Sister

By Anthony Peacey

How close can you ever be to another human being? How much can you love someone? And what has sex got to do with it? If that someone is not there, what can you do? In his earliest years Nicky found himself in a council of Indian Chiefs gathered to oversee his purchase of a friend's sister for a bag of marbles. But the girl did not agree. Later he found a sister, yet though he loved her he was not satisfied, and nuclear bombs cut short what happiness they had. A time came when he settled into a new crib in which a soul of amity, a jewel of strange and alien cut, already slept. Waking they peered from prismatic eyes, seeing their face in the corners of vision, the snout of a shiny black chitinous helmet, mandibles flexing sideways. But Y'y'yr was not the sister he sought.

Nicky was a name of his distant past when Melikaphkaz XIV sent him to confront the Valkyries, who were rampaging across the far stars of the empire in their Great Ships. The Emperor seemed to know more about his origins than he did himself. A royal marriage beckoned, but experience told him that should sister and wife coincide jealousies could be catastrophic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthony Peacey
• Release date: Dec 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215878781

Anthony Peacey

This fellow lives in the forest with his wife, whom he met in their teens. At her first square dance she caught him in her butterfly net. She threw away the net and they've been fluttering around together ever since. To help pay for the necessary nectar and a leaf over their heads (there started to be caterpillars, long since butterflies themselves) he has bent umbrella handles (truly), delivered bread, milk, mail, worked as a shop assistant, in forestry, wild life research (ornithologist), taught English as a second language, driven interstate trucks, lectured in computer science—among other things. He first saw the light of day in Gloucestershire, England; migrated to Australia aged 30; and lived near Perth for a long time. Recently they moved to Far North Queensland.

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Sister

Anthony Peacey

Copyright 2023 Anthony Peacey

Smashwords Edition

Cover: Ross Robinson Graphic Design

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for Gloria

Table of Contents

PART 1

Chapter 1 — In the Beginning

Chapter 2 — Lyubov

Chapter 3 — Y’y’y’y’y’y’y’yr

Chapter 4 — The Last Oo’oo’ooraam

Chapter 5 — Fire Mountain

Chapter 6 — The Planet Cooker

Chapter 7 — The Duel

Chapter 8 — The Dowager Librarian

Chapter 9 — Flame Song

Chapter 10 — Goers and Stayers

Chapter 11 — Orth

Chapter 12 — Holmgang

PART 2

Chapter 13 — Pitipir II

Chapter 14 — Desolate Years

Chapter 15 — Son of the Throne

Chapter 16 — Assassin

Chapter 17 — Iroes-Orchillena

Chapter 18 — Scorch

Chapter 19 — Sunrise

Chapter 20 — Storm

Chapter 21 — Wotan

Chapter 22 — The Maw

Chapter 23 — Marriage

Chapter 24 — Circle Rainbow

Chapter 25 — Nemesis

Chapter 26 — We

Numeration

Transliteration and pronunciation

About the author

Other titles by Anthony Peacey

Connect with me

PART 1

Chapter 1

In the Beginning

Shar sleeps across my feet.

I sit writing.

‘But you cannot help me with this story, can you, Shar?’

As she hears her name the tip of her tail twitches, otherwise her sleep is disturbed by no movement but the rise and fall of her breathing, big marmalade cat-thing. No, she cannot help; she cannot answer my questions, though I talk to her endlessly. And yet at night, when the glory of the galaxy fills half the sky and she stands beside me, my hand in the fur between her ears, ah! she is the companion of my loneliness. On other nights with our rock ball looking away from the galaxy the sky is starless, empty, velvet black, save one or two tiny ghostly lenses of other star islands impossibly distant. For Old Bavariiya, our star, is voyaging on a wide eccentric orbit into vacancy; he will not reach apogee for aeearaana; and on this world, his only companion, I am the only human. This is my final exile.

I sit here in my hut waiting for Old Bavariiya to go nova, waiting for my dissolution. I survived the annihilation of the mighty Scorch but I will not survive Old Bavariiya.

Ah, the Scorch! We think we are safe. We live in the present moment, we cannot do otherwise. The past is mere memory; the future does not yet exist. We think the next moment will be much like this one and usually we are right. But we can never be sure. Melikaphkaz XIV was with his First Karnatch Fleet, making a symbolic imperial progress to the Voxa-Chorar region to collect tribute from those who remained in the ashes of recent conquest. The fleet was travelling within an impenetrable thousand leean wide force bubble. The Emperor sat at the evening banquet aboard his flagship Scorch. He was raising a spoonful of baruuz roe in aspic to the lips of Iriri, his latest concubine. Iriri, young and breath-takingly beautiful, smirked; the Empress of half the galaxy, Kai-Orchillena, glared. At that moment, within the force bubble, the nine ships of the Valkyries appeared and disappeared. It happened in an instant. The ships appeared, by what means was not known, evenly spaced around a sphere with the Scorch at its centre. They unleashed some new potency of destruction, then disappeared in order themselves to avoid its blaze, hellishly confined within the last moments of the force bubble. All that remained was a raging ball of plasma expanding across the stars. Melikaphkaz’s millennial tyranny was over. Perhaps it was better for Iriri to go out in her own little starburst at the zenith of her fortune. It could never have been other than brief. She was young and inexperienced. The cruelty and kindness of Kai-Orchillena were as limitless as her power, but though her moods were unpredictable, Iriri could scarcely have expected kindness.

And I—I was on the Scorch.

I write upon the dried skin of the ihn fish with the inky exudation of the biradia snail. Futile effort; Bavariiya in his rage will eat the skins. But I write, who am no writer. One finds something to do. I have started this story of my life several times, screwed up and burnt the pages and started again. It was a stew, a gallimaufry of different meats, words from different times and places, disparate cultures and worlds. For I have had many lives, more than I can count, more than I can remember. Now to give the story focus I have decided to write it for Nicky the Grub and his friends, Nicky who was me in my first instar. Those peoples who have understood the chain of lives most often use ‘life’ for the whole, and ‘instar’ or some such word for the links. ‘Instar’ in Nicky the Grub’s language meant the stages of development of insects, as egg, larva, pupa, butterfly. The word serves well, for my first instar seems so different from later ones that surely I, Nicky, was a mere larva, a grub, a caterpillar. Nicky knew nothing of instars, nothing of galaxies and stars, nothing beyond the hills that rimmed his valley. On the lane of his childhood horse carts brought the milk and the bread; cars were rare. So I will try to use his words, his ideas, to rein the horses of my narration.

But I am uncomfortable with Nicky’s numbers. ‘Thousand’ and ‘million’ are awkward to me. In most of my human instars I have had two thumbs on each hand. Perhaps because of this a twelve-based system is commonest. Aee is twelve; aeea twelve to the second power, one hundred and forty-four in Nicky’s system, aeeara twelve to the third power, and aeearaana twelve to the sixth; so aeearaana is not one million, but nearly three million.

Nicky the Grub, me, my first instar. I will try to set it down because even then at the very beginning I was different. I lacked something, I yearned for something which did not seem to trouble anyone else.

Olly Dodd pushed Nicky the Grub into a hedge. The thorns scratched my face and dug into my legs, but I would not cry. Anyway, that was not the worst.

It is the first thing I can remember. I was five years old, had not long started school, and was on the way home with other kids. Johnny Grant was already my friend, a boy who smelt of the dairy on his father’s farm. Olly Dodd was a year older than us, big and brutish. We were climbing a hill with fields on one side and a strip of woodland on the other.

‘Wipe your nose, Johnny, you dirty kid,’ said Olly.

True enough Johnny’s nose exuded a yellow-green slime that he occasionally licked away.

‘Wipe your own,’ said Johnny.

‘Watch it!’

‘Your nose is a pig’s snout.’

‘I’ll thump you.’

‘Pig face,’ said I.

‘Snotty snout,’ said Johnny, skipping away.

‘Pig face, snotty snout,’ I sang.

And Olly pushed me into the hedge. Then he chased Johnny and pushed him into the hedge. The other kids were laughing. The hedge was of hawthorn bristling with spikes. My cheek was bleeding, my leg painfully impaled.

I heard Johnny’s sister Sylvia say like a grown-up, ‘You’ve only got yourself to blame, Johnny. You shouldn’t have cheeked him.’ Even scolding him seemed like an act of care, of love; and she was helping him from the thorns, straightening his jacket.

I was overwhelmed by a wave of desolation, worse by far than the thorns. I had no sister to help me and care for me. I had no sister. There was a great gap in my life.

Somehow I must have struggled from the hedge and found my way home in that little company. But why were my feelings so unbridled? Why did I so yearn for a sister? Why did I have such a sense of lack, as if I were half an ancient bridge reaching out across the river of life, terminating in broken masonry hanging over an abyss, the other half missing?

At the bottom of our garden was a dry-stone wall, beginning in places to fall down. Over the wall was a little grove of trees. The hillside fell steeply to the valley bottom where was the next house, occupied by Policeman Pomfrey. Among the trees Adrian Pomfrey, the Policeman’s son, known to us as ‘Pom’, had built a ‘camp’. I helped him. This was some years after the thorny hedge episode. The camp was of bricks and boards with a tin roof. You could not stand upright in it.

Here one day sat a council of Indian Chiefs, Pom himself, me, my brother Jimmy, a year younger than me, Midge Clutterbuck, Tom Fox, and a couple of others, gathered to witness a certain transaction. In the fireplace burned a little fire of dry sticks. The smoke went up a rolled tin chimney. The business to hand was of great moment to me: I had bought Tom’s sister, ‘swapped’ as we used to say, for my entire treasure of marbles.

We were gathered awaiting Rosemary so that the exchange could be made formally before witnesses.

I got out my marbles for everyone to see. Many were admired, but one in particular: ‘Wow! That Biggie is a beauty.’ Two or three times as large as any other, it was clear with internal golden spirals embasketting a burst of star flowers green and red.

‘Anyway, what do you want a sister for?’ asked Pom.

I found this hard to answer. I knew by this time that no one would understand how I felt. ‘I just do.’

‘I don’t have one,’ said Pom. He was an only child. ‘What do you think, Jimmy?’

‘I don’t care. It’s just a girl.’

‘Tom wants to get rid of her,’ said Midge Clutterbuck.

‘I do not,’ said Tom, perhaps worried that the value of the merchandise would be called into question. ‘She’s a good sister. She’s worth a lot more than this, really.’

At this point in our lives we hardly understood what need there was for females in the world. We didn’t really see a connection between girls and mothers. Mothers clearly had a place, though I’m not sure that we regarded them as females: they were grownups.

But there was Midge. He was small for his age, a hanger-on to our gang. We felt that he was a bit common.

‘Nicky just wants to … you know.’

Something in the way he said this silenced us momentarily.

‘What?’ said Pom.

‘You know, shag her.’

By the time, some seventy years later, that that instar came to its rather violent end such a remark would not have surprised children much younger than we were, so much had the world changed. But Midge’s vulgarity made us happy innocents uncomfortable.

‘You can’t do that with a sister,’ I said.

‘No,’ agreed Pom.

‘No, you can’t,’ said Tom with force.

‘Jeremy Burton shags Mary. Everyone knows that.’ In the face of opposition Midge too became forceful. Jeremy and Mary were several years older than us.

‘Anyway,’ said Pom, ‘what will she have to do when she’s your sister? Will she come and live with you?’

‘I don’t think so. At least, not straight away.’ There was the awkward matter of our parents, who still knew nothing of this arrangement.

‘No,’ said Tom, ‘she’d better stay in our house.’

‘Well, what then?’

‘Well, she’ll have to come with me when I do things.’

‘What things?’

‘Oh, go places, build camps …’ I could not explain the feeling I expected to have of being completed in some way, of being a bridge with a firm footing on both sides of the river.

Just then, looking out of the hole which served Pom’s camp for a door, Jimmy spotted her. ‘Here she comes.’

Rosemary got down and came in crouching.

‘Here,’ said Tom.

He and Jimmy moved apart to make a place. She sat down opposite me, the only girl in a circle of boys, but she had brothers so boys were no mystery to her.

We were all silent.

‘What is it?’ said Rosemary. ‘What did you want me to come for?’ She was fair with eyes that seemed to reflect a summer sky. That day she had on a flowery summer dress.

‘This is an important council,’ said Pom the Indian Chief. ‘Rosie, we are here to all see it done properly.’ He was seeking some tone of formality.

Rosie was mystified. ‘What are you talking about?’

I remember being aware just then, that although the voices of us boys had not yet broken, her girl’s voice was different, and sweet to me.

‘Rosie,’ I said, ‘will you be my sister?’ At the last moment some instinct told me that I should ask her. Hitherto Tom and I had dealt like farmers at the market buying and selling a cow.

Rosie looked at me as if she didn’t understand.

‘Will you be my sister?’ I smiled ingratiatingly.

‘Well, I can’t, can I?’

‘Why not?’

‘Yes, why not?’ said Pom.

‘Course you can,’ said Tom.

She looked at Tom with the beginnings of irritation.

‘I can’t. You’ve got to be in the same family.’

‘You can now,’ said Pom. He was enjoying his role of chief Chief, host of the council. ‘It’s something new. We’ve just invented it.’

‘Yes,’ said Tom. ‘And you like Nicky.’

There were some seconds of silence.

Rosie was looking at me with her big skyey eyes and a kind of affectionate puzzlement. She started to say, ‘But you can’t do—’

The dreadful Midge broke in to shine the glare of blunt truth. ‘Tom has swapped you to Nick for his marbles.’

Rosie stiffened, her face went hard. Suddenly she punched Tom, an awkward movement but with vicious intent. ‘You bloody ’orrible sod!’ she cried. A mannish expression and a very bad one, which she should not even have known. It shocked us.

‘Rosie, it’s all right.’ I extended my hand towards her.

‘Don’t touch me!’ she shrieked, eyes wide and glaring into mine.

The boys sat, not quite so chiefly, their self-assurance punctured by Rosie’s outburst.

She turned again to Tom. ‘I hate you!’

‘Well,’ said the awful Midge, ‘if you hate him you can go and be Nicky’s sister.’

‘I hate him too. I hate you all!’

She got up, her head brushing the low roof. She pushed Tom and he fell sideways, but her hair caught in twisted wire that held the corrugated iron to a pole and she fell herself. She began to cry tears of rage.

‘I hate you,’ she said again to Tom. ‘But you’re my brother and no one can say you’re not. You can’t swap me, never. Never, never, never! I’m going home.’

She crawled to the door, stood and ran. On the steep path she looked like a bird, light but unbalanced, in danger of falling. She vanished down towards the road.

My feelings were in turmoil. I had thought to leave the council with a sister—even though perhaps in the depths of my heart there was a doubt that a girl swapped for marbles could be the real thing—but now Rosie, who at least had been a good friend, said she hated me.

‘I think the fire needs making up,’ said Jimmy. He started to break small sticks to bring back the flames.

‘Well, it’s not my fault,’ said Tom. ‘I wanted you to have her. You should still give me something … that Biggie.’ He trailed off as though aware that the request was not reasonable.

Pom, the paramount Chief, disappointed that his council should end in this manner, said, ‘Yes, something. What do you think?’ (The ‘you’ was plural. Most languages have different words for ‘you’ addressed to one being, and ‘you’ addressed to several, but that language was deficient in this respect. Awkward.)

A curl of resentment said that I owed nothing, but I didn’t really care. I was unhappy.

‘No, he shouldn’t ’ave to give nothing.’

‘Yes he should, cos Tom really meant it.’

‘Maybe ten percent of the marbles,’ said Pom. This was recent learning. In our little gang he fancied himself as something of a savant.

‘What’s ten pissent?’ asked Midge.

‘Anyway, it’s too much,’ said one of the other chiefs.

‘The Biggie will do,’ said Tom, cupidity crystallizing his demand.

I awakened from despond to say, ‘Not the Biggie.’

‘No,’ said Pom, ‘the Biggie’s too much.’

The council decided that I should give Tom ten ordinary marbles. It seemed to me that I owed Tom nothing, but I really didn’t care.

However, Tom was disgruntled and Tom was my best friend. I had lost Rosie; I didn’t want to lose Tom too. I gave him the Biggie and found my generosity applauded.

In fact I won the Biggie back later. I had to stake twenty others to get Tom to play it, but he lost without rancour. Our friendship remained strong. Rosie too returned to amity and a couple of years later I was glad that she wasn’t my sister for I began to wish other things of her. Not, in Midge’s blunt language, to shag, but some exploration of love. The rich aspects and moods of the business were opening up to us. But it never happened. Julia intervened.

My father and uncle took my grandmother to a pretty old town on a river, along with Jimmy and I. Gran and dad went to book shops and an art gallery, while uncle Bart took us boys in a rowboat on the river. I fell in the water. Our boat was shooting ahead, and Julia pulled me out. I found myself in another boat with this dark angel with slightly tilted green elfin eyes.

There had been a war in my earliest years. Many people were displaced. Julia’s family came from somewhere in the east. Her father, Maxie, was a big man, quiet but not gloomy, often smiling. I thought his face fierce. If Julia’s face was not fierce, her love for me was, and I returned it for a lifetime. We had children, three I think, and the boys did have a sister, lucky lads. My own feeling of lack over a sister sank into the depths of my mind, forgotten for months, perhaps years, at a time, yet it never left me. The love of Julia filled my days like sunlight. In our later years we spoke of what would happen if one died before the other. It would be hard to bear. The bright childhood visions of heaven and hell had grown dim; we did not expect to find an afterlife where we might meet again. We hoped in some way to go together, but fortune did not grant us that.

The end of that instar came wholly unexpectedly. We were visiting one of our granddaughters in another city, a tall and beautiful girl recently married. She took a day off work and took us to the zoo, which was a rather fine one. We had left the tropical bird house when I found I needed to pee. With an old fellow’s deliberate movements I stepped over a low fence designed to keep people on the path and sought the concealment of some shrubbery behind an enclosure of gorillas. When I had pissed to my satisfaction I continued around the building intending to meet Julia and Alexandra on the other side, for they had been walking slowly along talking about babies. There had been some brief shouting but at that moment it did not signify with me. I was on a concrete path made narrow by tall untended bushes on one side and the pale rear wall of the enclosure on the other. I rounded a corner and was face to face, chest to chest, with a gorilla.

We were both taken by surprise. Before I could back off he made a sweep with his heavy arm and I was hurled down into the adamant stony meeting of wall and path. I don’t think he was hostile, just startled, but my head struck the concrete. There was a flash of blinding pain, a moment—it seemed both extended and instantaneous—of darkness, then time slowed.

From far away as through an inchoate multi-coloured fog I heard Alexandra say, ‘I’m pregnant, grandma. I didn’t say because I wasn’t sure. But just then I had a very strange feeling. Now I’m sure. That does sound odd, doesn’t it?’

Julia did not reply. Before Alexandra had finished speaking she said in tones of anxiety, ‘What’s that noise? What’s going on? Nicky’s round there.’

Her words scarcely registered with me. Some dream had been disturbed. If a foetus can sweat I was sweating streams, and quivering—but for the moment I didn’t realize I was a foetus. There was a regular beat that I both heard and felt. It had been going on since the beginning of time. I loved that beat; it was the pulse of my life.

Nicky the Grub had never considered that he and his body might be separable. He had vague ideas of ‘soul’, ‘mind’, ‘awareness’, but he had never realized that he himself was simply and fundamentally, and magnificently, Consciousness, and that his body was just the present vehicle. Now I began to learn, and later I acquired a word for the essential me: Shoma.

Here now did not seem to be heaven, and it certainly wasn’t hell. There was another shoma, bright with life, but undefined. He regarded me as if with the huge eyes of a baby. We were like streams of water, the one from the mountains of years and the other a rill from rain recently fallen. We merged and flowed. Neither lost anything by it.

That is the first transmigration I can remember. I realized after a while that I had merged with my great-grandchild, that is to say with the shoma that inhabited the great-grandchild body of my former body. It does seem that, although between bodies shomas do not inhabit regular time and space, proximity often facilitates the next incarnation. But not always. I once leapt into the Lesser Magellanic Cloud and across aeeara of years for no apparent cause. The wise have spoken of the Winds of Qi that swirl within shoma space and disturb its usual supposed alignment with the material universe.

After a while I-we settled down, ceased to ‘sweat’ and ‘quiver’. The warm dream returned, and most welcome it was. Alexandra’s heartbeat lulled me. The essence of shomas is not disparate; our individualities are defined by memories. A new foetus and a developed individual do not have memories that conflict. Was my brother ‘new’, that is a drop arriving direct from the Shoma Mother into a virgin brain? I think so. So are we born as individuals, then to persist through diverse instars. I don’t think I made a conscious attempt to impress my memories upon the new foetal brain, as I often did later, but much of Nicky’s memory seems to have survived. I sank into the warm dream of childhood, babyhood, renewed. In truth I was overwhelmed. I had discovered that the death of the body was not necessarily the death of the soul, of awareness, that is of the me shoma. I had learned that in transmigration one might merge (later I found that one might have to fight). Yes, I was overwhelmed. Let me rest and recuperate for a while and let the amazing universe take care of itself.

And Julia? I seem to know that, hard though my loss to her was, she weathered it and lived happy years among our descendants. Did she have a special bond with Alexandra’s first boy? I like to think so, but I remember little of that instar.

Chapter 2

Lyubov

I have been thinking about memory. It is the machinery of brains that best preserves memory. While shomas are between brains memory seems to decay, to trickle off in runnels and fall off in chunks like ice from a warming glacier. But I am not happy with the brain I have now, its thinking is lurching and ponderous, like those heavy burrowing animals of old Orth—wombats, weren’t they? Memories in this brain are shadowy, ragged as the winding sheets of old corpses. I wish for the brain before this, the bright and powerful brain that for aeeara of years shared the rule of half the galaxy. Well, crying over what is lost helps nothing, is a useless scattering of the coin of life’s moments.

This body is fine, humaniform, as was my last. This one is larger, though not a great deal, than what was normal among Nicky’s people, well muscled with gleaming ebony skin. I have let my mane and beard grow long. Why not? There is no one to see me but Shar and I don’t think she minds if I am unkempt.

There is much I want to remember but I am slow getting to it. My early instars were coloured by a longing that I little understood. I came to realize that I carried a dream in my heart of hearts and though I thought it no more than that, when I began to transmigrate with some awareness I strove to preserve it. I was with Miri. We were human, very young. So young that a year’s difference would have been clear, so I think we were twins. We walked hand in hand down beside a steep laughing stream, scrambled over rocks. There was a rhyme:

The freshets are ringing,

In Norland spring’s springing.

About us towered summery mountains on whose heights the snows were melting, and we could only hear the birds when we strayed further from the noisy water. We were alone. Somewhere upstream perhaps was a mother, a father, or an uncle at the high summer pasture with the cows.

We settled among the grass and flowers by a pool from which the sun glanced in shards of light. We broke dark leaves from a bush and threw them into the water where they became dragon ships. If we threw them in the right place an eddy would carry them out into the current among the bubbles from the little fall that fed the pool, and they would sail away to disappear over the drop at the outlet. We began to race our ships. The first to disappear was the winner.

The sun at last went behind the mountain and after a long twilight we found ourselves lost in a gloomy forest of pine. As it became dark and cold we crept into a hollow, deep-floored with pine needles soft and dry; we broke branches from the trees, curled up and pulled the branches over us. We slept with our arms about each other.

We were not in the least worried or frightened. We were hungry but that did not signify. We had all we needed: I had Miri, and Miri had me.

In the morning we woke to find the sunlight of new day streaming in beneath the eaves of the forest. That dream is saturated with a feeling of wholeness, rightness, of a world with nothing missing. I treasured that dream through instars, sought it, dwelt in it whenever the sense of lack and loss in my life became too poignant.

Orth (that was the name of Nicky’s planet, wasn’t it?) came to a bad end. So what’s new in the galaxy? But I am really thinking not of the end of Orth, which may not have ended yet for all I know, but of that civilization. In that last Orthian instar that I can recall I did have a sister, Lyubov. She was a couple of years younger than me. This must have been many generations after Nicky, after Julia and the gorilla. The greater powers of the planet were plagued by a pernicious political system called democracy. Unworkable. By the ‘will of the people’ the world ran on short-term gratification, with results as predictable as the ending by starvation and cannibalism of a plague of mice.

We damaged the climatic; the atmosphere heated; deserts grew on every continent. Water was scarce where the masses breeding without control needed it. War was endemic, always, whatever the excuse, over resources—plunder, that is.

By the time I was born in the kingdom of Farstan on the great continent of Uras democracy was in retreat, but too late. In any case few other forms of government are much better. Benign dictatorship or an oligarchy of philosophers seems to deliver the greatest good to the greatest number, but both are rare. A ruthless duad of intellectuals is best of all—but perhaps I am prejudiced.

I was pugnacious in that instar and my will was developing. Nicky the Grub was growing up. Some called me a bully but I had the knack of pleasing a following. Lyubov was born two years after I, and followed me like a puppy, but when there was strife she would hide, reappearing to dress my wounds or hold my victorious hand and gaze at me with adoration.

By twenty-five I was second in command of the army. I came to the attention of Natsha, the daughter of Mogul Barda, and she married me. She did not have much time for Lyubov.

I say ‘army’ and ‘Mogul’ but in truth Farstan was just a little valley ringed by mountains able to be briefly independent because there was nothing there that its larger neighbours wanted. Self-styled Mogul Barda was a petty kinglet and the army a chimera of border patrol and gang of condottieri.

When I married I established a house in the capital, the only real city in the valley, and arranged for Lyubov and her husband to move there also from the village of our birth on the skirts of the mountains.

‘I don’t know what you want her here for,’ said Natsha, ‘she’s a rabbit.’

‘And you’re a lynx.’

She smiled at that. She meant that Lyubov was timid, which was true, and would not or could not help my career, help me in the jostling of the little court—also true. But neither was Natsha much help, she was too selfish and obsessed with her own schemes. Did we love each other? Yes, after a fashion. Her lips, long and full, carried fire and passion of which I was often the beneficiary, but rarely words of love. My chief support at that time was from Bogor and our henchmen. They intimidated my domestic enemies, one of the most persistent falling to Bogor’s slim blade while I guarded him from retribution. A good friend. In time most became wary of me or fawned upon me. They thought I would be Mogul but fate ruled otherwise.

There had been a global communications net but with the grass fires of local war getting fiercer it had become ragged. Farstan was largely cut off before I was born. News of what was happening outside often arrived late and thus Barda called me to the capital at an inopportune moment. Someone had accused me—falsely—of plotting his removal. That was in my thirty-second year when I was generalissimo of our little gang of bandits. I convinced my father-in-law that I had no designs upon his life or throne and we had downed a couple of tankards to restored amity when the wireless man burst in, in great agitation. The army of Bing-bing was approaching our border. I suppose that even had I been there we could not have withstood them for long. We were pragmatic, Barda and I and Natsha. We fled.

The first leg of our flight was by road, for we expected that a Bing-bing force would already be sitting across the railway line. We fled to Karinaya, an outpost of the reduced empire of Mosk, our destination. I would have gone to Karinaya anyway, for Lyubov was there visiting the spiritual leader of her cult. I thought the city would fall to the Bing-bing but hopefully not before we had come and gone.

I could not find Lyubov. Guns were heard to the south, the snarl of planes, a spatter of bombs falling upon a suburb like the first fat raindrops of a storm.

‘Come,’ said Natsha, ‘the train is leaving.’

The train for Mosk. Barda and his people were already aboard.

‘Wait a bit. I’m going to this address for Lyubov.’

‘I’m not waiting for that ninny.’

‘You know I can’t leave her.’

‘Always that damned Luby getting in our way. It’s our lives, Igar. Don’t be stupid, come on!’

‘There’ll be another train.’ This was highly uncertain.

‘I will not wait.’

‘You go on then. I’ll see you on the train, or in Mosk.’

She did vouchsafe me a kiss and an embrace, fiercer than I expected, anger and—yes—love. She took our two boys and left. I never saw her again.

I finally found Lyubov in a dim room hung with rich silks. She was sitting on the carpet with a small crowd around the leader, a fellow in his fifties, heavy, dark, massively maned and bearded. Some raw animal smell contended in the air with incense, and I saw raised on a tripod a steel pan shining dimly. Upon it were the entrails of … a cat or rabbit? arranged in a knot like a flat flower.

(I start to write with some fragment of grave-cloth memory in my mind, and then I am amazed how it bursts into flame and throws off such sparks of detail.)

I had entered without ceremony. Seizing Lyubov’s arm I hauled her to her feet. ‘Come on, the Bing-bing are here.’

Lyubov appeared half in trance. When I shook her, her eyes came back to me, timid, anxious; then she looked at the leader for guidance or permission.

After a weighty pause, in a voice that seemed to come from a cavern, that one said, ‘Go with him, daughter. It is your fate.’

Perhaps he did not want to chance his authority in contention with me.

‘You should all get out,’ I said. ‘The city can’t stand against the Bing-bing.’

‘They will not harm us,’ said the leader.

I did not stay to argue but went out into daylight still holding the bemused Lyubov by the arm, dragging her. In the car she said, ‘Where is Arvi?’ Her husband.

‘I don’t know. We couldn’t find him.’

‘Igar, we must go back for him.’

‘That’s impossible.’ I explained the situation, the uncaring ploughshares of the world rending the sunlit meadows of her dreams. As she began to cry quietly I took her and held her in my arms.

‘And you,’ I said to the driver. ‘Get on that train, or take your car. Get out.’

‘I will. You’re my last customer.’ Indeed he could just about retire on what he was charging me. ‘Do you want me to take you?’ he said, perhaps thinking to increase the luxury of his retirement.

‘No thanks. Just drop us at the station. Our people are there.’

But they were not. The train had gone. Another left a couple of hours later, likely to be the last indeed, and not heading west but north. Nevertheless Lyubov and I took it.

We slept on the floor of the carriage’s corridor crushed among other groaning, snoring, weeping, farting refugees. Lyubov was quiet, grieving at the loss of Arvi. Would she ever see him again? she whispered. ‘Of course. They won’t destroy the place, and Arvi will keep his head down, won’t he?’ The contrast between Arvi’s prudence and my rashness was a family joke. I believe she felt safer and more comforted in my arms than she would have felt in Arvi’s had she lost me, my little sister.

In the morning we looked out to see wide featureless steppe fleeing south beside us under a high grey sky. The train stank; half the toilets, if you could fight your way to them, were blocked, the floor swimming in piss. I struggled through a couple of carriages and managed to buy part of a stale loaf and some salami from an avaricious old woman. On the second day we were hungry and desperately thirsty. A few left the train but the two or three stops were only villages. The landscape changed, became rolling with ranges of hills clothed with taiga forest of pine and birch. Although the air was thick and disgusting, we got used to it; we kept the windows closed for it was cold now. A rumour circulated that a group of Bing-bing thugs were on the train. Was it so? Why were they not torn to pieces? They had guns, they were a special force. What did they want? They wanted me as it turned out.

We left the train at Vyatask. There was half a kilometre of carriages and on the part of the platform that we could see there was no sign of the Bing-bing. In the last day we had seen the blaze of autumn in the forest, rust, vermillion, gold. The air was frosty. Some hundreds of kilometres west was another railhead and to this I decided we would make our way. I could not buy a car, and indeed it might not have been much use, for the roads were poor and the finding of fuel uncertain. Instead I bought horses, food, and extra clothes. It was late in the year to begin such a journey but not too late.

Two nights we slept under an oilskin in the forest. Lyubov was despondent, pining for Arvi, their daughter, their comfortable house in Farstan; and she suffered from the cold. The following morning, chancing upon an outlying farm, we asked to buy eggs and a chicken. The family, farmer and his wife, two sons grown and married with children of their own, regaled us with a huge meal of stewed rabbits and some unwelcome news. The thugs of Bing-bing had been there enquiring after us, or at least after a Farstan officer travelling with a woman that could hardly be another pair. They had not caused trouble to the farmer except to plunder his fuel drums for their two cars. There were six of them. Why were they pursuing me? Perhaps it was just the customary ruthlessness of Bing-bing. Their leaders had read their Machiavelli, or perhaps it was in their own Art of War—they had an ancient and rich culture—and they wanted to extirpate the entire family of the former rulers of a conquered nation.

‘I was going to ask you if we could stay here tonight—we would pay you of course. But—’

Lyubov broke in and said it for me. ‘No, Igar. It might be dangerous for them.’

Lyubov was timid. She let me make all the decisions and start everything happening, from choosing our camping places and making our fires to saddling our horses and rationing their oats—while we still had any—but she always thought of others.

‘Yes,’ agreed the old man. ‘You could stay as long as you wanted otherwise, but we get used to the quiet life out here.’

‘Father!’ said his son. ‘Let them stay. If those pigs come back we’ll kill them all.’

‘What with? Didn’t you see their guns? One of them could shoot us all down before we had loaded the second shell.’

‘We’ll ambush them.’

‘Leave them alone,’ I said. ‘We won’t be staying.’

‘How did they come in?’ said the farmer. ‘Two to find the lay of the land while the others waited out of sight. They’re trained. They’re bad medicine.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We’ll be getting along.’

The old farmer smiled at me over the debris of the meal on the rough boards of the table. He had twinkling blue eyes between bushy brows and beard, and he kept his wide battered hat on in the house. ‘There’s a hut in the forest where you can stay. Warmer than sleeping on the ground.’

It was two days’ journey. I think they used the hut when hunting. We stayed there a couple of nights keeping a huge fire alight for the luxury of warmth. The old farmer told us that no road was near it that went anywhere, but there was a track and one morning we heard