For a moment I forgot how much trouble we were in. I remembered playing with toys, pretending to fight off the bad guys with sticks, Mazol smiling awkwardly like a man who enjoyed kids but didn't know how to show it. But those memories were distant. After Pike died, Mazol was never the same. Now he was the bad guy, and this room was just another reminder of how sad our lives had become.
After passing several doors, we entered the castle's huge, domed entrance room. Carved marble staircases swept up on both sides to an ornate balcony. Towering windows on one wall were covered with thick black curtains that only allowed small cracks of light to pass around their edges. Dozens of statues and tables and bookshelves covered in white dust sheets surrounded us like ghostly assassins ready to kill as soon as our back was turned. Mazol let Henri go and began searching for something.
Yesler walked up to her and took a turn around, like he was inspecting a defective Clanker. He was about a foot shorter than her and had a small, porcelain like face—a mask for the rotten soul he carried on the inside. He slowly slipped a knife from his belt and licked the blade before pressing it to her throat.
"You like stealing food," he said, like it was a curious concept he didn't understand. He glanced quickly in Mazol's direction, but my uncle wasn't watching. Yesler turned back to Henri and began to press the knife into her skin. A trickle of blood ran down the edge of the knife. Henri squirmed and cried, but he only pushed the knife harder.
"What does that feel like?" he asked. "Does it hurt?"
I lunged at him, but Ballard held me back.
Mazol looked over his shoulder, "Cut it out, you two!"
Mazol pulled a dusty white sheet off a set of tables in the corner. Then he uncovered two brightly painted chests of drawers.
Yesler reluctantly put his knife away as Mazol continued pulling sheets off every piece of furniture he came to. He stopped suddenly when he found a set of sturdy looking burnt-orange-stained stools about the height of my waist. He dragged one across the mosaic stone floor, and it screeched a long and ominous note.
"Uncle Mazol," I said.
He ignored me.
"I stole the food."
With a wave of Mazol's hand, Yesler grabbed Henri and pulled her over to the stool.
"She didn't do anything wrong!"
Mazol lifted Henri up—there was barely room for her two feet on the small stool. "You're gonna stand on this stool until sun-up, you hear me?"
"That's nearly a full day away," I said.
"If you make it that long," he continued, still ignoring me. "I won't give you any lashes for your thievery,"
I wriggled away from Ballard and limped to Mazol.
"Let me do it instead," I pleaded.
"Oh the gimp wants to be a hero, does he?" Mazol said. "You can't stand for five minutes without help."
"I can do it, I swear."
"I need you in the Caldroen. Somebody's got to work around here."
"Don't worry gimp," Yesler added. "You'll get your chance. Still got yours coming." Then he turned to Henri and said softly. "Consider yourself lucky, I wouldn't have been so easy on you."
The cut on her neck was almost completely healed; like the other girls at Daemanhur, Henri healed quickly. Yesler found the last drop of blood with his finger and licked it off.
"But she was starving!" I yelled.
"She wasn't going to die; it's only in her head," Mazol said.
"If you just fed us all more we wouldn't have to steal."
"That's enough! If I catch you sneaking her any more food tonight, I'll double her time."
He turned his attention back to her. "And if you so much as take one step off this stool, you'll get a lash for every hour remaining until sunrise. I expect you to show up for work tomorrow morning all the brighter. Am I clear?" He took her silence as a yes and turned to go.
As he walked from the room, I looked Henri in the eyes. She had never seemed so alone. Tears drying on her red cheeks, poorly cut black hair hanging over the misshapen dark rimmed glasses I had made for her myself, dirty rags hung about her skinny body in a shape that somewhat resembled a dress.
"Make sure Little Sae is buried properly," she said.
"I'll talk to him, Henri," I whispered, "I'll get you out of this. I'll make it right. We'll bury Little Sae together—"
Mazol started laughing behind me, and I felt like a fool.
"What do you think a worthless gimp like you can do to make anything right?" Mazol said.
I said nothing, but the monster inside me wanted to tear his head off to keep him from saying another word.
"All you do is make life miserable for everyone. Why do you think I'm stuck taking care of you? Your own father couldn't even stand to have you around."
It would have been easier if my father was dead like my mother. Then Mazol wouldn't have been able to rub in that he left me. But, like Mazol, my father knew the truth about me. He knew what I was going to become. That's why he didn't stick around.
And now Henri knew too. My stomach turned over at the thought of her leaving me too.
"You just concentrate on making up for all the lost work this morning," Mazol said. "If we don't get our orders out on time, none of us are going to be eating."
"I don't work if I don't eat," Ballard said. His voice was so low it sounded like it was mixed with the growl of a tiger.
"Please let her go, uncle." I said, "Punish me instead."
"I thought I told you to shut it?" Mazol said.
I turned back to Henri, trying to think of something to say to make it better, but there was something about her, a look in her eyes I couldn't figure out.
She must have been frightened, furious, even disappointed I had let her down. But she didn't look like she was feeling any of those things. It was almost like she was sad—for me.
Maybe she was finally accepting what I was going to become. I told her it wouldn't take long.
I hung my head as Ballard started to pull me from the room. I kept glancing back, keeping eye contact with Henri for as long as I possibly could, limping along as she grew smaller and smaller behind me.
There had to be a way to get her out of standing on that stool all night. But I knew it would be worse to try. If I got caught, she'd get a lashing. It wasn't worth the risk.
I thought, cynically, that I was about to actually make her disappear, into the shadows of the shrouded statues towering around her. But I didn't want to be cynical. I turned my mind back to her face.
If she was worried about me becoming a monster like the book said, she would look more scared of me. I remembered the way Pike looked when he read those words on the roof of the tower. He was afraid of me; that was why we fell. That was why it was my fault.
But if Henri wasn't afraid, what was she thinking? Why would she be sad for me? Did she know something I didn't?
I could still see her, barely, watching us through the door when Yesler walked over and offered a stick to me with a sly smile.
"Here you go boy, you left your cane back in the closet didn't you?"
I eyed him suspiciously, not believing for a moment he was actually trying to help me. I held out my hand, but as I leaned forward to take it, he tossed it across the room with a laugh.
I took a few short painful steps towards where it landed, but Yesler put out his foot as I passed. I tripped and my left knee cracked against the stone.
"Watch your step gimp," he said with another laugh.
He jogged to catch up with Mazol and said, "Who gets to give Henri the lashes if she falls off the stool?"
"You're sick, you know that?" Mazol said, then added thoughtfully, "How 'bout we make the gimp do it?" He turned around and watched me as I slowly caught up to them.
"You hear that gimp?" Mazol said. "You're giving the lashes if she doesn't stay on that stool all night." He waved away a giant red fly that was trying to land on his forehead.
"Don't you think that's a bit much?" Ballard said, frowning.
Y
esler grinned. "It's perfect. It's the only way to keep him from trying to help her. You know the gimp. Always trying to be a hero and always failing."
"And don't think you've gotten off for this stunt," Mazol said to me. He turned, continued walking, and called over his shoulder. "By the time I'm through with you, just the thought of stealing food is gonna give you nightmares."
I could hear Ballard lumbering slowly behind me as Yesler took a long, hopeful look back at Henri. Then Yesler turned to me and said, "I hope she falls."
CHAPTER SEVEN
Monday
1:05 pm
I was a wicked boy and my loving uncle was going to cure me of wickedness. That's what he told me a few minutes after we left Henri—right before Yesler took a whip to my back. Normally, three lashes feel like thirty. It's much worse when Yesler gives them.
But I didn't make a sound.
If stealing food for starving orphans was wicked, then I was the worst sort of wicked there was. But I knew the lashes weren't for stealing food. They were for climbing the tower with Pike five years ago. Every punishment went back to climbing the tower with Pike.
He hit the ground first; me, a fraction of a second latter. I often thought back to that moment; all the thousands of little things that caused us to fall just the way we did. Marcus taught me about science. Physics. How little changes can add up to the difference between life and death.
A soft breeze. The turning of the earth. The way our bodies moved and how we changed our paths through the air without even knowing it. The result was a 4 foot distance between where we landed.
I hit a thick straw roof and went strait through into a shed that was filled with hay, breaking 12 bones, the worst of which never healed properly.
Pike wasn't so lucky.
He hit the cobblestone pavement just outside the hut I landed on. Marcus said that a body can bounce up to six feet into the air after a fall like that. He also said it's a painless way to die. I don't know if that's true, but I do know it's not painless to the one's who survive. Especially when I know that it was me who killed Pike. And if somehow I was able to forget, my uncle Mazol was going to remind me.
That's what the lashes were really for.
Yesler wanted to leave me in the hall where they whipped me, make me walk back to the Caldroen myself. But Ballard must have known I wouldn't make it. With one arm around me, he helped me limp through the castle. Under his other arm, he carried one of the small chests that the fallings had come to Daemanhur in as babies. No babies had come for years, but the warts used the chests to carry the stuff we processed in the clankers. I don't know where the stuff came from, but we never saw it. I carried my shirt; it would be a while before I could put it on again. I could hear the blood dripping off my back onto the stone floor as we walked.
We were moving too slow for my uncle and Yesler, so they went ahead to keep an eye on the fallings. Not long after they were out of sight, Ballard gestured to a bench. He seemed to sense how badly I needed to sit down.
"Don't run off," he said with a crooked smile and a growl, then set the chest down next to me and disappeared around a corner. I wasn't sure if he was trying to be funny or not, but when you have blood running down your back and your best friend is being punished for something you did, it's difficult to find anything funny.
I sat on the bench, careful not to touch my back to the wall, trying not to think about anything. For a few moments, I thought about trying to open the chest next to me, just to see what the mysterious stuff was that we worked all day and night to process. But I knew it was locked. Instead, I stared blankly through a huge window into the courtyard.
Daemanhur sat on a cliff's edge, high above the Leschi sea, which filled the northern horizon. A 40 foot wall circled the courtyard, running close to the castle by the tower on the uphill side and stretching for nearly a mile down the slopes towards the harbor where a small trade-town was built a few more miles down the road.
There was a creek that ran under the wall on the uphill side of the courtyard and kept a large lake full year round. There were fish in the lake, but most weren't big enough to eat. That didn't stop us from trying though. Another larger river joined the creek just above the town and ran into a harbor where ships docked from time to time.
I sometimes watched the ships come into the harbor while I was working the clankers, just to give me something to think about besides work. Men from the town traded with the ships, and sold some of the goods to Mazol. Those who dared to travel through the jungle only did during the daylight and always with armored carriages and trained guards. They also kept moving no matter what. They didn't stop for nothing, not even if one of their passengers fell out of the carriage.
I heard once that traveling guards, runners they were called, the kind who protected deliveries through the jungle earned more money than the town's mayor. Even for that much money, I wouldn't take that job. Runners usually didn't live past thirty. To be a good runner you had to be strong, ruthless and talented with a spear. Intelligence, on the other hand, was not required.
When the warts ordered goods, the runners would come to the gates on the uphill side of the courtyard just outside the window I was looking through. There was a fortified sort of room that was open to the outside where the delivery men could wait in relative safety for someone to come open the gates. The runners would pull a chain which ran over the courtyard and was connected to a bronze bell in the Caldroen; the bell was in the Caldroen because that's where the fallings worked and someone would always hear it in there.
I tried to imagine what life was like outside the walls of the castle, for the men who lived in that little town on the harbor. I breathed out a long deep sigh and felt my shoulders relax a little. Resting felt good. Too good. It wasn't right that I was just sitting around, letting the fallings do my work for me. I stood and turned to make my way to the Caldroen without Ballard's help, when something caught my eye.
I must not have heard the bell ring, but someone was making a delivery at that very moment. Pearl, struggling to push open one of the huge gates in the wall, suddenly jumped out of the road as four horses and a heavily armored cart flew past her, coming to a halt near the castle. The horses were huge, covered in spikes and iron platted armor. It was a small convoy, usually there were at least eight horses and a much larger carriage, which meant that these runners were even tougher that ordinary.
Three filthy giants jumped out of the cart and began unloading bags of something that looked heavy onto the castle's loading dock. They weren't as big as Ballard, but I guessed they were at least 7 feet tall. Marcus, our normal delivery master, wasn't with them. That meant there wasn't anyone to keep them in line and I could tell from the castle they had been drinking. It wasn't uncommon for runners to drink on the job, maybe it was how they dealt with the constant tension of working in the jungle, but a good delivery master like Marcus always made sure they stayed out of trouble.
Pearl was walking back to the castle, cutting a wide path to stay out of the runners' way, but a man wearing a thick red beard spotted her. She noticed him leering at her and moved off the road into the grass. The man dropped the sack he was unloading and staggered in Pearl's direction. I saw him yell something at her, but couldn't hear what he said. Pearl changed directions and headed towards the other side of the cart.
By then, the other two men noticed Pearl and tried to cut her off. They were surrounding her now, and moving in. She tried to shove past one, but one caught her easily and pushed her backwards. She stumbled and the red bearded man caught her. I heard her scream for help, but her voice was faint because of the castle's thick walls.
There was a door to the courtyard on the far side of the room. I limped towards it as fast as I could and ran straight into Ballard as he came around a corner. He was holding a steaming loaf of bread in his hand and had a wide, odd sort of grin.
"Look what I found," he said, ripping it in two and offering half to me.
My stomach turne
d over from hunger at the mouth-watering smell, but I ignored him and kept moving. I didn't even bother to ask him for help. It wasn't worth the risk, he might have tried to stop me.
"Aren't you hungry?" Ballard said through a bite of bread. "Evan? Where are you..."
His voice faded as I hobbled through the door and I wasn't listening anyways. Stumbling towards Pearl, I picked up speed as I went. Whenever my blood rose like this, I felt the pain in my leg less. I always paid for it later, but for a few moments at a time, I could nearly sprint.
"Waz yr name, litt'l gurl?" I heard one of the men say. His face was hanging and his cheeks were bright red. The man was completely drunk. Where was their master? I was furious with Mazol for making Pearl open the gates with these Runners. They were all the same.
"Be a gud gurl now," said another as he pulled at her arm.
The bearded man grabbed her from behind and clasped his hand over Pearl's mouth to stop her from screaming, but she bit his finger. Cursing, he lifted his hand to strike her, but his hand never fell.
He was a foot and a half taller than me and twice as thick at the waist, but I had a head full of steam and the element of surprise. I barreled into him and we crashed into the cart. The man hit his head on the way to the ground. I was dazed by the collision for a moment, but regained my bearings first and was straddled on top of his chest just as he cracked an eye open.
The first thing he saw was my fist crushing his nose. I got in four solid punches before the other two grabbed me from behind. I dodged one man's fist and used his momentum and misdirection to throw him to the ground. They might be brilliant with spears, but they fought hand to hand like they were stupid as elephants. The third man faked a punch at my head and I dodged it easily. I pulled a loose plank off the ground and smacked him across the face so hard blood flew from his nose and covered the cart's side.
I thought for a moment that I was actually going to best these three massive runners, but when I was going in for a second swing with the plank I felt a fist connect with my side. I felt like I had been hit with a iron hammer. I stooped over and gasped for air. By then the bearded man had gotten to his feet. He was holding his face and I saw blood running between his fingers. Then he kicked me in the shoulder and I hit the ground. All I could do was cover my face with my arms as they took turns kicking me.
Evan Burl and the Falling Page 4