As Simple As Hunger Page 3

  The Moor exhaled a great breath, as if he had been holding it in advance of Benjon denying him. “Ask for me, ask for Ferdinand, for Ferdinand del Cadiz. Everyone will know who you mean.”

  “And who am I seeing?” Benjon asked, fishing his notes from his pocket for something to look at, though his gaze passed through them like sunlight through glass. “Who do you want me to give my, my medical opinion of?”

  “Hugo Waldren,” Ferdinand said in a low voice, and without fanfare. “Do you see the need for discretion now?”

  Benjon frowned, deliberately ignoring the implications of this revelation for due examination later – what should it matter to him if one of the great Celebrated was an invert, a deviant, it was not his business, it was not his interest, he had no interest at all in such things, none while the bromine worked – and said, “He seemed quite normal just now.”

  Ferdinand made a noise of derision and flapped his hand at Benjon as if waving away a fly. “You don’t know him like I know him,” he said.

  It was, Benjon thought, trying not to conjure any mental images at all, certainly none that would trouble his bromine and so close to the debate as well, it was a most accurate assessment.

  Ferdinand left and almost immediately, as if they had planned it so, his redheaded guide returned.

  “No time for Overseer Greytooth now,” she said, beckoning him mostly with her head, “straight to the broadcast. Please don’t swear so this time. The Guardian of Decency gets a very sore arm ringing the bell over your oaths.”

  Chapter 2

  “Then,” said Benjon, hunched over his coffee cup with his long fingers interlocked about the heated tin as if it was as cool as mere meat, “this enormous Moorish invert – samefucker – harangued me to examine his, his –”

  He had not slept, which was quite usual for Benjon, who regarded it as an inconvenience, and he meant some sort of delicacy in giving his account of his unexpected encounters in Edinburgh, which was very much not.

  “Penis?” Hajar asked. She was looking out across the untamed vistas of Benjon’s primary area of study, which still contained a dining table somewhere under the notations, instruments, and fly-covered trays of congealed blood at different concentrations.

  She sounded perhaps a little bored, but in Benjon’s experience she would feign interest without betraying her own thoughts if she were truly unmoved.

  “No, no, no.” Benjon closed his eyes against the image, which only made it all the more potent. “No. Not his penis, his –”

  “Testicles?” offered Hajar with a faint smile, still rummaging through his items with her gaze.

  “No,” Ben said, nearly spilling his coffee: his scarf, Hajar assured him, still smelled quite strongly of it despite the pervasive stink of the railways clinging to him like pig fat. “It was not his anatomy he required me for but his – what do those wretched men call those, their, the men that they –” he could feel his larynx bouncing restively in his throat, dancing in time with the tides of his anxiety. He was only now consuming his daily bromine, and he feared its lack of effect above all things.

  “Lovers,” Hajar suggested.

  “Prisoners, usually,” Benjon snapped, and he finished his too-hot coffee in a gulp. The pain he preferred to the passage of this thoughts.

  “He asked you to examine his lover,” Hajar prompted, watching him from under drooping eyelids. She seemed tired, although Benjon knew he was in the habit of ascribing his own feelings to others: he had been told so often enough.

  “But not for any symptom that might present a diagnosis,” Benjon said sulkily. “No itches or welts or watery stools. It seems his – the man I am to examine – is only ‘not himself’. There seemed nothing awry with him when I spoke with him before.”

  Hajar smiled again. “You aren’t exactly the best judge of that.” She flattened the band of her headscarf (dark green, today, and embroidered with fading tree branches) against her forehead and added with slow curiosity, “Who was it?”

  “The Moor?” Benjon asked, throwing his tin cup at the sink without looking – there was a clonk but nothing broke. “An engineer of sorts. He had mechanical lubricant on his hands.” He was pleased with this observation – it was only lately that he had realised symptoms of fact as well as of disease betrayed themselves on the person.

  “His lover,” Hajar said, as if the notion did not bother her at all. “You are avoiding all description and you were at Albion Broadcasting, was he one of the Celebrated?”

  “I swore not to say,” Benjon said, and it sounded uncharacteristically pompous in his mouth. “It is a delicate business, you see, if he is a, an inver—a samefucker.”

  “So it is one of the Celebrated,” Hajar concluded, without apparent disgust or any inflection.”

  Benjon scrubbed at his eyes, which ached from their thirty or more hours of use, and said, “Can you keep a secret, then?”

  “Don’t I keep all your secrets, Ben?” Hajar reminded him. She spoke softly; he could not tell of discretion, or of sympathy for his tiredness.

  “This isn’t my secret.”

  “Assume our covenant extends to the secrets of others,” Hajar assured him, her hands folded and still in her lap. A fly dislodged from the blood trays buzzed around them both, drawing strange patterns in the cold air, sluggish but fretful.

  Benjon scrubbed his eyes a second time and blurted, “Hugo Waldren,” as if the name were a belch or some packet of phlegm caught in his throat and determined to be let out.

  “Well,” Hajar said, with another of her faint smiles, “that is quite a turn-up. You met Hugo Waldren.”

  “I am to examine Hugo Waldren,” Benjon said, “for some unknown infirmity, at the request of his –”

  “Shh,” Hajar said, “I am enjoying the thought of him trying to teach you Doleful Canary.” She smiled at the bookcase, her attention elsewhere. “What was – was that why you were so subdued in your debate?”

  “I was attempting stratagem,” Ben explained. The flourishing colony of bluebottles swarmed over his abandoned equipment and engaged in a few struggles for dominance. “It didn’t work.”

  Pilbrook had tried to rile him, the Wiltshirist had been as provocative as a tick, and he had resorted in the end to repeating, “You may say so, but the evidence disagrees,” over and over until Pilbrook threatened to kick him.

  “No,” Hajar agreed, “it didn’t. You sounded sedated and cowed. What stratagem was that?”

  “I don’t have your mother’s charm,” Benjon growled, getting to his feet.

  “No one does,” Hajar said in seeming sympathy, “I wish –”

  “Wish what?” Benjon asked, seized by the desire to continue his remapping of the nerve connections of the foot – he would have to acquire a new foot, of course, but the cold rooms at the halls of the dead were full of unclaimed corpses.

  But Hajar did not finish her thought. “Are you going to examine Hugo Waldren?”

  “Yes,” said Benjon, turning over sheaves of uneven diagrams in brown ink, in search of his most recent attempts. “Yes, I’m required back there next week at Greytooth’s bloody pleasure, I may as well – where is it –” he waved an admonitory finger after her as she picked her way through the detritus and gold seams of his labours, her feet raised high, “Don’t tell anyone.”

  * * *

  “Perhaps,” Hajar said, two days later, perched in Benjon’s room at the University with a tin mug full of some hot mint leaf infusion, “perhaps if we persuaded him to lend a little support to our cause.”

  She was in Rill’s spot, Rill having finally been enticed out of the narrow doorway with the promise of a cock fight in the town, and Benjon sprawled on his desk trying to find a kernel of sense in his wretched student’s work. Thus far the rotten child had mentioned seaweed so many times that Benjon suspected him of defecting to the Coastal Divination School on the sly.

  It took Benjon some time to realise, therefore, that he didn’t understand what she had
just said, and that it had no bearing on the conversation they had been having about the tendency of objects to fall to the ground and how ornithopters and birds briefly flouted this law.

  “Who?” Benjon asked.

  “Your recent patient,” Hajar said, into her drink.

  “Boxwright is already a committed Empiricist,” Benjon said, perplexed, his mind still clouded with the unwelcome episode of sleep which had finally imposed itself upon him a few hours earlier, “that is why he is my patient.”

  “In Edinburgh.”

  Thanks to the confusion of sleep there was still another moment in which Benjon was not certain to whom she referred, but realisation took him with the abrupt sweep of climax, and he almost immediately deepened his already-abyssal scowl.

  “Him? Why would he join—”

  “He doesn’t have to,” Hajar said, a queer excitement in her voice, her eyes wider than was usual for her, “all he has to do is say a few things. Maybe favour us a little in his satires. He is popular, Ben, people listen to him.”

  “They think him a buffoon.”

  “They love him,” Hajar insisted, pointing her cup at him. “They may take no account of his words at first, but the meaning will come through to them over time.”

  “Hrm.” Benjon pinched his lips thoughtfully. “Is this your mother’s doing?”

  Hajar answered too quickly, and with unusual sharpness. “No, it’s my idea,” she said, returning to her mint infusion with apparent savagery. “Mine.”

  Benjon nodded his understanding slowly, and thought a little longer. In principle it was a cunning notion. Rill’s researches, which Benjon frequently decried as pointless and wasteful and merely an excuse to talk his way into the quim of his female students, had determined the effect of unrelated commentary on the impartial listener. Talk often enough of the comparative worthlessness of finches, Rill had shown, and without prompting a subordinate will free or even destroy their finches in order to replace them with some other, less-derided bird – even if there is no evidence to suggest finches are of more or less worth than canaries, even if —

  At the word ‘canaries’ Benjon was reminded of the focus of their conversation, and yanked again at his lip.

  “How?”

  Unlike him, Hajar was practiced in keeping pace with a conversation littered with holes, and she said, “Ben, you will hold a certain power over him, will you not?”

  It took him so long to see what she was hinting so obliquely toward that Hajar sighed and drummed her fingers on the base of her cup, producing an unpleasant sloshing and a clonk.

  “You already have information about him which he would not see shared.”

  Benjon blinked, and released his lip. Hajar did not appear to be joking, and she also did not appear to be a dream: he kicked the desk to be sure, and received inarguable pain in his toe which left his foot hot.

  “Blackmail.”

  Hajar made a face and moved a hand in a rocking, so-so motion. “Persuasion.”

  “Is this what your mother teaches you?” Benjon asked, more to himself than to Hajar, though he was quite sure his mother had never taught him to threaten ruin on men he barely knew for the sake of advancing a cause she herself would probably not have believed in, had she lived.

  “You surely don’t think she gets her way through smiling sweetly and saying please,” Hajar said with considerable sourness. “This was my conception. You needn’t be cruel –” she paused to take in more of the infusion, and stared into the steaming waters for a moment, “– you shouldn’t be harsh. You could ask for it in payment for the examination and treatment of his disorder, I am sure an intelligent man like him will see the undercurrent as plainly as if you had spoken it aloud. Tell him you will not take money, only a favour.”

  Benjon covered his eyes with his hand. “This is underhanded.”

  Hajar laughed at him. “I am sure the Wiltshirists and the Coastal School and the Bradlets and the Cumbrians and all the other Occultists never exert pressure below the table.”

  “Would it work?”

  Hajar pointed her cup at him again. “No one knows the future. Is it worth trying?”

  Benjon rubbed his face. “It might be better-handled by someone more subtle.” He attempted a smile, but it stood only as a worried grimace on his face, and he let it fade away in haste.

  “By me?” Hajar sounded thoughtful. “I shall send him a bill on your behalf, but to write it would require even more subtlety.”

  Outside the tiny room, in the corridor, Willets’ voice echoed like the blast of some terrible explosion. “And this room contains the pernicious mongerers of heresy among the studies of the body, who believe knowledge of sickness can be divined through the cutting up of the dead —”

  “I see Willets has progressed onto misrepresenting the truth,” Hajar said evenly. “Please, Benjon, if for no other reason than to see that weasel’s face when he hears H—you-know-who expounding in favour of empiricism on What’s My bloody Purpose?.”

  “I will try,” Benjon said stiffly, only noticing afterward that he was using the same voice as that which he used in his ill-fated attempts to placate the Dean or assure the Arch Chancellor that he was absolutely, positively, definitely never going to shout ‘bollocks’ during one of Divinator Jeppesen’s speeches again.

  Hajar blinked and sat back in Rill’s chair as if he had sworn at her, the empty cup clasped in her hands. “Sorry. I don’t mean to push. But this could be useful.” She fidgeted in Rill’s chair, and laid her cup on the arm. “It would, could, be the beginning of credibility. Wider acceptance.”

  “I know,” Benjon said, irritated with the lecture. “I know all this, I know all this. I kn—”

  Outside the room there was a loud exclamation containing nothing but startled vowels, and a frigid squawk that indicated that Rill had finally caught Willets in the act of defacing their office sign. Benjon stared at the door for a moment, losing his train of thought immediately, and made a weak gesture at Hajar.

  “You should,” he said out of the side of his mouth, as Rill said something indistinct which was probably a curse word of some description and Willets huffed back and the cackling noise of amused students rose up like the crackling of a wood fire. “You should leave before this gets noisier.”

  “No point,” Hajar said, drawing her feet up into Rill’s armchair, and she let her headscarf hang loose about her face. “Magda will abandon her work to see what the fuss is about so that is ruined, and there is only one way out of this room, which leads into the jaws of the lion. I think, if you do not mind, I will remain here and read your monograph on the blistering response in overwarmed skin, and wait until Dr Rill gives the all-clear.”

  Perhaps with another visitor Benjon would have bristled and demanded a speedy exit to prevent his distraction from work, but Hajar had a very great knack for disappearing into the wallpaper and disturbing no one. He waved a superfluous wave while Rill and Willets pecked at each other outside like enraged ducks.

  * * *

  The day prior to his return to Edinburgh, another arthropod spy (or, more practically, simply a free, unenslaved arthropod loose in the dominions of Albion) was announced on the Wireless as captured.

  As Benjon understood from the gossip of porters, the beetle was found in the more northerly dominions, bleary and chilled, and was taken to be interrogated. As he understood from previous tours of Albion Broadcasting-B, the hideous sounds of arthropod suffering would be relayed to the Broadcasting-B station from a transmitter in Bergen without the beetle needing to be brought across. As he knew from a lifetime of listening to such broadcasts, he would not listen unless he was under torture himself.

  Benjon was unable to escape the news, however irrelevant it was: he made the grievous mistake of leaving the School in search of more coffee beans and, as he should have predicted, ran against the wall of common conversation on his return.

  “What d’you make of this spy, eh?” the porter asked, stretching h
is leg across the doorway. There was mud on the man’s cloth-leg, which was against University regulation, but Benjon was not in the habit of reporting petty misdeeds.

  “Very little,” Benjon said, wondering if trying to leap the man’s legs would earn him a cudgel to the back of his calves.

  “Not had one in a bit, had we?” the porter said, with friendly malice. They all played this game with him: Benjon’s dislike of small talk and chatter had become known all about after he shouted down one of the former guardians of this doorway, and ever since the grey woollen tunics had made it their occupation to wrest his composure from him as often as possible. “Got to be at least a year. Makes you wonder what that bloody great bug was doing at Bergen, right it does.”

  “Probably lost,” muttered Benjon. The attrition against the denizens of the Gated Continent, however alien and alarming and androphagid they might appear, was a mere distraction thrust out to confound the folk, in Benjon’s opinion, whenever the Witegamot and Prefects felt they were in danger of becoming uppity.

  “Nah, they don’t get lost,” said the porter with the granite confidence of the utterly uninformed. “Got compasses inside their heads, like the birds.”

  “Birds get lost –”

  “Anyhurr,” said the porter, shifting his weight with quiet menace. “My two is down on it being the first of a few, you know. They always come in batches. Click, click, squeak, squeak. How’d they ever translate all that rubbish, eh?”

  Benjon didn’t dignify this with a response. He couldn’t produce even an inkling of the man’s name, and the porters had progressed this week onto demanding from him a civil request for entry with their names attached in the sure knowledge that such mindless pleasantries ground on him.

  The clouds over the city closed above their stalemate like a slammed door, and with an accompanying growl they disgorged several fat blobs of rain onto Benjon’s head.

  “Get in, then,” muttered the porter, dodging aside for him. A more practiced combatant – Gull, for example – would have made him stand in the rain, but this grizzled beast had at least a grain of sympathy in him.