The City's son

CHAPTER 14

I want to help you — I want to help you do more than just run.

Her words are like river silt, clogging up my ears. I look back at her arm, at the mark I gave her. City dirt has entered it; it will be a scar — it was meant to be a scare, but though she swore fancily at my clumsiness as I swabbed it with disinfectant and stitched it with a splinter of railway sleeper, she wears it patiently enough.

We weave through the crowds on Church Street. I’m ostentatiously invisible: people take pains not to look at me, I suppose because I look so much like the figures huddled in sleeping-bags in doorways that they are also careful to ignore.

Is that how you’re going to live up your mother’s legacy? Run?

It was an idiotic question, frankly. I can no more live up to my mother’s legacy than I can wear her estuary-water skirts, or match her cruelty, or fill her Docklands throne with my bony arse. I’d be a laughing-stock before I died.

Except now there are two of us laughing-stocks: me, and my idiotic, brave, scarred girl with a conscience. And that makes the odds against us half as bad. So here we are, entering the gates of a graveyard in Stoke Newington: a graveyard left to become a wilderness, and the last gathering-ground for my mother’s damned priesthood.

It was Beth’s idea. ‘You’re the son of a Goddess, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘Doesn’t your mum have a vicar or two to help us out?’ It sounded so simple, so logical.

I’m going to have to talk very fast, and I’ll try to sound confident, but the man I need to convince peddles bullshit by the steaming ton, so he knows it when he hears it. We plunge deep into the bracken, where the just-turning leaves filter the light gold. My tongue feels like a lead slug in my mouth. I’m desperately trying to work out what it is I’m going to say.

‘A graveyard,’ Beth said flatly as Fil closed the gate behind them. Weeds had grown everywhere, making the railings more a hedge than anything. ‘Seriously? A graveyard?’

‘What’s wrong?’ he said, tunnelling through the foliage. The growl of the traffic on the main road became muffled.

‘Oh, nothing — having seen what you’ve got crawling around radio-masts and lampposts, I can’t bloody wait to see what you manage to pull out of a graveyard. If it’s just ghosts and zombies I’m going to be sorely disappointed, Fil.’

She was still in a temper after the spiders, and her feet were starting ache. They’d taken the long route from Crystal Palace to Stoke Newington to avoid the cranes that reared beside the main road in Dalston. Fil wouldn’t go near them. Beth had never noticed them before and wondered idly when they’d appeared. They were sprouting like malign winter trees across the skyline.

She still hadn’t seen Fil eat. In fact, she was starting to think he didn’t. She’d ducked into a shop with a revolving sign and ordered food off a revolving spit — and now she was sheepishly readying herself for a revolving stomach. She’d offered to buy him a kebab too, but he’d politely declined. Last night, under the tower, his skin had been covered in oily sweat, but just walking barefoot over the tarmac seemed to revive him, as if he was drawing sustenance from the exhaust-heavy air. It suddenly struck Beth that the grey colour on his skin wasn’t dirt, it was him — and it was growing deeper the stronger he got. He’s feeding off the city, she thought, like a plant, living off the sun. She groped for a term and came up with Urbosynthesis.

The undergrowth gave way to a clearing filled with gravestones where life-sized statues stood sentinel. Granite monks stood side by side with scholars in stone togas. The Virgin Mary bent over her baby. Two marble angels wrapped their wings around one another as they kissed, and a statue of a blindfolded woman held a sword above a grave with the inscription: John Archibald, justice. Hanged 1860.

There were almost as many statues as headstones, arranged in a rough circle. A stone monk stood at the heart of the crowd, his heavy granite cowl shading his eyes. He held one finger in the air and his lips were carved slightly open, as though the sculptor had captured him telling a joke — a dirty one, judging by the lascivious twist to his mouth.

‘Well.’ Fil gave a resigned sigh. ‘We’re here.’

‘Where’s here?’ Beth asked. ‘Apart from the set for a bad vampire movie?’

‘The garden of my mother’s temple.’ A wry smile flickered across his lips. ‘Say hello, Beth.’

‘To who?’

‘To your ghosts.’

‘What are you saying, Filius — that we’re dead to you? I’m hurt.’

Beth started. The voice was, well, gravelly — and it had come from the stone monk.

Fil bit his lip sheepishly and said, ‘Petris — I didn’t recognise you.’ He looked at the statue. ‘Have you lost weight?’

‘Indeed.’ The voice coming from the statue sounded parched. The monk’s stone lips didn’t move. ‘Off the face. Little vandals.’

‘Oh, a chisel job? I–I like it, very sleek. It makes you look…’ He tailed off, looking awkward.

‘Yes?’

‘Um…’

The statue’s sigh was like tumbling shale. ‘Clearly, tact wasn’t one of the lessons I actually managed, by some Herculean effort, to hammer through your skull. Who’s the young lady?’

The statue hadn’t moved. Its stone eyes, behind their cataracts of moss, didn’t twitch. But now Beth could feel it looking at her.

‘Have you fallen foul of that lamp-lass’ temper already, Filius?’ the statue went on. ‘Or is the young prince sampling daytime delights as well now?’ His tone was heavy with innuendo.

‘She’s just a friend, Petris,’ Fil said, ‘and I can’t imagine how I failed to learn tact from someone as well-versed in sticking his nose in as you are.’

‘Alas, if only I still had a whole nose to stick in,’ Petris said mournfully.

‘Yeah,’ said Fil, ‘you ugly bastard.’ He stepped forward and threw his skinny arms around the statue. Beth half expected the granite arms to enfold the boy, but they remained fixed in place as he hung around the stone monk’s neck with his legs kicking in the air.

A grating laugh issued from the statue’s mouth.

‘Beth,’ Fil said, ‘this is Petris. He taught me nearly every dirty trick I know.’

‘Er… Pleasure.’ Beth looked quizzically at the statue. ‘I thought you said your teacher was called Gutter-something?’

‘Gutterglass. Different teachers for different things. You get a lot of tutors when you’re royalty. Glas was like an uncle to me, and an aunt, and she did a bang-up job. This filthy old priest here’ — he jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at the statue — ‘was responsible for my — uh — moral education.’

‘I did my best to show you the difference between right and wrong,’ Petris said grandly.

‘And “wrong” you thought best shown by example.’

The statue spluttered, and Beth could see little flecks of saliva wetting the stone around its mouth. ‘That’s not fair, Filius.’

‘No? That garbage gin nearly killed me.’

‘You were a damn sight more interested in that than nineteenth-century gas-lamp theodicies,’ the stone monk said snippily. ‘I was merely doing what any good teacher would and linking the lesson to what you knew.’ His tone grew conspiratorial. ‘Can you honestly tell me you didn’t have a religious experience with that magnetic massage I taught you? If you didn’t then your electric girlfriend certainly would have.’

Fil laughed, but he blushed a little too. ‘Admit it, you were a terrible influence.’

‘Maybe, but a superb taker of confession. You never held anything back.’

‘There was no point! You were there with me while I was sinning!’

‘I just teach the rules, Filius; I never claimed to be good at following them.’ A coughing sound came from the statue’s immobile mouth and little clouds of powdery grey dust puffed out in front of his lips.

Fil winced, but said nothing.

‘Anyway,’ Petris said when the coughing fit had subsided, ‘not that it isn’t marvellous to see you, you little terror, but why in Thames’ name are you here now? I haven’t had word of you in months.’

Behind his back, Fil had both hands on the haft of his railing. His grubby thumbs started to rub over one another. ‘I-’ He glanced back over his shoulder at Beth. ‘ We need your help.’

Petris’ laughter drained away. Any motion was far too small to see, but Beth was positive she felt all the statues in the clearing shift a tiny bit closer.

‘Really?’ Petris’ tone was mild. ‘Do tell. What could a humble Pavement Priest do for the Son of the Streets?’

Fil looked straight at the statue’s birdshit-speckled eyes. ‘Fight for his Mother again.’

Everything in the clearing froze. They weren’t simply still — they’d been still before — but now every human-shaped hunk of stone seemed to emit a tangible chill.

‘Well, what a request,’ Petris said slowly. His voice was very quiet. ‘Filius, you know I’d need a heart of stone to refuse you anything, but-’

Beth snorted.

Fil looked up at her sharply and she felt Petris doing the same.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Don’t mind me.’

‘Yes?’ the statue said.

‘Oh,’ she stumbled, ‘nothing, it’s just it was funny. “Heart of stone.” What with you being a-’

Alarm flashed across Fil’s features and he shook his head curtly. She tailed off, flustered by the sudden, intense quiet.

‘Yes?’ Petris said again, with the slightest edge to his voice.

‘Nothing.’

Another dry-shale sigh. ‘Come here, child.’

Fil protested. ‘Petris, no — she didn’t mean-’

‘Keep your trousers on, Filius. I’m not going to hurt her. I merely think that she deserves to know which side she’s picked.’

Fil looked at the statue in chagrin for a moment, then hung his head. ‘Yeah, all right,’ he said quietly. He looked at Beth. ‘Go on.’

Beth walked hesitantly towards Petris, gooseflesh rippling over her.

The Pavement Priest’s brow and cowl had calcified together to a scabrous white. Beth could see what Fil had called a chisel job: a chunk of Petris’ nose and right cheek had been sheared off. As she got closer, she could make out two tiny pinhead holes at the centre of the glittering granite eyes.

‘Closer.’ Beth stared into those holes; she thought she saw something blink. She found her heart hammering.

‘Closer.’ His breath was stony dust.

She stopped an inch in front of his face. The statue’s mouth was half an inch ajar, and inside it…

Inside it she saw flesh lips, pink, parched and peeling. They moved to shape the words as Petris whispered, ‘Did no one ever teach you that it’s what’s inside that counts?’

‘How did you get in there?’ she breathed.

‘I was born here!’ Petris announced grandly. ‘All the Pavement Priests are, for our sins: caged since squalling infancy in our punishment-skins.’

Inside the granite eyes there was a flicker of motion towards Fil. ‘His Mother is not as merciful as she might be.’

Beth’s brow furrowed. Her hackles had risen instinctively at the word punishment. ‘That doesn’t make any sense. How can you be punished before you’re born? What could you’ve done by then?’

‘Petty crimes, I dare say, and dreadful ones too. Crimes to give a little girl nightmares,’ Petris said, a mica-like glint in his eye. ‘I didn’t say this was the first time we’d been born, did I? We sinned in lives past, but Mater Viae felt that it would be unsporting to let us snuff it before our debt to her was paid. So she sold our deaths out from under us, right out of our still-warm corpses.’

A grumble of assent went around the circle. Beth stared at them, imagining the pale bodies that had never seen sunlight, born entombed inside these stone figures. She wanted to ask how, but she knew she wouldn’t understand. And, in the end, what did ‘how’ matter anyway? Instead she asked, ‘Who’d buy a death?’

A hush fell on the clearing again, and Petris’ lip curled. ‘In London? Only gentlemen of the most questionable tastes, I assure you. There are… collectors.’

‘Conjurors,’ another voice put in, coming from inside a marble scholar.

‘Conmen’

‘Cun-’ Lady Justice began, but someone shushed her.

‘The Chemical Synod, they call themselves. Our deaths are now ingredients in their stores.’ Petris’ voice was bitter with contempt. ‘They are traders, bargainers, barterers.’

‘Bastards,’ Lady Justice spat, and this time no one stopped her. ‘Complete and utter bastards.’

‘They’ll make anything a commodity,’ Petris growled, ‘height, gravity, heartbreak — but death, oh, death they prize most highly, because with our deaths sitting ready in their larders, they can exchange each for another, and so kill any enemy they choose.’

He sighed. ‘Of course, there is one small matter, a tragedy, if you will, of afterthought. Without our deaths, we can’t die. So we are reborn, into the stone, over and over again.’ Petris spoke with a self-deprecating dryness, but Beth could clearly hear the bitter note.

‘You want to die?’ she asked.

‘Of course. Don’t you?’

‘Not that you’d know it from the fact I’m tailing his scrawny highness here around, but not really, no.’

‘I mean eventually,’ Petris said, as though this was obvious. ‘How old are you? Twenty? Thirty?’

‘Sixteen.’

‘ Sixteen? ’ He sounded surprised. ‘Great Thames, now I feel really ancient. Well, believe me when I say that you cannot imagine, with your sixteen birthdays, what it’s like to be me, waking up again and again, morning after morning, when you’ve already done all you ever wanted to do, and seen all you ever wanted to see.

‘My life had a beginning, but it has no end to give it shape. That’s what our Goddess took from us in payment for our sins: the outlines, the boundaries, the very definition of a life.’

He took a deep breath, and then erupted into another coughing fit. ‘So,’ he said when he’d recovered, ‘when Filius here asks us to come and fight for her — and believe me, if there’s anything this old priest does better than drink and fornicate, it’s fight — well, there we have a little bit of a problem: because the infinity she has condemned us to is rather easier to tolerate without her actually around.’

The other statues — no, not statues, Pavement Priests — were moving now. Stone ground against stone as, agonisingly, almost invisibly slowly, they drew closer around her. She felt her bones shiver and her muscles charge with the urge to run, but she held herself firm, even as their shadows crept over the sunlit grass. Wheezing breaths reached her ears over the churning rock. She marvelled at the effort it must take to move that weight.

‘Your scrawny friend here is asking us to be slaves again,’ Petris whispered darkly into her ear. ‘And while I love him, and I do sincerely love him, I don’t love him that much.’

She didn’t know how he’d got so close. She shivered as his musty breath stroked her cheek.

‘You’re already slaves,’ Fil called.

Beth twisted around.

‘You’ve sharp ears boy,’ Petris grunted.

‘Yeah, well, I’m a lot less drunk then I was the last time you saw me.’

‘So am I. Perhaps if you’d got me more so, I’d be more inclined to listen to your drivel. What did you just say?’

‘I said, you’re already slaves.’ He placed his spear-butt on Petris’ chest. ‘’Cause while she’s not here, you can’t pay her back — the only way you’ll get your freedom is in her service, and you know it. So here’s the deal. Fight for me, and she’ll free you when she returns.’

The motion of the statues stopped.

Petris laughed. ‘Out of interest,’ he said, ‘it’s hardly relevant, I know, but indulge an old man’s curiosity, have you ever commanded an army before, Filius?’

‘Nope,’ he admitted cheerfully.

‘Do you have even a basic grasp of strategy, tactics, supply chains, logistics?’

‘Nope.’

‘And have you ever met your Mother, the vengeful and — lest we forget — jealous Goddess, on whose behalf you have elected to start making extravagant promises?’

‘No.’

‘Well then, I can find no fault in your strategy.’ Petris’ voice was as flat as slate. ‘That all sounds marvellous.’

Fil hissed impatiently and rapped his knuckles on Petris’ cowl. ‘Well, how’s your current plan working? Shuffling around your old haunts in your stone pyjamas, hoping she doesn’t come knocking on your mausoleum door? You’re in Limbo, Petris. I’m offering you an out.’

He showed the inside of his wrist to the statue: the crown of tower blocks. He tapped his spear-head against the arm of Petris’ robe and a fine filigree of cracks appeared. The stone flaked away, giving off a smell like damp caverns. A few inches of flesh were exposed, white as paper. A tower block tattoo could be seen there, too.

‘Please, old man,’ Fil said quietly. ‘I need your help.’

A sound interrupted them, a high-pitched wail of distress. Beth wrenched her eyes away from them, looking for the source of the noise. It was the choking, snotty unmistakable squeal of a baby. It was coming from the stone bundle cradled in the Virgin Mary’s arms.

‘Oh!’ the Virgin said, sounding surprised. ‘Oh, hush now, shhhh shhhhh.’ There was a desperate note to her voice, almost as if she had been unaware of the child until it started crying. ‘Hush now, Shhhhsh, shhhhhsh.’

‘A newborn,’ Petris murmured sadly, and his neck grated against his chin as he turned his face away from Fil.

The baby’s crying was joined by the dirge of stone on stone, cracks emerging and as quickly resealing, as the other statues moved planting their heavy feet with care.

Beth noticed that Petris’ wrist had sealed over with fresh granite.

‘There now…’

‘It’s all right, we’ll take care of you.’

‘Are you thirsty?’

The statues clustered around the child, cooing in soothing granite tones. One of the angels crooked its wing, a tiny movement, allowing rainwater that had collected in the grooves of its feathers to trickle into the baby’s mouth.

Beth looked at them. Though the blank stone figures hadn’t turned towards them, she could feel the hostility emanating from them all: hostility to them, to their offer, and to the Goddess they were there representing.

‘Filius.’ Petris didn’t turn away from the baby. ‘I’m sorry. We may have only a few inches of freedom inside the stone, but they’re inches we need to protect. I don’t trust her, and I don’t trust you to speak for her. The answer’s no.’

Fil looked dejected. He turned to go, and as he walked past, he ran his fingertips over the baby’s head. The limestone crumbled away and he bent down and kissed the exposed skin. His lips came up sticky with afterbirth.

The baby didn’t stop crying, and as Beth followed him through the soaking bracken she heard the stone reforming over the child’s head.