Philip Reeve: A Darkling Plain

Grike sank deeper into his fugue. Stars blurred over him; seasons blinked at him. The trees became a wood. Bare branches breathed in, exhaled green leaves, turned golden, bare, breathed in.

At last a human figure began to flash in front of him, stooping again and again to place something around his neck. With a deep effort he began to rouse himself; the flicker of day and night becoming less frantic as the whirl of seasons and centuries slowed.

A summer morning. Green light shining through the leaves of an ancient oak wood. Garlands of flowers decked Grike’s torso, and the remnants of older garlands lay dried and crumbling in his mossy lap. His shoulders were shaggy with ferns. A bird had nested in the crook of his arm. Of Tom and Hester nothing remained but a little dust blowing between the gnarled roots of the trees.

Goats were moving through the wood. The bells on their necks chimed softly. A small Once-Born boy came and stood looking at Grike, and was joined by a girl, still smaller. They had ocher skin, brown eyes, dusty black hair.

“HELLO,” said Grike. His voice was rustier and more screechy than ever. The boy fled, but the girl stayed, speaking to him in a language that he did not know. After a while she went and picked some small blue flowers among the oak trees and made a crown for him. Her brother came back, cautious, wide-eyed. The little girl brought some fat and rubbed it into Grike’s joints. He moved. He stood up. Gravel and owl pellets cascaded off him; he shook himself free of cobwebs and birds’ nests and moss.

The girl took his hand, and her brother led them down the valley amid a bleating, chiming crowd of goats. They stopped at a village, where adult Once-Born came to stare at Grike and poke him with sticks and the handles of simple farm tools. Listening to their excited chatter, he started to decipher their language. They’d thought him nothing but an old statue, sitting there in his cave. They had hung flowers about his neck for luck each summer when they brought their goats up to the high pastures. They had been doing it since their mothers’ mothers’ time.

Down a track to a paved road, riding on a cart now, the children beside him. The sun was redder than Grike recalled, the air clearer, the mountain climate kinder. A town lay cupped in a wooded vale. Grike wondered if his new friends realized that its ancient metal walls were made from the tracks of a mobile city, and that some of its round, rust-brown watchtowers had once been wheels. They seemed simple people, and he imagined that their society had no machines at all, but as they brought him through the town gates, he saw delicate airborne ships of wood and glass rising like dragonflies from tall stone mooring towers. Silvery disks, like misty mirrors, swiveled and pivoted on their undersides, and the air beneath them rippled like a heat haze.

They took him to a meeting place, a big hall in the city’s heart. People crowded around him to ask questions. What kind of being was he? How long had he been asleep? Was he one of the machine men out of the old stories?

Grike had no answers. He asked questions of his own. He asked if there were any places in the world where cities still moved and hunted and ate one another. The Once-Born laughed. Of course there weren’t; cities only moved in fairy tales; who would want to live in a moving city? It was a mad ideal.

“What are you for?” asked one boy at last, pushing to the front of the crowd. Grike looked down at him. He pondered awhile, thinking of something Dr. Popjoy had told Anna.

“I AM A REMEMBERING MACHINE,” he said.

“What do you remember?”

“I REMEMBER THE AGE OF THE TRACTION CITIES. I REMEMBER LONDON AND ARKANGEL; THADDEUS VALENTINE AND ANNA FANG. I REMEMBER HESTER AND TOM.”

His listeners looked blank. Someone said, “Who were they?”

“THEY LIVED LONG AGO. IT SEEMS ONLY YESTERDAY TO ME.”

The little girl who’d found Grike looked up at him and said, “Tell us!” Around her, people smiled and nodded, settling down cross-legged, waiting to see what stories he had brought for them out of the lost past. They liked stories. Grike felt, for a moment, almost afraid. He didn’t know how to begin.

He sat down on the chair they brought for him. He took the little girl on his lap. He watched dust motes dancing in the ancient sunlight that poured like honey through the hall’s long windows. And then he turned his face toward the expectant faces of the Once-Borns, and began.

“IT WAS A DARK, BLUSTERY DAY IN SPRING,” he said, “AND THE CITY OF LONDON WAS CHASING A SMALL MINING TOWN ACROSS THE DRIED-UP BED OF THE OLD NORTH SEA…”