The Wild Folk Read online

  “I swear by the City, you are hardly worth feeding for the trouble you cause. I would make it six rules broken and six hours in the closet without food or water, the biggest of course being blasphemy, to speak of the animals of the Country in that eager manner, when they of course are very diseased, and very dangerous to us.” Brother Christoff shook his head at Tin’s wide-eyed innocence. Sebastian snickered. At that, the Brother had grabbed Tin forcefully by the arm and dragged him out of the dormitory, giving him six belt lashes in the hallway and then slamming him into a narrow, dank closet alongside the mop bucket.

  Groaning with pain, Tin had leaned back against the stone wall, his backside and thighs stinging too much to sit down, and lit the candle-stub smuggled inside the toe of his sock. He always kept one there when he held a story night – it had happened before, the closet-punishment, and he’d found it was more bearable with a little light.

  As the flame had come to life, the candle illuminated a spider occupying a crooked web in the corner of the closet. It had long brown legs and a thick thorax with a strange pattern. Its body cast a wildly elongated shadow. At first Tin had gone very still. Could it truly be a real spider? With a little gasp of delight he’d leaned closer to examine the spider’s markings. There was a funny shape on her coppery head, like a violin. He’d always liked the sound of the violin, lilting above the dusty drone of the organ during Sunday’s brief hymns, before Father Ralstein’s sermons about Grace and Progress. He’d remembered then, with a start of panic, the name fiddleback. This was in one of his books. It was a very deadly kind of spider. He’d leaned as far away from it as he could, and taken several deep breaths.

  The fiddleback seemed to be regarding him from her web. If anything, she had retreated slightly onto a far edge of silk, tucking her legs in close. She hadn’t looked especially interested in biting him. Nor had she looked particularly diseased, though Tin had heard over and over again the maxim Do not trust in your senses for they will lead you astray; trust only in the Perfection of Brotherhood, and of the Golden Way. She’d scuttled closer again. She was definitely watching him. He thought he could see her tiny eyes. Despite everything, despite his own panic, they looked gentle.

  Even if I catch a flu, Tin had thought wildly, I don’t care! This is a real spider. And she is looking at me!

  After a little while, the fiddleback had turned away and set to repairing several broken pieces of silk on her web. Lifting his candle-stub nearer still, careful not to singe any threads, Tin had watched how she wove the silk of her body in and out. Where did it come from? How was it made? He gaped.

  Nothing he had ever seen or been taught came close to explaining the beauty of the fibres she wove, the grace of her quick eight legs, the perfect gleaming sphere of her body and its violin tattoo, her very otherness, alive but entirely different from him. Where had she come from? How had she got in? Was she from the Country? What had she seen? What was it like out there? His head had spun. She was a tiny mystery, perfectly encapsulating a much larger one. What if he made a model of her, one big enough for him to climb into, a vehicle of sorts? Maybe then he would understand more about what made her what she was, and the mystery that she contained.

  For the rest of his stay in the closet, Tin had dreamed up plans in his mind. He’d sketched her every detail there in his imagination, every gleam and curve and line, her faceted eyes and the bends on her eight legs. He’d imagined that his brain was a pencil, and had sketched in the dark, unafraid of the deadly fiddleback in the corner. She had become his friend.

  Now, sitting inside his creation three months later, he saw that he was no closer to understanding anything – not the mystery of fiddleback spiders, not the nature of spider silk nor the secrets of animals. And certainly not a thing about the much maligned Country outside the City’s Wall. The mundane realities of his life settled around him where he sat. He was an orphan, owned by the Brothers at the Fifth Cloister of Grace and Progress since he was born. No matter what he did, what he invented or discovered, even if he did the thing they all tried for each day and figured out how to transmute scrap metals into stargold for the Brothers, would he ever be free? Would he ever be his own, and not theirs?

  Every day, all day, the orphan boys and girls of the City’s five cloisters were told they mattered less than the last of the stargold that powered the City. That their bodies were worthless and dispensable. Why else would the Brothers make children work with poisons to make new gold? Why else would they let them die trying? Only last week a vial full of liquid mercury had exploded, killing two boys in the shift just before Tin’s. Father Ralstein had given a brief speech that praised the boys’ sacrifice for the greater good of the City’s progress and perfection. There was no funeral. Things like this happened so often that Tin had only felt a kind of cold dread during the speech. What kept him from giving in entirely to the listless hopelessness that so afflicted many of the other boys was making up stories and telling them, and inventing little contraptions with his hands. Otherwise he’d want to fight the Brothers, even the stone walls themselves. Otherwise, life in the Cloister would have been entirely unbearable.

  A sudden movement all around him brought Tin back to himself. The lantern light seemed to be dancing across the dark room. There was a sound of well-oiled wheels, spinning. He almost yelped with shock. The Fiddleback was moving. It was rolling along on its eight wheels, its eight legs flexing gently as it went. What was more, it was glowing.

  Tin instinctively grabbed hold of the steering wheel to keep from running into the wall. The metal wheel flushed gold under his hands. Every metal scrap inside the seat compartment flashed the same, the very colour of stargold. Now he really did yelp. Then he leaped right out through the Fiddleback’s door and tumbled onto the stone floor, almost shattering the glass of his lantern. Abruptly the Fiddleback stilled and darkened, the glow snuffed.

  Tin sat up, dazed and gasping. He started to tremble. What had just happened? Was it alchemy? Was it real stargold, or just the colour? He crept back and placed a shaking forefinger on the Fiddleback’s side. Nothing happened. Taking a deep breath that was more joyous than fearful, he clambered back in again and sat down. This time he focused very hard, watching every scrap and wire and bit of metal around him in case the impossible transmutation happened again. This time he noticed a strange feeling stealing through his body. It was like a warm light in all of his bones. It settled right in the centre of him, a golden star. Then, just as before, the Fiddleback began to move. The engine below purred very gently. The wheels spun on their supple legs. Tin grasped the steering wheel and watched as it and the rest of the Fiddleback turned the colour of gold once again.

  For the next hour, Tin zipped and zoomed around the dark stone chamber, testing out all the speeds and abrupt turns that the Fiddleback was capable of, getting used to steering eight legs at once, amazed at how fluid and lifelike his creation was, and how well it worked. For a little while the why and the how and the what of its miraculous animation didn’t matter. All he knew was that he had never felt so happy in his life. He would think about it later, tomorrow in the Alchemics Workshop while grinding at the mercury they had been using over the past six months in the Brothers’ latest set of experiments.

  A noise outside brought him abruptly to a halt. The Fiddleback stopped without a sound. It cast a subtle, shimmering light on all the walls. Tin listened hard. It had sounded like a cough, quickly stifled, the sudden movement of boots outside the stone door. He hardly breathed. But the catacombs were silent now, so silent his ears rang. Maybe he had imagined it. Maybe it had come from the Fiddleback, something to do with the brakes or a wheel. He sat still for a long time, straining for any further sounds. All he could hear was his own breath. The last thing he wanted was for his Fiddleback to be discovered by the Brothers. This thought struck him, sickly. Whatever made his Fiddleback run, it had something to do with stargold; the stargold that the Brothers coveted. Tin didn’t understand what had happened to make his
invention run, but he knew that if it fell into the Brothers’ hands, its beauty and mystery would be taken from him for ever.

  But surely the sound was nothing; he was always so careful to make sure no one saw him when he snuck down to the catacombs. Still, just to be safe, he reluctantly climbed out of the Fiddleback and tucked it back into its corner, laying the rugs and bit of tarp back over it. The golden glow took longer to fade this time. For a moment Tin thought that it was emanating from his hands as well. But it was very late, and he was quivering with fatigue and excitement. He needed to tell Sebastian! Someone needed to share in this miracle, this mystery, and Seb was his best friend. He’d kept his Fiddleback a secret until now, but he needed to talk to someone about what had happened.

  “Till tomorrow night then,” he whispered to the Fiddleback, half-expecting it to reply. But it only sat silently under its rugs.

  The way back was circuitous, winding through the kitchen cellars, below the Library and Alchemics Workshop and Metals Studio, zigzagging through the least-used and dustiest passages. He crept quietly behind old barrels of wine that the Brothers kept for themselves. He skirted sacks of beans and tubs of the flavourless oats they ate daily. The oats came from the Albion Agricultural Facility, where all the fertilizers and pesticides were fabricated to grow just enough food and rapeseed lantern oil annually for the residents of the City.

  Tin neared the trapdoor hatch he usually used to sneak in and out of the underground, taking from his pocket the clever lock-pick he and Seb had fashioned. It was the closest trapdoor to his dormitory wing, and opened at the edge of a worn-out red carpet in one of the side rooms that flanked the big Assembly Hall where Father Ralstein gave his weekly sermons. Several huge candelabras lined a large central table, but the room, as far as Tin could tell, was rarely used.

  As he climbed the top stair and reached to unlock the trapdoor, he heard the voices of two men above him. The legs of a chair squeaked as somebody shifted his weight. But it was well past midnight. Why were any of the Brothers still awake? He had passed through the room dozens of times at this hour, and it had always been empty. Then he heard one of them speak his own name, and his whole body went cold. He froze, crouching there beneath the floor.

  “Martin Hyde, he’s called? Well, maybe this is worth calling me here for, straight out of bed at the witching hour.” The speaker broke off into a rumble of low, delighted laughter. Another man, younger, said something whining in reply. Tin couldn’t tell from their voices alone who the two men were, but he caught a high strain in the younger voice, and thought of Brother Warren, the slim, quiet fellow always transcribing texts in the Library. For a moment Tin’s ears couldn’t focus on their words above the sound of his heart – should he turn all the way round, try another exit point somewhere near the Cloister? But then he’d be locked outside, with no way in until mid-morning exercises. Should he just wait, curled on the stair, until they were gone? And why were they talking about him anyway?

  Tin listened more closely to the cadence of the older man’s voice, and realized why he hadn’t recognized it at first. It was Father Ralstein himself. The boys never spoke to or interacted with the Head of the Cloister, only heard his weekly sermons on the subjects of Grace and Progress, always delivered in deep and booming tones. Now, he spoke in a conversational voice, and Tin only recognized him because of the crackling resonance of his laugh. It was a frightening sound. He listened harder.

  “So you say this thing he has made, this contraption – it’s shaped like a spider? And he’s found a way to turn it into gold?” Father Ralstein’s voice purred, horribly.

  At this, Tin sank down to his knees in a sweat, his mouth dry. How did they know about his Fiddleback? Had that noise been someone at the door after all? How long had they been watching him? And how had he not noticed? His Fiddleback! It was his secret, the only thing that was really his in the whole world. The idea of the Brothers getting their hands on it, taking its miraculous gold for themselves, made him want to break apart with anger, into a hundred little pieces.

  “Yes, Father, yes!” intoned Brother Warren, his voice rising. “It seems impossible, I know, but I saw it before my very eyes. The thing turns to pure gold when the boy is in it, and runs. It moves just like a spider, with eight legs. It’s ingenious.”

  “Your excitement is understandable, Brother,” said Father Ralstein, his voice very deep now, so deep it was hard for Tin to hear. It trembled with anticipation. “This is indeed a revelation. But how do you know it’s real gold – stargold – the gold we have been trying for a hundred years to create? Think of how many times a boy has managed some starry resemblance in the Alchemics Workshop, something with a golden sheen that only lasts a week or so, and melts to nothing in the Star-Breaker. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  “Yes, Father. But it runs, you know, the engine runs! It has to run on something, and not just any old something. The boy must have made some very important discovery, some secret about the inherent properties of stargold. We always knew he was uncommonly clever. I’ve had my eye on him.” The Brother’s tone wheedled and flashed.

  Horror flooded Tin’s chest now. He wanted to throw up. He hadn’t made his Fiddleback as some tool for the Brothers, but as a wild act of imagination. Now they would take it from him and pick it apart until all the wonder was gone from it, like they did with everything. His whole life he had been told that his efforts to make gold were for the common good, the good of the City, to return it to its former state of glory. But he’d never felt as free or as glad in all his years as he had tonight. He wouldn’t give the magic of it away! He couldn’t.

  “You know, Brother Warren, how dangerously low our reserves of stargold are of late?” Father Ralstein said after a pause, his tone grave. “They won’t last us the year at current consumption rates. Probably not even through spring, unless we severely curtail Citywide use. It’s the very last of the stargold in all the City. Stripped from every last façade and woman’s jewellery case.”

  “Yes, Father, yes! That’s why—”

  But Father Ralstein ignored the Brother’s wheedling. “I remember the tales my great-grandfather told when I was just a boy, of his own great-grandfather’s boyhood Before the Collapse. How the City shone as one great golden star, brighter than the sun and more perfect. Now look what a shanty town it’s become. What degradation we live amidst. The slovenly poor running our Generators, turning the waterwheels day and night just to keep the lanterns lit. It’s pathetic!”

  “Yes, a disgrace indeed!” Brother Warren echoed. “But perhaps it’s now at an end, Father?”

  “Oh my dear Brother Warren, how little you know!” But Father Ralstein’s voice brimmed with triumph, not defeat. It thundered through the room, and Tin found it hard to swallow; his mouth was too dry with fear. “I am going to tell you a secret, Brother,” the man continued. “A Secret Ordain passed down from Cloister Father to Cloister Father since the time of the Collapse, we who carry what is left of the Star-Priests’ knowledge. It was written by Solomon Pierce, last of the great Priests, last of the men who could read the patterns of the stars. He died of the Plagues, but not before he left two decrees. The first was that, on the two-hundredth anniversary of his death, the River Lutea would again run clean, and that on that day we should send a contingent of Brothers to test it for contamination and disease.

  “The second, his Secret Ordain, sounded like little more than the deathbed ravings of a delirious man. It was written down nevertheless, though no one has been able to make sense of it since. Until I have, this evening.” Father Ralstein paused with a self-indulgent smile. “When the Spider makes Gold the Land will behold the return of the Old. Solomon Pierce, there always was a soft place in his head, they said. He predicted the Collapse, you know. So it seems he predicted our Rebirth, too. It was the Spider bit that nobody understood. Gradually we came to ignore it, thinking perhaps the scribe at his deathbed had misheard. Some thought it had to do with the legendary arachnid sl
ain by the first of the Star Priests when they arrived here five hundred years ago, that monster big as a horse they found in the deep cavern at the City’s heart where now we drill for groundwater. But still it didn’t make much sense. Now at last it seems, Brother Warren, that the decrees have converged. In a fortnight it will be the two-hundredth anniversary of Solomon Pierce’s death. A small contingent of the City’s private guard has been informed, and is preparing for a covert mission to test the River Lutea and the Country itself for habitability. Of course it’s a top-secret mission. We can’t have ordinary City people finding out, and getting ideas about freedom, about leaving the City… And tonight you have brought me the Spider. You have answered the riddle. This Spider, it is a sign! A mascot for our Rebirth! The City shall rise! We are the Old, the old rulers, returning at last to cleanse the Country of savagery and turn it once more into the productive paradise it is destined to be. Without our intervention, this place has become but a wild and poisoned wasteland, without order, without meaning. It must be perfected once more!” Father Ralstein’s voice rose to a feverish cry. But he quelled it abruptly. “Bring me the boy. Bring me the Spider,” he demanded, and the words shook with greed.

  At this, Tin turned in a panic to run back down the stairs as far and fast as he could possibly manage. But he was having trouble breathing, and his heart was thumping so hard in his chest that he stood too fast, dizzily, and whacked his head on the trapdoor. Horrified, head spinning, he ran.

  “Well,” said Father Ralstein, eyeing the trapdoor and rising to his feet. “I believe we have an eavesdropper.” It was a growl.

  “Tin, no doubt,” replied Brother Warren smoothly. “This is his regular exit route.”