We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Siege of Burning Grass by Premee Mohamed, out from Solaris on March 12.
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 to infiltrate one of Med’ariz’s flying cities, obeying 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 his own morals and the principles of his fellow resistance members?
PART ONE
ST. 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.
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The Siege of Burning 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.
Excerpted from The Siege of Burning Grass, copyright © 2024 by Premee Mohamed.
