The Silk Mind

By Pete Alex Harris

Ashlin Smith is incredibly bored with his job as supervisor of the Royal Badger Survey.
He wants nothing more than to quit and go back to being a blacksmith like the rest of his family wanted.
However, due to politics, prophecy, and an inexplicable plot set in motion decades before, his job is about to become a lot more interesting, and not in a good way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pete Alex Harris
• Release date: May 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311917102

Pete Alex Harris

Geographically, I've lived in Scotland for most of my life, and I've lived in books for nearly as long. I think being a writer is the first job I remember wanting to do. Economically, that has always been very unlikely, and I've made a living as various kinds of computer programmer and software engineer.I write mostly for fun; let nobody pretend that writing isn't about the most fun you can have for about the least physical danger (in a free country anyway). It would also be cool to be a volcanologist, I suppose, but the odds aren't as good.

Book preview

Part I The Badger Survey

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Chapter 1 Brand New Day

Ashlin turned over on the edge of his sleep, bothered by something malign hovering in the background. A sound, like the whine of a mosquito, modulated into some lunatic’s idea of a tune. Words followed, as he woke to the sound of squeeze box, bells, and clacking oak staves.

Hello, hooray, it’s a bran’ new day!

Woken by the horn of the morning …

Rise up, rise up, for it’s time to play,

And the cock do crow for a bran’ new day!

Bloody morris dancers!

He was never going to get back to sleep with that racket going on outside, and besides, his bladder had woken up too.

Unlike most mornings, where he would wake from pleasant dreams to dismal anticipation of his daily responsibilities, on this morning he woke disgruntled but then remembered with joy that today was going to be different.

Today, he was going to become unemployed, and then tomorrow he was going to pay up the last few pence of rent due on his room, and travel out to the country (not on official business, thank god) to his cousin’s house, and become a blacksmith.

He should have done it four years ago. Like his grandma had said: You’re Ashlin Smith, not Ashlin Badger-botherer. That had at the time seemed comical, and the least persuasive argument from any of his relatives. Most of them had leaned hard on the old don’t get above your station line, and the classic if smithing was good enough for your father and it’s good enough for uncle Stan, then it’s good enough for you.

And at the time, the promise of a well-paid job, working for the Crown Office of the Regent Counsel, seemed grand, and the element of badger-bothering the job might entail didn’t weigh upon the young man’s mind. Now he was not so sure. It occurred to him that since the Royal Badger Survey had been instituted some 80 years ago, Grandma might possibly be the one member of his family who would have heard most about its origins and purposes, and known what the job entailed.

Sadly, she was gone now, and even if Ashlin had been able to pop around for tea and a chat one more time (for which, now, he suddenly realised with unexpected pain, he would have given almost anything), it’s probable she would only have said Told you so, silly boy.

He pissed, and washed, and dressed, and went down for breakfast. Breakfast was as awful as usual, but today it tasted, if not good, then at least bearable; a trial to be overcome in the knowledge that it would soon be over, and not be followed by an endless succession of awful breakfasts marking out and punctuating all his tomorrows with unsatisfactory porridge. One more awful breakfast at the start of one more day and then he would be away from it all.

This early in the morning, he would be able to report in to the Crown Office without much danger of meeting the other members of the Badger Survey. Any time before ten he would be unlikely to encounter Justin, who would roll in with another implausible reason why he had been delayed, or simply begin one of his stories that go nowhere and leave the listeners feeling like they had been subtly robbed. Perhaps only of their time, but sometimes the feeling was so acute, and so in tune with their other emotional reactions to Justin’s person, that they would pat and touch their pockets and pouches in case somehow the pointless narration had been a distracting ruse to allow them to be pick-pocketed.

Justin was now to be someone else’s problem.

And Jenna too, although she wasn’t the same kind of problem. Ashlin would under other circumstances have been drawn to her pretty face and clever sense of humour, and in his romantic inexperience he would have been dashed against the rocks of her confidence and wit. But their work situation and various badger-related experiences together had interfered with and delayed this process, so that they were now friends, and it was clear that she wasn’t interested in pursuing any greater closeness. So that was that.

But next to Jenna, other girls seemed less interesting and less pretty than they would if seen fairly only in their own light. This was unjust to them, he felt, and also very unsatisfactory for a young man woken regularly by the horn of the morning. Maybe out at his cousin’s forge, putting on some muscle and showing it off to good effect, bare-armed and sweating as he hammered out the hot iron, just maybe, he would impress and be impressed by some honest country girl, and drop back into the sort of ordinary life his family wished for him.

So yes, Jenna would also become someone else’s problem. Not such a bad problem to have, but anyway, not his.

Climbing the steep cobbled street, stepped with slabs of granite, he remembered how grand the port and eponymous capital city of the old nation of Atlar had seemed only four years before. It had wide streets and parks, and a few ancient stone buildings, all scored and stained up to the fourth storey. The newer buildings around them, on foundations of old stone below and new construction above, whispered a brave tale of calamity and survival.

Now the history of the Great Wave was well known to him. It was dramatic and terrifying, but some amount of the mystery and awe of it had faded, leaving the city somewhat less able to impress him. For one thing, much of the dirt and dilapidation was recent.

God above and below, he muttered, they could at least have cleaned the place up a bit by now. They’ve had four-score years to do it.

The office of the Regent Counsel occupied the mostly repaired shell of what had been the old Royal Palace. It was no longer a manifestation of the wealth and maritime power of Atlar, or the dignity of its long and noble royal line. It was a functional and efficient expression of the day to day bureaucracy needed to actually make a state operate.

A king can roll around in his golden coach, waving condescendingly at people, and for some reason those people don’t take it as an arrogant display, a rubbing of their noses in the dirt while he shows off his big fat silk waistcoat and ridiculous wig. A king can get away with worse than that, even.

But a regent has to restrain his self-indulgence a little. He is a steward, a mere caretaker, almost. He must not get above himself, even if he has as much of the indefinable royal quality in his blood as a formally crowned monarch. Of course, so has a pig farmer, as far as natural philosophers have been able to determine, but that is by the by.

If a king rules foolishly over a kingdom, and makes a great unholy mess of things, then it can always be someone else’s fault. The merchants are devious, the money-lenders are cheats, the people are idle, the priests are corrupt.

But if a kingdom under a mere regent is not run smoothly, and all grievances are not resolved, or at least carefully managed, then it is soon the general opinion that he is Not Doing His Job. And also that Things Were Better Under Mad King Leonard Say What You Like But He Loved His People, and so forth.

Willem, second Regent of Atlar was, if not as big a fool as his father had been, at least not very clever. And so he relied heavily on the Regent Counsel for advice in his public affairs, and to keep all the confusing details away from his fuddled old head. Time wasn’t standing still, and there were ever new problems he didn’t understand, and new solutions he didn’t understand to old problems that he thought (most inaccurately) that he had once understood.

This arrangement was working surprisingly well.

For these and other reasons, the old Royal Palace had been refurbished and redecorated without needless additional expense, and more than that, the finer fittings and ostentatious decoration had actually been removed, within and outside the building, so that if you didn’t know, you would never have guessed at its exalted origins or its vital importance to the state. You would perhaps think it a tradesman’s bank or a dealership in stationery, because a very great deal of paper was in evidence at all times.

The working office or depot of the Badger Survey was not in the Crown Office buildings; it was near the edge of town, supposedly for more convenient access to the countryside. But resignations from the Badger Survey, or from any organisation under the umbrella of the Crown Office, required complicated paperwork which had to be processed centrally, so Ashlin made his way into the central office building in search of the bureaucratic necessities that would free him.

It was rumoured that other ways of leaving Crown Office jobs had been known to occur more suddenly and under very informal conditions. But then, even the most orderly of bureaucracies have to tolerate this kind of asymmetry in their procedures. They perhaps make up for it by producing extra paperwork after the funeral.

Ashlin leaned over a wooden half-door into a tiny room with a single window the size and shape of a dinner plate high in the wall, and shelves of paper, books, and miscellaneous secretarial paraphernalia reaching up nearly as high on all four sides of the room. There was also a small writing desk and a chair, occupied by a short and broad man, reading one sheet of paper and making notes onto another. There was barely enough space for another person to stand within the room, hence the convenient removal of the top half of the door to make this unnecessary.

Good morning to you, George, Ashlin said.

Indeed, and to you, Ash, replied the broad man without looking up.

I’ve come to resign from my post. Is there anything to write my name on before I go?

Indeed there is a form of some kind. There always is, returned George. Allow me to just fetch it down.

He looked around the shelves up to head height, didn’t seem to find what he was looking for, and then rummaged around at head-and-an-arm height. Still without satisfaction, it seemed. He laid a hand on the top of the writing desk and rocked it slightly, as if pondering whether it might bear his weight. It seemed not.

If you’ll excuse me, I may need to fetch a step-ladder. Or indeed a tall person would do.

George being so broad, it was necessary for him to move his desk a little to get to the half-door, and it was necessary for Ashlin to back away from the door to allow him to get out into the corridor. There was a moment of uncertainty where it seemed Ashlin might have to retreat into a janitor’s cupboard to allow George to pass, but he turned sideways quite gracefully (most of his width being shoulder, not gut) and paced off.

This gave Ashlin a few minutes to wonder where the ladder was even going to go in a room that small, and had got as far as forming a theory that the chair would have to be moved out of the office, and the desk turned just so. Or perhaps one side of the ladder could be put over the half door …

George returned, not with a ladder but with a tall person, so this geometrical question was never resolved.

This is Derk, said George, he will be working with you.

To get the form? Would one of them sit on the other’s shoulders or something? It seemed like a needless introduction. If Derk was just here to help reach a shelf, after which Ashlin would probably never need to see him again, one might as well take the trouble to introduce a stepladder by name.

Ashlin later regretted this moment of confusion. Had he understood the import of what he had just heard, he might have made a getaway then. He could have forgone his last week’s pay, and maybe changed his name or moved abroad. But he hesitated, looking puzzled, for long enough that George had time to add:

Doctor Grey will explain.

Doctor Grey being the Regent Counsel himself. It was that he would take an interest in the resignation of a Badger Survey Supervisor, but it was far more unlikely that he might trouble himself with how to retrieve the paperwork from a high shelf. So, reality came crashing back into a recognisable shape: Ashlin's escape was being thwarted somehow, and the time for making objections to George had passed. Ashlin made an attempt nevertheless.

"I’m resigning today. So Derk won’t be working with me, no offence intended Derk, and I have no objection on personal grounds, but I’m resigning today. That’s what you wanted to get the form for, remember?"

Doctor Grey will explain.

And that was that.

Chapter 2 Something More

Doctor Grey was a thin, grey-eyed, grey-haired man of indeterminate age. He had been the Regent Counsel for some large number of years, and gave every impression of intending to be the Regent Counsel for some large number of years more. Anything so disruptive to the smooth, efficient running of the Crown Office as his own retirement or death from old age would be a damned impertinence and was not to be permitted under any circumstances.

He was always dressed neatly and anonymously in the current fashion of bankers and businessmen, tending to favour black or dark grey garments. It was occasionally a joke among the younger employees of the office that he wore his grey name as he wore his grey clothes, as a habit rather than with any personal attachment.

Older employees who had laughed about this in their time were more of the opinion that it wasn’t actually a joke.

There should have been nothing terrifying about such a grey little man. But it was he that carried out the will of the Crown. In the absence of a King, the will of the Crown was the judgement of the Regent. And in the absence of a Regent with any idea of what was going on, the judgement of the Regent was the advice of the Regent Counsel. He was very much the kind of man to exercise the full authority of the state to act on his own advice.

But I’m resigning my post today, Ashlin attempted. So, it would be better if you bring in Jenna as supervisor, and she can train Derk.

This was met with silence, while Doctor Grey walked over to his window and gazed out at the street below. Then he looked across the street to the old stone bell-tower, where directly at eye-level was the line of scoring and greenish stain left by the Great Wave. The Regent Counsel seemed to muse upon that outline, that boundary between modern times and long-ago history.

You can, if you insist of course. I will be disappointed, and I think you too would be, in time.

He turned and met Ashlin’s eyes, caught them in following his own gaze back from the bell tower.

There are, however, political circumstances that lead me to ask you to stay on in the employment of the Crown Office for a little while longer. And personal reasons why I think you would benefit from this more than you currently appreciate.

He walked up to his desk and pushed a small leather-bound book across the surface towards Ashlin. With a look, he indicated that Ashlin pick it up.

Ashlin did so, read the title—which was simply notes—and opened it to the first page. He scanned it briefly, without it really sinking in. He looked up, waiting for an explanation of how it was relevant.

Eighty years ago, Ashlin, not one in a hundred people would have picked that book up and opened it to read even a page of it. Only about half of them would have held it the right way up, and then only by chance. Times have changed, with the trade schools and the clergy schools, and just last year, the opening of the first of our public libraries.

"Your father, Ashlin, could not read. He was a fine man, but he didn’t have the chances you had, and he didn’t make of himself what he could have. Don’t be offended; he made a better man of himself than many with more wealth and opportunity, but still, as a blacksmith