Force Majeure by Daniel O'Mahoney

whole buildings hauled into the mountains by mules, then by … thunderers the journal calls them … and then …’ Her breathing or her heartbeat must have quickened, as Luis noticed her agitation. ‘What’s the matter?’
    ‘Doctor Arkadin’s journals? You’ve read them? They’re here?’
    Luis’ shoulders rippled genially. ‘Someone wrote a journal, not him. I read it years back. Lord knows where it is today.’
    ‘I’d like to see it.’
    Luis held out a hand full of spare War-pieces. ‘It’s your move,’ he told her.
    So: there was the city where she couldn’t clear her head; there was the library, the place of secrets and conspiracies; there was the room she shared with Azure, precariously private; and on the roof, there was the howling pressure of the air, little of which ever reached her lungs. The only place where she felt truly herself was the memory garden, a scrubland full of stones on the mountainside. There was, Azure had said, an angel buried there, and it could well have been a cemetery. The stones – marked by inscriptions not in English and occasionally not even in Roman script – could well have been grave-markers, but most were ancient, and the earth, disturbed or not, was hidden under wild grass that grew waist-deep in places. Kay’s task out here, sometimes alone, sometimes as half of a taciturn pair, was ostensibly taming the ragged edges of the garden. In practice she was on guard duty. She was given tools – they were a sentry’s weapons.
    The last stone in the garden was a tottering obelisk on a crumbling base, its edges and inscriptions eroded into smoothness. A short way beyond that was the wall, which met the canal, which met the city. Aside from the bridge, under constant vigil, it was the narrowest gap between Candida and the old free house that claimed to predate it. Invaders came this way, jumping, bridging or swimming the moat. They were city boys mainly, barred from the house because of their age and their frame of mind. They came to gloat mostly and sat on the walls or the branches of overhanging trees, often soaked from the crossing or naked. They shivered helplessly as Kay and her companions patrolled the grounds. They shouted suggestions to the watchwomen like crude, hooting monkeys.
    ‘Show your boobs!’
    ‘That’s the wrong frame of mind,’ Luna said, walking with her on her first day in the garden. ‘They’re nothing but mouths,’ Quint mock-whispered.
    ‘ Don’t show your boobs,’ Luna warned.
    Kay shook her head. Gardening duty wasn’t peaceful but it was clear . She felt useful here and alert. Occasionally, very occasionally, an over-heated youth dropped from the wall and made a break for the doors. They couldn’t get far into the house without being seen and caught, but the gardeners were the first line of defence, and that gave Kay an odd sense of responsibility, and pride if she could intercept them. She charged them, becoming the fierce-haired giantess of her childhood fantasies, a red-haired Boudicca in an overgrown garden. The boys usually broke ground or dodged rather than counter-charged. If they tried, she cracked them lightly across the temple with the handle of whatever garden-weapon she’d brought; a hoe, a rake, a spade. The same handle, carefully turned, could knock the legs out from beneath them. In the last resort, she barrelled into them, trusting her height and her momentum to knock them both squirming to the ground. It was play-fighting.
    Don’t enjoy it.
    It isn’t a game.
    At the end of the third week, she caught a boy, topless and slippery with canalwater, at the base of the obelisk, and pinned him there with her boot firmly on his chest until his eyes and his mouth offered surrender. A dirt-etched picture on the side of the pillar showed a four-legged animal – a horse? – vaulting the sea-gap between two headlands, its rider a mere passenger clinging desperately to its mane. Kay felt for him. Her breaths fired hard, like