Chapter 8 #7
“The question is,” Grimhild said, “did I remember to bring the key or have I got to go all the way back down again and fetch it? No, here it is. That’s all right, then.”
She unlocked the door, then stepped back to let me pass. I walked in.
Dark as a bag inside. Gradually I was able to see; a bed (wooden frame with ropes stretched over it) and someone lying down, hands and feet tied to the frame with navy-issue rope.
They used to make it at a ropewalk in Scheria, using old imperial fixtures, until it burned down a few years ago.
Luckily they had a lot of the stuff stockpiled.
God knows what they’ll do when it’s all used up.
A woman in a nun’s habit. It was too dark to see her face, but I didn’t need to.
She lifted her head. “Hello, you,” she said.
Svangerd wouldn’t say that. “Are you all right?” I asked.
“No, of course I’m not all right. I’m tied up, and some swine keeps pouring drugs down my throat. You?”
“Not so bad,” I said. “How’s Svangerd?”
“Sulking.”
Come on, then, I thought, if you’re coming. Oh, said a voice in my head. Really? Yes, I thought. Now, before she figures out what we’re doing.
And then I felt – oh boy. It began with an unbearable pressure inside my head, like when a woman stuffs chopped-up pork into a length of pig’s gut to make sausages.
It felt like my skull was being stretched like the sausage skin, and something soft and flexible and massive was being forced into it; in through my ears and up my nose and into my mouth, stretching my jaws until the hinges dislocated; into my throat, airtight so I couldn’t breathe; down into my chest and my lungs and my stomach, and from there outwards, right down to my toes and fingertips; something freezing cold, leaching all the warmth out of me as it squeezed me against the inside of my skin, like a big cow in the barn inadvertently grinding you into a wall or a door.
I could feel myself being compressed, until the fibres of my being, my moral fibre, in which I’m so sadly deficient, began to pull apart under the weight, while at the same time all my thoughts and feelings and beliefs and everything I knew to be true were crushed, compacted, squashed into felt like the wool that’s no good for spinning.
I was paper-thin, a single layer of living bark around a dead, freezing cold tree.
I was so small and insignificant, I could hardly hear myself think.
Sorry about this, said a voice from the icy core. We apologise for any inconvenience.
Holy Mother Church maintains that the Bad Place we go to after we die is hot; oceans of fire, deep pools of blindingly bright orange lava, with beds of glowing charcoal; presumably it’s that way because the Faith started up in a country with lots of volcanos.
But where I come from, the priests tailor orthodoxy a little to suit local sensibilities, and hell isn’t hot, quite the reverse.
It’s cold, frozen inside unimaginably vast blocks of ice.
A sensible alteration; where I used to live, fire in winter is a frail, tenuous thing that needs to be fed and cosseted, the only source of light and warmth in a very cold world that’ll kill you in five hours, twenty minutes if you let the fire go out.
Fire is hope, an illusion, a constant battle to kid yourself into believing that you can carry on living a little bit longer.
Cold is reality, the real world, the way things actually are, and you know it perfectly well deep down, only you’ve got to keep lying to yourself, just as you’ve got to keep piling logs on the hearth.
Are you all right? You’ve gone all quiet.
A skin of bark around a tree of ice. I tried to feel my fingers. They weren’t there.
Leave all that to me.
I felt incredibly stupid, like you do when you’ve just woken up, or when you’ve had a bash on the head.
Thinking was like trying to lift an anvil, and I was so weak, so thinly spread.
I remembered what Sulpician wrote about the Melwar, the savages who used to live in what later became the Aelian Republic.
The Aelians came from the south, and they had better armour and bigger horses.
Gradually they drove the Melwar further and further north, systematically burning their villages and slaughtering their livestock, until there was nowhere left for them to go except the freezing cold moors and the mountainsides; and that’s when the Melwar became my ancestors, the people who live in the places the Aelians had no earthly use for.
And then the Rosinholet came, and the Aram Chantat, who drove the last few Aelians out into the wilderness and the cold, stony country; layers of bark around a dead core, a hollow tree with its heart eaten out.
Funny the things you think about at times like that.
Of course, Sulpician’s book was lost centuries ago, but Leowulf quotes certain passages in his homilies.
Faintly, ever so far away, I could hear my voice telling someone that that was fine, I’d seen enough, thanks for humouring me.
Perfectly all right, replied a woman’s voice, and I was pretty sure I once knew who it belonged to, only that information was lost when the Aram no Vei burned the imperial library at somewhere-or-other.
So, the woman’s voice continued, have you thought any more about what we were talking about?
Yes, said my voice, and for now it’s got to be thanks but no thanks, I really need to get Svangerd home, where she feels safe.
I think it’ll take her a while to get over all this.
Of course, said the woman, we should be finished with her in a couple of days, and then you can have her.
And then I apologised for being such a nuisance, but that’s the price you pay for being a hardened sceptic, and blessed are those that have seen and yet have not believed – (which I knew was wrong, because surely it was the other way round, blessed are those that have not seen and yet – I couldn’t remember the rest of it, that book had apparently got lost somewhere or been burned, but I knew I used to know it, at some point).
I was moving. I wasn’t, but my legs were, and they were carrying me, like my father used to carry me on his shoulders when I was very small, and it always terrified the life out of me, though I believe he thought he was being nice and doing something I liked.
So instead I thought about the long, slow, cold death of learning in the north-west in the centuries after the Fall, and everything we used to have before it was taken away from us.
If you happen to live in a reasonably warm place, you probably don’t know how painful cold can be.
Trust me, it’s the worst thing, worse than burning, even; worse than the fire that eats up books and paintings and houses and whole cities, and it lasts so much longer.
Are you sure you’re all right? I haven’t heard a peep out of you, and that’s not like you at all.
Please, I thought back, as hard as I could, but I had no idea what I was begging for. That information had been lost, like the plays of Notker or the principles of advanced metallurgy.