Axl shrugged. ‘How the fuck would I know?’
Footsteps, when they finally approached, came through the bar at the front and stopped carefully at the kitchen door.
‘You decent?’ There was a brisk knocking and then the woman stuck her head round the door.
‘Well… ?’ Ketzia stopped and looked at the innkeeper. ‘Didn’t know you were back,’ she said to her husband, not sounding too pleased.
Leon flushed. ‘Our guest wants a towel.’ He put heavy emphasis on the second word, as if the idea of anyone wanting to stay at his inn was somehow ridiculous.
‘Probably does. If he plans to dry himself,’ said the woman.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Swimming Towards the Light
‘Budvar,’ Axl demanded, but only because he knew Leon couldn’t possibly provide bottled beer. Couldn’t provide a decent shave either, obviously enough, because Cocheforet didn’t run to generators and the Braun disposable Axl had stolen from Dr Jane’s surgery didn’t work on daylight, it needed a feed.
Which was tough, because Cocheforet didn’t run to that either. The better Axl felt inside himself the worse his temper got. Almost as if the constant headache had acted as a filter against the world in which he’d found himself.
No razor, no newsfeed and no new eyes, but worst of all no hope of finding any of them anywhere ... It was like stumbling back two centuries. Except it wasn’t. What it was really like was going below Third World.
Standing at the zinc, Axl stared slowly round at Leon’s filthy bar and the silent, three-man crowd of even filthier customers and wondered for the first time what he was doing, other than saving his own life. Mind you, he knew what they were doing. Waiting for him to leave the room.
As for Samsara itself… Well, the best you could say was that it was economically self-sufficient. Not importing food or technology from Earth meant no commercial ties, and no commercial ties meant no metaNational leverage. Economic blockade might have replaced the gunboat kind nine times out of ten, but even the guys on Capitol Hill weren’t stupid enough to try that one on Tsongkhapa, not when there were no essentials that Samsara needed.
In the end Axl settled for some kind of fermented barley mess called chang that came out of a big copper pot, looked like molasses mixed with water and tasted of rained-out bonfires. It was what the three men sat silently in the corner were drinking too. Only they all used long wooden straws and drank straight from a smaller pot that a dark-haired Tibetan boy had carried over to their table. The boy didn’t seem to have a name. Leon just called him you.
The behaviour of the other customers ran the full gamut from A to B and back again. From staring into the chang to glaring at Axl with undisguised suspicion as he tossed three years of therapy and two twelve-point plans straight down his gullet in choking gulps of thin, yeast-sour ditch water. It was five years since he’d last touched alcohol and, given what the chang tasted like, not a day of it had been wasted.
He was really getting on their wick and the only problem was he had less than no idea why. If he had, he might have been able to work on it a bit more. Make push come to shove, because that’s what it had to do. Axl didn’t have time to blend it, become accepted, put up the usual smokescreen.
Outside in the street a door slammed loudly and everyone in the bar tried not to look at each other, but that was okay because Axl was busy looking at all of them. No one looked back.
‘Rotten night,’ said Axl, nodding towards the noise. There was no reply to that either, but Axl was starting to enjoy filling the sullen silences. His words were slurred far more than four small bowls of chang warranted, especially as one of those was still soaking into the earthen floor at his feet.
On the other side of the inn wall, wind was ripping needles from thin pines while hail thudded into the wet ground like endless shot. In all the newsfeeds he’d seen about Samsara none had mentioned that the weather was buggered. Mind you, he hadn’t seen many and those he had always concentrated on Vajrayana and life in that city.
Samsara was silly season stuff. Every time the Jihad in North Africa declared a brief peace or the Russian Tsar who was holed up at Yekaterinburg summoned Marshal Sukarov to play wargames instead of letting the marshal lead his troops from what could loosely be called the Sino-Russian war front, given it was fought by proxies and much of it was information-based anyway—every time Cy Sat ran out of hard news they sent some photogenic, freelance Ishie off to Samsara to record her impressions.
Mostly these were of the Vajrayana’s quaint, wonderful and why can’t we manage this on Earth variety. But maybe, Axl decided, that was because in reality the wheelworld was freezing, with fucked weather and villages full of traumatised basket cases with killer PTS. Somehow that side of the experiment didn’t make it to the screen.
He couldn’t imagine why.
‘Another beer,’ Axl demanded, banging down his wooden bowl so that what was left slopped across the table before dripping slowly onto the floor. Behind his bar, Leon scowled into his beard but told the boy to take Axl a fresh bowl anyway. The bowl was small, hand-lathed from oak and decorated with five poor-quality cracked turquoises. The boy carried it like it was the most precious thing he’d ever seen.
‘Your room’s ready,’ Leon said pointedly.
‘But I’m not,’ said Axl as he slammed the new bowl back onto the table, spilling some more. ‘I’m going for a walk…’
And you’re welcome to come after me, he told the three men in his head, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Fingers touched the brass hilt of his hunting knife where its bare blade was surgically taped to his side, handle down for ease of use.
Outside was bitter, which wasn’t a surprise: nor was the wind that drove along the valley into Axl’s face, though the night air was so cold it took him a few seconds to catch his breath, and longer still for his eye to adjust to the darkness. What would have surprised Axl, if he hadn’t just been sitting in the inn listening carefully to the noises outside, was the figure frozen animal-still between the stables and an open-ended shed beyond. If in doubt freeze, but not when you’re alone on open ground. Someone should have told the person that. Mind you, someone should have told him that all those years ago, not left him to find out for himself.
Axl didn’t hurry after the ghost figure. Mainly because hurrying wasn’t something he’d been taught. When he ran it was hard and fast, accelerating like an animal and preferably wired up on cooking sulphate. The rest of the time he walked slowly, head up and shoulders loose. As stances went, it didn’t say look at me, but it didn’t say walk through me either. It said, here’s a man going about his business, let’s leave it that way…
Axl could do hard eye without thinking about it and he could tap into psychotic on whim just by taking the filter off his memories, but like his old sergeant used to stress, the main sign of success was not needing to. Getting left alone was a primary skill, one Axl had long since picked up on the street, and beside it all that other shit about slowing down heartbeat, dropping brain rhythms from beta to alpha and hitting a neurological low of ten cycles per second was just that, so much shit.
You couldn’t turn on a teen newsfeed without seeing some bug-eyed drone making a living recycling memes from StreetSemantics 101, but what Axl knew he’d learned direct on the streets of Alphabet by watching who survived and who got razzed.
And he learned fast from his mistakes.