Buch lesen: «The Memory»

CHAPTER 2

‘The Machinery destroyed my family,’ said Jaco Paprissi. ‘The Machinery destroyed us all.’

The old man stared hard at Jandell. When he had first appeared before Drayn and the Operator, rising out of the grass like an animal, his features had been obscured by thick, green paint, the same colour as his robes. Now the paint was gone, but the wildness remained. His skin was raw, his grey hair matted with dirt. His face was deeply lined, but there was a certain spark in his dark eyes. A drive. It reminded Drayn of her mother.

He had taken them into this settlement, him and his men, through clusters of low, stone buildings, until they had come to this cold, dark hall, a damp space of wood and animals and smouldering flame. The other people had peeled off as they went, until they were alone, just Drayn and Jandell and this strange old man.

The wind howled outside the building. The wind always seemed to howl in this place.

Jandell took his son away. That’s what he’d said, when they first met this man. Drayn had met a boy, deep in the Old Place, one who had stood at her side on her journey through her worst memories. That was him. Drayn knew it. She saw some of Alexander in Jaco. She wondered if she should tell him. I met your boy, my lord. I met him in the land of memory.

‘No,’ Jandell said.

Drayn was unsure, at first, if he was speaking to Jaco or to her. He was sitting to her side at the rough-edged table, hunched over, his strange cloak gathered around him, the faces staring wanly at the world outside their prison. ‘I destroyed your family. I cannot hide from that.’

Jaco ran a hand through his nest of hair. ‘Yes. But you’re as much a victim as the rest of us. You may have built it and operated it, but the Machinery was its own thing. It spoke to Alexander. It told him such … things. And it made you take him away.’

A new brightness seemed to enter Jaco’s eyes. He was directly opposite Jandell, and he leaned in towards him. ‘Is he alive down there?’ But the light flickered out as quickly as it had come. ‘No. He can’t be. It’s not a place for little boys.’

A little boy. I met him. I knew him well …

Jandell shook his head. ‘There is a boy in the Underland, but he is just a shadow. He is a dream. When I took him away …’ He bowed his head.

‘He’s just a memory, now,’ Jaco whispered.

Jandell frowned. ‘Just a memory? How do you know that?’

Jaco waved a hand. ‘I’ve learned a lot, out here.’ He took his gaze from Jandell, and looked again at the table. ‘Did you hurt him, Operator?’ he asked in a quiet voice.

An image came before Drayn: Alexander, chained to a chair, exhausted. Jandell was inches from his face, his mouth twisted into a sneer. He held something in his hand – a whip, perhaps.

‘The boy was gone at the beginning. But the memories … I fought that creature of memory, for his knowledge,’ Jandell whispered. ‘Yet even when he told me the One had returned, I would not believe him.’

‘But he didn’t tell you everything, did he, Operator? He didn’t tell you who the One was. He wouldn’t have wanted you to hurt her. His sister.’

A new image appeared in Drayn’s mind: a girl with black hair, a girl in white rags, slowly turning to purple …

Jandell rubbed his temples with thin fingers.

‘Alexander did well to keep it from me,’ he whispered.

‘No,’ Jaco said. ‘Not Alexander. The thing that lives down there: a memory of a boy.’

‘Perhaps that is Alexander. Why shouldn’t memories be real?’

It was the first time Drayn had spoken. The others turned to her, and Jandell smiled.

‘I was a dark thing, in recent years,’ Jandell said. ‘I was mad, and paranoid, and weak. Do you know what saved me, Paprissi?’

Jaco shook his head.

Jandell pointed at Drayn. ‘This girl,’ he whispered. ‘This Fallen Girl, and her powerful memories. More than that, though: her memories are powerful indeed, but so is she.’

Drayn turned her head away. Part of her wondered if she should thank the Operator. But why? How can I thank him for his praise, when I did nothing to earn it?

‘Operator,’ Jaco said.

‘My name is Jandell.’ He sighed. ‘A bleak name. The Bleak Jandell.’

Jaco nodded. ‘Jandell. I want you to know …’ He looked at the moss-covered ceiling, as if searching for answers. ‘I do not forgive you, for what you did.’

Jandell bowed his head. ‘You shouldn’t.’ He gestured at his cloak, at the faces inside. ‘Someone made this garment for me to remind me of all the things I did, and all the people I hurt, when I was Jandell the Bleak.’ He smiled. ‘Was. I am a fool; I will always be Jandell the Bleak.’

‘I hadn’t finished,’ Jaco whispered. ‘I do not forgive you for what you did. But I do not hate you, either. Because it was my fault.’ He stroked his beard. ‘I brought this upon my family. I could have stopped it.’ His voice grew weary. ‘Alexander told me about Katrina. He told me what she was. And I didn’t believe him. I couldn’t. I loved that girl as much as my son.’ He placed his head in his hands and began to tremble. ‘If I had told you the truth, you could have destroyed her, and Alexander would still be alive.’

Jandell shrugged his shoulders. ‘Perhaps it is all fate,’ he whispered.

There came a noise from outside: the whinnying of a horse. A man pushed open the door. He seemed to be middle-aged, though it was difficult to tell with any precision. His head was completely bald, without even eyebrows. He was tall, but strangely stooped. He had pale skin, but it was so weather-beaten as to almost be a shade of red, and he wore the same green robes as Jaco.

‘Dark is coming from the beyond,’ he said, pointing in the direction of the ocean. ‘Not now, my leader, but soon, the dark will come.’

Jaco nodded, before turning to Jandell and Drayn. ‘We have to go. This isn’t a good place at night. There are raiders, further up the coast, and animals that come from the forests.’

They made their way on horseback from the small settlement, Drayn tucked in behind Jandell, with the faces of the cloak staring up at her. She felt something when she looked at them: things from the past, tugging at her.

She turned her head, back in the direction they had come from, squinting her eyes against the wind. The settlement was very small, only a handful of squat, broken dwellings. There were people, there, leaning against the walls or wandering around, armed with spears. But the only ones on the road were Jaco, Jandell, Drayn and the bald newcomer.

‘Allos,’ he said. He rode up next to Jandell and Drayn, and pointed to his face. ‘Allos. Me.’

Drayn smiled at him and extended a hand. The man grasped it, perhaps a little too hard, and grinned back at her.

‘I’m Drayn,’ the girl said.

‘Drayn,’ said Allos. His voice was as rugged as the landscape, a thing of stone and hill. ‘Drayn, from another place.’

Allos turned back to the road, and his expression fell serious once more.

‘Where are we going?’ Drayn called up ahead, where Jaco was leading the way. The old man came to a halt and turned to the girl.

‘Up the road,’ he said, jerking his head in the direction of travel. ‘That place back there is just an outpost. We don’t live there.’

‘What’s up the road?’

Jaco grinned at her. He was old, this man, but remained a powerful physical presence. She could feel the merest hint of his memories. They were full of wonderful things: things that no one else had ever seen. But they were tinged with sadness, too.

‘Home is up the road,’ he said in a cheery voice.

The road gave way to a dirt path. As the night came in, trees sprang up on either side, great sentinels that loomed over them, moaning and swaying in the air. The darkness beyond crackled with sound: the movements of animals among the branches and twigs of the forest floor.

Drayn did not know what she had expected when she first set sail with Jandell. In some ways, she was disappointed by what she had found: wind and rain and rocks and trees. But there were other things, here, that she had never experienced. The land was vast: she had seen that when they first landed. Even the smell here was different, coming at her in waves: the scent of a fire, fuelled by strange things.

‘We are almost there,’ Jaco said. It was growing difficult to see him, up ahead in the gloom. ‘I hope you’re not tired, Drayn.’

‘No,’ the girl said.

Allos spoke, then. She could not see him, but he was near her side.

‘What powers? Why, when you will not turn to them?’

For a moment Drayn was confused. ‘Powers? What powers do I have, is that what you mean?’

‘He is talking to me,’ Jandell whispered. ‘He knows what I am. Perhaps he has seen my kind before.’

‘Yes, before,’ Allos said. ‘For such a long time before, the powers were here.’

‘He’s wondering why I ride this horse,’ Jandell said. ‘He wonders why I don’t lift us all up, with the click of a finger, and take us where we need to go.’

‘They are things, indeed, that matter now,’ Allos said.

Drayn searched for Allos, in the dark. He was nowhere to be seen. He was from this place, unlike Jaco Paprissi. The language he spoke was not his own. The land, though, was his, and he could disappear against it as he wished.

‘I am a thing of memory,’ Jandell said. ‘But I am far from the only one. When I draw on the power, sometimes others can sense me: not all of them, and not always, but some of them.’

‘And there are some you are hiding from, Operator,’ said Jaco.

Jandell did not respond.

A light appeared before them. It was a torch, raised high in the centre of the path, far away from the trees. They took their horses around it, on either side.

‘We are almost there,’ Jaco said.

Drayn saw that the base of the torch had been shaped into a figure. No: it was many figures, stacked one on top of the other, naked human beings. At the top, one of them held the torch in his hand.

‘Men and women,’ Allos said. He emerged at her side. ‘Together. That is the future: no powers but those of the world itself, and the people who live here.’

He nodded at the fire, before pushing on up the path.

They passed by more of the torches as they went deeper into the woods. After a while, the distances between the flames grew shorter, until they reached one every ten paces or so. The dirt path began to widen and became a road once more, paved with wide grey stones. Drayn felt something change in the world around her: more memories crowded in, cluttering her mind.

‘Look ahead,’ Jandell said.

She leaned around him. The road was coming to an end: before it was a high wall, formed of spiked wooden poles. There were figures walking along the edge, though she could not make them out clearly.

Jaco rode ahead of them, and the gate opened.

The road continued for another while. Signs of civilisation began to emerge: the smell of animals, the sounds of distant conversations. They passed through another gate, and then another, shell after shell of defences. The trees began to thin out, until they disappeared altogether.

Another gate came. This time, though, things were different. The roar of people could be heard all around them, even in the night, and the world was cast in a golden glare from a thousand torches.

Jaco turned to them, and grinned. ‘Here we are, then. The heart of our little civilisation!’

The gate opened, the small party entered, and the world changed.

They had come to a town square, its surface a muddy mess, ramshackle dwellings of stone and wood leaning over its sides. The place was crowded with men and women, talking among themselves, drinking from wooden cups. Torches burned all around, though Drayn wondered if they were necessary: the moon above them seemed somehow larger than normal, a vast sphere of blue light, surrounded by infinite, sparkling stars.

No one seemed to notice the newcomers when they first passed through the gate. After a while, however, that began to change. Fingers pointed at them from small, whispering groups. Drayn glanced at some of the people and saw they were like Allos, pale skinned, but rough and raw.

Jaco led them away from the square. They passed through side streets and byways, all of them teeming with life. The buildings varied madly in their construction, from relatively stable stone structures to leaning piles of wood, though they were similar in one important way: none was taller than one or two storeys.

‘We are here,’ said Jaco.

In many ways, the building before them was much the same as the others they had passed: a stone structure, low and long. But there was something very different about it. Its lines were neater and sharper, the path before it swept clean. A man and a woman stood at either side, holding spears.

Jaco led them to the door, and nodded to the guards. He beckoned to the small group, who followed him inside. They were now in a large, well-kept room, its only furniture a great table surrounded by rough-hewn chairs. There were no paintings on the walls, no statues, no tapestries, only a handful of glowing candles. Still, there was an air of importance to the place: a sense of ordered authority.

Jaco whispered something to Allos, who nodded and vanished through a door on one side of the room. The old man took a seat at the table, and indicated to the others to join him. Drayn sat in a chair at Jaco’s side, but Jandell remained on his feet, studying the hall.

‘Do you like it, Operator?’ Jaco asked, gesturing at the room. ‘This is a minor version of Memory Hall, I suppose you could say. It’s the centre of our world.’

‘No,’ Jandell said. ‘I built Memory Hall. You made this yourselves, with your own hands.’ There was admiration in his voice. Perhaps it was even pride.

‘Indeed,’ Jaco said. ‘No fanciness here. No names, no titles. This is just the Hall.’

‘And what are you?’ Jandell asked.

Jaco shrugged. ‘Just a Councillor. One of ten, elected by the people. Anyone can run for the job, as they like, no matter who they are. No children, though.’ He grimaced. ‘I think that was the Machinery’s worst mistake. Was there ever a good child Strategist?’

Allos entered the room again, carrying a tray of food. It was simple stuff: white meats, wooden cups of water, bread. He placed it on the table, and disappeared once more.

‘Allos there is a Councillor, too,’ Jaco said. ‘He won a seat in the last election.’

‘Why’s he serving you food, then?’ Drayn asked.

Both faces turned to her.

‘Because he likes to help.’ Jaco frowned. ‘You’re not an Overlander. I can tell. Yet we speak the same language. Where are you from?’

Drayn was about to speak, but Jandell held up a hand to silence her. ‘It doesn’t matter. All that matters is where we’re going.’

He took a seat opposite Jaco. ‘But why are you hiding here, Paprissi?’

‘Hiding?’ Jaco laughed. ‘Who’s hiding? I came here for the same reasons as you, Jandell. To find answers.’

The two men – human and Operator – stared hard at one another.

‘What is this place?’ Drayn asked.

Jaco shrugged. ‘We just call it the Newlands.’

‘Is this the only city here?’

Jaco leaned back in his chair, and bit his lip. ‘As far as I know, this is the only city in the Newlands. But we’re not the only people here, not by a long way. There are communities all along the coast, and in the interior, far outside the forest’s boundaries. We don’t see them often. We try to avoid them, to be honest. It’s a savage place.’