by M. R. Carey
“Is this the Rampart business you was talking about earlier?” I asked. For I still had some little hope, in spite of everything. Maybe all new Ramparts was tested in this way the first time they come into the hold after their testing.
But Catrin shaked her head. “You’re not a Rampart, Koli. You’re just a thief. You think I don’t know all the tech that’s here? Your music player was one of ours, that we bring up each year for the testing and then take back down again. It’s got our mark on it, though I doubt you seen that. If you had, you would of tried to scrape it off or cover it up.”
She was right about that, though I thought I knowed now what the mark might be. There was three scratches on the back of the DreamSleeve, all in a row and all the same size, which was about as long as my little fingernail. They was too neat to be made by accident. I should of thought that the Vennastins, or Ramparts of past times, would of had a way to know their own tech in case it got stole or lost.
“So that’s the start of the story,” Catrin said. “You broke in here, and took away seven pieces. The one you used today was one of the seven. Where are the others?”
“They’re under my bed, at the mill,” I told her. There didn’t seem to be no use in lying, that being the first place anyone would look.
“Did you get any of the others working?”
“No. Just the…” I almost said Monono Special Edition, which was what Monono always called her own DreamSleeve to tell it apart from the others. “Just that one,” I said instead.
Catrin come around behind me, which made my hair prickle somewhat. She wasn’t wearing the firethrower any more, but she was bigger and stronger than me and she could hurt me if she wanted to. She didn’t though. She put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed just a little, as if to give me comfort. “That ain’t it,” she said, soft as silk.
“I don’t know what you mean, Dam Catrin.”
“That ain’t the part of the story I need to hear, Koli. Be honest with me now. Be honest, and be brave, and there’s a way you can come out of this that’s not too bad. Thieves is hanged, but I don’t want to hang you. It’s bad for everyone when something like that happens. Let’s think our way around this, shall we, and see where we come out.”
I didn’t say a word to that. The words thieves is hanged was still clanging around inside my mind, big enough and loud enough that there wasn’t no room for nothing else. I come close to repeating them back to her to see if I could push them out again, for they was making me so weak I all but slipped off the stool.
“Starting up the tech for the first time is hard,” Catrin said in that same soft voice. “You’re a smart boy, but smart’s not good enough. You would of needed coaching. So who coached you, Koli? And what else did she tell you?”
That she rung like the tocsin bell, even louder than thieves is hanged. I seen what Catrin knowed, or what she suspected – and I decided right then that I wasn’t going to say nothing about Ursala. She had told me true, and none of this was her fault. What’s more than that, she had saved my life, and my sister Athen’s when she was like to die from the septicaemia. Hanged or not hanged, I did not mean to give her up.
“Nobody coached me,” I says. “I figured it out for myself.”
“That’s a lie,” Catrin says. She come back around to the front of me, and she squatted down so her face was closer to mine. She looked real sad, like all of this was forced on her the same way it was forced on me, and we was suffering it together. “Koli, this is bad enough already. Don’t make it worse by protecting the one who’s really at fault.”
“You want to know who coached me?” I says then. “On Dandrake’s blood?”
“Yes. On Dandrake’s blood. Tell me.”
“It was Mardew.”
Catrin’s eyes went wide. “Ratshit!” she said.
“Stop my heart if it’s a lie. I went to watch him and Haijon on the gather-ground when they was training. I seen what Mardew did and sometimes I heard things he said to Haijon when he thought I wasn’t listening, or when I pretended to be asleep. That’s the only coaching I got, Catrin. From your sisterson.”
She leaned in closer still. She cupped one hand round the back of my neck to hold me there while she looked at me, the way you’d look at a piece of part-steeped wood to see if any buds had sprouted in it. She was searching the grain of my face for the lie that was there.
And I just looked back at her, like the lie wasn’t nowhere to be found, when all the while it was inside me, wanting, wanting, wanting to burst out. And it almost did, for her watching me so close was pulling the words up out of my throat, but just when I felt like I couldn’t keep silent no longer, she spoke up again.
“Was it just you, or was there others? Some friends of yours that you shared the risk and the plunder with? Say their names, if there were, and I’ll go light on them. I promise.”
“There was just me.”
“And who’d you talk to after? Who’d you show off your fine new treasure to? For we both know you couldn’t of kept a secret like that all to yourself.”
“Yeah, I did!” I said it like she had give me an insult, letting her see some anger that was really just fear turned around to another purpose. “I was saving it up for today. That way you’d have to make me a Rampart, because everybody in the village would be looking on. I wasn’t going to risk someone else spilling the secret first.”
She stood up at last. She reached out to take the candle from the shelf, but I spoke up quickly. “Leave me a light, Dam Catrin,” I says. “Please.”
She thought about that for a moment or two, then she went out of the room, leaving the candle set where it was. I heard the bolt hit the end of its groove again, and I went down off the stool onto my knees, shaking all over like a sickness had fell on me.
I was alone for a fair while after that, but I didn’t sleep again. I was thinking the whole time. Why was Catrin so keen to know who I’d talked to, or who had talked to me? I thought at first it was just because she hated Ursala so much, but then she had dropped that questioning and asked me about my friends instead.
It come to me at last what must be in her mind. If I had made the DreamSleeve work, even by accident, then I had got to know it wasn’t nothing special in me that had done it – that it was just how the tech was made. And if I knowed that, I knowed that Ramparts was no different from anyone else, but only made it seem like they was by tricks and lies.
That was why Fer jumped in so fast to stop Mardew’s mouth when he asked me how to make the DreamSleeve switch on. He was giving away the big secret, that nobody was ever meant to speak of.
And that was why Catrin had gone about to bring me inside the Underhold right away, not giving me the chance to say a word to anyone about the DreamSleeve or what I could make it do. Every word I spoke was a choker seed that could root between the stones of Rampart Hold and tear them down.
So now here I was, under the ground and in Catrin’s hand, that wasn’t like to open up and let me go again. A sick fear growed in me then. I only seen one way that this could end. They was going to have to kill me, for if they let me go they was letting go of everything. All their power, their riches, the things that set them up higher than the rest of us in Mythen Rood.
I wished mightily that I had been worse in keeping secrets than I was.
It felt like a long time again before I heard the bolt move, but I think my crowded thoughts made it seem so. Mardew come in with a wooden platter in his hand. The smell of roasted pig-meat filled the little room, and I sit up at once. It’s a curious thing that even when you’re scared for your life you can still be hungry, and jump up like a dog at the prospect of a meal.
Mardew set the platter down and went outside again. He come in a second time, carrying a jug. I had already snatched up the platter, but finding my mouth was fearful dry I held out my hand for the jug too. Whatever was in it, I would start with a swig of that to make the food go down easier.
But Mardew held it out of my reach.
“Beg for it, Koli,” he says with a sneer on his face. “And maybe I’ll let you have some.”
Well, I didn’t beg, for I seen well enough that Mardew was sent by Catrin to feed me and would do as he was bid by her, the same as everyone did. But as he stood there with the jug in his hand, holding it up out of my reach, I noticed that his face was swole up around his eye on the one side and his jaw on the other side.
I opened my mouth to ask him who had walked over his face, but I thought better of it before the words was out. I could see Mardew was in a great rage. His teeth was set in his bottom lip and his eyes was staring fierce at me. I seen too that he had brung the platter and the jug in one at a time because he was wearing the cutter on his right hand.
I guess I was seeing a lot of things clear right then. My body didn’t have nowhere to go so my mind was just racing, racing. Catrin must of beat Mardew because she believed the lie I told her – that I learned to use the DreamSleeve by watching him teach the cutter to Haijon. So it was me, really, that had made those marks on him, and he probably knowed that as well as I did. It was best I didn’t rile him further.
Still, I wasn’t going to beg like a dog for a bone, neither.
“Let me have some water, Mardew,” I said. “I been here for hours now, and I’m parched to death.”
“Parched to death is what you should be, you thieving bastard,” Mardew said. “We ought to lock the door and walk away and come back in the Spring to air the room out.”
“Yeah, but that’s Catrin’s call,” I said, “and none of yours.”
He tipped up the jug and let some of the water spill out on the floor. “Oops,” he said. “What was that I hear you say?”
I kept my mouth shut this time. He spilled a little more water, to see if he could get a rise out of me, but I seen there wasn’t no way to win this game except by not playing it. I took a handful of meat off the platter, and a slice of turnip that was there too, and commenced to eat.
By and by, Mardew set the jug down, acting like he didn’t care. “Maybe I spit in it, Koli,” he said. “Maybe I done worse. Cheers.” He went out and slammed the door.
As soon as he was gone, I fell on that jug like a knifestrike and drunk about half of it off in one go. It was water, cold from the well, and it was the sweetest I ever tasted. I wasn’t feared that Mardew might of spit or pissed in it. If he had, he wouldn’t of said anything about it but only stayed to watch me drink with a big grin on his stupid face.
I finished the meal, but kept back some of the water. I didn’t know how long I might be kept down there.
I kind of got an answer to that, though, when I waked up from another doze a little later. Someone had been in the room while I was asleep, coming and going without waking me. Whoever they was, they had took away the wore-down candle and put in a fresh one. They had also put a shit-bucket in the corner of the room for me to use.
So they was meaning to keep me for a while yet.
31
Some days went by.
I could keep a count of their passing by the number of meals I got to eat, which I marked by taking blobs of wax from off of the candle and sticking them to the inside of the door in a line. I couldn’t read, back in those days, but I could count well enough on my fingers or if I had something else that would be a marker. I had steeped the green wood oftentimes at the mill, and you couldn’t do that safely if you couldn’t count off the days in some wise.
It was most often porridge they give me to eat after that first day, and it was most often Fer, Rampart Arrow, that brung it in to me. But sometimes it was Mardew, which meant the porridge come with insults and maybe a kick or two. He wasn’t done with hating on me. I thought at first it was just on account of that beating, but then one day he asked me again how to make the DreamSleeve work, and I realised it was that too. He must of liked “Enter Sandman” a whole lot. Either that or he couldn’t stand for there to be anything that someone else had and he didn’t. I was none too keen on being kicked, but I took heart from it anyway, for it meant he had not got Monono to talk to him, or play for him. I would of hated that.
I thought about her all the time. I had never got to thank her for what she done for me, going out so far to find the personal security alarm and bring it back. I had never even said I was sorry for those times when I tried to get her to authorise me – treating her like she was some kind of animal I meant to train up instead of like a real person. For she was one, I seen now, though she lived in a silver box. Finding her and waking her had been the best thing I ever done, not because it made me a Rampart but because it meant I got to meet her and learn about music and Tokyo from her and be her friend, at least for a little time.
I thought about Jemiu too, and how she had worried about me when I was being just about as selfish and bad as I could be, scanting my duties and my share-work so others had got to pick up the slack for me. I wished I could see her again, and Athen and Mull too, though I was not so foolish as to think that was going to happen.
Apart from thinking, there was not much else I could do. I spent a lot of time walking back and forth across the room, for if I sit still on the cold floor for too long I got fearful cramps. Other times, I played the stone game in my head against myself, trying to set up ways to win against a three-stone vantage and a made king. And for some hours I used the point of the knife I et with to carve on the inside of the door, down near the bottom corner where it wouldn’t be seen. The wood was a lighter colour in the heart than it was on the outside face, so it was quite good to work with, despite being hard and dry and fighting back against the blade. I cut Spinner’s face into the wood, as well as I could fashion it, and though I wasn’t happy with the way it come out, yet it passed the time a little.
Ten meals come and went. I had not seen Catrin since that first night, only Fer and Mardew, and I had not seen nobody else at all. There was a strange thought that come to me sometimes, which was that Spinner and Haijon was living right above me, enjoying their month of honey and never dreaming how close I was. For Catrin must of lied to them, surely. She must of lied to everyone. If people knowed I was down here, they would of come. Someone would of come.
Ten meals meant three days, more or less. And since that first one had been a supper, I guess it was late on the third day when Catrin come back. She brung the stool again, and sit herself down on it. She brung the firethrower too, slung loose around her shoulder.
“How you feeling, Koli?” she asks me.
“I’m about as well as can be expected, Rampart Fire,” I says. It come by itself, me naming her like that, for when she wore the firethrower that was who she was. “Though I can’t say I’m happy to be here.”
She smiled, just for a second – a smile that was there and then gone again, right after. “No,” she says. “I imagine not. If it’s any comfort to you, we’re not happy either.”
“No?” I says. “I hope that’s not on account of me.”
“Oh, it’s very much on account of you.” She didn’t smile this time, though I meant what I said as a kind of a joke. She sighed instead, and rubbed her shoulder as though she had been carrying a big weight and had only set it down for a moment, knowing she had got to pick it up again soon. “The thing is,” she said, “we’ve got a choice to make, and it’s a hard one. Very hard. On top of that, we don’t know how far to believe you. If you’re telling the truth, in some ways that makes the choice easier. But it seems like we can’t know for sure until after. Until we see what comes, or doesn’t come.”
“What is it you’re choosing between?” I asked her.
She shaked her head. “How’d you know, Koli?” she says, instead of answering. “Tell me true now. How’d you know what to do to make that tech wake up? It’s not an easy thing to do, even knowing what we know. If you’re ignorant, it’s not possible. So someone helped you, or someone told you, or someone give you a clue, at least. We won’t be mad if you tell us. It will help us to keep this thing where it belongs.”
&nbs
p; “The DreamSleeve belongs to me now. It waked for me.”
“Is that what it’s called?” I bit my tongue, now it was too late and I already give that away for nothing. But Catrin didn’t seem that interested. “I wasn’t talking about the tech,” she says, “but about the rest of it. You know what I mean.”
I made pretend I was really stupid. “No, I don’t know nothing, Rampart Fire. I promise you.”
“You know a lot more than you should. The question I’d like an answer to is, what does Jemiu know? And them sisters of yours? How far does this go, in other words? You know when we clear the ground inside the fence, we got to make sure not a single seed stays rooted, but burn every last one of them out even if the ground is scorched bare.”
I got scared then, more than I ever been before. So scared I was hard put not to cry. “They don’t know nothing about it,” I said. “It was me on my own, Catrin. I swear it. I never told them any of what I know.”
“Ah,” she says, kind of leaning in on me a little. “So then you do know something.”
“I know that what Ramparts do, anyone can do,” I said. “I know it’s in the tech, not in you, and you just cheat each time to make it look the way it does. That’s what I know.” I wasn’t meaning to say any of this until she said that thing about my mother and my sisters. I give her the one truth to make her believe the rest of it, that I hadn’t told nobody in the village what I found out. Only I left Ursala out of it, for Catrin wasn’t asking after her any more and I was happy to leave it that way if I could.
Catrin nodded, like I was repeating back a hard lesson and I had got it right at last.
“I didn’t tell it to nobody,” I said again. “I swear. If I did, they would of spoke up by now, wouldn’t they? With me being lost to all sight for three days.”
“You’re not lost,” Catrin said. “And nobody is looking for you. Set your mind right on that, Koli. I could kill you here and now, and it wouldn’t make no difference to nobody.”