Day Boy Read online

  ‘You right?’ he says.

  I’ve got a bit of a limp, there’s bruises and lumps fattening up all over. And flies keep scrabbling at my juicy lip; it hurts when I brush them away. ‘I’m right.’

  ‘You gotta stop doing that.’

  ‘Stop what?’

  ‘You know.’

  But I can’t say that I do.

  CHAPTER 3

  DAIN’S ON THE roof. The sound of him striding about up there in the dark is louder than a possum and more sure-footed, there’s no need to pretend he’s got any reason for stealth. There’s no weight to him; it’s his presence that shifts the iron roof sheeting, it bends and shudders beneath him. They do that, they change the world just by being, and the world rushes to fit them, to do their bidding. That is their mastery.

  He descends, pushing his mood before him, and I can tell he’s aggrieved. He doesn’t conceal the clatter in his bones, there’s no fluid to him right now. He’s chosen to discard it and I can feel the certainty of trouble. He descends and I don’t bother hiding, there’s nowhere to hide. Not from him.

  The night’s hot and bright, and there’s a moon shining in the window, he’s caught in it for a moment, and there’s him cast across the room like a scattering of deeper night given shoulders, and long, long arms. A head dipping towards me. Then he’s through the window.

  I lie in bed staring (been too hot for sleeping anyway) and he lifts me up. Hefts me easily as if I don’t weigh anything at all. ‘I know you’re awake. I—’ His eyes widen, and then narrow. It would be comic on someone more human. ‘There’s blood on you, you—’

  Dain knows blood. He’s defined by it, you might say, it is his food and fury. There’s blood on him too, I can smell it. Fresh from George.

  ‘Nothing, it’s nothing,’ I say.

  ‘Doesn’t look like it.’

  Dain lets me drop. Back onto the bed, and none too gently. I sit up with some effort, not much of it exaggerated.

  ‘Come with me,’ he says, and I follow him downstairs and into the kitchen.

  He clicks his tongue at the mess. The unwashed plates, two-day-old stack. Most of it mine. The Master takes his teas, his liquors, his thin broths, but scarcely any real food passes his lips. He has no need of it. Doesn’t mean he hasn’t taught me to cook. The Masters don’t eat as we do, but they like the smell of good food cooking, and fine brandy; well, Dain does, and I’ve seen Sobel guzzling down his dusty old wines by the bottle. Dain’s a good host, on the rare occasion it’s called for, which means I have to be too, so I’m set the task of practising most nights.

  Doesn’t mean I like cleaning up after.

  ‘Why didn’t you drink with him, boy?’ His voice is all clear in my ears, all insinuated there, working its way deeper. All those Masters’ voices settle in you, threat and terror and charm.

  I don’t blame George for telling him. The feed loosens their tongues, and Dain would have drawn it out of him along with the blood. Dain’s always with the questions. Did my boy treat you well? Was he respectful?

  ‘I was busy.’ I look down at my feet.

  ‘You were busy at things you had no right to be busy at, when you could have been keeping one of mine company.’ He crouches down and peers at my bruised face. Clicks his tongue, again. ‘Unlike that—there’s no shame to be had in compassion. No more than there’s shame to be felt in what we do.’

  ‘But I feel it.’ And he can’t tell me it isn’t the same for him. Dain’s lying to both of us if he thinks that.

  ‘Course you do, you’re a good boy.’ He stands slowly. ‘I raised you that way. You’ll go to George’s tomorrow, you’ll see that he is looked after.’

  Dain expects the civilities to be observed, because the core of him is most uncivil indeed. Anne once asked me, one of the few times she was being serious, what it’s like, being a party to all that terror, the Master and his hungers, being its Day Boy? And I told her it’s very well mannered. Because I know the history of it, how much greater the terror was before. The dark coming to town, swirling in all unchecked after that final war was lost. The doors broken down if you locked them, and if you didn’t, sometimes that was just as bad. Things weren’t at all civilised then. And there was nowhere to run, because it was that way everywhere.

  Dain holds my chin, jerks me this way and that as he examines my bruises. My skin’s hot and sore, his fingers cold and soothing for all their hardness. His eyes are dark with disapproval, and the slightest flicker of restlessness. My Master’s been that way of late. ‘You’ve got to stop doing this.’ Everything’s an echo today. I think of Grove and his disappointment.

  ‘Doing what? Bruising when Dougie hits me?’ It hurts to move my mouth.

  Dain’s face darkens, but he’s already softening, there’s no violence to him tonight. He’s at his most human when he is full of blood. ‘Provoking him. The boy’s as mean-tempered as his Master, and not nearly as calculating.’

  ‘It were just a grin.’

  Dain’s eyes shift darker still. ‘I know your smiles. Didn’t Dav teach you anything?’

  ‘Dav is long gone.’ Dav was the boy before me. Gone to the City in the Shadow of the Mountain when his time was done. He’d taught me much, all right, but some things don’t stick and anyway Dav was good at trouble too. Just he had an awful good knack for not being found out. Even now Dain speaks fondly of him. Dav did this better, or Dav would never…Makes a fella sick with jealousy, sometimes.

  ‘You’ve a lot of learning to do. And not much time to do it in: a year with me, perhaps two if I go cap in hand to the city and ask for an extension, and then your tenure’s done. I want you to think on that, Mark.’ He brings his full gaze to bear on me, and I’m swept up in it, my limbs shaking, till he turns his attention away. ‘Your future—be it Constabulary work, or something…lesser—that’s dependent on your actions as much as any sponsorship of mine.’

  He picks up a cup, shows it to me. It’s stained with an inch of coffee turned to silt. He puts the cup down precisely halfway between two stacks of plates, and he knits his brow.

  ‘Regardless, there’ll be a trip to the City in the Shadow of the Mountain. You need to see what futures lie ahead for you. I’m not sure you understand the possibilities. You’ve never been one to think more than a day ahead, if that.’ He wrinkles his nose. ‘Now, clean this kitchen, it’s starting to smell.’

  And he’s gone to his study and the book he’s always scratching at.

  Something lesser? What about something greater?

  Dav took Change, got his official letter, and went to the city five years back. I know there’s not much chance they’d offer it twice in a row. I’ll be sent to the city, to work there. At the university maybe; apprentice to a tradie.

  Which isn’t as bad as it could be; Mastery’s a grim sort of gift. Dain isn’t one that loves his kind. He’s set himself apart from them all the years I’ve known him, says what he has is a curse, not a blessing.

  I stack those dishes, one by one; everything’s hot to touch.

  Time’s slow, grown liquid like honey with twice the stick. And I stand there, in soapy water to my elbows. And despite myself I imagine
what Dav was given. Mastery and the shaping of the earth to his will, and the fighting of monsters and the walking of boundaries. And Day Boys of his own! And all those years and hungers! And to see so clearly in the darkest of dark. And it gets so much that my head is buzzing. But it isn’t mine to be thinking of. There’s all the time in the world.

  I’ve a year to impress or to disappoint to see if I’m worthy of anything better than drudgery. It’s too much. Too long.

  I pull the plug, watch the water drain, and I’m all tired again, and tomorrow’s looming. And I can’t help yawning.

  A year’s all kinds of forever.

  You never know when they’re coming. But they will come, and they will drink, and you might drown in all that drinking. People die, and their deaths are whispered. And their deaths are seen as the consequence.

  Their funerals are quiet affairs, with none but family there—if there’s family left.

  Lot of bodies in that cemetery, and that’s just the way it is, I guess. Cemeteries have a habit of filling up. They always do. Patient bloody things, accommodating and wide.

  EGAN AND THE MOON

  This is how Grove tells it. Standing before us all. Face grown to seriousness, and a deep remembering. He likes to get the words proper and in the right order. You can see his mind working them, well before his mouth. I reckon we all have a better memory of it than him. But he still says it.

  We all know these stories; they’re the stories we tell when we gather in the old cave—our secret meeting place (as if there were any secrets from our Masters). We tell these stories with no embellishment. Well, very little. But Grove says it perfect. The rest of us might change a word, or a scene or a beat in our story. Some of us might throw in some comedy, who doesn’t like a laugh? But he won’t have any of that. This is Egan’s story. Egan is his Master, and my Master’s enemy, and this was how he told it to him. So this is how we hear it.

  And I remember it still. Word for word.

  Egan is old; you all know that, don’t you? Oldest, maybe, amongst the New. Why is he out here in our little town, so far from the heart and the city dark? Whys and wherefores that’s all messed. Don’t you all be looking at me. Egan’s my Master, but he don’t share much. Just the chores like the rest of you fellows, a bit of learning. Not that I took to the classroom. Stop your smiling Twitch or I’ll clobber you. Stop it.

  But he tells me: he fell in love with the moon.

  Back in those days of engines breaking, the sky grown loud and supple and cruel. Back when the world was bigger and smaller, which is how they put it, bigger and smaller. That’s how the world shook out, I guess.

  Back then he fell in love with the moon.

  He left his life, his once lovers, why he even left his phone, and they were magical things with everything in the world in them. He rolled up his swag. Kissed his past goodbye, and he took to the road. You know them roads. They were threads of black; they went everywhere, not only east to west. But that’s where he went. West. He followed the moon.

  How do you catch the moon?

  Course, you don’t. It’s up there and we’re down here. You can’t catch that. Once maybe, but even then they’d lost those great fires, those massive engines that could get there. All the great fires were burning down and no one cared to blow on those embers and build ’em up.

  So my Master travelled. Threaded his way through all the falling down and burning, through a night pitched as dark as ever been. He met others, but none could help him. He might have been mad. Might have stunk with fear. He crossed bridges. He marked the earth with his blood. He walked through his shoes till his heels found the hard earth and a time came when he walked barefoot. His feet grown horny and black. Clothes on his flesh ragged, not much flesh to cover. The road had hardened and thinned him. He was a shadow: a hungry shadow.

  You wouldn’t have recognised him. Maybe you would. And he chased that moon.

  How do you catch the moon?

  Moon catches you. If it wants to.

  It led him to the mountain.

  You know it. You all see it in your dreams sometime. The whispering mountain where the winds go. Wasn’t no city in its shadow then. Not much but a few shacks.

  Others had followed the moon. And my Master was great in his envy of them. But they were frightened, bent low by the mountain. Scared of what had drawn them.

  It was the Master that went down.

  It was him that went into the mountain. It was him that came back and he weren’t like them anymore.

  And then of course he met Dain and those two found trouble between them. But Egan was always the first.

  All I remember that makes sense is him.

  There’s a grey fuzz of memory; a before. No faces. Just a warmth, a smile, the smell of some summer flower that I can’t quite place. But it ends pretty quick.

  Dain took me as all Day Boys are took—well, except city boys raised in the Crèche or the Academy—a fairytale snatching. Dain reads me them sometimes: those stories Grimm and Andersen. Some child snatched from some distant town, a bed left empty—and me to never know which one.

  Eight years with Dain, first two with Dav as well. He’s my youth. The voice of me growing up. He tended my wounds, you see, they’re not just the makers of wounds. He saw to my tears (and he was more tolerant than most folks would guess; I was a weepy sort of kid), and he taught me.

  Dain liked his lessons. He’d been a teacher once. ‘You learn to think, boy, and you might get yourself out of trouble almost as much as you get yourself into it.’

  Maths, English, bits of science. I found it all too slippery but he never let up on it. History. The past before the Masters came, the secret past that was there all along. The crack in the world, and the way deals were made.

  ‘Everything’s a negotiation,’ Dain said. ‘The past and a place relative to it. To live or to die. We all make choices within a greater matrix of choices. Those that brought this world on us made choices they thought were the right ones.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Everything’s a negotiation.’

  CHAPTER 4

  I’M OUT THE door, stomping my way through a morning that’s already getting old, but lunch is hours off and there’s work done and work to be done.

  Day’s spiking my back with sweat, and I’ve yesterday’s hurt to contend with. I try not to limp, out along West Street then on to Main where the jacarandas are drooping. They’re all green; they’ve lost their blooms weeks ago. Out of Sun and into shade, shirt clinging to my back. I’d ride my bike, but I’m still too sore. The baker’s door is swinging, the heavy screen of the butcher’s black with flies, as are the scabbed corners of my lips. Keep brushing them away, and they keep coming back. Stomp, stomp: I’m weighed down with the weight of the Sun, and the dead weight of my boots. This is a day for bare feet, but I’m working. Like Dain says, we’re boys not animals
. Come back with the soles of my feet black and a clip under the ear’d be my earning.

  Down the dust of Main, past a couple of tired horses, waiting for their owners to finish buying supplies. I have some stubs of carrot, kept special: both snuffle them up. Horses aren’t that proud. Feel their wet lips against my palms, the soft weight of their eyes. Never ridden a horse in all my life, but I know how to treat them and they seem to know that I know.

  When I’m out of carrot, I move on. There’s things to attend to.

  I turn left into East Street, and he’s standing there like he’s been waiting, as I suppose he has, in the middle of the road, his feet bare, stovepipe hat at an angle. There’s a bruise under his chin; that makes me happy at least.

  ‘Mark,’ Dougie says.

  I fix a smile on my much more bruised-up than his face. No matter what Dain says, I can’t help it. Dougie holds his botheration inside him. There’s a lump of ice he’s chewing on, got a red slick of blood through it like a filament of ruby. The only ice in town comes from the butchers, shipped here on the Night Train, weeping as it’s carted off.

  Dougie doesn’t mind the blood. You can’t be queasy, not in our line of business. It’s good practice, all that red. I don’t have any of that ice for my split knuckles. Flex my fingers a little.

  ‘I’ve work to attend to,’ I say. ‘Master’s work.’

  Dougie takes a long suck of that ice, nods his head. Puts out his hand. ‘No hard feelings.’

  I look down at it, the water that beads a palm as tough and worn as my own. ‘No hard feelings,’ I say, though I’m never going to shake it.

  Now it’s Dougie that’s smiling, like I’ve given him validation, like he’s the bigger man, and he is: no contest. ‘Fair enough,’ he says. ‘We accounted for ourselves.’