“See what your boyfriend has cost us,” I hissed at Dina. “Now will you tell me who it is?”
“Oh, Davin, don’t be stupid,” Dina said quietly. “I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“I’m not the stupid one. It wasn’t me who went off into the woods at sundown because of a letter from some callous village lout.”
“Letter?” said Mama. “What letter?”
Dina didn’t say anything.
“Dina. What letter?”
Dina’s breathing sounded all wrong, almost like when she had been bitten by the coppertail.
“He said he never meant to frighten me. That it wasn’t he who killed Beastie. That he just wanted to get to know me better.”
Dina was right. I had been stupid. Horrendously stupid. Sezuan. The egg letter had been from Sezuan.
Mama’s eyes shone with fear and despair. “Oh, Dina,” she said. “And you believed him.”
“No. Not at first. And not… no, not really. It was just, everyone seemed so happy to be here. And I couldn’t bear it if we had to leave again. Because of me.”
Mama was silent for a long time. Please don’t scold her, I prayed. Please don’t scold her now. I had never heard my sister’s voice so small, so fragile. She sounded as if she would fall completely to pieces if anyone spoke harshly to her right now.
“How long has he been here?” Mama sounded calm, but it was not the sort of calm you could trust. It lay like a mask over something else—fear or anger, or both.
“I don’t know.” Dina’s voice was so small it had almost disappeared. “One day at school he had written something on one of the tablets. I saw it when I was handing them around. It must be a week ago now.”
“Nearly two,” I said hoarsely. “It was the day you came home with a stomachache.”
Dina nodded.
There was a sharp owl-like cry from the woods—the sort of cry that didn’t come from a proper owl.
“We have to go,” said Nico. “Standing in front of the flames like this we’re easy targets if anyone has a bow.”
It was almost as if they heard him. Suddenly, an arrow hit the ground only a few paces away.
“Get out,” came a shout from the darkness. “We want no witches in Clayton!”
“Into the trees,” ordered Nico. “If they get the horses too, we are in deep, deep trouble.”
That finally prodded Mama to move. She hauled Melli up on her hip and ran clumsily for the cover of the woods. Nico swept Dina into his arms and followed.
“Come on,” I told Rose, who was still clutching Belle. “And this time, keep a leash on that savage beast of yours!”
They chased us all night. Every time we thought it was safe to stop and breathe, we heard their damned owl’s cries, and then there would be an arrow. They were playing with us. They knew the woods better than we did, and as long as they kept a safe distance, there was nothing much we could do to defend ourselves. They didn’t mean to kill us—if that had been their intention, we would have been dead long since. But it was still a lethally dangerous game because they couldn’t see well enough to be certain of not hitting us. Once they nicked the little black gelding so that there was a long bloody furrow across his shoulder. And once it was only a sixth sense and a quick duck of his head that saved Nico from an arrow through the eye.
Not until dawn did they let us alone. One last arrow struck the ground in front of Silky, who was almost too tired to shy away from it.
“Get out of Loclain,” called a voice I couldn’t recognize. “We don’t need your kind here!”
Four days later, the woodlands of Loclain were behind us, and we trudged instead over the plains west of Sagisloc, with no firm goal in mind. We had even less now than when we left the Highlands—very little except life and limb and the clothes on our backs. If I had hated Sezuan before, it was nothing to what I felt now.
DAVIN
The Foundation
Sagisloc was a wealthy city. It showed from miles away. The roofs glittered with copper and glazed tiles, and I had never before seen so many glass windowpanes in one place. Nearly everyone was richly dressed. Silk waistcoats gleamed as they stretched across well-fed bellies, silver buttons flashed in the sun. Sagisloc could afford life’s luxuries and saw no reason to hide that fact.
“It looks very expensive,” I said to Mama. “Do you think they have room for people like us at all?”
“We have to try,” said Mama. “This can’t go on.”
She was right. We desperately needed rest and shelter. Melli had begun to cough, a horrid, wet-sounding cough that shook her whole body when the fits came on. We were all of us tired and pale, and Dina was still a ghostlike shadow of her usual self.
We asked a man in the street if there was a place we could find shelter. To my surprise he answered readily and pleasantly that there was a “hostel for travelers of no means” on the outskirts of town, and gave us clear directions on how to find it.
It was right near the lake, on the eastern edge of the city. It was big, far bigger than I had expected. Whitewashed buildings with red tile roofs lay on both sides of a neat gravel road, like a small village in its own right. The road was blocked by a large and heavy gate, crowned by a coat of arms with two dragon heads on it.
Nico halted his horse and looked up at the double dragon with a worried frown.
“What is it?” I asked.
“That’s the arms of the Draconis family,” he said.
“The dragons up there?”
He nodded.
“Does it matter?”
He grimaced. “Probably not. But if anybody asks, my name is Nicolas, not Nicodemus.”
It was easy to see where you were supposed to go. The road led through the gate and right up to an open door, and above the door was a sign showing a hand stretched out in welcome. Nico stayed with the horses while I went in with Mama and the girls to see if they had room for us.
It was a strange room. The walls were covered with slates, from floor to ceiling. Even the door had its load of slates. In the middle of the room stood a tall desk, and the man behind it had the double dragon embroidered on his gray and black suit.
“Welcome to the Draconis Foundation,” he said, smiling pleasantly. “What can I do for you?”
It wasn’t easy to stand there, empty-handed and “without means,” as they called it. To stand there asking for something, knowing you couldn’t pay for it.
“We heard that—that travelers might seek shelter here,” said Mama.
“Yes, of course,” said the man. “That is what we are here for. How many people in your household?”
“Six.”
“Six….” He made a note on a clean slate. “Age and sex?”
Mama mentioned us by age, starting with Melli and moving up. The man put down his little slate, fetched three others down from one wall, and started to make notes on those.
“Any household animals?”
“Three horses and a dog.”
He raised an eyebrow. That was probably more than most travelers without means brought with them.
“They will have to go to Foundation stables,” he said, and made yet another little note. He rang a bell, and two people appeared—an elderly man in gray shirt and trousers, and a young girl in a gray dress and white apron. “Paulus, see to it that the animals outside are brought to the stables. And if Olina will show the four ladies to their quarters? That will be Block C, rooms 2 and 5. The two gentlemen will please come with me.”
Nobody moved right away.
“We would rather stay together,” I said, rather loudly and firmly. “As a family.”
The man was already halfway out of the door.
“I regret,” he said with the same pleasant smile, “but that is not possible. We do not have the appropriate facilities. Here, men and women have separate quarters.”
Appropriate whatsits? It wasn’t a word I had ever heard before.
“What does that mean?” I asked Dina. “That
faci-something word.”
She shook her head tiredly. “Maybe it’s something to do with bed linen,” she said.
Melli coughed.
“We have to,” said Mama. “At least for a couple of days, so we can rest and gather our strength.”
She and the girls followed Olina out of the door and to the left. Accompanied by the man with the pleasant smile, Nico and I went the other way, to the right, into what was apparently the men’s quarters.
Everything was very clean and tidy. The paths and little squares had had their gravel neatly raked, the walls were recently whitewashed, and the woodwork on the stairs and walkways smelled of fresh tar. Here and there, old men in gray clothes were sweeping or raking the paths. Three little boys, hardly more than six or seven, were kneeling in the courtyard, nipping weeds with their bare fingers. They too wore gray trousers and shirts. Did everyone here have to dress like that?
“Room 8,” said our guide and opened a black door exactly like every other black door we had passed, except that this one had the number 8 and the letter E painted on it in white. He threw open the shutters to let in a bit more light, and we could see the room we were meant to sleep in.
It was not exactly spacious. On both sides of the aisle some wide wooden shelves had been built, in three tiers. That’s where one slept, apparently. Two to a shelf, one after the other, so to speak. At the end of each shelf was a wooden box, nailed to the wall. There was no other furniture, nor was there room for any. But at least the beds were made up with clean white sheets, a thin gray mattress, and gray blankets.
“It is the responsibility of the room’s inmates to keep the facilities tidy and hygienic,” said our guide. “Personal belongings are to be stored in the boxes. If the space there is not sufficient, surplus property may be brought to the common stores.”
I looked at the boxes. They weren’t very big. As little as we had managed to bring with us, we would still have quite a lot of “surplus property.”
“The top bunk and the middle one there are free. I ask you to take note of the bunk number. This is Room 8, Block E. Your bunk number, young man, is 10. In other words, you are 8-E-10, if anybody asks.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier just to tell people my name?” I said in some confusion. I couldn’t see what good all those numbers and letters would do, except perhaps to make it easier to find your bed at night.
“We cannot learn the name of every traveler passing through,” said our guide. “You’re 8-E-10. It isn’t too difficult for you, is it?”
“I suppose not,” I said.
“You can leave your belongings here while we go to the bathhouse.”
The bathhouse? Now? I would have liked to see how Mama and the girls were doing. But I suppose scrubbing off some of the travel dirt wouldn’t hurt.
The bathhouse was very posh; or at least, I had never bathed in anything so fine. There were two pools, a hot one and a cold one. First you stepped into the hot tub—large enough that several people could bathe at the same time, and deep enough for you to dunk yourself completely if you wanted—and then into the even larger cold pool to rinse off. It made the blood rush faster, throbbing under the skin, and I quite forgot how tired I was. Instead, I felt like teasing Nico a bit, the way I sometimes did with Kinni and Black-Arse. Or had done. Would I ever see Black-Arse again? But I didn’t want to think of that now. I dived beneath the surface and tugged at Nico’s ankle so that he got a ducking he wasn’t expecting.
When he resurfaced, he looked quite offended for a moment. But then a teasing gleam showed in his dark blue eyes. He tossed back his dark, wet hair, took a deep breath, and dived. And we had a glorious splashy water-fight with every kind of dirty trick and sneaky dodge. He knew quite a few, did Nico. More than I did, actually.
Afterward we sat on the edge of the pool, breathing hard. I looked at him sideways. He was quite thin now, but then, so was I. You could count our collected ribs with no trouble. Food had been sparse for months, and neither of us had had much in the way of fat before that.
Then I noticed some funny little scars he had all over his upper body. Short nicks and scratches, no more than an inch or so long.
“What’s that?” I asked.
He followed the direction of my gaze. “What? These?” He rubbed at one of the marks with a thumb.
“Yes.”
He grimaced. “My fencing teacher’s work. The first time you made a mistake, he would hit you. The second time, he cut you. Just a nick. He told us that a little blood made you remember the lesson better.”
I stared. There were scores of them. At least a hundred. Perhaps it was no wonder that Nico didn’t like swords much.
“That must have hurt. Was that why you didn’t want to fence anymore?”
He shook his head. “Not really. When I threw away my sword, I knew what my father would do to me when he found out. And he had a much heavier hand than the fencing master.”
“But why, then?”
He shrugged. “It’s not so easy to explain. It was just, I could see it. I could see what my father wanted me to be like. Which was basically a man like him. And I—I just didn’t want to.”
Maybe I was lucky not to have had a father. Or even to know who he was. Look at Nico. Look at poor Dina, who woke up one morning and discovered she had the Puff-Adder for a father.
The man with the pleasant smile returned. His smile stiffened a bit when he saw the mess we had made—there was water everywhere—but he didn’t say anything. He merely showed us into the third room in the bathhouse, where we were meant to dry and dress ourselves.
“Where are my clothes?” I asked.
“They were brought to the laundry,” said the man. “We have laid out clean ones.” He pointed to two neat piles of folded gray clothing. “When you are dressed, we will proceed to the Refectory.”
I looked questioningly at Nico, because that was yet another word I hadn’t heard before.
“Dining hall,” he murmured.
Well, that sounded encouraging. And the gray clothes fitted reasonably well. There was a drawstring to tighten the trousers with, and the shirt was loose but comfortable. And yet I didn’t like them. It was as if they turned me into something other than what I really was.
Nico looked at himself. “What elegance,” he said in a nasal drawl. “What delicacy of style.”
I had never heard courtiers speak about fashion, but when they did, they probably sounded exactly like Nico did right then. I couldn’t help laughing at his antics.
“Mesire,” I said, and gave him my best effort at a courtier’s bow. “Shall we proceed to the banquet?”
Nico smiled. “Let’s do that,” he said. “Before I start chewing on the towels.”
When we came to the dining hall—or the Refectory, as they called it—I couldn’t see Mama and the girls at first; naturally, they were now just as gray as the rest, and the women had to wear scarves, too, so you couldn’t even see the color of their hair. But then I heard Melli cough.
It didn’t suit her at all, this gray clothing. Well, it hardly suited any of us, I suppose, but it was worse on Melli. She looked like a little lost sparrow. Her natural chubbiness had all but disappeared, and the gray scarf made her face look even more fever pale. I wanted to tear it off her and get her into her own nightdress and then into bed, and feed her hot broth, cranberry juice, and bedtime stories.
“Shouldn’t she be in bed?” I asked Mama.
“Eating in the dormitories is not allowed,” said Mama. “I’ll put her to bed as soon as she’s had a little food.”
Dina sat hunched around her snakebitten arm, staring at the empty tin bowl in front of her. She looked oddly numb and uncaring, as if she was too tired even to feel. Rose, on the other hand, had furious red blotches high on her cheeks, a sign that her temper was very close to the boiling point.
“What is it?” I asked her cautiously.
“They put Belle in a cage! With a lot of other dogs.”
“W
hy? Did she bite somebody?”
“Of course she didn’t!” Rose looked mortally offended. “They said they couldn’t have stray dogs in the grounds. As if Belle would ever stray! She was right by my side the whole time!”
“It’s only a couple of days, Rose,” said Mama in a comforting tone.
“If one of those mangy mongrels bites Belle, I’ll—I’ll make them sorry!”
Somebody tapped my shoulder.
“You’re not supposed to sit here,” said one of the gray women. Her voice was neither sharp nor apolegetic, merely toneless, as if that was the way the world was, and there was nothing she could do about it.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Those aren’t your seats.”
“What do you mean?”
She pointed to the bench, and I noticed that numbers had been painted on the boards. Numbers like those on the bunks.
“This is 2-C-4,” she said. “That’s my seat.”
I moved along the bench so that there was room for her, but it seemed that wasn’t good enough.
“You have to go to your own seats.”
“Does it matter?”
She nodded tiredly. “Nobody gets fed until everyone is in their proper place.”
This Foundation with all its rules and numbers, I thought. I could get tired of it very quickly. But I noticed that Nico and I were the only men in this part of the dining hall, and we were already collecting sullen looks from the hungry people all around us.
“We’d better move,” I told Nico. “Let’s see if we can find 8-E-10 and 8-E-11.”
DAVIN
The Reeds
After the meal—barley soup—we were put to work, or at least, Nico and I were. I wasn’t sure what had happened to the girls. We were told to go down to the lake, where they were harvesting reeds for thatching and the like. Two men in black tunics were in charge, it seemed, while the actual harvesting was done by workers dressed in gray just like Nico and me. They gave us each a sickle to cut the reeds with.
The Serpent Gift Page 11