Articles
The Shift , Ten Days before Quarter
My friend,
I found her. Against all probability – and my own judgement that you sent me on a fool’s errand – I have found her. Not where you indicated that she would be, I will add, but close enough. The other correspondent – I presume there must be at least one other of us that you have out here sending you ink and paper whispers – must have been working from what they had been told, rather than what they had seen. A number of the details were erroneous, and the overall situation of the place was altogether different from what you indicated or I had imagined. The camp, if you can call it that, is far larger than a few hundred wagons and tents for example. Far larger.
It is called the Shift, a name that echoes both its nature, and the loose clothing common in the west. Both are accurate evocations of the place’s reality. Make no mistake, it might have started as a camp, but it is now a city of this new age. I would say that it would rival the central districts of Sul in population. There are tents, thousands of tents in vast tangles of fabric and rope. Many of them use the trunks of trees as their uprights. Most of those trees are dead, long stripped of life and bark. The tallest still live, with ragged branches of leaves spreading into the sky above the waves and peaks of fabric bellow.
Impermanence is everything in the Shift. Fabric cable and rope do not last, after all. The divisions between rooms, between dwellings, between districts even, migrate, fold away, or become tattered. There are alliances and blood ties as complex as the patchwork walls and webs of rope that support them. They are bound, unbound, stitched by blood and unstitched by power. The rules of life and loyalty are firm, but everyone knows they might not be the same in a dozen years. There are generations that have never known the towns and cities of their ancestors as anything other than stories.
Finding a member of the royal family who might have come here when she was a child, but who would now be ancient, is a task I would wish on no one. I often doubt that you appreciate the effort satisfying your missives requires. Perhaps your other correspondents are more docilely compliant, but if not then you must be fortunate indeed that such patience still exists in the lands.
One of the chief problems was that the people of the Shift view anyone who has been there for more than a season as one of their own. All distinction of outsider from native, newcomer from old blood, dissolves in short order. The people of the Shift are just those that are there. If you were to leave its community for long enough you would no longer be one of them. Similarly, there is no real difference between someone who has been there since spring and someone whose great grandfather helped raise the first tents. The concept of a scion of one of the old kingdoms simply has no meaning to them. A person is a person now, and the past has no hold on them, any more than the future makes them any promises. Unsurprisingly, this has led many exiles and hunted vagabonds to the shift. It is a fluid place. A place where you must take the measure of the balances of power and of threat every day and still might make a mistake. Which is all to say that arriving at the shift, I found my task to be both more complex and more dangerous than I had anticipated.
I began my search, as is my habit, with drunkenness. Liquor and ferment are ever the keys to the interior of the human heart and head. In the shift both are available in quantity, with some sellers carrying slings of glasses and long-necked bottles on their backs. They pour by bowing so that a fine stream of fluid runs from a spout jutting over their shoulder and into a glass that they proffer to you with one hand while leaving the other free to take your coins. They insist on coin too, silver or gold. For all the fluid nature of Shift society and physical structure, it likes its tokens of wealth solid. There are no drinking dens or places of habitual imbibing. Instead, there are gatherings. Two people or a handful will stop, and stand or sit while they talk. Drink sellers will come and soon there will be glasses in hand, peoples’ lips stained to rainbows by the liqueurs and their words spiced by its fire. More people will join. The space of the gathering will grow wider. The fabric borders to dwellings, shops and avenues will pull back to accommodate the growing crowd. Sub-groupings will form like whirlpools in a surging tide. The whole will grow and endure or break apart and dissolve back into the fabric of the place. It was at one of the larger and longer lasting of such gatherings that I found the first sign that my search might not be hopeless.
I had already learnt that there was next to no point in enquiring of a person who had come from a far place running from disaster – one might as well have searched for a drop of water in a bucket. Asking about old royal signs, or tokens of lineage similarly had proved pointless. I had almost decided to write and say that I was going to pursue the possibility no further. In the event, it was chance, or so I thought, that stopped me abandoning the endeavour.
Sound is a strange thing in the Shift. It follows different laws. The thickest separation between spaces might be an old tapestry, the thinnest a gauze. Every moment is filled with a melange of voices, the creak of rope and cloth, the clink of cooking pots and the cries of the joyous or despairing. Sound is not divided by walls as it is in a palace or house of stone, nor does it have the empty space to fade into silence. Words slide between the sheets that separate private from public. Shouts funnel though gaps in hangings and tangle amongst the ropes and folds of cloth. If you wish to keep a secret, keep it behind your teeth, is a truth of everyday life to those of the Shift.
I was in the depths of a gathering, and several cups deep at that, when I heard a sound that cut through the ocean tide of voices and song. It was a low chiming of bells, a small sound but of a tone and key so different from the drift of noise that I lurched upright and spilled the better part of my drink in the process. I heard one more note of it, and then it was gone, folded away out of hearing. But I knew the sound and what it meant. I looked for the source right away of course, made a fool of myself by blundering through the crowds and past curtains and hangings. There was no one there.
The regent bells were a strange affectation, even for a sub-society as strange as the royal families of the age before the cataclysm. Every member of the family wearing a series of bells on their person, often, hanging from ears, wrists, or necks. The bells themselves clusters of tubes, each tube no wider than a stem of corn and producing a particular note, so that the chimes rung as the royal scion moved produced a sonic signature unique to them. Those that spent their lives in the courts could tell who approached without needing to look. Some have speculated that it was a protection against assassination., If so, it was remarkably ineffective.
It was a regent bell that I heard in the warm night air of the Shift, a ripple of metallic laughter reaching from memory. You don’t forget the texture of sound from those bells. They linger in your nerves and dreams afterwards. I had only heard a regent bell once before, years ago, when I almost died in the remains of Nevenor. A different bell, a different signature of sound, but of a kind. The sound lingered as I stood, breathing hard, half tangled in the hangings I had blundered through – sharp and warm notes running up and down my spine. The eyes of a confused family looked back at me.
From that moment I knew that what I sought was there – that she was there. I did not doubt what I had heard. The sounds of a regent bell are impossible to imitate in part because their specific qualities are impossible to remember. You can recognise them, but not recall why.
I walked the Shift after that. I listened. I circled where I had first heard the bells, but after days I chose to walk further, my steps and path tending to nothing but the need to cross the camp. The season changed and rain came. Water dripped from ropes and fabric edges. Still I heard no bells. My certainty faded to doubt. Still, I walked and listened, and still only the tap-tap of rain drops spoke to me. And what was there to do but doubt? The royal families went beyond our reach or beyond life long ago. Why believe that one persisted, still? Stories of a scion of the line who fled the night of cataclysm, alone or with devoted companions, fearful, or bold, innocent or malign: these are the works of tongues and quill tips rather than reality. I started to see the flaws in the thread I followed. At first, I comforted myself that you must have had insight that I did not. In those stretching days and weeks, I realised that you knew no more than I did, that you had sent me to the Shift as a fisherman might cast a net into water, uncertain and indifferent if it brought up a catch or not. We are your nets and lines and hooks, aren’t we? How many of us are there in the lands, sending you correspondence, searching for ghosts of the past and trying to shape the future? A sourness entered my thoughts, which I confess remains there.
Then I heard the bells again. It was dawn, and the wind cut from the east. Chill-edged rather than cold, and carrying the promise of more rain as the day rose. I had not slept, and the dream-seed smoke and liqueur had left me with soft clouds for thoughts and a rising hunger for sleep. The first note of the bells crept into that fog of failing consciousness. In my half dreams I saw golden wings, and black claws, and flat black water without limit of depth or horizon. I might have sat and listened for an age, but leapt up. The bells did not fade but kept moving. I was not certain of the direction – the fabric forest of of the Shift makes you uncertain of anything that is not in front of you – but I thought that they were moving away. I went towards where I thought they were coming from. I pulled my way through hangings, stepped over sleeping souls still wrapped in blankets against the night’s chill.
The bells kept sounding. They moved. They danced in space, flitting from one place to another. Cries followed me from the people whose sleep I had disturbed, but I did not stop. It was not the months lost to searching, or the idea that I might find a member of a caste lost to a past age. No, I think it was the sound. The bells you see – I think they find something in us, and the sound hooks onto our thoughts and does not let go. Ruler and ruled. Monarch and subject. I followed its golden thread of sound until I pulled aside a hanging.
And there she was.
We have debated in person and by correspondence how the scions of the ruling past might have survived. Whether their lives might be longer than those of others, or whether there are other means that could preserve them.
The face that turned to look at me was that of someone no older than twenty summers, fewer perhaps. A tattered shawl framed it, and the rest of her clothes were as patchwork as the Shift itself. The bells hung from a cord on her neck. We stood in a space between spaces. She had been walking, a bucket of rainwater in one hand. She looked at me. There were far more than twenty summers in that gaze. She did not run, and I know that she could have killed me then. I knelt.
‘Your majesty,’ I said. I think those words and that gesture saved my life. ‘I have been looking for you for a long time.’
She put a hand out, hesitantly, and the bells laughed. She put her palm on my head, then her fingers under my chin and raised my eyes to hers. That look. What had those eyes seen? I cannot remember their colour now. Just the feeling of falling up into the depths behind them.
What should I do now that you have found me? You say that you have been seeking me for a long time. I have been staying unfound for a longer time still, and had no wish for it to be otherwise. Now I must go from here. If you have found me, then others might. The only question is if you should live.
All this in those eyes. Not words spoken in my head, not whispers without sound, but a string of understanding in my own thoughts. Like music. It was simpler and more terrifying than almost anything I have experienced.
I said that I did not want to die.
I know. Very few wish to end and those that do know not what they wish for. I know. I have no desire for you to die, but I will not accept the fate that you would drag me to.
I was struggling to speak. I could feel bile in my throat. Heat in my eyes. I opened my mouth, to begin to explain – to say that we meant her no harm, that our only concern was to heal the damage of the past, to try and find a way out of what was coming, if that was possible. That she was one of the last, maybe the last connection to the cataclysm, that it was not her, but her insight that we sought.
I did not get to say that. She knew it already. She had known it from the instant I looked into her eyes. The words did not come. She stared at me for a second that was an eon.
She let me go. Nausea filled me. Heat haze blurred my sight. I was on the ground. I think she turned her head, as though to listen to a whisper. And then she said that she would not come with me, but that I could live. I gathered the strength to ask her what she would do. She said that one home had been taken from her, and now I had taken another. She would go elsewhere, but that we could talk again. She left me then, and I remained, kneeling on the floor, the sound of bells in my ears still. She left me with a name, and the words ‘year turn’. I think, I hope that this means that if I go there at the end and beginning of the year, I will find her again. I do not know why she extended me this means of contacting her. There was and is no need for her to do so. So, the possibility remains that she might be willing to speak to us, to help us understand.
I do not know what to make of this. You will say, no doubt, that there is a possibility that my judgement has been altered in some way by such contact with one of the royal line. Am I now not a seeker, but a servant? I do not know, and I fear the answer.
I remain your faithful friend,
Astronio
Edited by Greg Smith
Written without AI
