Across Infinities: The Twelve Games · Book 4
The Iron Garden
Prologue: Channel One
Channel One, live to the eternals, and welcome to world four. I’m the boy’s Shadow, I’m your host, and if any of you halo-wearing bastards spills nectar on my carpet again I’m putting it on the air.
New world, new format. This season’s show is called Cover Story. One contestant, one false identity, thirty days inside the enemy’s house. The audience bets on the day the lie cracks, and the house wins either way, because there’s a fire on the schedule and it doesn’t care who’s telling the truth.
The stakes, for the new viewers in the cheap clouds: the council has a child on the docket called Ivy, a brand-new eternal, and she gets approved only if this love holds through twelve worlds. The odds on a love such as theirs are one in a quadrillion. We’re on world four. Do the math and then have a drink.
Welcome back.
The chair’s empty again, and I’m sitting in it. I’d like that noted. First time in a season. I’ve been looking forward to it as you look forward to a hot bath.
They’re not here. They’re over the road.
Not gone; over the road. At the end of last season, after the fold, they crossed to the other booth, the small one with the typewriter and the clean ribbon, knocked, and asked if they might come in. I’m told they stayed an hour. I’m told they’ve been back four times. They go after the tea trolley and come back before the lights, and they don’t say anything, and I don’t ask, and we both behave as though somebody who has never in my experience visited anybody has simply taken up a hobby. Like fretwork. Or arson.
Three items of business.
First. The build. World four is the prettiest thing they’ve made in years, and I told them so, and they took it as they take everything: small bow, no change in the eyes. Constantinople, eighteen ninety-five. Brass and steam and minarets in the snow; a palace on a hill above the water; and in the palace gardens a house made entirely of iron and glass, a hundred feet long, full of trees that have no business being alive in January. Everyone calls it the Iron Garden. It’s the only name in any build I’d have chosen myself.
It’s going to burn. I’m telling you now so you can enjoy it while it’s standing. A woman has spent nine years filling a glass house with every growing thing she could beg, buy or carry, and before the month is out somebody’s going to put a match to it, and she’s going to stand in the snow and watch. You’ll want to look away. Don’t. It’s very well written.
Second. There’s a new line in the margin of the build. In their hand, in the pen. It wasn’t there at the fold. It was there when they came back from over the road the first time.
Let them be given somebody to lose.
Before anybody in the gallery starts booing them: that isn’t malice. It’s maintenance. The system logged a fault at the end of world three, a love that refused to pay full price, and the Architect is the fixer, so they patched it the only way the rules allow, by raising the price. They don’t want anybody to lose. They want the build to stop breaking. Those are different things, and I’ve stopped being sure which is worse.
Under it there was something else, crossed out. I can read it. You can read most of what they cross out if you hold the page to the lamp; they cross out like somebody who expects to want it back. It said somebody small. They’ve put a line through that, and another, and written beside it, very neatly: not yet.
So it isn’t a small one. Not this season. I’ve been through the build for who it is instead, and I think I’ve found him. He’s young, he’s charming, he has very good shoes, and he’s going to be our boy’s best friend in this world. Not the friend, mind. That one’s Jonathan, over on his own channel with his own Shadow, and he’d want me to say so. That’s all I’ll say. I didn’t write him. I’d like that noted too.
Third. The list.
Things that weren’t in the build. Page four now. Last season added a dog on a step, a horn, a tune on a roof, an ebb that stood still for a day, and a man who said no to a gate. I keep it in the drawer under the desk. They know I keep it. They’ve stopped asking me not to. Last week, before they went over the road, they stood by the drawer for a moment with a hand on the handle, and I thought they were going to take it out and read it, and they didn’t. They said, “Page four?” and I said, “Page four,” and they nodded as if I’d told them the weather.
Our boy goes in born, as he always does now: a life, a mother, a trade, a set of debts, and none of the last three worlds. The wipe takes those. It doesn’t take the marks. Eleven pale dots along his ribs from a vault stair, where something with claws caught him and a woman sewed him up with her hairpins. Seventeen stitches down his left forearm from a well. He’ll say they were a glassworks. Glassworks scar everybody.
And he’ll have a pull, here, under the breastbone, pointing north up the water at a hill, and a house made of glass.
She’s in it. She doesn’t know who he is. She’s going to dislike him on sight, and she’s going to be right to: he’s been sent to lie to her.
Take your seats. Mind the snow. It’s real; they did it properly this time. And whatever you do, don’t light anything.
* * *
Chapter 1: The Costume
Channel One, round one of Cover Story, and our contestant has nine days on a train to learn the word bath. He fails. Bookies in the upper gallery have him cracking by Adrianople at four to one, and some cherub in row nine just yelled GRAHSS at the screen. Sit down, Kevin. Also, Freddie has very good shoes. I’m contractually obliged to keep mentioning the shoes.
Edmund Grey had nine days on the Orient Express to learn to talk like a gentleman, and by Adrianople he still couldn’t say bath.
“Grass,” he told the window. “Grahss. Bath. Bahth. Glass.” The word sat in his mouth like a pebble. “Glahss,” he said. “Glahss house.”
The window didn’t care. It was a good window, French-built, thick, in a mahogany frame, the kind the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits put in so rich people could watch Bulgaria go past without feeling it. Bulgaria had gone past all night: white fields, black trees, a horse alone in a snowfield with a blanket on, looking at nothing.
He’d checked the glass as soon as the train moved, out of habit. Drawn crown, decent anneal, a seed of bubbles bottom left where somebody in Belgium had let the batch go cold. You could tell Belgian. It had a greenish edge, like the sea off Margate.
That was the trouble. He could tell Belgian glass at a glance, and he couldn’t say bath, and in thirty hours a roomful of diplomats would be listening to him try.
“Bahth,” he said again.
“You’re doing it with your jaw,” said the man opposite. “Do it with your nose. It’s all nose, the English upper class. It’s why we’ve all got such enormous ones.” Edmund turned from the window.
The man opposite had boarded at Sofia in the middle of the night, very drunk and very polite, and apologized to the conductor, the luggage and Edmund, in that order, before falling asleep with his hat over his face. Under the hat he was perhaps twenty-six, fair, pink with sleep, with the sort of face that had been looked after since birth by people paid to do it. His coat was better than Edmund’s. Edmund’s coat had been made in Savile Row three weeks ago on the embassy’s account by a tailor who’d measured him twice and sighed once.
“I beg your pardon,” said Edmund. “Grahss,” he added, because he’d started the sentence that way and now couldn’t stop.
“Good God, no,” said the man. “Don’t apologize. Never apologize. That’s the first rule. You apologize to servants and dogs, and then only when you’ve trodden on them.” He stuck out a hand. “Ainsley. Freddie. Second attaché, His Britannic Majesty’s Embassy, Constantinople, for my sins. You’ll be Mr. Grey.”
Edmund studied the hand. Then he took it. The grip was good. The fingers were soft as a girl’s.
“How did you…”
“Dorne sent me up to Sofia to collect you. I was meant to board at Belgrade and give you a pleasant supper and a briefing, but I met a Serbian gentleman with a cousin who makes plum brandy, and here we are. The briefing was mostly about plum brandy, as it turns out.” Freddie Ainsley sat back. He had very fine shoes. He crossed his ankles to show them off without seeming to. “You’re the glass man.”
“I’m the engineer.”
“The glass man,” said Freddie, nodding, as if that settled it. “From the Crystal Palace Company.”
“Yes,” said Edmund, who had never been inside the Crystal Palace in his life.
“Splendid. My mother took me to the Crystal Palace when I was six. There was a model of a dinosaur. I was sick on it.” He watched Edmund with real interest. “Where did you go to school?”
The train rocked. A wheel ran over a joint and the carriage said tak, and then tak.
Edmund had been told what to say, by a man in an office off Whitehall with a coal fire and no name on the door, who’d looked at Edmund’s file and then at Edmund’s hands and said, “Hm.” He’d been issued a school, a father, a reason for not having gone to university, and a club he could mention but must never be asked to take anybody to. He’d said them to the porthole as far as Ostend.
“Rugby,” he said.
“Liar,” said Freddie Ainsley happily. Edmund went still.
“Oh, don’t look like that. Nobody went to Rugby. Rugby’s what you say when you didn’t go anywhere you want to talk about.” Freddie fished a cigarette case out of an inside pocket and offered it. Edmund shook his head. “Look, old man. It’s a costume. We’re all in costume, here. That’s the joke of the place. Every Englishman in Pera’s pretending to be a slightly better Englishman than he was at home, and every Turk he meets knows it, and is far too well-mannered to say so. You’ll be fine. Just do it with your nose.” He lit the cigarette. “Where did you really go?”
The wheel said tak. The horse in the snowfield, three hundred miles back, was still standing in Edmund’s head, in its blanket, looking at nothing; he felt very like it.
“Smethwick,” said Edmund. “Board school. Then Chance’s.”
“Chance’s?”
“The glassworks. My father blew glass for them thirty years. I went in at twelve. Lighthouse lenses, mostly. Then night school, in Birmingham. Then…” He stopped. Then a man with no name on his door. “Then this.”
Freddie Ainsley considered him through the smoke for a moment with an expression Edmund couldn’t read.
“Rugby,” Freddie said at last, and nodded. “Good school. Damp. I’ll back you up. I’ll say I knew your cousin.”
* * *
Constantinople came at them out of the snow like something being unwrapped.
First a long sea wall, old, the color of bread, with gray-green sea slapping at it. Then white gardens, black cypresses in them like men at a funeral. Then the train turned, the snow thinned, and there was the city all at once across a sheet of moving water: domes on domes, pale gray and pale gold, lifting up a hill, and the minarets between them so thin and so many it looked as if somebody had stuck pins in a cushion to hold it down. Smoke from ten thousand chimneys. Gulls in it. Hundreds of small black boats with curled prows sliding between the shores as if the water were a floor.
Edmund stood at the window with his hand flat on the glass.
“Yes,” said Freddie behind him, quietly, in a different voice. “It does that. Every time.”
And something under Edmund’s breastbone turned over.
He put his hand to it. It was the size of a thumb, warm, and it pointed. He’d have sworn on his mother’s life it pointed: not at the domes but up the water to the left, where the far shore climbed a long green hill, and at the top, among dark trees, a low white palace and something beside it that caught the gray light and threw it back. A long curved roof. It flashed once, like a heliograph, and went dark.
“What’s that?” he said. “The glass. On the hill.” Freddie leaned to look.
“That,” he said, “is your job, Mr. Grey of Rugby. That’s Yıldız. The Star Palace. His Majesty the Sultan lives there, mostly behind a lot of walls, and that thing that just flashed at you is his greenhouse. The Iron Garden.” He picked up his hat. “It’s been falling down for twenty years. Somebody had the bright idea of getting an Englishman to fix it. You’ll be very popular.”
The thing under Edmund’s breastbone went on pointing. He kept his hand on it. Under his shirt, along the ribs on the same side, there was a short row of little pale scars, eleven of them, evenly spaced, that he’d had as long as he could remember, and they’d begun, very faintly, to itch.
* * *
Sirkeci station was new and pink and full of people shouting. Freddie got them through it in eleven minutes by the simple method of walking very fast in a good coat and saying embassy in four languages. There was a carriage. There was a bridge, crowded and floating, on pontoons, over a strip of water called the Golden Horn that was not golden but the color of slate, with a little skin of ice at the edges where the boats weren’t. On the far side the street went up, very steeply, between tall buildings that might have been in Vienna if Vienna had been built on a cliff, and at the top it leveled out, and there was a long busy street of shops and cafés and churches and embassies, and Freddie said, “Pera. Home. Try not to fall in love with it; it doesn’t love you back,” and turned in at a gate.
The British Embassy was a palace too, in its way: gray stone, Italianate, very big, very cold, with a coat of arms over the door and a porter who gazed at Edmund’s boots before he looked at his face. Freddie took him through four rooms and up a staircase and along a corridor hung with portraits of men with whiskers, and knocked at a door, and opened it without waiting, and said, “Glass man, sir.”
“Thank you, Ainsley. That’ll be all.”
“Sir.”
Mr. Lucius Dorne, Counselor of Embassy, did not get up.
He was a long, gray, dry man of about fifty, sitting behind a desk with nothing on it but a blotter, a pen and one sheet of paper, and he had the stillest hands Edmund had ever seen. They lay on the blotter like a pair of gloves somebody had put down. He studied Edmund for some time. Then he said, “Sit,” and Edmund sat.
“You were nine days on the road,” said Mr. Dorne. “Seven would have done.”
“There was snow at…”
“I know where the snow was, Mr. Grey. I’m told about the snow.” He moved the one sheet of paper a quarter of an inch, with one finger. “You’ll present yourself at Yıldız at four o’clock this afternoon. Ainsley will take you. You will be received at the garden gate by the steward of the Has Bahçe, Cemil Ağa, who speaks some French, and by a palace official whose name you’ll be told and should forget. You’ll be shown the Iron Garden. You’ll admire it. You’ll find it in a shocking state of repair, which it is, and you’ll say that it can be put right within the month, which it can’t, and that the English firm you represent will be honored, which it won’t, because it doesn’t exist. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The contract,” said Mr. Dorne, “is real. The money is real. The glass is real; it’s in the Bosphorus now, on a collier out of Newcastle, two hundred and forty crates of it, and you’ll be glad of every pane. You will repair His Majesty’s greenhouse, Mr. Grey, and you’ll do it well, because you’re very good at it, which is why you’re here and not somebody from Rugby.” He let that sit. “And from time to time, when you’re asked to, you’ll do one or two other small things. You’ll be told what, and when. You’ll do them, and you’ll say nothing, and at the end of the month you’ll go home with four hundred pounds, and your mother will keep her house in…” his eyes went to the paper “…Rabone Lane.”
Edmund said nothing. He’d known since the office with the coal fire. He hadn’t, until now, heard anybody say his mother’s street aloud in a cold room, and it changed things a little; not what he’d do, but how it would feel when he did it.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“Good.” Mr. Dorne moved the paper back the quarter-inch. “One more matter. There’s a woman in the garden.”
“Sir?”
“A botanist. Of sorts. Her late father was the botanist; she was his assistant; he died; she stayed. The Palace tolerates her because she keeps the orchids alive, and because the gentleman she reports to is very old and has forgotten she isn’t supposed to be there. Our papers call her Miss Aydın. She speaks French and German and, I’m told, English, and she dislikes the English intensely, which is the only thing about her I find reassuring.” He looked up. “She’ll be in your way. Charm her, Mr. Grey. You’ve been taught how. That is, in a sense, what the coat’s for.”
* * *
He had been taught how. He went up to Yıldız at half past three in an embassy carriage with Freddie beside him and a new silk hat on his knees, doing his vowels silently and doing his face: interested, easy, faintly amused, as if everything were slightly beneath him but he was far too kind to say so. He’d practiced it on the boat in a mirror the size of a slice of bread. It made his jaw ache.
The road climbed through snow, through gates and more gates, past soldiers in blue with red fezzes stamping their feet, past a mosque and a clock tower and a long white wall that went on for a mile; then a small gate, and a garden deep in snow, quiet as a church, paths swept black, and at the end of a long walk of cypresses, the house of glass.
The carriage stopped. Edmund got down, and forgot his face.
It was huge. That was the first thing. He’d seen the drawings: a hundred and four feet long, a central dome on a drum, two curving wings, cast iron by a Glasgow foundry in 1866, shipped in pieces and bolted together by men who hadn’t left any notes. He’d known the numbers. The numbers hadn’t said anything about how it would sit there in the white garden in the failing afternoon like a ship that had come aground in the snow and lit its lamps. Every pane that was still whole was running with water on the inside and glowing faintly gold; there was a fire somewhere in it, and warmth, and the warmth had misted the glass so that you saw what was inside only as shapes. Great dark shapes, ribbed and fanned and feathered. Palms. Fronds the size of a man. A tree with leaves like plates. And the iron itself, every rib and bracket of it, cast into flowers: lilies and acanthus and twisting vine and roses, so that the whole frame of the thing, black against the gold, was a garden in its own right; an iron garden holding up a glass one.
Then the other thing, because he couldn’t not see it; he was Joe Grey’s son from Rabone Lane and he’d been looking at glass since before he could read. Panes missing everywhere, scores of them, boarded with planks or sacking or nothing at all, black holes in the gold. Putty gone gray and crumbling. Rust bleeding from every bolt-head in long brown tears down the white paint. A long crack in the drum of the dome, bound with wire. And at the back, a thin unhappy plume from a boiler chimney that was drawing badly and would, one cold night, go out and stay out.
“Well?” said Freddie, stamping. “Do you admire it?”
“It’s dying,” said Edmund, in his own voice, without thinking. “Somebody’s been letting it.” Freddie watched him sideways.
A little round man in a long coat and a fez was coming down the walk toward them with his hands out, beaming, followed by a thin unbeaming one in a black frock coat; and the round one called out in French, Welcome, welcome, the English engineer, welcome to the Has Bahçe, and the thin one said nothing at all and eyed Edmund’s boots.
Edmund put his face back on. It went on stiff.
There were bows. There were names, Cemil Ağa the steward and the thin one, whose name was Ferid and who was something to do with the Palace that nobody explained, and Edmund forgot it as instructed and then remembered it, because he’d seen eyes like those before, in the gaffer’s office at Chance’s, on the day they’d docked the men a week for breakages. There were compliments, in French, which Edmund had been drilled in and which came out, he thought, only a little like a man reading a railway timetable. And then Cemil Ağa took him by the elbow and led him up three iron steps to a door of glass and iron in the end of the west wing, and opened it, and the warmth came out to meet him.
He stepped in. It was four o’clock exactly; somewhere down in the city, a long way below, a muezzin began, and then another, and then a dozen, from all the hills at once. It was summer.
One step, and the winter was behind him and it was June in a wet wood: warm, close, green, heavy. Water dripped; somewhere it ran. The air was thick with leaf-mold and something sweet and white and drowning that turned out to be jasmine, trained up an iron column by the door and flowering in January as if nobody had told it. Light came down gold and green through the misted glass. His ears popped. His good Savile Row coat was suddenly ridiculous.
And the thing under his breastbone turned all the way around, like a compass needle when you bring a knife to it, and pointed down the wing, through the green, at a ladder.
There was a woman on the ladder. She had her back to him. She was up among the fronds of a palm with a knife in one hand and a cloth bag hanging from her wrist, cutting something, carefully, and dropping it in the bag. She was wearing a long dark skirt with the hem tied up out of the way, and a man’s gray jacket over it, too big, with the sleeves rolled, and a dark scarf over her hair, pinned, coming loose. She didn’t turn around. She’d heard the door. Everybody in the building must have felt the door; the cold had come in after him like a dog.
“Fermez la porte,” she said, not loudly, to the palm. “Vous laissez entrer l’hiver.”
Close the door. You’re letting in the winter. Edmund closed the door.
He stood with his back to it, in the green heat, with the cold gone, and the jasmine, and the muezzins faint through the glass behind him, and the little row of marks along his ribs burning now, quite plainly.
The woman on the ladder cut one more thing and dropped it in the bag. Then she turned her head, not her body, and looked down the length of the wing at him over her shoulder, for exactly as long as it took her to see the coat, and the hat in his hand, and the face he’d put on in the carriage.
Then she turned back to the palm.
“Ah,” she said, in the tone of a woman who has found a slug. “L’Anglais.”
A note on timing. Four o’clock, their clock, the first day of the year: he stepped through a door into summer. The jasmine wasn’t in the first draft. They put it in the margin afterward, with an arrow. They’re very fond of an entrance.
Over the road, at four o’clock, a warm wind smelling of jasmine crossed a frozen yard. I didn’t write that. I’ve put it on page four. Our boy has a month, four hundred pounds, his mother’s house, and a list of small things he’ll be told to do; and the first of them, though he doesn’t know it yet, is to her.
* * *