight,” he said.  “Difficult magic, that.  Taught at Bogbones and Atul schools, however.”

“They teach all magics,” said Samara but it sounded automatic and less defensive than she’d been so far.

“They teach this one,” said Efimov.  “Problem is, the way they teach it is about leverage.  Flight is achieved by pushing on something else, typically the ground.”

Garret’s forehead, which could charitably be compared a freshly ploughed field, furrowed further as he thought about this.  “Isn’t that right though?” he asked. “I mean, a bird flaps its wings and pushes the air against the ground to stay aloft, right?”

Efimov shook his head.  “No, bird pushes air against air when it flaps.  Ground is a long way away and there is a lot of air between it and bird.  Also, air moves when pushed.  Flying is not like rowing boat.  Flapping is not for support, flapping is for direction.  Bird curves wings, adjusts direction.  Bird flaps to turn, but relies on being light enough not to fall too fast.”

Garret puzzled over this.  “Ok,” he said at last.  “I don’t think I understand that, but magic does it differently anyway?”

“Exact,” said Efimov.  “And here is problem.  Magic flying here — ground is too far away.  So we have only falling until ground is close enough, and then magic probably not strong enough to slow fall and start flying before ground catches us.”

“We die, but more slowly,” said Samara.  She was staring into the blue sky and Garret wondered for a moment if he’d ever seen her look so hopeless.  “We’re stranded on the side of this stupid mountain and we’re going to die here.”

“Time for climbing,” said Efimov.

“We can’t climb, you idiot!  There’s no way up.  The scree will kill us just as much as jumping off the mountainside will!”

“Not climbing up,” said Efimov.  Garret plucked up his courage to look over the edge of the mountain and wished he hadn’t.  The side of the mountain was yellowish-grey rock and while there were lots of bumps and crags and cracks Garret didn’t like the idea of clinging to them for dear life while trying to inch his way towards the ground.  Somewhere overhead a bird chose that moment to scream and the cry echoed around them eerily.

“You want to climb down?!  Have you gone mad?”

Efimov gestured at the path.  “Path continues below us,” he said.  “Only need to climb down to rest of path.”

Garret thought Samara was going to start shouting but she stood up instead, and took three quick steps to the edge.  Then she knelt and peered over, then stretched out, lying down and let her head hang over the edge.

“You’re right,” she said, sounding surprised.  “The path switches back and carries on below us.  We could climb down to that.”

“We?” asked Garret and wasn’t at all surprised when the other two ignored him.  “I might be a bit heavy for that,” he said into the silence.  “My pack, that is,” he said when he still got no response.

“You will have to carry only what is necessary to you,” said Efimov.  “But I think we have a plan now.”

“We?” asked Garret again. A chill feeling of dread started in the pit of his stomach and spread outwards.

Samara led the way as though it had been her idea all along until they’d reached the first point where they could rejoin the path.  Garret, gritting his teeth and sweating so much that water seemed to run off his head in a rivulet, had struggled down with his pack intact.  When his feet finally settled on the path and his heart stopped pounding in his chest like it was going to burst the pain in his fingers and toes started up.  As he massaged his hands and got his breathing back under control, Efimov looked over the edge again and said,

“I think we could climb a bit further.  Would save time.”

“Lead on,” said Samara.  Garret bit his tongue and wondered at the unfairness of the world that his companions seemed determined to take the hardest approach to everything.

“I might prefer the path,” he said, even as Efimov slipped over the edge of the path and started to climb down.  “I don’t have any spiders in my ancestry, you know.”

“It’s getting dark,” said Samara, glancing up at the sky.  It was a deeper blue than it had been earlier and Garret now noted, with dismay, that there were hints of red and orange, sunset colours, amongst the sparse clouds.  “Sure you want to be up here on your own when that happens?”

“Extortion,” muttered Garret under his breath and resigned himself to following Samara.

Now, with the path once again in sight, she had stopped in front of him and he was wondering how long he had before his fingers just stopped working and he fell off the mountain.

“There’s a problem,” she said and Garret had to restrain himself to keep from shouting that there better bloody had be.  “Efimov had stopped.”

“Great,” said Garret, unable to help himself.  His jaw ached from gritting his teeth.

“What?”  Samara turned her head to look at him and then she sneered. “Oh, was that sarcasm?”

“What else?” said Garret.  He reminded himself that while he was only to fall off this cursed mountain the way things were going, he didn’t have to anger Samara into pushing him off.  “I don’t think I can go back.”

“I don’t think any of us can,” she said.  “But… oh, Efimov’s done it!”  She sounded impressed, which was very unlike her.  “That was quite a jump he made,” she continued.  Then she looked at Garret again.  “You might have a problem with that pack though.”

Garret had regretted keeping his pack eight times so far and would have taken it off and picked it up from the bottom of the mountain if he’d thought it was at all possible without it pulling him down with it.  He was certain that as tired as he now was, it wasn’t going to be easier.

“Right,” he said.  “Got this far though, so you never know.”

“Sure,” said Samara.  She edged forwards at last.  “See you if you make it!”

Ellesbrith of Quyani

 The old house was lit by candles: tall, yellow columns of dragonfly-wax harvested from the roofs of the city and moulded into shape by the ciresters.  The narrow hallway that Ramayon walked down after locking the door behind him held two, both floor-standing and as tall as mid-chest on him.  Each wick was finger-thick and burned white with a faintly lavender edge.  Shadows wavered on the walls in front of him as he moved and his eyes tracked them alertly.  The house was safe, he was sure of that, but in Quyani you lived longest by not taking chances.  There was a smell too, something papery and dry; the ciresters said it came from the wax and Ramayon, who would never dare to climb the roofs and harvest wax, chose to believe them.  The smell wasn’t unpleasant, but after a short while it was like being in a musty, unaired library and he then felt an urge to escape to fresh air.

At the end of the hallway was another door.  It had no lock and pushed outwards easily when he laid a hand on it.  He walked through, letting the door swing shut by itself, and now he was a in an antechamber of sorts.  There were doors in each of the other three walls, and in the centre of the room was a flight of wooden stairs leading downwards.  The staircase was surrounded by wooden bannisters except where the top stair made contact with the floor and, unsurprisingly, the stairs themselves vanished into darkness.  Between the doors were frescos in what looked like an untutored hand; colour was applied boldly but seemingly without much thought, and the lines of the people and animals depicted were bold but crude.  Ramayon paused for a moment, looking at the frescos.  They were mostly hunting scenes and were supposedly older than the house, painted onto the walls of caves before Quyani had been quarried around them.  Personally he thought that some of the people who lived here and never left had drawn them when they were bored and had made the story up to justify them.

The door to his left opened and a woman stepped out.  She was slightly shorter than him, wearing a blue shirt and grey trousers and had auburn hair tied back from her face in a pony-tail.  She hesitated for a moment, then recognised him.

“Ramayon,” she said.  She didn’t sound precisely hostile, but he knew she didn’t like him and, though the ballots were secret, he suspected that she had voted against his joining their society.  “Have you been lurking here long?”

“I just arrived,” he said.  “Do people often lurk in here, then?”

She pursed her lips for a moment, disliking that he’d picked up on her choice of verb.  “A slip of the tongue,” she said, waving one hand dismissively.  “Some people have been known to study the paintings.  I would… I would not have thought you were one of them.”

Ramayon decided to ignore the implied slight.  “I am sure they have amazing qualities,” he said, walking towards the door she was standing in front of.  “But I was asked to come here by Ellesbrith and you know as well as I that she does not like to be kept waiting.”

“She is impatient already,” said the woman.  She stepped aside. “I would recommend being apologetic.”

“We are not the same, though,” murmured Ramayon as he passed through the doorway.

This room had been hewn out of the rock itself; the floor, the walls and the ceiling were all pale-grey stone.  The floor had veins of colour, mostly brown and red, running through it while the walls were more uniform.  The ceiling was hard to judge as stalactites descended from it in several places and the rest was so rough that it might have been entirely natural.  In the centre of the room was a helix of metal that spiralled upwards and eventually made contact with a stalactite.  There was a cold draught coming from somewhere up near the ceiling and Ramayon shivered.

Ellesbrith was standing by the helix doing something to it with a rubber-handled tool that seemed to consist of eight prongs connected together at a central point.  As he approached she looked over her shoulder at him.

“I said midnight,” she said sharply.  Her voice echoed around the cavern, which was a better descriptor than room in Ramayon’s opinion.  “Are you deaf, stupid, or inconvenienced?”

“I am late,” said Ramayon, who knew that Ellesbrith hated anything she could describe as an excuse.  “I passed Natalie on my way in.”

He waited.  Ellesbrith tapped the helix and seemed very interested in the noises that her tool made.  After thirty seconds or so she looked over her shoulder again and she looked less annoyed.

“Natalie overran her time,” she said.  “Not that that’s any of your concern, and since you couldn’t have known she would you couldn’t have allowed for that in your arrival.”

“True,” said Ramayon. “But the circumstances are that I am only late in absolute terms; relatively speaking I am exactly when you needed me.”

“One day,” said Ellesbrith, “one day you won’t have a smart answer.  Then what will you do?”

“I’ll cross that bridge when it needs burning,” said Ramayon.  Ellesbirth snorted, but it might have been laughter.

“Fine,” she said.  “Be like that.  Now come and look at this.  If I’m not mistaken, the dance of shadows is getting longer, and I think we’re in danger of seeing a prophecy fulfilled.”

Pictures of my sister (2)

 The tea was strange.  I didn’t like the way it dried my tongue when I swallowed and it had a powerful taste that I didn’t recognise.  My uncle watched my face, and then poured a little milk in, clouding it.  He stirred it and I tasted again, and we repeated this until I nodded.  The taste of the tea was hard to identify now and I definitely preferred the taste of the milk, which was dominant, but there was something about this that was getting better as I sipped.

“What is she drinking?”  My aunt’s voice carried well; when she wanted attention in a shop or a crowded hall, she got it.  It was a pleasant voice, usually, but when she was annoyed it went up in pitch slightly and seemed to cut through other sounds a little more easily.  This morning she didn’t sound annoyed, but there was definitely a note of disapproval.

“Milky tea,” said my uncle.  He shrugged.  “More milk than tea, I’d say, but she has to start sometime.”

My aunt pursed her lips but her eyes didn’t harden and I knew she wasn’t really annoyed.  “I’m not sure anyone needs to start drinking tea,” she said, but her voice had lost its edge.  “But I suppose if it means we can make a pot of tea without adding other drinks as well it saves time.”

My aunt liked to save time, along with lots of other things.  That thought made me wonder: were the missing pictures saved somewhere else too?

“We shall go to the department store today,” said my aunt, waving a hand at the teapot.  My uncle nodded and poured her a cup of tea, listening as she detailed the things she wanted to buy.  I sipped my tea as well, listening carefully.  While my aunt would never have dreamed of asking me to remember anything for her — ordering my uncle to was fine, but admitting she couldn’t do it herself would have been like announcing she was a horse — she did occasionally ask me if I’d been listening.  If I couldn’t answer her questions, I got a lecture on listening to adults which, oddly enough, was so rehearsed that I could practically repeat it myself.

“When we come back, we shall attend to the garden,” she finished.  Then she looked at me.  “You must have homework.”

I nodded, though it was less a question than an insistence.  “Good.  You shall do that then, and I shall look over it afterwards.”  I nodded again, but inwardly I cringed.  My aunt found more faults with my homework than my teachers did.

The department store trip was both tiring and boring.  Though the shop housed many things, often new and exciting, my aunt only had time and thoughts for the things she was buying and disliked ‘window shopping’ as she phrased it.  So my uncle and I trudged after her, occasionally pausing when we thought we weren’t observed to look at other things and then hurrying after my aunt to try and avoid being told not to dawdle, lollygaggle, or be accused of browsing.  I wasn’t sure why browsing was such a sin, but the stern look on my aunt’s face convinced me that it was problematic at least.  The car journey back was warm and the radio was turned on and I was allowed to listen to music.  My aunt occasionally humphed at things, but my uncle seemed to have more say in matters in the car and the radio was left alone.  I was happy; music was fun and made me feel cheerful and I didn’t see why my aunt might not like some of it.

Back at home, when the purchases had been carefully unwrapped and put away and tea had been poured and drunk (and I had slightly less milk in mine this time, with a quiet wink from my uncle and I thought I might be starting to like it more), my aunt led the way into the garden and my uncle strolled behind her whistling and I made my way upstairs to my bedroom and my schoolbooks.

I stopped on the first landing.  My room was on the second floor with a tiny, chilly bathroom next to it that I only used for going to the toilet.  The first floor had my uncle and aunt’s bedroom, the main bathroom that was bigger and warmer and had the fluffy, tassled bathmats that I loved standing on and wiggling my toes in, and the room that my uncle called his study.  The door was usually slightly ajar, by a couple of centimetres, but rarely closed unless my uncle was in there.  I’d peeked inside of a few occasions but the room was boring: there was a bookcase in one corner, a desk and two chairs, some pictures on the walls and a window and that was pretty much it.  But now I hesitated, remembering my thought from earlier: had my aunt saved the pictures from the photo album somewhere in the study?

I pushed the door gently.  I had seen my aunt and uncle both go outside and still I couldn’t quite get away from the feeling that one of them had someone sneaked back inside and was waiting in the study for me to catch me.  The door swung silently back and revealed the empty room.  I looked out of the window, but the study was at the front of the house and the garden at the back, so there was nothing much to see but the narrow strip of grass that made up the front lawn, the hedge that shielded it from the road, and the road beyond.  The room was much as I’d remembered it; the bookcase was there and the desk; the chairs had been pushed against the wall and there were papers on the desk.  I looked at them quickly, my heart pounding in my chest as I worried that my aunt or uncle might come up the stairs at any time for something they’d forgotten and they would find me there, but they weren’t pictures.  They had words and numbers and were probably bills, but to me they meant nothing.

I looked at the bookcase, wondering what my aunt might have saved the pictures in.  There were no photo-albums that I could see, and the books were all serious-looking: they were big, heavy and often had gold lettering on the spines.  The top two shelves were mostly full, but the bottom two held no books at all.  One was empty, and the bottom shelf had a couple of white cardboard boxes sitting on it.  One was open and I could see a scattering of paperclips, some string, a short metal ruler and other office-stationery type things and the other had a cardboard lid that closed it.

I was so nervous that I had to tiptoe to the stairs and peer over the bannister, listening as hard as I could.  The house was quiet and I thought that my aunt and uncle were still out in the garden.  I tiptoed back, holding my breath, and gently tugged on the lid of the box.  It slipped upwards easily — it was a little too large — and inside was a stack of paper.  I picked it out and looked at it, shuffling it in my hands.  Much of it seemed to be letters in envelopes addressed to my aunt, but between two of them was something glossier and firmer: the missing pictures.

I stared at them, and then put everything back in the box and the lid back on, tiptoed out of the room and closed the door almost all the way, then ran upstairs to my room.  I got my books out and sat down in front of them and stared blindly at the page of English comprehension questions.  All I could see was the pictures of my parents holding two children: one that was me as a baby and an older girl I didn’t recognise at all.

Pictures of my sister (1)

 The picture album was kept on the bookshelf in the drawing room.  Only my aunt called it the drawing room; my uncle, a tired-looking man with prematurely grey hair rolled his eyes every time she did.  I asked him once about it, when he was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of milkless tea.

“Ronnie,” he said, for my aunt’s name was Veronica and forbidden to me, “likes to… see the best in things, shall we say.  Why not call it a drawing room?  If the house had more than five rooms and a lean-to then we might have call to need another name of it, mightn’t we?”

I would get the picture album down and turn the pages of it when no-one else was around.  That usually meant the mornings of the weekends, when my aunt refused to get up before 10 and my uncle, who got up before dawn every weekday, also took the opportunity to sleep a little longer.  In the silence of the house and the slanting rays of pale sunlight that crept past the branches of the trees in the garden and through the dusty glass of the bay window I would get the album down and run my hands over it’s fake leather cover.  It felt rough and plasticky and it crackled when I opened it.  The pages were filled with small square photographs, some in colour but most in black and white, each tucked into a pocket of yellowing plastic.  The pages were faintly sticky and I had to turn each page carefully to pull the plastic envelopes apart with another crackle.

I didn’t know anyone in the pictures for the first eight or nine pages.  They were young people who gradually got older as I turned the pages and studied each scene.  Initially there were six of them, three men and three women, who were playing croquet or sitting at a table and eating or drinking.  After two pages though the pictures showed only two of them, and I guessed that they had got married.  Then a baby appeared in the pictures, and for a page there were only photographs of the baby.  As the baby got older the pictures started showing all three of them more, and then the parents disappeared and the baby, now a young woman, started appearing with people I took to be her friends.  Soon enough those pictures became just her and a young man, and I recognised them as my mother and father.

The tenth page was where I spent most of my time.  The first two picture envelopes there were empty and there was no indication as to why the pictures were missing.  Then I appeared in the third picture, dressed in baby clothes and not-really-smiling at the camera.

The twelfth page was where the pictures stopped altogether.  There was a cutting from a newspaper, fragile and yellowing and I avoided opening it up or touching it in case it fell apart.  In three paragraphs my parents’s death in a car accident were recorded as though it were a shop opening or a minor social event.  The first time I read it hot tears fell from my eyes and a tight sensation knotted my stomach.  I had dim memories of coming to visit my aunt and uncle and waking up in the morning, puzzled that I was still in their house, and then my uncle sitting me at the table with him and gently explaining that my parents needed me to stay with him and my aunt for a little longer.

A little longer became a lot longer and I’m sure at some point they explained to me that my parents were dead; probably around the time they changed my school to one closer to where they lived, but by then I’d found the newspaper cutting and read about it for myself.  I’m not sure though; I’m not sure at all that my aunt thinks I’m old enough even now to know what happened to my parents. 

I set the album back on the shelf on Sunday morning, pushing it back between one of Jane Austen’s monstrosities and a hard-cover book on gardening.  The album made a faint squeak and I pretended to myself that it was a small noise of satisfaction to be back in its place.  I turned around to leave the drawing room, closing the door tightly behind me as though I’d never been there, and there was my uncle standing in the doorway.  Now it was my turn to squeak.

“Don’t let Ronnie know you’ve been in here,” he said and left quietly.

I tugged the drawing room door closed, making sure it looked just like it did when I’d opened it to come in and hurried into the kitchen to find him.  He was there alone, still looking tired even though he’d only just got up.  He was stood at the stove, with his back to me, setting the kettle on a burner and lighting the gas.

“Uncle?” I said.  My voice quivered just a little and I felt a shiver run down my spine.  My aunt was quick to admonish, to caution and to criticise but she left actual punishments to my uncle.  He was the one who would send me to my room, or smack me — a single slap to the back of my legs that would sting for thirty seconds.  He was always restrained, but the implication was that he didn’t have to be, and I knew that I didn’t want to ever push him to the point of thinking he needed to hit me twice.

“If she catches you there’ll be hell to pay,” he said.  He looked round and looked over my head so that I looked behind me too.  The hallway was empty.  “She won’t wait for me to come home.”

“But why?” I asked.  “Is it because of the missing pictures?”

He didn’t answer at first, instead taking cups from the cupboard and setting them down loudly on the counter-top.  Then he found a teaspoon from a drawer, rattling the cutlery.  Then the tea-caddy needing taking from its place at the back of the counter, lined up with the sugar and flour canisters against the white tiles.  Then he looked round again, checking once more that the hallway was empty.

“Don’t talk about them,” he said.  “Even if she catches you, don’t talk about them.”

“Bu—“

“Shush!”

He didn’t shout but I heard in that word the implicit threat that if I didn’t, I’d invite punishment.  I opened my mouth, and then thought about how hard that single word had sounded.  I nodded instead.

“Good girl,” he said and the harshness of his tone had mellowed back into the gentle voice he used almost all the time, and especially with my aunt.  “I think it’s about time you learned about an adult vice, isn’t it?  Let’s make you a small cup of tea.”

Stuffed rice

 “Stuffed rice,” said the waiter, setting the plate in front of me.

“Pardon?” I said, staring at him, and then the plate, in disbelief.

It had started three days earlier when my editor, bless her rancid, fatty little soul, left.  She claimed she’d been headhunted by a news network looking to replace a recently-departed prime-time host, and while she was certainly fascist enough in her views for that to be possible, none of us actually believed it.  Still, we dutifully passed a card round (I took the liberty of writing fake messages from three made-up names to confuse her if she bothered to read it) and had a small collection for a leaving gift.  When that added up to mostly pocket lint, we wrapped up a stapler from the stationery cupboard and reluctantly agreed to spend an evening drinking with her instead.  Knowing full well that no-one would be able to agree on a location because no-one wanted her knowing where they liked to hang out, I proposed a bar/restaurant that had recently opened and that I would have to review anyway.  This wasn’t negatively received, so we ended up, nine of us sitting at a table for six, in Malhereusement.  The atmosphere was French, the menu appeared Swedish and the cooking seemed to be East European, all of which intrigued me enough to make a reservation to review it a few days later.  The drinks came fast enough that we managed to largely overlook the enforced company we were keeping, and most of managed a fairly civil send-off for her.

Someone, not me, did key her car afterwards, but that’s small potatoes; senior management have had much more expensive send-offs, and I’m not talking about the bill presented to accounts the next morning.

So, with the hang-over mostly subsided and an empty editor’s office awaiting a new incumbent, I made my way back to Malhereusement and attempted to peruse the menu.  My first problem was that the menu was indeed written in Swedish which I’ve never learned to speak.  The Blonde claims to speak some Norwegian but given the outrage caused in Barcelona when she attempted to speak Spanish I’ve never dared accompany her near a Scandinavian destination.  I waved a waiter, who waved back but didn’t move.  I waved a little more impatiently and he waved a little harder and eventually, after I yelled “Come here!” at him, I got some more service.

“I can’t read this,” I said, holding the menu out.

“Would you like me to read it to you?” he asked, sounding both polite and impertinent at the same time.  

“In English?” I said.  My editor, bless her holey, fungus-infested cotton socks, had a sense of humour like that of a pregnant cat trapped in a wheelie-bin and I’d had too many conversations like this with her.

“The menu is in, ah… Swedish,” said the waiter.  I forced a smile; the kind where your lips press so hard over your teeth that you can feel the skin stretching to ripping point.

“Then that would not be helpful,” I said.

“We have a Braille menu,” he said, turning as if to go and get it.

“I’m not blind,” I said tartly.  “I want a menu written in a language I speak.  English, for preference, but I can manage German, Swahili and Ancient Mesopotamian at a pinch.”  In fairness I haven’t touched Mesopotamian since university but I doubted that they’d have written the menu in a language that obscure.

I was wrong.  The waiter, dare I say gleefully, presented me with the menu written in Ancient Mesopotamian.  I blew the dust off it, and opened it and marvelled at the words before me.

I pointed at several items after it became clear that the waiter neither spoke nor wrote the language he’d handed me a menu in, and he wrote down their positions on the page — I watched him.  At no point was there a hint of an apology, or a suggestion that he might have carried this joke a little too far.  He took the menu away and a few minutes later presented me with a platter of flatbreads and some dips and I was pleasantly surprised to find them both edible and enjoyable.

And then he came with the starter, set it down in front of me, and said, “Stuffed rice.”

“Pardon?” I said, staring first at him and then at the plate.

It was true.  Someone, and I hope they were exceedingly well paid, had apparently hollowed out each individual grain of rice and then painstakingly stuffed them with a farce of onion, pepper and tomato.  I guessed that they’d been cooked in a mixture of wine and stock, and the rice was perfectly tender and slightly fluffy.  It was a complete inversion of the normal stuffed vegetable dish, very well executed, and left me wondering what kind of world I was sitting in.

“Someone keyed my car!” said a nasal voice, and my ex-editor sat down, uninvited at the table with me.  “Oh, are those stuffed maggots?”å

Kitchomat 101

 Moden cookery is, of course, mediated by machine, and modern cookbooks should reflect that.  Sadly we see that there are still many ‘author’s out there (and we use our scare quotes advisedly as who these days writes for themselves when ChatGPT42 assembles nouns and verbs more entertainingly than any of us?) who seem to think that they are writing for people and not for the kitchen automata (the near ubiquitous kitchomat).

Gone are the days when an author might recommend beating the cook before each service in order to ensure that the food was of acceptable quality.  Also gone are the days when a brigade of staff would assemble to convey dishes from the kitchen to the dining room a la russe, and gone too are the days when a simple meal for two might be served solely by the butler and illuminated only by candlelight.

More recently, the time has passed when the time-conscious might stop briefly at a fast-food restaurant for take-out, or when they might hurtle into a one-stop shop for pre-packaged, pre-sliced and pre-cooked food to reheat in the microwave, the precursor of today’s kitchomats.  Gone too is the antediluvian and, it must be indicated, somewhat childish, obsession with foraging and cooking by individuals.  Why would you attempt something with such proven failure rates by even modestly intelligent people when the kitchomat can be relied upon to faultlessly and repeatedly produce excellent quality in a fraction of the time?

No more shall cookbooks instruct the cook in how to chop, slice, dice, brunoise and, via other pretentious culinary jargon, pretend to understand how lumpen vegetables and bruised fruit shall come together with variously sourced proteins to form a ‘meal’.  Now, as this book shall indicate, we shall provide only the necessary instructions for the kitchomat, and it will feed us.

By way of example, the ‘author’ of this book sat down with ChatGPT42 for a brief, enervating, conversation and, whilst discussing things of a fratricidal nature, asked for a menu for the evening, when the ‘author’s family would be visiting (mostly to show off their new self-driving vehicles).  The suggested menu was:

‘Clear’ tomato water with basil foam,

Sous-vide chicken breast with cauliflower ‘rice’ and carrot ‘caviar’

Banana and peanut-butter smoothie

and, it should be noted, the quotes are ChatGPT’s own.  Naturally the ‘author’ handed this over, unquestioningly, to the kitchomat, knowing that it could only produce a satisfactory result.

The kitchomat, while a technological marvel, does sometimes ask questions if presented with requests couched entirely in natural language.  This is to be expected; the vagaries and ambiguities that arise when people attempt to think for themselves are to be derided at all costs, and precision and simplicity are to be aspired to.  The kitchomat’s first question was to enquire as to what was meant by “‘Clear’”.

Naturally the ‘author’ referred the question by to ChatGPT42 for clarification.  Having established that the resultant liquid should be clear and free of particles in suspension, the kitchomat opted to wash the tomatoes and serve the washing water.  To obtain a basil foam it added a basil purée to its soap dispenser, producing light-green bubbles that popped with a delicious fragrance.

As you, my ‘reader’s (and I am sure that most of you are having a synopsis of this text read to you by your favourite text-to-speech generator) may have guessed, the kitchomat also enquired as the to intended meaning of ‘rice’ and ‘caviar’, which ChatGPT42 responded to.  The outcome was a dish of brutally violated cauliflower and minced carrot served with a luke-warm lump of pale protein.

The kitchomat professed to have no trouble at all in understanding the nature of the smoothie, and I was delighted to hear the familiar whine of the kitchen centrifuge in operation.

Serving such a meal in the modern home is also a dream of ease and elegance.  With no human staff around, there is no-one standing around idle while people eat; there is no danger of food or drink being spilled on guests, and there is no need to have people lean back and forth so that hot dishes can be circulated behind or in front of them.  Instead the kitchomat deploys its dishes to a squadron of roombas which happily and helpfully deliver them to the table.  Indeed, who has not been charmed the sight of a roomba trundling along the length of the dining table carrying with it, say, a hedgehog of cheese-like protein studded with spears of hemi-vegetables?

The tomato water with basil foam was expertly conveyed to the table with minimal spillage and guests were invited to dip their own cups into the tureen (the drinks dispenser was sadly unavailable that evening), and the sous-vide chicken breast was only slightly mauled by the cat en route.  The piece de resistance, naturally, was the peanut butter smoothie, served (as you might expect) with straws.  Sadly the kitchomat had assumed that chunky peanut butter (as is my usual preference) was intended, but this caused blockages in the straws making it hard to eat as intended.  The bananas were pureed into a slurry of pure starch however, so it was possible to ‘eat’ around the island of peanuts and all was not lost!

With this success evident on the page, this book shall now provide recipes in the modern sense: instructions obtained from ChatGPT42 for delivery to the kitchomat so that ‘reader’s may host dinner gatherings fit for a robot overlord!

Ostrich Feathers

 “Ostrich feathers?” Maggie raised an eyebrow.

“I had no idea,” sighed Juniper.  She was clutching a martini glass in one hand and the olive, tidily impaled on a cocktail stick, in the other.  “They looked glorious for ten minutes after I arrived.”

“It’s the sea breeze,” said Maggie, trying to sound knowledgable.  She had been in Ferkala for nearly a year and had rapidly tired of having everything explained to her by the older expats.  “It uncurls them cruelly.  They’ll not recover.”

“Oh,” said Juniper mournfully.  She made a delicate moue with her lips, which were rather too full for the proper effect and then tossed back her martini.  She scrunched up her face and shuddered, then looked about her.  “Where’s the man with the drinks tray?”

Maggie looked about the room as well, as her own glass was nearly empty.  They were in the Ice House, which had once been an actual ice house storing huge blocks of ice sailed in from the near continent.  After electricity had been introduced and refrigeration improved to the point where everyone had their own fridge the Ice House had gradually emptied and now was used by the Oompah of Ferkala as an events venue.  Tall, thick walls towered over them with light filtering down from high small windows.  The room was essentially circular and the floor, once covered with straw, was now laid with a sparkling mosaic that depicted the liberation of Ferkala.  It was filled with the best people that Ferkala had to offer, if you believed the invitations that the Oompah issues.  Maggie suspected that it was really filled with the bored and the boorish; those people with nothing better to do than eat and drink at someone else’s expense.

“There’s a cheterry over there,” she said, pointing.  Chetteries were uniformed men who carried out the indispensable services necessary to the civilising of Ferkala.

“Over here!” shouted Juniper, waving an arm vigorously.  Maggie carefully chose not to observe the sweat patch that had formed under Juniper’s arm.  “Over here!  Damn him, the man isn’t listening.”  She looked at Maggie as though expecting her to do something.

“I’m sure he isn’t,” said Maggie, feeling a touch superior.  “He’s not a servant, after all.  But he probably knows where one is.”

“You mean I have to approach him?”  Juniper looked aghast.  “But he a cheterry.”

Maggie smiled, thin-lipped and mean.  “You could cast about for a servant,” she said.  “They usually pass through no less often than every half-hour.”

“Half an hour!”

Juniper stormed off, pushing her way through the thin crowd of people dressed in wilting finery as the heat of the evening soaked through the thick walls of the Ice House.  Occasionally a head turned as she forged ahead like a vander-boat on the river, looking to see what novelty might be happening, but for the most part the crowd were already feeling desuetude settle over them and though the band was playing upbeat numbers still the dancing was slowing and the conversations were slurring and Maggie felt that people would be departing soon.

“What have you done now?” asked a voice behind her, and she turned to find Lieutenant-Colonel Kittiwake strolling towards her, a half-drunk glass of Negroni in one hand and a fresh mint julep in the other.  He offered her the mint julep with a minimal inclination of his head and she grinned mischievously and took the negroni instead.

“Juniper was being tedious,” she said. “I directed her to the cheterry.”

“Drink!  I said, I want another drink!”  Juniper’s voice was harsh and abrasive and cut through the muted hubbub of the senescing crowd like a hot knife through butter.  Heads turned in earnest now, sensing drama, and expectations rose.

“She doesn’t know they’re all mute?” Kittiwake frowned at the mint julep and tasted it experimentally.  “Hmmph, you drink this?  It tastes like medicine.”

“She’s not been here long, and she’s not one for learning,” said Maggie.  “It’s sweet in its own way, but I think I’d prefer to be a spectator more than a player where she’s concerned.  I’d say she’ll be returning before the year is out.”

“You’re still determined to stay?”

Maggie sipped the negroni, wishing that Kittiwake hadn’t already drunk half of it, but preferring the bitterness to the astringency of mint.  “Yes,” she said.  “The Oompah is over-reaching, I’m sure of it, and I think there are opportunities here.  Modest ones, of course, but a sharp pair of eyes and a thoughtful demeanour can achieve a lot.”

“The Oompah believes that the governors lack ambition,” said Kittiwake.  He set the julep aside on a tray as a servant passed by.  “He wishes to expand.  There will be expeditions made to the Allaba foothills in the next two weeks, and scouts send out beyond them.”

“Are you even listening to me?”  Juniper sounded furious and Maggie was keeping her eyes averted from the scene even though most other people now had stopped everything and was watching with fascination.  Even Kittiwake, who was standing side-on to the proceedings, was darting glances when it wasn’t impolite.

“The foothills?” Maggie pretended to think for a moment, but this was old news to her.  “How would an expedition venture up into the mountains, or beyond them, though?  They are high, and airless from what I hear.”

“The Oompah believes that they are not as airless as is made out,” said Kittiwake.  “But I really require another drink before continuing our delightful conversation, milady, and I fear I shall need to find one myself.  The evening grows hotter and I think the Ice House is starting to empty.

There was a ringing slap that punctuated his sentence and Maggie now allowed herself to look over at Juniper and her harangue.  The cheterry appeared to have slapped her, which could only mean that she’s struck him first.  Their regard for protocol was legendary.

“I should accompany you,” she said artlessly.  “Or rather, you should accompany me.  I shall let you take me to dinner, perhaps at Spencer and Co.”

Lieutenant-Colonel Kittiwake shook his head very slightly.  “I see,” he said.  “The master criminal departs, having wrought chaos and achieved her ends.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Maggie with the most insincere smile she owned.

Strike!

 The Aide looked down at her papers.  They were a mix of official documents, some stamped with ‘Confidential’, ‘Secret’ or ‘Miscellaneous’ (the classifications secretary was apparently feeling ambitious) and print-outs from various web-sites because the Minister refused to look at a screen that wasn’t showing his own image.  She shuffled them a little, pointlessly as she already had the ones she wanted on the top, and then looked up at the Minister.  His eyes were on the television mounted on the wall behind her, but they were drifting away indicating that the news report of his latest speech had ended.

“Well?” he said, as though he hadn’t been the one to stop the conversation in the middle.  “My train to the Midlands on Thursday?”

“There are none,” said the Aide.  “The unions are on strike.”

“What?  That’s ridiculous!”

“Minister, that’s the consequence of your policies on public transport.  You announced funding cuts, you’ve announced your intent to pass new laws to castrate the unions, and you’ve announced a new mandatory retirement age that is seven years higher than anything even your most cynical critic predicted.   All public transport workers have gone on strike while they still can.”

“Castrate,” murmured the Minister.

“Yes, Minister.  And, while you will probably have to mean that metaphorically and not literally in order to get the law passed, that is still quite drastic.  You are being compared with Draco in the popular press, which is quite astonishing as it means they are taking the trouble to explain to their readers who that was.  You’ve also been compared with Nero, Caligula, and at least three of the Borgias.  Whether you intended it or not, the country is getting quite an education as a result of your policies.”

The Minister smiled.  “So if they’re on strike, the trains aren’t running at all?”

“No, Minister.”

“Then just commandeer one.”

The Aide opened her mouth, and then hesitated.  This hadn’t come up in the pre-briefing meeting she’d had with the Minister’s Secretary or the saner members of the cabinet.

“I don’t think I can,” she said slowly, wondering if she could.

“I don’t see what the problem is,” said the Minister. “Official government business can’t be held hostage by the peons, and if there’s no other trains running there’s no danger of collision.  I mean, how hard can it be to drive a train?  They run on rails!”

The Aide, who had spent several hours with the Minister’s speech-writer trying to make sure he never made a statement anything like what he’d just said, stretched a smile across her face with an effort.

“It’s not just the question of speed,” she said.  “There are signals to be considered, and the state of the track — which, as you know, you’ve been cutting the maintenance budgets for in the past three years —“

“Yes well, they only spend it on alcohol, don’t they?”

“…probably not, actually Minister.  Or there would be a lot more train accidents than there already are.”

“Hmm,” said the Minister in a way that the Aide had come to dread.  “Train accidents.  If there were more, it would contribute to our populations crisis, right?  As well as lowering public confidence in public transport?  Which would boost support for the idea that we should all just use helicopters to travel around the country, right?”

The Aide, try as she might, had been unable to find out who had put the idea in the Minister’s head that only people who could afford to fly in helicopters should be able to move around the country faster than walking pace but she was persisting in her attempts as it was especially galling for her.

“Our population crisis is that it is decreasing, Minister,” she said.  “We need more people, not more accidents.”

“Not old people,” said the Minister cheerfully.  “We’ve got too many of them.  We just need young people, and young people like helicopters!  They’re exciting!  Fun!  They go fast!”

“The trains would go fast if you didn’t keep cutting the track maintenance budget,” said the Aide, knowing full well that the Minister wouldn’t listen.  “Why don’t you fly to the Midlands then?  There are airports there.  Somewhere.”

The Minister waved a hand as though swatting a fly.  “Too soon,” he said.  “Let’s thoroughly discredit public transport and the unions first.  So commandeer me a train, and let’s break this strike!”

“Very good, Minister,” said the Aide sombrely.

Bon Amba

 The path down the mountainside was as treacherous as Garret could imagine; there was a large amount of loose scree that regularly slipped underfoot and rattled off, pulled by gravity to the steppe below, and the path was little more than a goat-trail with large sections that needed to either jumped over or skirted around on tiptoe.  In an hour they’d barely progressed a kilometre and he suspected that they were barely a hundred metres lower than the cave they’d started off from.

His pack was weighing heavily on his shoulders but he stubbornly refused to think about it.  If he did he’d have to set it down and sort out what he really wanted to keep and that would upset Samara as she would resent the delay, think he should throw it all away, and then start shouting when he inevitably decided he wanted to keep all of it.  So he flexed his back muscled and gritted his teeth and trudged on after the other two.

Efimov was in the middle and seemed least bothered by the whole ordeal.  Garret found himself puzzling over that a little: they were headed to Blinton where the people had apparently disliked Efimov enough to want him dead and he didn’t seem too concerned.  Granted, he’d rotted their eyes out of their heads, which could be seen as making a point, but even so… Garret had been hounded by people before and hurt by names such a ghoul and graverobber (what, exactly, was the point at which grave robbery turned into archaeology and became respectable, after all?) and he doubted that he’d be as sanguine as Efimov seemingly was.

“What is Bon Amba?” said Samara suddenly.  She had apparently found a stretch of path clear of scree and long enough to consider talking instead of breathing heavily and wondering how to get past the next obstacle.

“Is magic system,” said Efimov easily.  “Rock ahead is rotten, watch footing please.”

Samara halted and stared at the path in front of them.  “Where?” she said after a moment.  She sounded as though she was getting angry again, but wasn’t quite there yet, and her shoulders were hunched up just a little.  Garret took the opportunity to set his pack down and sit on it.

“Slightly to your left,” said Efimov.  He edged forward a little and pointed so that his arm stretched past Samara and she could see the slightly darker patch of rock he was indicating.

“That?”  She shrugged and drew a dagger from her belt.  Kneeling down she reached forward and poked the rock experimentally.  “Nothing wrong with — oh shiiii—“

With a crack and a dull rumble the end of the path splintered into fist-sized rocks and cascaded down the mountainside, bouncing and throwing up clouds of yellowish dust.

“Not careful enough,” said Efimov.

Samara rounded on him, the dagger raised in the air above his head and the muscles of her biceps and triceps standing out like thick cords.  Her eyes were wide with anger and her lips had pulled back to reveal cat-like canines and sharp, flesh-tearing teeth.  Musk rose on the thin, cold air and Garret got off his pack and crouched behind it.

“Be keeping calm, please,” said Efimov as though she were pointing out a particularly nice area of scenery.  “Path is still crumbling.  You should come this way please.”

Garret peeked out from behind his pack and saw Samara hesitating, her arm jerking as she fought the urge to launch herself at Efimov and stab him to death.  When she lunged he was certain that she’d lost the internal battle and ducked back behind his pack, waiting for the screams and the spatter of hot blood.

There was a crash and another cloud of yellowish-brown dust surged over him, stinging his eyes and filling his mouth with an earthy-bitter taste.  He spat, trying to clear it and rubbed at his eyes though that made the stinging worse as the grit seemed to work its way further in.  It took him a good few minutes to finally be able to see again, and then, to his surprise, he found Samara disentangling herself from Efimov, the dagger dropped on the path behind him, and him helping her away from the new end of their path down the mountain, which was now a vertical drop.

“Thanks,” said Samara curtly.  Garret was well aware that that was as grateful as she got, and Efimov nodded as though not expecting even that.  There was a moment of silence and then, clearly forcing herself to speak, Samara said, “That could have been tricky… uh, more tricky to handle if you’d not spotted it.”  Her mouth clamped shut and her lips started turning white with the pressure she was applying.

“Bon Amba,” said Efimov.  He picked her dagger up and returned it to her; she refused to break her tight-lipped silence as she put it away.  “Is different kind of magic; not taught at Bogbones or Atul schools.”

“They teach every kind of magic at Bogbones,” said Samara.  Her cheeks reddened though as though she’d not meant to speak.

“No,” said Efimov.  “I do not believe all kinds of magics are yet known, so that is not possible.  And Bon Amba is not taught anywhere.  Is learned from studying the residues, is left-over magic from some other time.  Bon Amba will show you where the connections are missing or where they can be made.  But is dangerous, some of those connections were broken for the reason, and who knows what reason is any more?”

“Bon Amba makes connections?” asked Garret.  Efimov’s accent wasn’t usually a problem for him, but he didn’t feel like he was understanding what he was saying about this.

“No.  Bon Amba reveals connections.  People with magic can then use it to change those connections.”

“Could you have used it on the path?”

Efimov looked directly at him and Garret felt like a particularly stupid student in front of the teacher.

“I did,” said Efimov gently.  “That is how I was able to warn Samara.  I think you mean to ask, could I have used magic to stop the path disintegrating, after I used Bon Amba to find the problem?”

“Yes,” said Garret.  It sounded like what he should have asked, he thought.

“Yes,” said Efimov.  “If there had been more time.  But now the path is gone and there is nothing to connect.  We must find another way down.”