by Kate Elliott
“Leave off!” The sergeant sauntered forward. “Find me stout sticks and big rocks.” He surveyed the huddled mass of captives, with their knees dripping and their chins damp. “You want to join us, be a soldier, you learn how to kill.” As soldiers brought him sticks he thrust them into the hands of the reluctant captives. “Just like the lords command us to do. Go on, then. Hit him as hard as you can. Aui! Don’t make me mad at you.”
He grabbed a boy and shoved him up to the prone youth, who was trying to crawl away, his face bloody and his look dazed. In Shai’s eyes, all movement slowed.
The lad holding the stick tapped the lad’s leg. The sergeant cuffed him so hard he reeled. “Hit. Or I’ll kill you for disobedience.”
Down the sticks came, one by one, some breaking over the body and others holding firm. The captives looked as dazed as if they were the ones being beaten, but they kept hitting and hitting and those who hesitated were struck until they, too, took a turn. Until the lad’s face was crushed in.
But he wasn’t yet dead. His spirit still inhabited his body, although from the blood running from his nose and the hollow where his skull had been caved in, it was hard to imagine how his spirit could reside there.
“Here, now, what about the ox?” Twist trotted over to where Shai crouched silently by the stream, the girl lying on the ground beside him, her head turned to watch the beating. He shoved on Shai’s shoulder, but Shai had braced himself, so he wasn’t shifted.
He grinned, looking right up into the man’s ugly face. “I chop wood. I chop wood.”
“Give him an axe,” laughed the soldier. “Let’s see if he can lop off its head in one go.”
The sergeant waded over. “The hells! Are you a cursed horse’s ass? You don’t go giving a fellow with arms that size an axe, you gods-cursed lack-brain. Get on now. Time to get moving.”
The horses were brought, the captives prodded into lines.
Vali uncurled from the ball he’d made of himself. “Whsst! They overlooked me, thank the gods.”
Shai sat rigid, not sure he could ever move again. If he closed his eyes, he saw sticks rising and falling in the hands of frightened children; if he opened them, he saw the body, and the ghost girl patting the beaten lad to try to rouse him.
“Heya!” murmured Vali. “Best get moving, you don’t want to get killed.”
“He’s not dead,” muttered Shai.
Vali looked at him sideways. “He looks dead.”
The familiar prickle of warning raced along Shai’s skin. In Kartu Town, they burned those who could see ghosts, for being tainted with the evil eye. Here, they killed those who weren’t obedient. No use taking chances.
“Get up,” he said to the girl.
“I don’t want to be beat like that,” Yudit whispered, struggling to her knees although she hadn’t the strength to rise.
“Get moving!” shouted the sergeant.
Whips cracked. Horses clopped through the shallows and plunged across breast-deep at the ford. The captives slogged through, shivering, but the worst cold was surely in their hearts, knowing what they had done.
“You there, ox! Get moving!”
He scooped up the girl and slung her over his back like a sack of wool to be brought down Dezara Mountain to market. Not much to carry. Vali slogged along beside, his expression thoughtful, his eyes seeking.
As he waded the ford, the sergeant yelled after him. “Best leave her if she can’t walk on her own. You fall behind, too, and we’ll kill you, too. You’re not that much use to us, ox.”
“He’s too stupid to understand your meaning,” said the one called Twist.
Shai clambered with difficulty up the far bank, Vali balancing him with a grip on one elbow, and shifted Yudit to a marginally more comfortable position over his shoulders. He filled his belly with breath, finding strength. Then he fell into line with the others, abandoning the dying boy and the ghost who would not leave him.
39
In the Barrens, underground, lamplight flickered. Nallo ceased cutting on the face of the tunnel immediately and crawled with mattock in hand back past the second lamp and toward the bottom of the shaft. She crouched under the hole, a hand gripping the rope in case she needed to tug for a lift out. Down the tunnel, the flame dimmed, pulsed twice, and flared to a steady flame. Behind her, Mas was using the back of his spade to tamp down the debris in a bucket, seemingly unconcerned. He’d done similar work before. He had an instinct for danger.
“Doesn’t it get to you?” If she thought too much about the space in which they crouched, she’d scream.
“Neh. We’re getting four times the rate of buyout toward our debt contracts as the ones working aboveground. Even the lads taking the extra shift of militia training only get half rates of what we do. It’s worth it. I might stay on after I’ve paid off my debt, work for coin.”
“They’ll be working on these irrigation channels for years.”
“So they will. I can make a tidy sum, hope to start a house of my own.” He moved up beside her with the bucket. “Let me get this hooked up. You want me to do cutting?”
She refused to show weakness, although her shoulders and legs and back ached. The supervisor had told her this was man’s work, best fit for short men so the tunnel roof didn’t have to be cut very high, but a strong woman could fit into narrower spaces than most men. She had proved her worth. Wiping sweat from her brow, she returned to the face of the tunnel. Behind, the winch creaked as the full bucket was hauled up. Mas began to fill another.
She cut with the mattock, checking her direction by lining up on the two lamps. He shoveled and filled. Later, they switched out. Increasingly they heard the faint hammering vibrations of the team working in their direction from the shaft ahead, but they remained yet a fair distance apart. The winch reeled up full buckets and lowered empty ones. The work would have been monotonous, if not for the memory of the fall that last week had buried two men, and the water that had drowned the boy from Old Fort before that, and the old man who had asphyxiated when they’d sunk their first attempt at a mother well.
The second shift was lowered on the rope. Nallo and Mas chose to walk out along the conduit toward the mouth about half a mey distant. The gentle pitch and clay floor made the journey an easy one; shafts offered light and air about every two hundred paces. Mas was a scrawny older man, toughened by years of hard labor.
“You going to try for the militia, Nallo?”
“Neh. I’m too tired after my shift to do any drilling. The Qin don’t want women in the militia units anyway. What about you?”
“Neh, I’m too old for that.” He halted in the darkest part midway between two shafts. “Eihi! We’ve got debris here.”
She swore under her breath, thrilled by discomfiting fear. As she bent to shovel at the tiny hills of debris heaped along the floor, he probed the ceiling for a breach. A grain spat onto her neck, followed by a hissing spill that got under her tunic, crawling along her spine.
“Seems like nothing,” he said, “just a bit of loose—”
The sound crackled like a body turning over on a bed of pebbles. Mas grabbed at her.
“Move!”
She bent for the buckets, but he yanked harder as, in a downpour, loose material rained down. She ran with head bent under the low ceiling. A soft rumble expanded behind her and a cloud of dust nipped at her heels.
And faded.
Mas jogged on a ways farther, then halted to spit debris out of his mouth.
“Shouldn’t we keep moving?”
“Neh, this is well packed, we dug this section ourselves if you recall.”
Her neck was clammy, and her hands were hot. “I’ll like to get out.”
“Cursed fools were supposed to reinforce that area. Don’t know what they’re thinking not to have done it yet.”
“Can we get out?” She was starting to shake.
“Eh, sure.” As they walked mouth-ward, he chatted on like nothing had happened. “Listen, what I said
before? About starting up my own house? I’ll need a wife. You interested?”
She licked grit from her lips and thought about slapping him upside the back of the head. She was strong enough that it would really hurt him. “Eh, that’s a kindness, Mas. I’m not interested, thanks.”
“Well, then, what with there being no Devouring temple to visit, if you had a thought about a bit of sharing?”
Maybe a month’s hard labor had mellowed her. Maybe it was knowing he had likely saved her life back there. Maybe it was just that the stone-lined mouth loomed before them, sun bright beyond the dim confines of the underground conduit down which water would someday flow to irrigate fields. As they ducked out through the stone-framed mouth of the conduit and blinked in the hard sunlight, she managed a polite reply.
“I appreciate you asking, but I don’t want to get in trouble with the Qin.”
Mas scratched dust from his scant beard. He looked across the flat depression that would become a reservoir and toward the higher practice ground where four black-clad Qin soldiers were forming up the trainees—men just off shift—into ranks. “Neh, I suppose I don’t neither. They’re hard, that’s for sure. If fair. They don’t overcharge us for sleeping space and food, like some masters do. Water’s steep, though.”
She tried in vain to slap dust off her tunic and kilted-up trousers, but she was coated in the sandy grit that passed for soil in these parts. Mas led her over to the supervisor’s pavilion, and they got a hearing from the overseer, O’eki. The big man—an outlander—listened to Mas’s detailed recounting with the resignation of a man who hears this every day.
“Hu! You got off easy. Maybe you’d like to set the reinforcement yourself, Mas. You’re the best at it.”
“If I get the same hazard pay as for digging the face.”
“Come back at twilight. I’ll let you know then.”
They got into line by the supervisor’s pavilion, waiting to turn in their mattock and spade. The four men ahead of them, coming off their own shift change, took sword-length wooden batons in exchange and trotted out to the formation. She walked away toward the canvas barracks. Mas kept pace beside her until they reached the canvas screens that set off the entrance to the women’s barracks.
“If you’re sure. . .” He was an ordinary fellow, without any least distinguishing characteristics except that, like her, he’d had some pressing reason to sell his labor to the Qin. He’d never said what it was, but then again, neither had she. “I just meant to say—”
“Sorry!”
He winced, so she knew she’d snapped.
“I’m just shaking after that,” she added.
“Eh, truly, the murderer does get to people that way.”
“And I’m tired.” And I’ll never be interested in you, or maybe in any man.
He sighed.
“Truth is, Mas,” she added, for once thinking to spare him a bit of misery, “I really don’t care to test the Qin’s patience. You know how they are, all prim and dainty.”
“Surely I do. Strange notions, they’ve got. Men sleep in one barracks tent and women in another, and once curfew falls, no mixing. Those who disobey are sent home, or whipped. Eiya! No use ruining your hopes for buying out your debt and gathering a nest egg of coin, just for an afternoon’s pleasure.”
She managed a smile, however insincere. Once safe within the women’s area, she measured out her ration of wash water, which was only enough to wash her face and hands and even then not get off the grime. Coated with grit, she lay down on the blanket assigned to her, and she thought not of her husband, that kind and patient man who had never treated her with anything except gentle forbearance, but of the hierodule they had briefly traveled with. So be it. She was here, slaving in the Barrens, and no doubt that cursed interfering reeve had captured Zubaidit and taken her back to Olossi to serve out her own sentence for theft and debt-breaking. They’d not meet again. That’s just how it was. She could never expect anything in life but leavings and scraps.
She hoped that Avisha and the children were doing well, but even that was out of her hands. After leaving Argent Hall, she had eked out a living doing day labor. In the meantime she had asked around at the Qin compound until she’d found out that a girl matching Avisha’s description had been taken in to the household of the captain’s wife. So at least they were being cared for. She’d heard a rumor that the captain’s wife had come to live here in the Barrens, in the settlement, but since debt slaves remained in their camp, she’d never seen her. Even if it were true, what was the point of seeing Avisha and the children? She could do nothing for them, and no doubt it would upset them, as it had that day when Avisha had seen her in the labour gang in Olossi.
The hells! She could not rest, although she was weary to the bone and still feeling in her skin the way the cloud of soil and debris had raced after her like a monstrous lilu with mouth gaped wide to devour her. Digging was hard, dangerous work. Men like Mas called the shaft and conduit “the murderer,” because men did die to bring water to barren settlements.
But the hard, dangerous work meant she didn’t have to think about what she did not have, what she could not do, and how those cursed reeves had tried to trick her into enslaving herself to their cursed halls. If she was going to walk into debt slavery, at least she had done it of her own choice, with her eyes open to the consequences.
But which would be worse? Suffocating under a mass of dirt as it forced its way down your throat and nostrils? Or having your head ripped off by a bad-tempered eagle?
She wiped yet more dust from her brow. Or maybe she was just smearing it together with sweat to give herself a mottled complexion. Through a gap in the canvas, she watched the sun settle westward toward hazy peaks. Stamps and shouts from the practice ground marked the pace of the training. Men who showed promise would be allowed to join the Qin militia, an elite group being trained to the strictest and most arduous standard imaginable, and despite or perhaps because of this, young men did put in second shifts for the chance to be as tough as the sauntering Qin soldiers.
Nearby, women worked with cheerful banter in the kitchens. A pair of mules came in with fresh laundry from the washing house a couple of mey inland, closer to a good water source, where other female debt slaves worked. The shaded ground beneath the canvas grew stuffy. She dozed off.
As she often did these days after working underground, she dreamed of flying. The land below her dangling feet is seen as hollows and rises, a patchwork of color and texture like a rumpled blanket but breathtaking in each distinct detail. A tiny deer springs across a clearing, followed by a fawn. A man in a red cap crouches alone by a campfire. A wagon drawn by droving beasts glides down a road, accompanied by a trio of walking men more like ants than human beings. Black thunderclouds pile up over mountains, building strength, and after lightning flashes, a blue burst of light bolts into existence, winks coquettishly, and vanishes.
Thunder boomed, waking her. Shouts woke the alarm bell, rung thrice. Running footsteps scraped on the ground outside. She scrambled to the entrance of the women’s compound, where debt slaves gathered.
“What happened?”
“A shaft fell in,” said one of the women. Her hands were coated with grease. They watched as the men training on the practice ground ran for the supervisor’s pavilion, grabbing spades and mattocks and rushing upland. A pair of Qin soldiers rode their horses inland, with a second man astride each carrying digging implements.
“Think it’s worth it?” asked the woman with greasy hands. “Men dying for water?”
“They’ll get irrigation all along here,” said her companion. “Lookya—”
Hillward, the ground sloped in rugged stair-steps cut with gullies and ridges, a light dry soil. Seaward, they looked over level ground whose soil was built up by the accumulation of rainwater coursing down from higher ground during the wet season, which came here only during the Flood Rains, and fanning out to form stretches of richer soil suitable for planting, if o
nly there was a steady supply of water. The mountains hoarded water, if it could be exploited. The Qin meant to do so.
Eagles circled above the distant shoreline. Off to the right snaked the low berm that ringed the quickly growing settlement and fort owned by the Qin outlanders. A pair of rowed cogs were coming in, headed for the shallow bay where they would beach and unload.
“Neh, there. Lookya!”
Thunderclouds boiled over a high mountain ridge to the northwest. A speck swooped out of the storm and, faster than seemed possible, glided close and, then, right over them.
The hells!
She began shaking harder than in the aftermath of the collapse. Best run and hide, and yet her feet took her out pace after pace until she found herself in the deserted parade ground as an eagle plummeted as on its death plunge and, pulling up at the last, thumped hard onto the dirt.
“Tumna.” Her heart raced as her voice choked.
The eagle glared at her from beneath ridged brows, as if to say, “Why did you abandon me?”
“They tried to force me, like when Uncle dragged me to Old Cross to sell my labor. What did you expect me to do?”
“Heya!” Mas signaled from the edge of the parade ground. “Get back, Nallo. That thing could rip your head off!”
She was so fixed on Tumna’s accusing stare that she did not notice the other eagles coming in until one landed with a delicate braking flutter of wings a safe distance away. Its harness held a reeve and a second person, hitched in front in a tangle of lines quickly unhooked. The woman walked out from under the hooked beak of the other raptor. Tumna swiveled her head to stare at the intruder, but the woman sketched a broad gesture, a signal that kept the bird in her place.
“You’re Nallo.” She carried a mass of lines and hooks draped over her right arm. “I’m Arda, training master of Naya Hall. That’s what they call the training hall here. I hear Joss ran you off with some nonsense about reeves being slaves and how you best be grateful for shelter over your head and so on. He’s astoundingly sanctimonious.”
“He was a self-satisfied ass, it’s true,” said Nallo, warming to her but remaining cautious.