by Simon Morden
He’d first kept it at bay, turning and keeping the blade-point at its muzzle as it circled him, looking for an opening. Then as it lunged at him one more time, he caught it on the nose. What had happened after that hadn’t been pretty, but at least it had been relatively quick.
Its claws couldn’t get to him through the tough material of his boilersuit, but its teeth had been a different matter. Dalip knew that if it had bitten him on his face or his hands or his feet, he’d need antibiotics that probably didn’t exist, and he’d also be bleeding heavily with a dog chewing on part of him.
He’d bunched the material on his arm, and offered that instead. It had clamped on, vice-like jaws closing hard, and he’d stabbed it. In the back, in the sides, and when it wouldn’t let go, the back of its neck.
The actual fight, from first nick to final, fatal blow had taken mere seconds. He’d left the knife in the dog, assuming he was still a prisoner, and wasn’t going to be allowed to keep a weapon.
She’d applauded him politely. Told him that Down was his true home. Then she’d left, taking the man with the silver cane with her.
That was all. Dalip had sat down in the centre of the circular floor and started to shake, the dog still and bleeding next to him. Then the guard had re-entered through the small door and taken the dog away. He’d left the door open, though. The invitation was obvious, one Dalip wasn’t quite ready to accept.
He pulled his sleeve back slowly, uncertain as to what he was going to see. Standing at the crease while some six-foot-tall fast bowler, only twenty-two yards away, launched a small hard ball at ninety miles an hour? Sometimes there were injuries: big, fat circular bruises, and once, a broken rib.
The skin on his forearm was torn, but only in a couple of places, and more shallow grazes than deep cuts. He could move his fingers and turn his wrist. The dark mottled arcs, top and bottom, showed where the teeth had dug in. It wasn’t that bad, but he might not be able to move it come the morning. And he’d had to kill the stupid dog, too.
He wondered where he’d got the courage to do it, to do something so alien to him as to stab another living creature to death. It might have been instinct, he supposed, but it was certainly nothing he’d learnt.
He looked up. The balcony was out of reach: he knew he’d never jump high enough to even get his fingertips on it. He looked at the pool of blood, and the smears leading from it, away and out the door. It was that way or no way.
Realising that he didn’t have an option, he dragged himself up. Beyond the door, he could go back to his cell, or keep following the blood, which trailed straight ahead, through the other door he’d noticed on the way in. That door was open too, and there was no one stopping him from going through.
There were high narrow windows, a fire, a rough table and some stools. Another door opened, and the guard came back through, blocking out the view outside – a courtyard, a wall, a fire issuing black, greasy smoke – before closing the door behind him.
‘Get yourself cleaned up,’ he said, jerking his head at a barrel.
‘Why am I here?’ said Dalip, not moving.
‘To fight.’ The man went to the barrel himself, and plunged his arms up to his elbows into the water. ‘What else?’
‘I didn’t come here to fight.’
‘Then why are you here?’
The circular argument infuriated Dalip. The guard scrubbed at his hands with a brush, then cast it aside.
‘I’m here by accident.’
‘No, you’re not.’ The guard took a towel, if the scrap of filthy material could be called such, and rubbed himself dry with it. ‘No one comes here by accident. You were going to die, right?’
The fire, the heat. ‘Yes.’
‘That’s when you made your choice. Die there or live here.’
‘But killing dogs? That’s not living.’
‘It is if that’s what you have to do to keep living.’ The guard threw the towel at Dalip who instinctively reached up and caught it before it slapped him wetly in the face. ‘Wash. Sit.’
Dalip did as he was told. The water wasn’t clean, but it was cleaner than he was. He carefully avoided washing the wound on his arm, though. But he did gather up his hair and thrust his head into the barrel, emerging with a gasp.
On the table was a wooden plate, with some crude bread and a wrinkled apple. Now he realised just how hungry he was. Opposite was the guard, again indicating with a jerk of his head that this was Dalip’s.
He sat warily. ‘Is this my reward, then?’
‘You’ve had your reward already. This is just food. Eat it or don’t, I don’t care.’
The cup next to his plate had water in it, hopefully not from the same barrel he’d just washed in. He was going to get sick if he didn’t drink it, just as he might if he did. If there was no alternative, like everything else he was having to endure, he’d have to cope.
His teeth still felt loose from the beating he’d had when he’d been captured, so he chewed slowly, watched all the time by the guard.
‘What’s your name?’ asked the man as Dalip moved on to his apple.
Perhaps he shouldn’t tell him, mindful as he was of the wolfman’s words. ‘Singh,’ he said.
‘Singh. What does that mean?’
‘Lion.’
It may have been funny, but it shouldn’t have been funny enough to make a man fall off his chair. When his gaoler had recovered, wiping his eyes and his mouth, and righting his stool, Dalip had reduced the apple to a thin woody core. The pips were lined up on the edge of his plate.
‘So, little lion man. Why are you here?’
‘I’m not here to fight.’
‘Then why are you here?’
‘We’ve done all that.’ The urge to wipe the table clean of plate, cup and the guard’s grin was strong. ‘None of us have done anything to anyone. Yet we’ve been lied to, taken against our will, locked up, and now, you’re making me kill dogs for some mad woman’s entertainment. Why?’
‘Because.’
Dalip howled in frustration. ‘That’s not an answer. We don’t deserve to be treated this way.’
‘How else do you think you should be treated?’ The smile slipped. ‘Listen. Until you do something that earns you better treatment, you’re lower than maggots, you’re lower than that, even. Just dirt. You came with nothing, you are nothing: you can stay nothing, I don’t care. No one’s going to be kind to you – you can forget all that. You work, and maybe she’ll pay attention to you.’
‘I will not live like that.’
‘Then,’ he said, ‘you’ll die like that.’ He took Dalip’s plate away, and tipped the pips and crumbs on to the floor. ‘It’s not that bad. You’ll get used to it.’
‘That’s what they said about people calling me nappy-head in the street. I didn’t get used to it.’ Dalip clenched his jaw. ‘I want my patka back.’
‘Your what, now?’
‘Patka. My head covering. The black one.’
‘They were taken away for a reason.’ The man reached out for Dalip’s cup, but Dalip snatched it away and drained it.
‘What’s the reason?’
‘Because she wanted me to.’
Dalip passed the cup across the table. ‘It’s important to me. That and my turban, and the steel bracelet, and the comb, and the little sword. They’re what marks me out as a Sikh.’
‘So earn them.’
‘How?’
The man got up from the table, banged the plate against the top and simply put it back on the pile with the others. The cup went unwashed on to a shelf. Dalip looked up and around him, at the soot-stained wooden roof-beams, the cobwebbed corners, the rough, unfinished, unloved nature of everything.
‘Everyone’s different. For you? You know what you need to do.’
‘Fight? I won’t do that.’
The guard put his hand on the knife at his belt. ‘You’ll do it when you’re told to.’
‘No. I’m not going to be some sort of, whatever it is. Performing seal.’
‘Then the next time you go into the pit, you’ll die.’
‘I’m not going in there again. I’m just not.’
The knife, drawn in a flash, lunged across the table at Dalip, and he stepped back. ‘You’ll fight or you’ll die. Doesn’t bother me where you do it.’
Had Dalip imagined a hint of desperation? ‘She won’t be happy if I die in my cell, will she?’
‘I’ll drag you out by your mane, little lion man.’ The guard passed the knife hand to hand and began circling the table. Dalip began to side-step, keeping the man opposite.
‘The moment you touch my hair is the moment you’d better be ready to finish it one way or the other. Just because I won’t fight in your pit doesn’t mean I won’t fight in my cell.’
‘We’ll come in mob-handed and take you down. Fists and feet, just like they did in the forest.’
‘And once you’ve beaten me up and thrown me in front of her, what then? I’m not stupid. I know that that dog was just the beginning. Next time it’ll something bigger, with more teeth, and sooner or later I’ll slip or fall, or drop the knife, or just get beaten. So you can either stop this nonsense, or kill me now. I’m not dying because someone thinks it’s fun to watch.’
He’d moved around the table far enough that the door leading to the outside was at his back, and his guard was between the table and the wall. There was an opportunity, if he was willing to take it.
He slapped his palms on the table’s edge, then quickly turned them so that his fingers were underneath. Then he heaved.
The guard didn’t realise what was happening at first. The table top reared up at him, and caught him squarely in the chest. As it started to fall it kept on turning.
Dalip didn’t wait to see where it landed. He bolted for the door, wrestled with its unfamiliar latch for a second before dragging the wood aside and running through, heedless of where he might end up.
Sun and sky. Momentarily dazzled, he tried in an instant to spot a way out, or somewhere that might lead to a way out. Whichever way he looked, there was a wall: tall, wide enough to walk on. Between him and it were, to his left, a short stone building, surrounded by crude wooden ones, and to his right, a patchwork of vegetable plots.
Dead centre, a gate, which he’d missed the first time.
He started to run.
The gate was open. There was no one even near it. The two bent backs over the rows of cabbages were turned against him. He was closing on them fast, head down like he was heading for the boundary, then past them without either of them looking up.
He glanced behind him, to see what lead he had. The guard, knife in hand, face screwed up in rage, was just emerging from the door.
Plenty. He’d make it with time to spare. He’d worry what lay beyond the wall when he was outside it. It couldn’t be worse than what he was running from.
No shouts. No alarm bells. He didn’t care why not. The view through the gate was widening: a lake, a mountainside, and open sky.
A shadow flickered over him. By the time he looked up, it was ahead, over the wall, turning back, a roar of wind under leathery, translucent wings. Dalip was almost at the gate when the scene beyond vanished, and the gap was taken up with a lunging, grinning reptilian head and a lithe, coiling serpentine body. Wings unfurled, it blocked his way, even if he was going to chance the razor-sharp teeth and two powerful sets of claws. The black scales only served to highlight the red of the open jaws.
It flapped its wings. The gale it created almost blew him over. He skidded to a halt. It hissed, and snapped at him, prevented from closing on him by its sheer size.
This was his gaoler, not the men. How could he possibly escape if this monster was loose?
Something heavy met the back of his skull. He was almost too surprised to fall. An arm came around his neck and a knife blade was pressed to his ear.
‘That was stupid, lion man. Very, very stupid.’
‘It’s a dragon. It’s really a dragon.’ Dalip didn’t struggle. There was now no point to struggling, or escaping, or any act of defiance. The geomancer had a dragon.
‘Wyvern, she calls it. I’ve seen it eat a man in two bites.’
It hissed at him again, its forked tongue rippling. Dalip could feel its hot, moist breath, smell its last meal rank on the wind.
‘I didn’t know. I didn’t understand.’
‘If I cut you, if I slice through your ear so that you bleed, I don’t think even she could hold it back. The scent, you see, it drives it wild. You’d be dead meat before you’d run another yard.’ The guard tightened his grip and the keen edge of the knife kissed Dalip’s skin.
Dalip swallowed against the man’s arm. The wyvern pulled its head back through the gate and stretched its wings. In two beats, it was perched on the wall, peering down at them, head cocked to one side to see them better.
‘What’s it going to be, lion man? In the belly of the beast, or back inside with me?’
The wyvern’s claws scrabbled for purchase, and it flapped to keep its balance. To Dalip, it looked like its wings were blotting out the sky.
‘Back inside. Take me back.’
‘On your feet then, and I’ll stick you if there’s any nonsense. Come on, little lion man, back to the pit where you belong.’
Dalip managed to get upright, and started the long walk back to his cell. Despite the knife at his back, he did his best to look around him. The central tall tower, with its conical roof. The more substantial gatehouse to the right. The two mountains, one behind him and one ahead, looming over the circular wall. An arched bridge leading from the main tower’s first floor to the shorter nearby cluster of buildings where he’d fled from, and was being led back to.
It was all a little ramshackle, like everything had been new once, a couple of hundred years ago, and now it was fading, slowly being returned to the ground from which it had been raised. But it was still formidable. And guarded by a dragon.
They’d reached the door. With an extra push between his shoulder blades to send him sprawling, it was slammed shut behind him, and bolted top and bottom.
‘Pick the table up.’ A toe jabbed his ribs. ‘Be quick about it.’
He did it, and he set the stools around it, and waited for the next instruction.
‘Why are you here?’ asked the guard.
Dalip remained mute.
‘That’s better. Next choice is whether you want to live for a short time or a long time.’ The guard sheathed his knife, and squinted at Dalip. ‘I’m guessing a long time, right? You don’t look like a kid who wants to die any time soon.’
‘I still don’t understand why you’re doing this to me.’
‘Because she’s seen it in the stones, in the leaves and the feathers, lion man. She’s seen you. And she’s right, isn’t she? There’s plenty of fight in you.’
‘I’ve never fought anyone, ever.’
‘Then you’ve wasted your time. You were born for this.’
‘I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how to fight.’
‘You need a teacher. I’ll find you someone.’
‘No,’ said Dalip without thinking. He didn’t want this stinking, pig-faced lackey or anyone connected with him.
‘Suit yourself.’
‘Stanislav. The other man you took. I want him.’
They stared at each other, and eventually the guard broke first. ‘All right. He doesn’t seem the sort, but why not?’
15
They were walking through the forest below Crows’ tumbling tower.
‘Can you find your way back?’ he asked her, and she turned around to see the way they’d come.
> ‘I reckon.’ The ground sloped up, either side of them, and if she gained a ridge-top, she thought she’d be able to see the ragged battlements easily.
‘Then we haven’t gone far enough.’
‘You’re not trying to get rid of me, are you?’
‘You’re very suspicious, Mary. Not everybody is trying to hurt you.’ He held his hands up above his head and embraced the sky. ‘This is not even magic. You find your way around with street signs and familiar buildings, yes?’
‘And?’
‘Where are your street signs? Where are your parks, your big shops, your busy junctions? They are nowhere, and even though we have barely gone any distance at all, you are already lost.’
‘All the trees look the same,’ she complained. ‘That’s not really fair.’
‘Being able to hide from the wolfman will not help you if you do not know where you are, or where you are going. So I will show you a few simple tricks.’
‘Magic tricks?’
‘That depends on whether you think the sun rising in the morning is magic, or the folds of the land are magic, or the way the wind blows is magic.’ He raised his eyebrows at her.
Mary looked up at him. ‘I’m guessing they are.’
‘Then you would be half-right. They are not magic, but they may bring magic with them.’
He said nothing else until they suddenly stepped out of the forest and on to the shore of the lake she’d seen from the castle. Close to, it was more of an inland sea, and even though they had been walking for what seemed like ages, judging both time and distance without a watch or familiar landmarks was hard.
Crows walked down to the shingle beach, where little waves lapped the stones. ‘Can you find your way back now?’ He held up his finger as her mouth opened. ‘Do not tell me yes or no. Tell me how, and take your time. Think.’