The Fall of Koli Page 3

  She seemed really happy to see me. “Koli?” she said. “Koli Faceless? Is that your name?” She had the strangest voice I ever heard – or maybe the second strangest, after Monono’s. There was a kind of a roll to it, or a bounce, that made most other people’s voices feel like they was just flat ground going on and on. That sounds foolish, but I don’t know how to say it better.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s me. I’m Koli.”

  “And I’m Lorraine.” She put her hand on her chest as she said it, kind of pointing to herself like I might not of already noticed her. “Why, Paul said you were just a boy. I was imagining someone half your size. You must be what? At least fourteen. And tall for it.”

  I didn’t know who Paul might be, although I thought maybe he could be the voice that talked out of the big drone called a raven. “No,” I said, for I felt like I had got to say something. “I’m sixteen, and short.”

  The woman give a laugh that was rich and loud. “Sixteen and short and utterly charming,” she said. “Are you too old to hug?”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, and I didn’t have no time to decide, for she gathered me up in her arms right then and there and pressed me to her, the way a mother does with a baby. It catched me by surprise, so I didn’t either pull away or hug her back. I just was drawed in against her. Her arms was soft but very strong, and she held me there for a long time. When I was up that close, she smelled of flowers and also of something sharp and high like the resin in a pine tree.

  “Ooh, I can’t help it,” she said. “You’re like my boy. Just like my little Stanley. Why does the world think boys can’t be gentle and loving as well as strong and fierce? Of course they can. Of course they can. The one thing doesn’t get in the way of the other at all. Gentle with your friends, fierce to your foes. Welcome to my house, Koli Faceless. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me that you’re visiting with us. It’s been so long since we had guests – and never one as sweet as you.”

  She let me go at last. I was all confused by that embrace, and the warm welcome, and the strange speech she give. I stammered out a thank you. “Bless you,” Lorraine said. “Don’t you even think about it. Come on with me, and I’ll take you to breakfast. You must be starving. Get yourself dressed, and we’ll go straight up to the crow’s nest. I’ve laid some clothes out for you. Now you mustn’t get any ideas! They’re Albion blues, and you know you really shouldn’t wear them before you’re sworn and ranked, but they’re what we have – so just for today we’re going to turn a blind eye.”

  She pointed to the end of the bed. There was some clothes there, sure enough. They was dark blue, just exactly like the ones she was wearing. I couldn’t help thinking of the Half-Ax soldiers we had met as we was coming from Calder, that was all in grey with red badges on their chests. This felt a lot like that – like these was clothes that was meant to make you look the same as the others all round you so you would end up being the same in other ways too. I didn’t like it much.

  Lorraine seen me hesitate, and read me wrong. “I’m so sorry, Koli,” she said. “I’ll wait outside while you change. I didn’t mean to embarrass you.” She went across to the door, but before she got there I scraped up enough courage from somewhere to ask the thing that was sitting right on the top of my mind and had been there since I first waked up.

  “What happened to my own clothes?”

  Lorraine stopped and turned around. “They’re being washed,” she said. “They’ll be returned to you as soon as they’re dry.”

  “But… there was something else with them.” I almost couldn’t say it, I was so scared of what the answer would be. If I had lost the DreamSleeve when I fell in the ocean, or if the water had ruined it, then I had killed Monono. I didn’t think I could live with myself if I had done that.

  “Your music player is fine,” Lorraine said. “We’re just giving it the once-over. We do that with any device that comes on board. You’ll get it back as soon as we’re done, I promise.” I didn’t say nothing to that, for I wasn’t sure how my voice would come out. I was close to crying from relief. I only nodded to show I’d heard.

  Lorraine went out of the room. I put the clothes on, thinking all the time about Monono and how long it would be before she was back with me. What was a once-over? What was a device, for that matter? Maybe it was another word for tech.

  The clothes was well made, and fit me pretty good. I wasn’t always sure which way round they was meant to go, especially the jacket, but I figured it out by trying all the ways there was until they looked more or less sensible. There was underclothes too, and a pair of black shoes so soft they was almost like gloves. To tell you the truth, there was about two or three times as many clothes as anyone needed to wear.

  While I was getting dressed, I seen how clean my skin was. I had been filthy before, from working in the forest at Many Fishes, and though the seawater might of washed away some of that dirt, the blackness under my nails and the sticky sap in my hair would not of shifted so easy. Someone had washed me while I was asleep. I didn’t like to think about that. It made me realise how helpless I must of been, not even to stir nor to know about it when Lorraine or whoever it might of been picked me up out of the sea and brung me here and made me ready for…

  Well, for whatever was to come next.

  I made my way at last through all the piled-up stuff to the door, opened it and stepped outside to where Lorraine was waiting for me in a kind of long, narrow hallway.

  She throwed her hands up to her mouth when she seen me. “Oh my!” she said. “Oh my poor heart! Don’t you look fine! I wish my Stanley wore his blues as well as you do, Koli, I swear I do.”

  She took my hand, like I was a little child that needed to be steadied when he walked, and we set off down the hallway.

  The place we was in reminded me somewhat of Rampart Hold back in Mythen Rood. Rampart Hold was the onliest house I ever knowed where the places between the rooms was as big as the rooms themselves. This hallway was narrow, like I said, but it went on for a really long way, past lots of doors that looked just exactly like the one we had come out of. It went round corners and doubled back on itself, and still it kept on going. The walls and the floor and the ceiling was all of metal, so our footsteps sounded like someone banging on a drum and not managing to get a tune out of it. The walls was mostly green, but the ceilings and floors was silver-grey and almost like a mirror. When I put my feet down, another Koli that was all wavery and strange like a reflection in water brung his own feet up to meet mine. There was a smell in the air that put me in mind of Wardo Hammer’s forge at the end of a hot day – a smell of iron that had been heated up and worked and was just now settling down to cool.

  By and by, we come to a door that was set across the hallway to block our path. Lorraine walked right up to it and touched her hand to it like she thought it was hanging open and just needed a push. The door didn’t give an inch. She done the same thing again, and again nothing happened.

  “Oh for goodness’ sake!” Lorraine muttered, sounding disgusted. She tried a third time, and at last the door opened. It pulled away on either side, slowly and with a great deal of creaking and stopping, until by and by there was a space in the middle for us to walk through.

  Lorraine laughed, then turned to me and shaked her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know I shouldn’t let these things annoy me. I feel like Blanche DuBois complaining that I used to have servants! But it’s the little things that get to you. I suppose it’s just human nature.” And on we went, through the door.

  Lorraine walked ahead of me, but she kept turning ever and again to tell me to go left or to watch the step as well as to talk about her son, Stanley, and all the many ways I reminded her of him. I was clever like he was, and kind like he was, and patient like he was, and all good things like that. It seemed to me she didn’t know me well enough yet to say any of those things, but it’s hard not to take to someone that likes you well and keeps on saying it. When she turned them
eyes on me, that was so big and so dark, it was like she had holded up a lantern in front of my face. It went a long way to make me feel less afraid of this place, for all it was so strange.

  “You got a big house, Dam Lorraine,” I said to her – partly just so as to have something to say, but also because I was wondering mightily what kind of place this was. The more I seen of it, the less I could believe it was any kind of a boat. Nothing that was this big and this solid could move, let alone float.

  “It may seem that way, Koli,” Lorraine said, “but it’s the last vestige of something far bigger.”

  “What’s that then? What’s it a stitch out of?”

  That made her laugh again, longer and harder this time. “Oh, stitch is good. I like that very much. As in, if we’re the stitch, what’s the fabric? I think you know though. I think everyone that’s good keeps Albion in their hearts, and I won’t believe you’re an exception to that.”

  It seemed like that was all the answer I was going to get. Anyway, I didn’t ask again, for fear she’d think I was a bad person for not knowing.

  After some more walking, we come to a wider space. It was so much brighter than the hallway we was in that I thought at first it had got to be outside. But I was mistook. I seen when we come right up to it that it was a kind of a big hole, where something had ripped right through the ship and let in light from above. The hallway picked up again about ten strides further on, and where it did there was ragged edges to the metal. Like the tech I seen in the room where I first waked, the ragged edges was somewhat melted, so what had come and broke the great ship open must of been as hot as the dead god’s Hell.

  Someone had tied a rope across the gap where the hallway give way to the hole. I grabbed tight onto the rope and looked down. It was a strange sight. It was like I was on a ledge halfway up a mountain, and right across from me there was another mountain much the same, going up high and sheer. But the face of the mountain was all made out of hallways like this one, and rooms, and stairs, that was meant to be inside but now was open to the air. Below us, a long way down, there was more rooms and hallways without no roof to them, that we was looking right into. And when I looked up, I seen a little piece of sky, with lots more levels in between it and me. Thick grey clouds was moving up there, but some of them had a gold edge to them where the sun was trying to break through.

  Lorraine stepped up beside me. “Did you ever see the Jewish Museum in Berlin?” she said. “The one Libeskind designed? There are huge light shafts that run right through it at strange angles. They’re meant to symbolise all that was lost from European culture when the Holocaust happened. We didn’t get to design these abruptions ourselves, but I like to think they do something similar.”

  I didn’t understand more than one word in ten out of that, but I had walked a long way with Ursala and was used to hearing words that made no sense. “What made the hole?” I asked Lorraine.

  “Our enemies made the hole, Koli Faceless, a very long time ago. They cracked the hull wide open with pocket nukes and poured conventional explosives into the breach.” She smiled, wide and warm, and put a hand on my arm. “It’s all right. Trust me, we gave much better than we got. Nemo me impune lacessit, as the saying goes. ‘Touch me, and see how I touch you back.’ And now we have improved ventilation, don’t we? Almost there. Come along.”

  There was a side corridor, and then another and another. We went this way, then that way, and by and by we come out on the far side of the hole. After that we went straight forward a long way, until at last we stopped at another door. There was a plate of silver metal on the wall next to it, that Lorraine tapped with her hand like she was knocking to come in. The door opened for us, breaking apart in the middle and sliding off to both sides, and the both of us stepped inside.

  We was now in a room that was so small it was only a kind of a cupboard. Once we was in, the doors closed on us again and the floor shook itself like a dog trying to get rid of a flea. I must of looked as scared as I felt, for Lorraine put a hand on my shoulder to calm me. “Oh, sweetheart,” she said, “it’s fine. It’s just a lift. Count to ten and we’ll be there.”

  Well, I know my numbers but I’m not what you would call quick with them. I only got to six. Then the shaking stopped, and the doors opened again.

  What was in front of us now was different from what had been there before. Instead of that endless hallway, there was a much shorter one with a higher ceiling, and then some stairs going up. Voices sounded from the top of them stairs – people talking loud, and one louder than all the rest. It was the voice that come out of the big drone that was called a raven.

  “And here we are,” Lorraine said, taking my hand again. “Come along, Koli. There are some people I’m dying for you to meet.”

  5

  Lorraine led me up the stairs into a place that was almost as big as the Count and Seal back in Mythen Rood. At first it didn’t seem to be a room at all. I thought all over again that we must of come out into the open air, for there wasn’t no walls anywhere around us. There was just the sky and them dark clouds and the sun that was running between them like a rabbit looking for its hole. And down below there was the ocean, raising itself up and setting itself down again.

  Then I seen a boy looking back at me out of the clouds, and it was my own self. I may be slow, oftentimes, but I knowed now what I was seeing. The walls of the room was all windows, without no wood or stone or clay in between them, and we was high enough up that the whole world was laid out below us. I stood there like I had swallowed a choker seed and growed roots.

  I might of stood there for aye and ever, except I heard a trencher or a bowl clatter, and smelled fresh bread. Them two things brung my mind from the great distances I was seeing back into the room. There was a table set there, and four people sitting at it.

  Two of the people at the table was Cup and Ursala, dressed all in blue like me. My heart give a jump when I seen them, for I hadn’t been certain sure until then that they was yet alive.

  There was a man sitting right at the head of the table that was also in blue. He was about as old as Ursala to look at – old enough that his hair was gone to grey around his ears and up by his temples, though the rest of it, and his short, squared-off beard, was black as pitch. He was tall and broad at the shoulder. Old as he was, I thought he was likely to be very strong.

  What was strangest about him, though, was that he had a drone at his shoulder – not a raven, which would not of fitted inside the room, but a drone like the ones that used to vex us so much in Calder. It was just sitting there in the air, bobbing from time to time like a cork afloat in a bucket. Its red eye was lit up bright as anything, which meant it was awake and ready to fire.

  The drone give me to mistrust this man right then and there. I guess I was not altogether scared of it, seeing that Cup and Ursala was sitting right by it and it wasn’t offering them no harm – and seeing that the raven had rescued us all out of the ocean. But I was determined I wouldn’t get no closer to it than I had to.

  The last one at the table was a boy my own age that had his arms folded in front of him and looked as sour as could be. His head was shaved clean, just like the heads of the Many Fishes people. There was sores there, all across his scalp, that was only halfway to being healed. He had a pale face – even paler than Lorraine’s – that made his blue eyes stand out strong and hard. The boy was the only one not dressed all in blue. His trousers was blue, but they was of a rougher cut than ours with the stitches all showing, and he had a white jerkin with a yellow smiling face painted on it, like the faces Monono showed me from time to time in the DreamSleeve’s window.

  “I meant that the design of the ship is striking,” Ursala was saying. “Not to mention its size. It’s very old, isn’t it?”

  “I believe it is,” the man said.

  “As in pre-war.”

  “Of course, pre-war.”

  “So how did the three of you come to be—?”

  Then the boy l
ooked round and seen me and Lorraine standing there. His mouth twisted in a sneer. “Oh my god,” he said. “How many more of them are there?”

  Cup and Ursala looked up at them words. Cup give a yell, and both of them got to their feet and run to me. Well, Cup run and Ursala followed after at a quick stride. The next thing I knowed, Cup was hugging me and holding onto me, and even Ursala – that hated being touched worse than almost anything – laid a hand on my shoulder. I was close to crying, though not from being sad. It was a great thing to be with them again. We had come so far now, and done so much together. There wasn’t no difference in my thoughts between I and we when it come to these two. They was a part of my I, just like Monono was.

  “We thought you was dead when you hit the water, Koli Brainless,” Cup said, with her arms tight around me. “Don’t you know how to climb a ladder?”

  “I thought I did,” I said. “But I guess not.”

  “The three of you should get a room,” the boy said. “With a little coin-op window maybe, like in a porno theatre. I’d watch.”

  “If you don’t mind your manners, Stanley,” the man said, “it will be you that goes to your room – and your meal won’t be following you there.” His face was stern, and there was a quickness in how he come in, like he had knowed all along the boy would say something he shouldn’t and now was proved right.