There was a kind of village here, a jumble of crude buildings of piled stone and wood. So narrow was the available strip of land that some of these dwellings, or store-rooms or manufactories, had been built into crevices in the cliff itself, connected by ladders and short staircases. This was the Attic, then, the unregarded home and workplace of the generations of servants who served the House of Feri.
He walked along the Attic’s single muddy street. It was a grim, silent place. There were a few people about – some adults trudging wearily between the rough shanties, a couple of kids who watched him wide-eyed, fingers picking at noses or navels. Everybody else was at work, it seemed. If the children were at least curious, the adults were no friendlier than the Elevator workers. But there was something lacking in their stares, he thought: they were sullen rather than defiant.
At the head of the Elevator the pale necks of tethered spindlings rose like flowers above weeds. They were here to turn the wheel that hauled the Elevator cage up and down. One weary animal eyed him; none of its time-enhanced smartness was any use to it here.
Near some of the huts cooking smells assailed him. Though it was only morning, the servants must be working on courses for that evening’s dinner. The hour that separated two courses on the ground corresponded to no less than ten hours here, time enough to produce dishes of almost magical perfection, regardless of the unpromising conditions of these kitchens.
A woman emerged from a doorway, wiping a cauldron with a filthy rag. She glared at Peri. She was short, squat, with arms and hands made powerful by a lifetime’s labour, and her tunic was a colourless rag. He had no idea how old she was: at least fifty, judging from the leathery crumples of her face. But her eyes were a startling grey-blue – startling for they were beautiful despite their setting, and startling for their familiarity.
He stood before her, hands open. He said, ‘Please—’
‘You don’t belong in blueshift.’
‘I have to find somebody.’
‘Go back to the red, you fool.’
‘Lora,’ he said. He drew himself up and tried to inject some command into his voice. ‘A girl, about sixteen. Do you know her?’ He fumbled in his pocket for money. ‘Look, I’ll make it worth your while.’
The woman considered his handful of coins. She pinched one nostril and blew a gout of snot into the mud at his feet. But, ignoring the coins, wiping her hands on her filthy smock, she turned and led him further into the little settlement.
They came to the doorway of one more unremarkable shack. He heard singing, a high, soft lilt. The song seemed familiar. His breath caught in his throat at its beauty, and, unbidden, fragments of his elaborate fantasy came back to him.
He stepped to the doorway and paused, letting his eyes adapt to the gloom. The hut’s single room contained a couple of sleeping pallets, a hole in the ground for a privy, a surface for preparing food. The place was hot; a fire burned in a stone-lined grate.
A woman stood in one shadowed corner. She was ironing a shirt, he saw, shoving at tough creases with a flat-iron; more irons were suspended over the fire. The work was obviously hard, physical. The woman stopped singing when he came in, but she kept labouring at the iron. Her eyes, when they met his, were unmistakable, unforgettable: a subtle grey-blue.
For a moment, watching her, he couldn’t speak, so complex and intense were his emotions.
That could be my shirt she’s ironing: that was his first thought. All his life he had been used to having his soiled clothes taken and returned as soon as he wanted, washed and folded, ironed and scented. But here was the cost, he saw now, a woman labouring for ten hours for every hour lived out by the slow-moving aristocrats below, burning up her life for his comfort. And if he lived as long as his father, he might see out ten generations of such ephemeral servants before he died, he realised with a shock: perhaps even more, for he could not believe that people lived terribly long here.
But she was still beautiful, he saw with relief. A year had passed for her in the month since he had seen her last, and that year showed in her; the clean profile of a woman was emerging from the softness of youth. But her face retained that quality of sculpted calm he had so prized on first glimpsing it. Now, though, there was none of the delicious startle he had seen when he had first caught her eye; in her expression he saw nothing but suspicion.
He stepped into the hut. ‘Lora – I know your name, but you don’t know mine . . . Do you remember me? I saw you at my father’s funeral – you served me pastries – I thought then, though we didn’t speak, that something deeper than words passed between us . . . Ah, I babble.’ So he did, all his carefully prepared speeches having flown from his head. He stammered, ‘Please – I’ve come to find you.’
Something stirred on one of the beds: a rustling of blankets, a sleepy gurgle. It was a baby, he realised dimly, as if his brain was working at the sluggish pace of the ground. Lora carefully set down her iron, walked to the bed and picked up the child. No wonder her song had seemed familiar: it was a lullaby.
She had a baby. Already his dreams of her purity were shattered. The child was only a few months old. In the year of her life that he had already lost, she must have conceived, come to term, delivered her child. But the conception must have happened soon after the funeral . . .
Or at the funeral itself.
She held out the child to him. ‘Your brother’s,’ she said. They were the first words she had ever spoken to him.
He recoiled. Without thinking about it he stumbled out of the hut. For a moment he was disoriented, uncertain which way he had come. The dreadful facts slowly worked into his awareness. Maco: had he really wanted her – or had he taken her simply because he could, because he could steal her from his romantic fool of a younger brother?
The old woman was here, the woman with Lora’s eyes – her mother, he realised suddenly. ‘You mustn’t be here,’ she growled. ‘You’ll bring harm.’
In his befuddled state, this was difficult to decode. ‘Look, I’m a human being as you are. You’ve no reason to be frightened of me . . . This is just superstition.’ But perhaps that superstition was useful for the House folk to maintain, if it kept these labouring servants trapped in their Attic. And this mother’s anger was surely motivated by more than a mere taboo. He didn’t understand anything, he realised with dismay.
The woman grabbed his arm and began to drag him away. Still dazed, his emotions wracked, he allowed himself to be led through the mud. There seemed to be more people about now. They all glared at him. He had the odd idea that the only thing that kept them from harming him was that it hadn’t occurred to them.
He reached the Elevator. The boxy cage was laden with cereals, fruit, platters of cold meat, pressed tablecloths. It was the stuff of a breakfast, he thought dully; no matter how much time had elapsed up here, on the ground the House had yet to wake up. He took his place in the cage and waited for the descent to begin, with as much dignity as he could muster.
‘. . . And you can go too, you with your red-tinged bastard!’
He turned. The scowling woman had dragged Lora out of her hut and had hauled her by main force to the Elevator. For a second Lora resisted; holding her child, she met Peri’s eyes. Perhaps if he had acted then, perhaps if he had found the right words, he could have saved her from this dreadful rejection. But there was nothing inside him, nothing left of the foolish dream he had constructed around this stranger. Shamed, he looked away. With a final shove the hard-faced woman deposited Lora inside the cage.
As they waited for the captive spindlings to start marching in their pen, Peri and Lora avoided each other’s gaze, as if the other didn’t even exist.