The Minority Council (2 page)

“Used to?” she echoed playfully.

“You said ‘That used to be the extent of it.’ As in, that’s no longer just what you do, with your magics. What’s changed?”

She made no answer. At length she said, “Give me your hand.”

I hesitated, but there was a seriousness in her face that hadn’t been there before, even though the smile remained in place. I put my hand in hers. Through her gloves I could feel her skin cold from the river wind. There was a colour in the whites of her eyes, a yellowish stain that didn’t belong, but which I couldn’t place. She took a deep breath, and when her lungs were full, breathed just a little deeper and I felt the change.

It started with a sound. First a fading, as the chugging of the boat receded, leaving only the lapping of the water against the boat’s hull; then a growing, as new sounds slipped in to take their place, as if they’d always been there, but had been drowned out by the noise of the here and now. A creaking of masts, a rattling of cloth, a flapping of sail. I listened, and heard the sound of voices calling
out from the waterside, calling in East End accents for the dockmaster to come quick to the wharf, for that bloody old fool to mind his feet, for the sailors and dolly girls to clear the way, for the ship docked from India to wait her turn because there’s ten tons of meat what will spoil over here unless it’s run quickly down to market. And looking towards the banks, in the converted warehouses that lined the docks lights were springing up behind the windows, flickering candlelight and lamplight, and the water around us teemed with a hundred craft, fishermen guided by a single burning point of light slung over the end of their boat, pilots and watermen with their little vessels stained sewage-sludge green, the silent cranes on the sides of the river now in full motion, wooden wharves running out into the water from a place where stone embankment should be. I opened my mouth to speak, but Meera’s fingers closed tighter around mine in a command for silence and as we passed beneath Tower Bridge, a bare shadow overhead, I could see the craft swarming around the Tower of London and the sky above it was full of a thousand cawing ravens, spiralling like a tornado overhead, unseen by any but her and me, and I looked upriver and London Bridge was sagging under the weight of houses clinging to its sides, half-timbered houses and crooked clinging shacks.

I said, “Meera…” but my voice fell away into nothing, a fog was rising off the river, smothering the boat but somehow through it the sounds kept coming, wooden wheels on cobblestones, dogs barking in the night, the ringing of church bells announcing the hour, a watchman’s rattle, a donkey’s bray of distress, the roar from an inn on the south bank. “Meera!” I begged. “You’ve got to stop!”

She didn’t hear me. Her face was lit up with delight, her eyes bright, flecked with yellow, her fingers so tight in mine they hurt. A glow to the north caught my eye and, as I watched, flames sprang up in the darkness behind a skyline of crooked cramped houses leaning against each other for support, and they spread, and overhead London Bridge was crammed with faceless dark shapes of people pressing against each other and children crying and women screaming and the sky was full of ashes and the stars were blacked out by smoke and I said, “Meera! You have to stop, you’ve gone too far, we’ll…”

Then the boat jumped to one side, bumping against something below and there was a barge with a canopy and a pair of men pulling at the oars, and they wore doublets and stockings and shoes with buckles on and flat caps and looking up onto the bridge there were heads, four heads all in a row, stuck on spikes, tongues hanging loose, eyes rolled upwards, ragged zigzags around the still-dripping necks where the axe had struck a dozen times in an attempt to break the spine, traitors’ heads stuck on spikes and the shallow banks were stained with fresh raw sewage and not so far off at all, the place where the city stopped; and there was a boy on the bridge, and I heard a shout.

And for a moment, just a moment, I looked up, and met a stranger’s eyes. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen years old, in a rough cap, his face smeared with dirt and sawdust, and, God help us, he wore a dagger in his belt and a pouch on his hip and iron buttons and as he leant out across London Bridge and looked down towards the river, he saw me, and I saw him.

I felt the deck beneath my feet grow cold, arctic cold.
My breath was slow, too slow, condensing in the air, sensation was going out of my feet and fingertips. There was a weight on my back, a pressure pushing me down and the river below was wide and dark and black, ready to pull us in. We gritted our teeth and with all our strength, with every ounce of power in us, grabbed hold of Meera’s wrist and pulled our fingers free. Her breath was steam on the air, her face was lit up in wonder and delight. I shook her by the shoulders and tried to shout, but my words were lost in the fog. I pushed her against the rail of the boat and, in that moment of confusion, forced her hands together with a sharp clap.

There was a noise too low to be heard, but I felt it. If whales wept, that would be the sound they made; if oceans talked, it would have been their language. It passed straight through our belly and out the other side, a ripple on the air that tore the fog around us to shreds, and for a moment it all ran backwards. The boy on the bridge darted away, the houses stretched out across the night, candles flickering in the windows, rats scurried away beneath horses’ hooves, fires rose and blazed and fell, leaving a cloud of ash, chimneys grew, smoke stained the sky, stone embankments advanced along the muddy banks, searchlights briefly swept the air and, far off, bombs blasted onto the docks of the East End before even that illusion was shattered and, with an unclenching, a letting out of breath, time returned to its normal place. I staggered as the spell broke, bumping into Meera who in turn caught hold of the railing for support. She was breathless, her face shimmering with sweat, but she was grinning, and her shoulders shook with a barely suppressed laugh. Our catamaran was passing beneath South
wark Bridge, towards the silver spike of the footbridge between St Paul’s and the Tate, engines slowing now as it moved in to dock, unperturbed by everything I’d witnessed.

And she was saying, “Did you see? Did you see did you did you see?”

“Meera!” I rasped. “You can’t do that, you can’t, you mustn’t, how did you do that?”

She clapped her hands together like a child, almost bouncing on the spot. “It’s here! It’s all here it’s all here if you just look the city built on layers and layers can you hear it? Can you hear it all the time it’s always there can you see?”

The cold night felt warm in comparison to where we’d just been. My legs were shaking. “Not possible,” I stammered. “No one should be able to do that, no one! How did you do that?”

“Don’t be a misery,” she retorted. “Wasn’t it incredible?” She opened her arms wide and for a moment I thought she was going to do it again. I caught her fingers in mine and pulled them back close.

Somehow the action had put us not a breath apart, her hands in mine. We hesitated, a strange tugging in our belly. She paused too, looking straight into our eyes, unafraid. Very few look into our eyes and are not afraid. What I’d meant to say somehow didn’t happen. Instead I heard myself say, “It was… yes. You’re right. It was. Incredible. Promise me—promise me you’ll never, ever do it again.”

“Why?”

“That kind of power—that sort of magic—isn’t meant. You can’t do it. You’ll burn. You’ll go too far and stay too long and you’ll burn. Promise me you won’t.”

She took an instant too long before she answered playfully, “Aw. It’s sweet that you care.”

Perhaps we could have said something else.

But the moment passed.

“I can see it now,” she said. “You’re the kinda guy who stands up when a woman enters the room, and doesn’t like to see ladies walk unescorted back to the bus stop. A regular knight in shiny armour.”

Our fingers were still tangled together, and didn’t show any sign of letting go. Her eyes crinkled as she smiled. “Did I scare you?” she asked softly, as the boat chugged round the bend towards the Oxo Tower. “Back then, were you scared?”

“Do I get points for lying?” I asked.

“You care
and
you want points? I’m beginning to think you have an ulterior motive.”

“I didn’t mean…”

“Wouldn’t be talking to you if you did.”

“Is this how you talk to every stranger you meet on the back of a boat?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“See—that scares me.”

“But you’re the first one I ever did magic for,” she added. “Were you impressed?”

“Honestly, yes. Never do it again.”

“Were you scared?”

“Honestly, yes. And may I add, as we’re standing here, never,
ever
, do it again.”

Her eyes widened; she stepped half a pace back as if trying to get a better look at me. “Oh, my God!” she exclaimed. “You weren’t scared for yourself, were you?”

“I’d be pretty thick if I wasn’t.”

“Yes, and unfortunately, being pretty thick, you’re not quite smart enough to lie well.”

“I study the art when I can.”

She laughed, and her fingers tightened in mine. “We’re nearly at the end of the line,” she said. “You’re sweet. Some guys try to be sweet because they think it’ll make women go gooey inside. They think ‘Well shit, I ain’t got brains, I ain’t got brawn, I ain’t got nothing worth saying so I’ll try being sweet.’ ”

“Most people don’t think I’m ‘sweet,’ ” I said, struggling with the word.

“What do they think?”

“Most people don’t get much past the job description.”

“What’s the job description?”

“Protector of the city,” I answered with a shrug.

“See what I mean? That’s so sweet you could spin it onto a stick and call it candy floss. Don’t try too hard, though. You’ll spoil the effect.”

Our boat was slipping in sideways by the next dock. Above us, directly overhead, the London Eye, built as a temporary Ferris wheel to last forever, was lit up pale violet, its dark capsules turning at a glacier’s crawl through the night. Across the river, the Houses of Parliament were brilliant sodium orange, with flecks of blue and green cast onto its towers. The river was rolling east, washing away the smells of the city, great ridges and swells beneath its surface, like invisible smooth backs of whales.

Meera asked where I was going.

I said I didn’t know.

She said she didn’t live far.

I said I had work to do.

She said, “Yeah, of course you do, work, at this hour.”

I wanted to say, look, it’s not like that, but there are a lot of really good reasons why I should head into town now and find a nice homeless hostel to spend the night in like I usually do, or a doorway out of the wind or something and it’s been lovely meeting you, but seriously, careful with the magic because that’s the kind of shit that you don’t want to screw around with and while it was great, it was deadly, please don’t do that again. So yeah. Bye. See you around, maybe. Perhaps. Sometime.

What I found myself saying was, “Yeah, well.”

After such inspiring prose, she would have been well within her rights to walk away.

She didn’t.

And neither did we.

Some five and a half weeks after the night on the river, I was sneaking in the back way to the office of Harlun and Phelps, bankers, financiers, dabblers in the arcane mysteries of the stock market and, quite incidentally, daytime employer of a very large percentage of the Aldermen who guard the city at night, when I heard a voice say, “… you are such a Nazi!”

The voice was young, female, indignant. It belonged to a woman in a bright purple hijab, white knee-length plastic coat, black slipper-shoes with a bow on them, and a glare that could wither moon rock. Upon reflection, her being in the goods entrance to the office of the Aldermen was no more implausible than my presence there; but whereas I was using the back entrance in order to avoid being caught by the Aldermen themselves and subjected to enquiries about memos, meeting agendas and roaming monsters, she was attempting to break into the back entrance for what appeared to be far more nefarious purposes.

A pair of security men were hustling her out to a barrage of “I have rights! Fascists, I demand my rights, I demand—you
pigs
!”

This last as she was barrelled out beneath the metal shutter of the goods entrance onto a ramp that ran down towards an underground car park where the mixture of bankers, financiers, analysts, secretaries, marketing men and magi who inhabited the glass-and-steel tower that I reluctantly called my workplace parked their expensive and sometimes environmentally self-conscious vehicles. For a second I considered going after her, but the urge passed and I turned back towards the concrete staircase that led to the service elevator.

This was a mistake. Where, not ten seconds before, the staircase had been empty and blissfully secretive, now it was inhabited by five-foot-seven’s-worth of Alderman, dressed all in black.

In the city of London there are two types of Alderman. The first, more pleasant, variety sits on local councils, shakes a lot of hands, attends a lot of parties, cuts a lot of ribbons and sometimes, on more enthusiastic days, lays a few foundation stones announcing that in this year of our lord, the worshipful Mayor/Councillor/Alderman for [Insert Borough Here] laid this glorious stone for our civic undertaking which will be of benefit for all. Thus, between the hours of 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., a small class of individuals moves around the city, not necessarily righting wrongs with their every deed, but hardly contributing to the overall mass of evil.