The Siege of Burning Grass

by Premee Mohamed

Genres: Literary Fiction; Dystopian; Military Sci-Fi; Authors of color

Synopsis

A stunning meditation on war, nationalism, violence and courage by a rising star of the genre.

The Empires of Varkal and Med’ariz have always been at war.

Alefret, the founder of Varkal’s pacifist resistance, was bombed and maimed by his own government, locked up in a secret prison and tortured by a ‘visionary’ scientist. But now they’re offering him a chance of freedom.

Ordered into one of Med’ariz’s flying cities with the bloodthirsty zealot Qhudur, he must find fellow anti-war activists in the enemy’s population and provoke them into an uprising against their rulers.

He should refuse to serve the warmongers, but what if he could end this pointless war once and for all? Is that worth compromising the manifesto he wrote when he started his rebellion?

Release date: March 12, 2024

Publisher: Solaris

Print pages: 432

Sample

PART ONEST. NENOTENUS’ SCHOOL FOR THE CORRECTION OF MINORS

They locked him up while his leg grew back. Alefret considered this fair—generous, even, what with the wartime cutbacks, the effortful efficiencies, the general spirit of make-do and do-without that permeates a country in wartime. It was presented as a generous favour to a temporarily-inconvenienced friend: like offering a hospital bed instead of a field tent.

No one spoke of his arrest or the charges against him.

On Fridays executions took place in the quadrangle, from which it was convenient to remove the dead through the cloisters and to those hidden bonfires that Alefret could not see but could smell. All week the odour hung in the air from the single day’s work. He was mindful of the principles he had learned and taught to others, which exhorted him not to watch such things.

Do not look. It is a small violence, but it is violence nonetheless.

I know, I know that.

Remember that what you see cannot be unseen.

Yes, I know.

He leaned on the windowsill to watch closely, as he did every Friday. How many Fridays had passed since his capture? He had lost count. The act of leaning felt good, as it took the weight off his ‘good’ leg (scarred, burnt, aching, but technically intact).

Below, frozen breath rose smoke-slow into a sky the colour of teeth, and this morning all was the same hue: the faded uniforms of the executioners, and the scavenged prison weeds, and the torpid rats that waited in the corners of the quad, and the ice-rimed ground, and the clouds and the walls and the knives—one brisk movement and finally another colour appeared, splashing into the stiff grass.

Alefret did not look away. He was ashamed that his response to this sudden spilling of colour was hunger, always hunger; he was ashamed that this was why he watched. It made something in his body believe there was food in the belly.

“Next! You, the ginge. Stand here. On the line. I said stand up!”

Four today, dispatched with the exhausted economy of motion that was the only beauty in this place. Everyone had to save energy no matter what form it took: gas, wood, food—and whatever spark kept the body in motion, that had to be saved too. Alefret had noted the peculiar grace lent by efficiency to the soldiers and prisoners here; the way they walked, sat in chairs, opened doors. Nothing could be wasted. Or it might be more accurate to say that nothing remained to waste.

Above the door, the lightspiders began to chitter, amplified by the curved glass of their enclosure; this was always in response to vibrations in the hallway, and so Alefret had enough time to push himself off the sill and sit heavily on the stone bunk as the interrogators came in.

In the quadrangle below, another name must have been discovered on the list—and this fifth one, perhaps from surprise, was not going quietly. His shrieked pleas grew in volume and urgency until they began to stutter, and Alefret knew the man was struggling so that the

 knife could not be placed into a useful spot. The screams were so loud that for a moment neither Alefret nor his captors moved, as if ordered to wait for silence to proceed.

Silence fell. They took Alefret by his arms, two panting men on either side, and dragged him unresisting down the hallway. They always interrogated him before the ministry of his wasps. Otherwise it would be a waste of good pain.

At each session he said, I am innocent of all crimes, and invariably they replied, You are not.

Always the same song, a call and response. Like the songs of his village, long-outlawed, blurred by recollection.

“No. You cannot speak. Only write. Here, now. Now.”

The walls of the room where they questioned him were still lined with schoolbooks and diagrams, kept (Alefret thought) only to retain what warmth was generated by the torturer’s brazier. The interrogators were cold too; sometimes their icy fingers were more startling than the instruments, though not often. The brazier itself was laughably small, like dollhouse furniture, and reminded Alefret of the jury-rigged stoves they had made in the city in its last days: you did not even have to chop wood, you fed the flames with broken-up pencils and the covers of books snipped into postage stamps.

While they interrogated him he studied diagrams of eyeballs and skeletons, colour-coded hearts (in rushes the red blood; out the blue), a plant cell as big as a bathtub, its jelly filled with things whose legends Alefret did not need to read. The nucleus, a chloroplast. A dropped shawl studded with beads: endoplasmic reticulum.

The worst was a poster of pregnancy, everything luridly red and pink and bisected down the middle, from brain to knees, right through the tender breasts, the adamantine womb, which is stronger than any other thing. And a baby, neatly folded, eyes closed.

As his blood spurted or his skin sizzled, Alefret often directed his thoughts to the baby: Don’t be born, little one. You will be born into war. Keep your eyes closed, face away.

He often thought: I am only sorry that you must hear this during your impressionable

 time. I hope you are not too affected by it.

He often thought: They will kill me. Don’t look.

In practical terms, how did one incarcerate people out there on the wrong side of the front, whilst remaining unremarked-upon by the foe? Alefret never had cause to ponder the question (it seemed frankly ridiculous to throw your own people in prison when there were, to put it mildly, more pressing concerns). But the answer in which he was now ensconced struck him as surprisingly sensible. In strictly logistical terms, that is.

St. Nenotenus’ School for the Correction of Minors: and he had guessed from the name that if you could not be corrected here, you would be buried out back. To reform you they would break your spirit or teach you to dissemble. One or the other, not both.

In which case, perhaps it was for the best that it no longer held any students, only such persons as himself. He had been told many times, by many people, that he needed to be corrected. Reformed, rehabilitated, remade.

Even in its abandoned state, Alefret could barely imagine the destinies of the pupils this school would have eventually matriculated. His mind’s eye conjured sickening generations of stranglers, despoilers, and frighteners; or (hopefully) something more banal, grim-faced little gargoyles rotating through life with the expressionless clack-clack of a brass cog. St. Nenotenus’ was never meant to create fine works of art from the raw material it was given. It would have broken children down to powder and reconstituted them, if they were lucky, into concrete. Something both useful and dead.

His cell was cold and grey, intricately wallpapered with mould. In the capital, before the war, you would have paid a month’s salary for a pre-pasted roll of such elaborate design. Four child-sized shelves protruded an arm’s length from the dressed stone wall, too shallow to accommodate Alefret’s prone form. He could sit on them, but was forced to sleep on the floor.

Having been imprisoned before, he had initially found the size and solitude luxurious; 

true, he slept on the floor, but there was room for at least another four or five prisoners, provided they were not built to his scale. Upon learning that he was under arrest he had expected to be crammed into a cell already full nose-to-nose. He had taken it as a kindness. Later he remembered that things began to happen to prisoners when they were locked up alone. They would know that.

Things in the mind. Terrible things. So that soon enough he welcomed the executions in the quad, the visits to his doctor, even the interrogations, just to hear another human voice.

He wondered whether the students would have called it a residence. A dormitory perhaps? Worryingly, the soldiers had not needed to modify anything when they arrived to appropriate it. Each room already boasted a stout iron door, gridded with thumb-thick bars. Hinges, handles, and locks unreachable from the inside, a flanged cup welded over the keyhole to prevent meddling from within. These had been prison cells long before they were prison cells.

As autumn’s chill deepened, Alefret’s dispensary wasps grew sluggish, and dragged themselves about as if they too were at war. Unlike him, they were not imprisoned and flew freely in and out of their residence, a box bolted to the ceiling; they even flew outside sometimes, short flights, always returning in minutes, shivering.

In the cold they hooked their claws into his skin and pulled with what seemed like silent groans of effort: infantry crawling through the mud of the battlefield. Now when they tasted his skin even their tongues were cold, like the brief lick of a draft. Then the emplacement in their ranks, more like artillerymen, the glossy abdomens rising, aiming, correcting angle and pitch, and firing a volley—the redhot agony of the sting. Slow spreading of false warmth as the envenomed drugs took effect. His leg was still cold, the wasps still cold; but warmth all the same.

They all looked the same to him, though each had been marked with a dot of coloured paint on their thorax. He thought he had worked it out: one for antibiotics of some kind, one for the growth serum that was regenerating his leg, and one for a painkiller. Those stings made no inroads on the pain everywhere else (from the cold, from the isolation, from the questioning) and he was sure they were designed not to. But they did help the leg. The stump became stonily inert instead of

a bonfire burning at his knee, or the riot of chewing sharks or razor-toothed lizards he sometimes hallucinated. When numb, it was manageable, and needed only to be transported to and from interrogations without weeping.

The leg, that is. Not him.

Though he also wept.

On Mondays and Thursdays one of the interrogators took him to the infirmary to see the prison doctor, whose name Alefret had still not learned. Strange that no one had said it in his hearing.

The doctor was short and slender, and very pale; with his gracile build and his black eyebrows sharp against his white forehead, he reminded Alefret of a birch sapling. The window behind the doctor’s narrow shoulders framed a beautiful thing: one last enemy city floating high on the horizon as a hawk. How had it not been brought down after two years of bombardment? It was a miracle—its every spire, every brick a miracle.

“It is a powerful fortification.” The doctor brusquely yanked the bandages from what remained of Alefret’s knee. “But they have nowhere left to run. Go on, Alefret, stare if you like—imprint it upon your eyes.”

“It is a miracle.”

The doctor looked up, his eyes not blue or green but grey, as if camouflaging themselves against the stone walls. “I’m going to change your wasps. You are becoming loose in the head.”

About a year ago he would have said, in his crisp, upper-class, urban accent, I shall report you for treason. But that had already happened and Alefret was already here. This was where you went if you were reported for treason. Here, now. And as far as Alefret could tell, the only reason he had not yet shared the fate of other traitors was because he was a miracle too.

I am the man they blew up who did not die. I am the man he cannot kill. Not for lack of trying.

During his interrogations, presumably at the nameless doctor’s orders, they avoided his stump. Everything else was fair game; and for a while Alefret had wondered why, if he was this medical miracle, the sole test subject

who had survived everything hurled at him, the doctor had not asked them to stop torturing Alefret lest it affect the research.

Later he had realized that he was not really a person to the doctor. Certainly nothing so grand as the man he cannot kill. Only an assortment of parts, some of which were of valid concern, some of which Alefret reckoned the pale man almost literally could not see, so that if he came into the room and there was a new bruise, or a fresh burn, anywhere except the site of the miracle-working, it did not register in his grey eyes.

The doctor said, “Very good.”

Was it? Alefret looked down at the stump: an ugly cut of meat, furiously crimson, ringed with the healed pinpricks of sting-delivered anaesthetic and the peppery speckles of glass and explosive and concrete and stone that had not been removed in those first frantic hours and were still steadily working their way inwards and outwards, like worms.

The crisply-sewn seam at the end still wept, still sobbed its thick, transparent tears from the central bulging, bloodshot eye of the bone the doctor had assured him would grow back first, surrounded by the tufty gelatine that would one day be muscle, nerve, tendon, skin, even hair, just as before. Only the leg, thought Alefret, was the miracle. The rest of him was so much meat.

A wasp hummed smoothly from its cage, sailed over his head, landed on his bare thigh. Iridescent blue and orange, like a hummingbird. The doctor nudged it away with the backs of his fingers, the only gentleness Alefret ever saw here; it was nearly enough to bring him to tears. The only thing capable of making him cry now was kindness.

“Not one doctor in a thousand could have salvaged that mess,” the pale man said, as he often did. “And never during a firefight... nor done this impossible thing, this regeneration. A word never before applied to mankind. An unreplicable combination of the wasp’s own venom and my years of research. All of medicine, perhaps all of science, will be forever changed, and you will again be whole. And still you will not thank us. Us, your countrymen, your protectors, your living

shields against the horror of the enemy.”

Your jailers, your torturers. In the face of the doctor’s proudly upraised chin, Alefret lowered his head, lower, lower, till his neck ached and his beard covered his breastbone. If you were part of the war effort, then you were proud of the war. The doctor, then, was proud in a way Alefret could not be and refused to be. Alefret could not even take pride in his own lack of pride.

The doctor snarled at Alefret’s submissiveness, but swiftly assumed the lofty expression of someone for whom certain emotions are beneath contempt. Back to work. He wound bandages, took samples, palpated the good flesh in the middle of Alefret’s thigh with a thumb like a paring knife.

“None of this is cheap, you know. It is an experimental program. No one believed I would succeed, no one. Then conditional upon my early and necessary success I received funding for six months only...”

“And I am the only survivor.”

“Who says that?”

“Someone said something,” Alefret said cautiously; the doctor’s tone had not been angry, but lightly curious, academic even. “I heard it in the hallway.” He felt something shift or change in the room, unheard, unseen; the interrogator, today’s minder, stood in the doorway of the infirmary, but Alefret thought he could feel the man’s breath on his back, even discern its sound (impossible!) in the long silence. The minder’s rage felt like the burning grasp of a ghost on the nape of his neck. I am going to regret saying that within his earshot.

What kind of man was this minder? Alefret knew already: it had been a long time since the last war, but not so long that it had passed out of everyone’s memory. When Alefret fled his village to take refuge in the capital, the elders had told him that in previous wars, the soldiers would burn their uniforms before doing the same, to avoid detection and reprisal. But this minder would never do such a thing. Even though successive waves of conscription and death might reduce the available uniform fabric from a full outfit to merely a jacket, then a

cloak, then armbands, then just a patch, at the end of the war he would not burn the patch. That was the kind of man he was. He lived for war, and if he had declared a secondary, private war against Alefret the traitor, so be it; he could fight on two fronts, three, as many as he needed.

“Supposing you are the only survivor,” the doctor said; Alefret wrenched his attention back from the sensation of a predator studying his neck. “Then you are the miracle, not that suspended clot of hovels and muck.” He never used the name of the enemy city. “You should show more gratitude, Alefret. Your every confession should be a—a love letter to my work.”

Alefret nodded, still looking down. The bandages dampened with seeping grief as he watched, an oblong moving warily along the seams of the cream-coloured cloth, then stuttering to a halt as if it had discovered, or suspected, an enemy trench.

From the toes that were no longer there, all the way to the back of his head, pain surged and returned: first the memory-pain of the explosion and the snapping collapse of the bones, then this new, fresh one, clean-edged and stitched shut, the impossible pain of growth, as if the leg was teething. The doctor did not notice the sound Alefret made when this happened.

In Edvor, the capital, the doctors wore sober and proper black. City folk called them crows and referred to feeding rather than paying them, as in, ‘Ah, she’s bad warm; you should put out scraps for a crow.’ But this doctor wore faded grey: the colour of the sky. As if he would be shocked to have fluids shed upon him. And indeed Alefret had never seen him stained with so much as a drop of blood.

“You should be paying us with respect and gratitude, if not actual money,” the doctor said as Alefret carefully regained his crutches. The wasps, changing shifts, moved in and out of their cages, and two perched on either of the doctor’s grey shoulders, listening. “Because you are dead weight otherwise. Worse than a thief. Just an empty hole into which we shovel food. You do know that.”

Alefret knew. How could he not? Every visit, the doctor told him this; and many other people had also told him. By now it must have been hundreds, perhaps

thousands. Even some of the soldiers in this prison, arrested for desertion or self-mutilation to avoid being sent to the front, had told Alefret this.

For a moment Alefret met the doctor’s colourless eyes with his own, but he found he could say nothing. The doctor did not care what Alefret had to say. To him it was like the barking of a distant dog: without language or meaning. Even when the doctor spoke to Alefret it was the way he spoke to his lab mice and rats and wasps and spiders; no reply was expected.

Alefret’s secret was not that he did not mind this treatment; it was that he expected it, and even felt that it was deserved. Not for anything he had done. For what he was.

After he had recovered enough to speak again, he had asked his captors—his inexplicable captors, for he could not at first understand why his own countrymen had imprisoned him, rather than the enemy—what they hoped to achieve by jailing him and his fellow pacifists, or at least those who could be clearly identified as belonging to the Pact.

It is a war crime, they replied. That is enough.

I said achieve, Alefret had said. That is not an achievement.

And then the questioning began.

Alefret had believed, if he had thought about it at all, that he and the others had been beneath official notice. Not even inconveniences. Actually invisible. Now he could not believe how naive he had been, or how wrong. They told him again and again, with knives, how wrong.

If he would not fight, and if he would not otherwise participate in and support the war, he was worse than dead weight; he was a criminal, and on top of that a traitor. There were no partisans and there was no such thing as the resistance. There was only this organization of cowards, when the entire country was being told that it could not cede so much as one inch. Cowards. A thick, impenetrable, useless mass, like a swamp, they said to him, sucking down the brave fighters

who, after all, fought only for his freedom, his and his countrymen. How could you, they said; how could you be so selfish. You watch them struggling and exhausting themselves and you add to their burden.

I will not support this war, Alefret said.

The questions were repeated ominously no matter what answer he gave: Do you communicate with the Meddon? Do you send them information? Intelligence? Do you meet with agents from their side? What have you told them? What have you given them? Don’t give us that shit about pacifists: did you give them maps? Names? Supplies? What have you given them? What? Do not speak. Only write.

Alefret wrote: I will not support this war. I have not supported this war. I do not support you and I do not support your enemies. At no time in the past have I done so. At no time in the future do I intend to do so.

Even if he had lied, he knew, the interrogations would not stop. They did not believe him. He watched passively as hope drained out of his body like pus. They would execute him if they wanted; they awaited only official orders. They would do nothing without orders. Even the torture instruments had to be signed out on a sheet attached to a clipboard; he had seen it. You had to use black or blue ink only. Not pencil. He could not prove his innocence or, if he had had any, his guilt; and the law was unjust anyway. And no one could help him. Everyone who might have been able to, or wanted to, or might even have considered it for a moment, was far from here.

He asked for a trial and they refused to give him one. For these efforts he did not receive either a yes or a no; but with what icy disdain did they turn their heads from the question! “I hate to see a man beg,” one of the interrogators said once—yes, today’s minder, Alefret was sure of it. “It makes me sick. To hear that note in the voice of a man. This is 

why we make you write, you know.”

A trial was not his greatest wish anyway. He did not know why he kept asking.

Back in his cell, he found himself wondering how recently the school had had pupils. Was it abandoned before or after the war started? Had the children been retrieved by their families after those few Meddon deserters began to straggle across the border to warn of troop movements? Or would your family simply abandon you if you had been sent here to be reformed? Perhaps the teachers had evacuated them, or maybe the children fled on their own, or...

He did not like to think about it. But you could say this much: by all accounts the enemy moved so quickly that in many cases they did not stop to ensure a total defeat of Varkallagi forces behind the front; and skirmishes continued in many places. It was possible the school was empty because... no, he would not say it. Even think it. The Meddon would not be so cruel.

At any rate, blood had been spilled here before the war. He knew it, felt it. The long-dried blood of children, not this new stuff.

The floors were smooth local limestone, cut and fitted nearly without visible seams. Wooden floors were too easy: you could pry those up, chisel holes in them, vanish. He knew this kind of architecture. Used in places prone to fire or escape. It was costly to quarry, haul, dress, fit; come to think of it, perhaps it was something else before it was a school, perhaps it really was a prison first. But certainly it was one of those buildings that would be repurposed again and again. Maybe when the Meddon got a hold of it they would use it for something else too. When, not if.

Outside, some miles away in the direction faced by the doctor’s window—not Alefret’s—the war raged on; or you would say it raged if it were louder. In fact nothing could be heard here. Varkal was low on ammunition, and to manufacture more was no easy thing now; the lizards could not breed nor mature fast enough, and they could not even be harvested quickly enough. The army had drafted the men and when the men were gone the women set to work; and when too many men had died, they drafted the women. Now women were dying, and no one could work.

Cities had already become uneasy alliances of the very old and the very young by the time Alefret fled to the capital. Indeed, he had been carrying two toddlers and two old ladies when the bomb took his leg. Nicely even in terms of weight distribution. You could almost laugh.

Balance, he thought now. Balance. Difficult now with something like a sixth of his bodily

 mass gone.

And they said it would grow back. He believed what he saw (the leg, the eye in the leg, the pain); but he still felt uneasy about it, because ‘his’ side was composed of liars. Liars who had spent so long demonizing the Meddon with radio and broadsheets that by the time the war actually began, no one on the fronts would evacuate. It is impossible, everyone said, that they are telling the truth now, when they have spent so long lying to us.

Again the lightspiders jittered and thrilled, frightened of oncoming footsteps in the hallway. Alefret blinked: on days he was taken to the doctor, they did not interrogate him. But it made sense that they had changed their mind. He had offended the good doctor, who had given no outward sign of it; he had been offensive, spoken offensively. The morning’s minder had said something. Someone had signed out the tools. Now he would...

The locks jingled: top, then bottom. Alefret sat heavily on the tiny shelf in the wall that had been a bed for a child, tugging the rags of his blanket over the stump of his thigh, blue-and-white strings waterfalling over the edge. Warmth drained from him into the stone at his back. He was already shivering when the minder and someone else entered, nearly filling the room, erect and haughty in their faded uniforms, still medalled, dazzling.

He had not seen the newcomer before. She was perhaps seventy, and beautiful in the way of a woman who only hit the full stride of that beauty at forty or fifty; she was like a court portrait rendered in oils of a queen widowed young. Her steely hair was combed straight back from a taut, round brow. Easier to paint, Alefret could not help but think. Some new torturer? Something worse? His face betrayed nothing but dull expectancy.

On her chest, awards and insignia glittered not like stars but flak, catching the weak autumn light. He did not know their entire system but it seemed to him that she had more decoration than most. Golden dots, stripes, ribbon, trim, and a patch sewn to her right sleeve of some unfamiliar animal. A general? Higher? What were the ranks?

“Do you know who I am, Alefret?”

“No.”

“No sir,” snarled the minder, starting from the doorway with his fist upraised. To Alefret’s surprise, she quelled him with a gesture of the fingers: a cutting movement, the smallest slash.

She said, “The good doctor says you are losing weight. Are the rations not sufficient?”

So she would not use the doctor’s name either. Why were they so invested in not telling him? Alefret said, “The rations are sufficient.” He met her eyes, the brass buttons of a raptor, and looked down again, not feeling as if he had actually managed to drop his gaze. Her eyes were sewn all over her coat, and continued to watch him. Her voice was smooth, even musical: the flute that plays the menacing counterpoint in minor key when the song about the wolf is sung around the fire.

“In a way, you’re very lucky to be in here.” She put her hands behind her back; Alefret visibly flinched, which she ignored. “In several ways. You’ve been informed, I’m sure, of the fates of those with whom you were arrested.”

Alefret marveled at the gymnastics she’d made the sentence perform to avoid ending it with a preposition, then woozily looked up again. His empty stomach sang. She was right; he was losing weight. He was hungry, not thinking clearly. What had she said? He sounded it out in his head again as if he were six years old and learning to read. Truthfully, in answer to her question, he had guessed, heard hints, never seen confirmation. “No.”

“Then you must wish to know, surely.”

He did not and this  had long ago failed to surprise him. ...