by Steve Thomas
The girl made her way to a nook in the stone structure, inside the first arch and invisible from the shore. The bridge was ancient, dating back to before the War of the Gods when all the great kings died in battle and the vast cities burned. She had found the room over a year ago while exploring under the bridge, playfully hiding from her father. She had tripped and stumbled into a mechanism that opened a hidden door. It jammed when the opening was just wide enough for her to squeeze through, and she never had learned how to shut it. There were only two clues to its purpose: a chair and a bell. The chair had been well worn and rotted out. It had collapsed under her weight the first time she tried to sit on it, and now it was rotting somewhere downstream. The bell hung from a strange apparatus housing a glass tube and mounted to the stone wall. The tube was empty, and there were more of them strewn about. It was probably a guard station, but the bell and its tubes remained a mystery.
The room could comfortably hold three or four people, but only Laremma and one other person knew about this place, and the other was waiting for her with a bottle of wine. Well, half a bottle of wine.
Keshdel balanced on an uneven stool fashioned from driftwood from the shore and fabric from her parents’ scrap bin. Some weavers’ daughters took up quilting. Keshdel had taken an interest in upholstery, but her woodworking skills left something to be desired. As soon as she saw Laremma squeeze through the doorway, Keshdel hopped to her feet and caught Laremma in an embrace.
“You’re back early,” she said.
“Disappointed?”
Keshdel released her and snatched up the bottle and the cup to pour Laremma a drink. The cup had fallen off Laremma’s father’s cart after sitting unsold for longer than Laremma had been alive. It was a perfectly fine cup, but the foreign engravings never failed to remind someone of Sangrook incantations. Laremma had invented hundreds of false translations, from puns to to epigrams to inspirational sayings, but the crudely engraved angular script always warded customers away.
Laremma accepted the cup and toasted her friend. “Let tonight’s meeting of the Troll Bridge Sisterhood commence.” She took her seat atop a second stool and tasted her wine. “Mmm. I can see why you were trying to drink the whole bottle before I got back.” She took another sip and handed the cup back. Keshdel smiled and tilted it up.
“How was Vestige, anyway?”
“Profitable, but disturbing. You would not believe how the city folk stared at me, or the disgusting things things they shouted. My father nearly got arrested shutting one of them up.”
“Stares? Because of your,” she affected the accent of the local midwife, “burgeoning womanhood?” She cupped her hands over her own chest, which had yet to burgeon, with a wide grin.
Laremma sighed. It was a joke to Keshdel, but a bad memory for her. “That and my hair.” Laremma lowered her hood, and Keshdel’s smile doubled in size.
“Don’t you start,” said Laremma.
“But your hair…”
“The dye will wash out.” She frowned. “In a week or two.”
“But your hair.”
“My father said it was safer to travel. Black hair makes you a target in Vestige. It’s gotten bad there.”
Vestige called itself the lone city of the old world, the only place to survive the War of the Gods, the last vestige of a time long gone. Laremma didn’t know whether she believed that, but it was certainly the largest and most powerful city she knew of. She and her father made three trips each year to sell the textiles and pottery from her village and to buy the goods that the townsfolk needed. It was a city unlike any she had ever seen, with towers that stabbed at the clouds and temples of heart-stopping beauty. It was a place of wealth and decadence, of crowds and crime.
It was also the seat of the Convergence. The Convergence had a presence everywhere. It was hard to argue against a religion that believed all gods were valid and all religions were true, with the slight stipulation that all the gods had converged into a singular entity while retaining their individuality. Just as the Convergence taught that the gods merged together, so did it seek to create an amalgam of all religions, absorbing them one at a time as their Templars and inquisitors sought out new converts. And where mysticism failed to convince prospective converts, the sword left little room for argument.
“What’s wrong with black hair?” asked Keshdel, stroking her red braids.
“They say the Sangrooks are resurging,” said Laremma.
“Sangrooks?” Keshdel laughed. “The demon-worshipers who will summon angry ghosts to scratch on your windows if you don’t finish your dinner? Those Sangrooks?”
Laremma shook her head, still picturing the bodies rotting in gibbets along the city wall. She could still see the crows pecking at flesh too weak to fight back. “They take the stories more seriously there. They really believe that the Sangrooks are Despot-worshipers who formed a secret cabal to undermine all that’s good and moral in the world.”
Keshdel’s smile melted away at Laremma’s somber tone. “What does that have to do with your hair?”
“They’re calling it a purge. They’re executing anyone suspected of having Sangrook blood. An inquisitor arrested one of our customers halfway through a sale and there’s a gallows on every corner now. I’m not sure who’s more dangerous, the Sangrook menace or the Convergence zealots. A foreign merchant’s daughter with dark hair… Well, we saw one of those hanging from a tree on our way there.”
“Your hair isn’t even that dark.”
“My father and the boys told a bounty hunter the same thing. We dyed three heads that night, and father sent us all home early.”
“Shit,” said Keshdel, refilling the wine cup. “I’m sorry. Glad you made it back.”
“Me too,” said Laremma, and she drank deeply.
They spent the afternoon speaking of things they had discussed one hundred times before. They spoke of the family businesses, of Keshdel’s ongoing feud with her stepmother and Laremma’s adventures with her father. They drank and sang, and they wondered about the bridge, who built it, what purpose their secret room served, and how they might operate the door. They talked until the sunlight dimmed and the sky turned red, marking the hour to return to the village.
“Another successful meeting,” said Keshdel as she stoppered the wine and stashed it away in the corner.
“Shall we reconvene tomorrow night?” asked Laremma.
“Oh, so you’ll be in town two nights in a row? Business must be slow.”
“Times are tough. Bring me some bread if you can spare it.”
Keshdel grinned. “What makes you think I can…” Her words drifted off and she tilted her head to raise an ear to the ceiling. “Do you hear that?”
Laremma went silent and listened. After a moment, she shook her head.
“Someone is on the bridge,” Keshdel whispered, slinking through the secret door.
“Keshdel, wait,” Laremma called after her, but her friend was already stepping across the rocky shore.
Part of her wanted to hide in the alcove, to sleep there if need be. Reputable visitors didn’t cross the bridge this late in the day and the town of Greatbridge didn’t receive many reputable visitors to begin with. It had been a large city once, based on the footprint of the walls. They stood strong, but inside those walls were scattered huts built from the crumbling ruins. Greatbridge was its own quarry, and so much of the town had been cannibalized over the years that no one could say what it had been like before the war.
Laremma believed that it had been a castle. The bridge itself was built defensively; it was shaped like a wedge wider on the village side than the opposing shore. A small army could defend against a larger one simply by holding the choke point, and the river itself was unnavigable. Plus, the sturdy construction, which had survived the death of civilization, implied wealth and power. Perhaps Greatbridge was once the seat of a king or a favored lord, or a renowned trading hub, accessible by land and water.
Now, no one came aside
from the occasional traveling merchant or Convergence missionary. Laremma worried, though. If it had been a trading hub or a strategic location once, Greatbridge could rise again. She feared for her town any time news spread of a bandit crew or a warlord’s army in the area. What if they recognized the potential of her run-down walled city? What if they saw the value of the bridge? Greatbridge was safe only because of its obscurity and the chaos of a world without civilization. How long would that obscurity last?
Any visitor was a potential threat. That was the reason Laremma wanted to stay holed up in her secret room, and it was the reason she chose to chase after her friend.
In her haste to catch up with Keshdel, she slipped off the stepping stones and sloshed through the river, then clambered up the hill against the bridge wall and came to rest next to Keshdel, hidden in the tall rushes. At last she, too, heard the footfalls. They weren’t the rigid, confident march of a soldier. Nor were they the light, creeping approach of a bandit. No, the steps came in quick slaps, the scampering of a barefoot child.
It was Laremma’s turn to be reckless. She brushed past her friend and peered over the parapet.
The bridge was empty beneath the setting sun.
The grass rustled and Keshdel’s head popped up beside her own. Laremma heard her friend’s indignant gasp. “Where is he? I know I heard someone walking.”
“I thought so, too.”
Keshdel glared at her. “I didn’t think I heard something. I heard something.”
But there was no one on the bridge. There was no use arguing about it. “Come on,” said Laremma. “We should head back to town.”
Keshdel followed, but only after taking a moment to examine the bridge one last time. Even when she moved on, her suspicious gaze remained transfixed on it. She was practically walking backwards until they reached the gate.
***
The next afternoon, the two girls walked together through the town gates. The gates were manned, but barely defensible. The bottom edges of the twin doors were soft and jagged with rot, the hinges were rusted and whiny, and one door was missing two boards. They’d be repaired in the winter, Laremma hoped.
“I still can’t get over your hair,” said Keshdel. “What did they put in it?”
“Father told me not to ask,” Laremma said with a shudder.
“I can’t believe you let me touch it.”
“I tried to stop you.”
“It feels like straw.” Keshdel ran her fingers through her own soft red hair for emphasis.
“It will grow back.”
“Maybe in two years after it falls out. I bet I could snap a clump in half.”
As they reached the rushes, Keshdel playfully grabbed at Laremma’s hair. Laremma spun away and, already off-balance from the jug of wine in the crook of her arm, slipped in the mud and tumbled down.
“Oh!” She heard Keshdel stifling a laugh. Laremma released the wine and rolled to her knees. She placed her hands on the nearest stones and saw something that gave her pause.
Keshdel crouched next to her and moved to help her stand. “Laremma, I’m so sorry.”
“Quiet,” she said.
“But—”
“Shh,” said Laremma. She gestured with her head to the footprint on the ground. “We aren’t alone.”
Keshdel traced the footprint with her finger. It was shorter than her hand, but narrower and with a deep curve. Human. Young. The tracks led under the bridge, leaving muddy marks all the way into their secret room. “So I did hear someone last night,” she whispered. “How did he get past us?”
“I don’t know.” Laremma groped for rocks to brace against as she stood. The sticky black mud clung to her. Her hands and knees were filthy, and her dress weighed heavily on her shoulders. Later on, she’d come up with some form of revenge for that, but it didn’t matter for the moment. Together, they crept forward and peered through the jammed stone door.
A haggard girl sat huddled in the far corner. She was small, a few years younger than Laremma and Keshdel. She was dressed in a dirt-stained nightgown, barefoot and disheveled. Her stringy black hair hung limply, framing a narrow face devoid of the usual plumpness of a girl her age. Her eyes were closed.
“Is she asleep?” asked Keshdel.
“Seems to be,” Laremma whispered.
“What do we do?”
This was some transient girl who had been traveling near sunset and found a hole to sleep in. She was best left alone to continue her journey. “Let her sleep, I imagine. She’ll probably be gone tomorrow. Maybe leave her some food.” She wondered if the chunk of cheese in her pocket was still clean enough to eat after her fall. She didn’t dare check, though, because her hands were still filthy.
Keshdel held up the muddied jug of wine. When had she found the time to retrieve it? “But we have an appointment I intend to keep. It’s meeting night.”
Laremma angrily flapped her skirt at Keshdel, splashing her with droplets of mud. The fabric fell hard and slapped against her knee. “We’re the Troll Bridge Sisterhood, not the Mud Monster Sisterhood. I’d rather go home and change anyway. We can meet tomorrow.”
Keshdel grimaced. “Just dunk the dress in the lake a few times. Better wet than dirty.” Laremma shook her head. “No one’s around to spy on your burgeoning womanhood, if that’s what you’re worried about. I won’t peek.”
Laremma gestured at the sleeping girl in the corner.
“She’s asleep,” said Keshdel.
“I’m awake now.”
Both heads snapped to the girl, who now regarded them with icy blue eyes. She yawned and stretched and scratched her back against the wall. “I’m sorry if I’m in your spot. I just needed somewhere to hide while I slept.”
Keshdel slid into the room, stopping just inside the doorway. She was blocking the exit, preventing the girl from running. The girl took note of that, too. “Why didn’t you find somewhere in the village?” Keshdel asked.
The girl considered the older girls, her eyes full of suspicion and her body tensing in case she had to run. “Because I didn’t want to be seen.”
Keshdel leaned against the door frame and crossed her arms. “Where are your parents?”
“Dead.”
Keshdel puffed her nose at this. “How? When?”
Laremma put a hand on her friend’s shoulder. “Stop interrogating the girl.”
“No,” she said. “I want to know why a little girl is traveling by herself in a nightgown. I want to know who she belongs to and who she is. And I want to know how she slipped past both of us before the sun was even down.”
The girl starting crying. She was just a lost little girl, and she was obviously afraid. She needed help, not small-town suspicion. Laremma pushed past Keshdel and crouched in front of the girl. “You’re safe with us. My name is Laremma. What shall I call you?”
The girl sniffled. “Kreon.”
“Where did you come from, Kreon?”
She didn’t respond, so Laremma took hold of her hands and asked again. The girl met her gaze with watery eyes and said, “Farnhem. It’s a small village on the other side of the river.”
“I’ve been to Farnhem,” said Laremma. “It seemed nice enough. Why did you run away?”
“The Convergence came,” said Kreon.
At the sound of that name, Laremma’s hand drifted to her abused hair, and she understood. With her thin black hair, sharp nose, and pale skin, Kreon was exactly the sort they were looking for. “You escaped the Purge,” she whispered.
Kreon nodded. “The Templars killed our fighters and rounded everyone up. They said that anyone who recognized our local gods as aspects of the Converged God would be spared. They gathered up the children and took them away. Anyone who fought back or argued or called them blasphemers…” She shook her head and closed her eyes.
“Or had dark hair.” Laremma sat and leaned against the wall next to Kreon. The girl inched towards her until their shoulders were touching. “I’m sorry. You were a clever
girl to escape, and you’re safe now. We’ll take care of you, all right?”
Kreon nodded with a faint smile.
Laremma snatched the wine from a befuddled Keshdel and left it in the corner next to the cup. “Cut this with river water and both will be safe to drink. We’ll be back tomorrow with food and supplies. Stay out of sight.”
She motioned for Keshdel to back out of the room, and they set along to the grassy path to town. Keshdel was silent, but her silence betrayed a desire to speak without being overheard.
“You don’t think we should help her,” said Laremma.
“I think you gave away our wine to a stranger.”
“Be serious. This isn’t about our meeting.”
Keshdel stopped and brushed her hair back from her face. “Her story doesn’t make sense. She never said how she escaped or when. She said they took away the children, but she escaped in time. Either she got taken away or she escaped during the attack. How would she know what happened to the children?”
“It’s a standard tactic for the Convergence,” said Laremma. She’d passed through recently-converted villages before, and she had heard the stories from neighboring towns before they, too, became part of the Convergence. “They send the children to special schools. Half the priests grew up that way.”
Keshdel chuckled and shook her head. “Common knowledge. Not everyone travels like you do. If she knew what they do, maybe it’s because she’s working for them. Maybe she was from another village entirely and she’s spying on us.”
“She’s just a scared little girl.”
“You just told me that those scared little girls get indoctrinated into priestesses.”
“You’re forgetting about the Purge.”
“Maybe she dyed her hair to avoid suspicion, like you did. She could have made it black to look like she’s on the run from them. For someone who spends so much time traveling, you can be so naive.”
As much as Laremma wanted to argue, as much as she wanted to trust Kreon, she knew she couldn’t be sure. All she had were her instincts and a sense of decency. “Just bring her some bedding and some clothes.”