Jane Higgins - The Bridge

When I didn’t answer, she said, ‘Bowman said to try the coffeehouse on the corner of River Road and Gantry Lane. We might find him there. That’s this way.’

We cleared the shadows of the half-demolished buildings across the road, and the township spread out below us. A scatter of fires burned on street corners. Shacks hunched in dark alleyways; lines of light leaked through their walls and doors. The smoky haze that hung across all of it was thick and bitter in the back of my throat. Across the river, darkness – you’d never guess a city lay there.

On the flat, every corner we passed had people huddled around brazier fires. They called greetings to us and invited us to join them. I wanted to head straight for the coffeehouse, but Lanya grabbed my sleeve and said, ‘Come this way! I want to show you something.’

‘No—’

‘Yes! It’s too early for the coffeehouse. People won’t be there yet.’ Then she was speeding upriver past stacks of empty market stalls wrapped in patched tarpaulins. ‘Quick, it’s nearly time.’ We came to a place in the riverwall where the barbed wire across it was cut and bent back. We leaned on the wall and looked across the water.

‘Watch,’ said Lanya.

‘For?’

‘You’ll see. It can’t be long now.’

We waited. The night got colder. Below us, the water lapped against the stones of the wall and behind us the township muttered into the darkness. The bridge towered above us, a shadowy monster presence. It never looked the same twice. The time of day, the weather, your mood – they all painted it differently. That night a mist lifted off the river and mingled with the peat smoke of ten thousand hearth fires. The moonlight and the mist turned it blue-black and silver. We could have been standing in an old photograph.

I said, ‘What are we waiting for? I need to find this man.’

‘Wait! Wait, wait, wait – look, there!’

Back west, across the river, a light blazed in the middle of the city, where everything else was black.

‘I think it’s their command center,’ said Lanya. ‘The Citysiders – Witch Hill, it’s called. It’s come on at this time the last three nights. What do you think it means? Does it mean they’re back in charge? The Commander said there’d been a hard battle for it. Maybe they’ve retaken it.’ She watched it like a drowning person watching the land. ‘What’s it like?’

‘What?’

‘The city. You were scavenging over there. What’s it like?’

‘It’s a war zone.’

She turned and looked at me. ‘It won’t always be. When we’ve won it, things will be different. We’re going to throw open the bridges and smash the prisons and bring home the prisoners. There’ll be hospitals full of medicine, and markets full of food, and banks of fuel cells for the taking. And we won’t make the Citysiders slaves, even though that’s what they did to us. But we’ll punish their army. We’ll make them grovel and be sorry and they’ll be shamed because, unlike them, we’ll be just and honorable. And everyone will have enough to eat and children won’t die in the winter, and old people will be warm and fed.’ She smiled at me and her eyes blazed. ‘When we’ve won it.’

‘And you think that can happen?’

‘Yes! Don’t you?’

I turned back towards the township. ‘I’m going to look for this coffeehouse.’

‘Tell me what you did over there,’ she said, catching up with me. ‘Tell me what you saw.’

‘Later. Another time. Can we find Goran first?’

‘There you go, running away again.’

‘What?’

‘You run. Every time we get near you, away you go.’ She jogged backwards in front of me. ‘If you’re only a stray, where did you learn to read and write? And why aren’t you fighting in a squad in Gilgate?’

‘Look out,’ I said. A little knot of people was gathered around a fire across the road. Lanya turned round and walked beside me, still talking. ‘And how do you know about that window with the saint and the birds? That marks you as an easterner, which I wouldn’t have guessed to look at you because you’re too dark. But your name does too, I suppose – if you’re a Nikos or a Nikolai. Are you? All right, not telling. Tell me this though: why, in the name of all that is holy, do you swear like a Citysider?’

‘How do you know what Citysiders swear like?’

‘No one here would blaspheme like you do – even in someone else’s Rule. Do that in some people’s hearing and you’ll be lying in a gutter with a knife in your back before you know what’s happened. You should know that. Why don’t you know that?’

‘So it’s different in Gilgate, so what?’

She turned in front of me and put her hands out to stop me. ‘Don’t do it here. Don’t. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, all right.’

But she didn’t move. ‘I don’t know who you are, Nikos or Nikolai or whatever your name is. And I don’t know why you’re here. Or what you’re hiding from – or who. Maybe you’re just afraid to fight – you’ve come to the wrong place if you are. But I do know this. You should tread with care. People here like to know what side everyone’s on. And no one can tell what side you’re on, because no one knows who you are and you never say.’

‘Maybe I’m just on my side.’

‘Maybe you are. But at the hearing you didn’t turn me in for my knife fight. Which you would have if you were looking out for you and no one else.’

I walked around her but she danced back in front of me. ‘One more thing!’

‘What?’

‘If a patrol comes by they’ll ask for papers. Do you have papers?’

I did, as it happens, have papers. But they were a thousand miles away in whatever was left of the school safe. They’d be ash and atoms now.

‘So I’ll vanish if a patrol comes anywhere near,’ I said. ‘Is that all?’

She smiled. ‘For now.’

‘You’re enjoying this.’

Her smile got wider. ‘It is better than sitting in barracks listening to another lecture on basic words and phrases of the enemy.’ She walked on. ‘What are you going to say to Goran?’

‘No idea.’

‘You should have asked Levkova for help.’

‘She has troubles of her own.’

‘Shall I ask her for you?’

‘No!’

‘You don’t look very keen. You’re more a behind-the-desk person, I think – than in the field.’

‘Thanks. You’re a great help.’

‘Look! There’s Gantry Lane. That must be it.’

The coffeehouse was a low, concrete buildinglit from inside by candles and noisy with laughter and music. We peered through a cracked window. The place was wall-to-wall people. ‘What if we meet someone who knows about the hearing?’ I said. ‘I’m supposed to be in Gilgate by now.’

‘Don’t worry. You’re not important enough for the Council to have notified anyone down here about you. And even if people know about the hearing, they’ll only know that some Gilgate low-life has been sent packing. They won’t know what you look like.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘You ready?’

‘I’m ready,’ said Lanya. I pushed open the door. People grumbled at us as we shouldered our way in, and after about six steps we reached a waist-high slab of wood that was the counter. The air was thick with smoke from a fire smoldering in a grate, and from whatever dried weed people were sucking on. You could probably get high from just standing there breathing. And whatever it was they were drinking, it did not smell like coffee. In one corner a singer was crooning, Freedom’s hour is comin’; set your feet to walk her path; freedom’s hour is comin’; set your face for her return…

‘Help you squaddies?’ A heavy, gray-haired man pushed past us, fingers clutching empty mugs. He clattered the mugs into a sink and peered at us from under bushy eyebrows. ‘Well?’