Ebony Hill

by Anna Mackenzie

  “I need to change Stefan’s dressings,” I tell him, reaching for a tray and scissors. I’m sick of hearing about Jofeia.

  “What happened to him?” Ronan asks.

  “He was burnt saving the horses when the paras set fire to the stables.”

  Ronan is silent as I clatter the burn salve and a dish for the discarded dressings onto the tray. “We didn’t know that Home Farm was under attack,” he says finally.

  I consider him through the screen of my hair. He has a bruise under one eye and a scabbed cut down his cheek. He could use a bath, I think – but then that’s probably true of us all. Something in me relents. “Was it bad at Dales?”

  He nods. “Everything happened at once. Noise and confusion. I didn’t know what was going on most of the time.”

  “It was the same here. It started with the fires. Then Rys—” I stop. My eyes skitter away around the med room. A bandage has fallen beneath one of the beds. I stoop to pick it up. “In some ways it was a relief, helping in the med room. It was something I could do. But—”

  The door swings open. I stare blankly at Saice.

  “Hello, Ronan. Truso said you were back.” She frowns. “Have you had that cut cleaned properly?”

  Ronan shakes his head.

  “Ness can take care of it for you.” She glances at my tray. “Use the alcohol prep. We’ll change Stefan’s dressings when you’re done.”

  My hands are clumsy as I pour the pungent liquid into a small metal dish and fold a square of cloth into a pad. “Sit here,” I tell him, pointing to the room’s only chair. Ronan does as he’s told. “This might sting.”

  He flinches when I swab the cut. Cleared of its grime, I see it’s deeper than I thought. “How’d you get it?”

  Ronan shrugs.

  Saice studies it over my shoulder. “It looks like a knife wound.”

  Silence.

  “Jofeia told me you’d been in the thick of things,” Saice adds.

  A bright spot of colour appears in each of Ronan’s cheeks. Under Saice’s continued scrutiny, he shrugs once more.

  I swab the cut again, for good measure. “Should I dress it?”

  Saice leans close to study it then shakes her head. “It’s begun to knit.”

  Ronan stands and begins to edge towards the door. “Come back tomorrow so we can check it,” Saice adds, and he’s gone.

  CHAPTER 14

  Brenon regroups his forces and leads a counter-attack against the paras at Summertops. With the scouts mostly gone, Home Farm feels strangely empty, though Brenon leaves a detachment behind to ensure we feel safe. I’m not sure how long it might be before any of us feels safe again.

  “Back to business, people,” Truso announces, soon after Brenon’s departure. “I don’t need to tell you that we’re weeks behind schedule. There are crops still to plant and those that we did get in the ground are in dire need of attention. Even more critical are the repairs to the house. We’ll all be in better shape when we’re weather-tight again.”

  He’s right. The part-repaired wall at the eastern end of the house proved little barrier to last night’s rain, and none at all to the chilly tongues of wind the storm carried in its skirts. Even the kitchen was cold this morning.

  Truso names three of the farm’s permanent residents and appoints them to repairs. “Decon have lent us a crew to help out. The house is our first priority, followed by the barn. Where materials are a problem, we’ll cannibalise what’s left of the stables. Tino, you’re in charge of repairs.”

  It was Tino who carried our plea for help to Vidya. It seems months ago, not weeks. It must have been a shock to him to discover how much had happened in his absence – but arriving with Jolan’s scouts, he at least had the satisfaction of being part of our rescue.

  Truso scans the rest of us. I doubt he’s impressed by the state of his workforce. “Fieldwork will run dawn to dusk. Until we’re up to date, early crews will be on planting, late crews on crop maintenance. If you can manage a double shift, all the better. The scouts who are still with us are responsible for security under Farra, so we’ve no need to worry on that score.”

  Shuffling and covert glances suggest that not many find their fears so easy to allay.

  “Aiya,” Truso continues, “we’ll need your continuing forbearance in catering. You’ve been stoic through difficult circumstances and I’m sorry to ask for more.” He meets each wary set of eyes. “I’m asking it of everyone. Apart from those on repairs, Saice and Ness in the med room, and Aiya’s kitchen crew, we need everyone in the field crews, every daylight hour we’ve got. Any questions?”

  No one seems inclined to speak. “I can do an afternoon shift with the field crews,” I offer. “The ward room’s not as full as it was.” It’s true. The patients in our care are daily reducing.

  Before Truso can answer, Zeek steps forward. “What about seasonal workers? Surely Vidya can help by sending a crew now, as well as at harvest?”

  “No doubt they will, as soon as Brenon gives the all-clear.” Truso studies his diminished workforce. “The fieldwork can’t wait.”

  “He must think we’re still at risk.” It’s Catha, Tanlin’s mother, who says it, though her fear is echoed on every face.

  “Brenon is confident that he has the paras contained at Summertops, and that he’ll soon have that situation resolved in our favour,” Truso answers smoothly. “Until he does, and we’re one hundred percent certain there are no paras left on the loose, Brenon would prefer to minimise movement to and from Vidya.”

  “What about the children?” Catha persists. “Can you promise they’re safe here? That there will be no more attacks?”

  A muscle shifts in Truso’s cheek. “I can’t promise, Catha. But given the change in circumstances, I don’t believe there’s any need to evacuate the children. We’ve seen the worst of it and won.” He pauses. “Of course, anyone who wishes to return to Vidya will be able to do so after Brenon sanctions travel. For the moment, we’re still under martial law.”

  The reminder is an uncomfortable one, loosing a rumble of disgruntled murmurs. I’d heard that some of the farm’s permanent residents have been considering relocating to Vidya. The reaction to Truso’s announcement confirms the rumour true.

  “Who decides when it’s lifted?” someone asks.

  “Brenon. But even then—” Truso hesitates. “I’d like to ask that anyone considering leaving delays until replacement fieldworkers arrive. Right now, we need every able body we can get.”

  There are no more questions. Perhaps, like me, the others are thinking about those who are no longer able-bodied, or no longer here at all. The faces around me are solemn as we file out of the hall to begin our day’s labours.

  Truso does his best to pull things back to normal. I’m not sure any of us remember what normal might be, and whatever sense of it we begin to approach is rearranged when news comes back each day from Summertops.

  It takes Brenon four days to regain control of the hill farm and his victory costs the lives of seven more scouts, three killed by booby-traps after the battle is over. Of the residents of Summertops, four are still alive, two women and two girls. Jolan escorts them to Home Farm and entrusts them to Saice. We do what we can for their injuries, but their suffering goes deeper than the scars that we see.

  The battle bequeaths us, as well, a fresh batch of walking wounded, among them a scout, scarcely older than me, who can’t hold within him the horror of what they found in the farmhouse at Summertops. Saice swears me to silence, though her insistence is redundant. I’ve no desire to repeat what he told us.

  We’re midway through our morning clinic when Aiya bursts into the med room, cheeks damp with tears. “Saice!”

  Abandoning the patient she’s tending, Saice grips the older woman’s arms. It takes me a moment to realise that Aiya’s tears are of relief. “They found them,” she sobs.

  “The children: they’re alive.” The children – three girls and two boys, all younger than se
ven, and one girl of fourteen – were discovered cowering in an old cellar beneath the barn at Summertops, unaware that the war had turned in their favour.

  “One of the men got them into hiding when he realised the farm was under attack,” Aiya tells us. “They’ve had nothing to eat but carrots and pickled cabbage in all that time.”

  “They’ll be half-starved,” Saice says.

  “But alive.” Aiya smiles damply. “The scouts are bringing them back today.”

  “Are any of the women we have here …?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The children, when they arrive, are gaunt and hollow-eyed. Aiya and Manet take charge of them, one by one addressing the medical problems Saice identifies: dehydration, malnourishment, muscle-wasting due to the cramped conditions they’ve survived in. They’re also filthy. In their honour, Truso has the bath-house filled for the first time in weeks. More than just the newcomers are grateful for that.

  The children’s reunion with the other survivors from Summertops is oddly restrained, as if they’ve lost the ability to allow themselves fully-fledged emotion. That some families are reunited makes it worse for the others: the two children who discover themselves newly orphaned and the woman whose only daughter remains unaccounted for. The random injustice so enrages me I can scarcely speak civilly, even to Saice.

  Brenon’s return to Home Farm two days later produces none of the celebration the arrival of the children engendered. He brings with him three prisoners, battered and silent.

  It signals the end of the war – which Brenon describes not as war but as a series of skirmishes. His skirmishes cost the four farms fifteen lives and Vidya thirty-three more. There are as many again wounded, though Saice is confident all but one of those will recover. Of him, she says we’ll have to wait and see.

  For the four people missing – one of them Opi – Brenon holds little hope. Silently, I add all four to the chest of grief inside me.

  It is three weeks to the day since Esha was shot when Brenon has the prisoners brought out into the yard. All but one. When Farra told me, four days ago, that one of the men had died of infection, I felt nothing. I have nothing left to feel, and it makes no difference anyway.

  All the prisoners are to be shot.

  Brenon gave them a trial with the community as judge. His logic was stark: he said that if we released the prisoners to go back to their base, they’d likely return with more men and arms, better prepared and knowing our numbers, and looking for vengeance too. I understand that letting them live would be a risk, but it’s the same argument Colm would have used against Dev back on Dunnett. Given the opportunity, Colm would have ordered Dev killed, and me beside him; maybe my brother Ty and our cousin Sophie too.

  Brenon argued that the farms are safe only if none of the invaders remains alive. That then their disappearance might be attributed to exposure to some toxin or old-world catastrophe; that even if the group they come from assumes they were killed in their attempt to take the farms, that failure will make them hesitate before they decide to try again. They’ll look for easier pickings, Brenon said.

  The people at Summertops were easy pickings. It was what happened there, more than all the rest, that swung the trial against them. I spoke out for the prisoners. I said that if we choose to take lives when we needn’t, we’re no better than they are. I asked where it would end. Truso placed his hand on my shoulder.

  “Ness is right.” His voice was gravelly with exhaustion. “We should never take life lightly. But equally we must protect what we have. Our decision must be made with a view to security, not vengeance.”

  Other voices took over, some arguing in favour of retribution, others of their perception of an ongoing threat. No one else spoke for the lives held in the balance. The women from Summertops chose not to attend the trial, but the brother of one was there and he called not only for the men’s deaths, but for a share of suffering first. Others talked him down.

  When Brenon finally called for a vote, the vote was for death.

  My breath comes hard in my chest as I push my legs on. Beneath my booted foot, the cushion of moss that scrabbles over an outcrop of rock gives way, exposing a vein of lighter flecks. Even the rock itself is foreign to me, its smooth grey planes bejewelled with tiny slivers of silver.

  In my heart I wish for the jagged bones of Dunnett that run in stepped ridges down the flanks of the cliffs.

  I don’t want to be with the others while they carry out their day’s work. Though my lungs are burning, I force myself higher, to where the rock begins to win out over soil and plants.

  When Brenon announced that the sentence would be carried out immediately, I couldn’t stay. Ronan met my eyes as I elbowed my way from the room, but he didn’t follow me. Perhaps he understands my need to be alone, and far enough away that I can’t hear the community’s judgment carried out.

  Reaching a crest, I bend forward to ease the cramp in my side. To the east, lines of hills echo into the distance, each shadowed ridge paler than the one that stands before. Far to the north there’s a glint of light that could be a lake or the sea and, beyond it, a single pale peak. I keep my back to the south, to Home Farm, to Vidya.

  It makes no sense that I should feel sympathy for the prisoners. Esha’s life alone was worth far more than theirs – but killing them can’t bring her back.

  Flopping onto a stone slab, I prop my chin on my drawn-up knees. Sweat makes my skin tacky, snaring my shirt to my back, drying like old tears on my face. I shiver despite the sunlight that comes scattering through the clouds.

  Each time I close my eyes, a parade of faces, mute but pleading, begins a march behind my lids: Esha, Ben, Rys, the scout who died after we worked so hard to save his leg, the one we couldn’t save no matter what we did. Sometimes Pa joins the procession, and Mama too. Her sister Bella smiles and stretches a hand to my cheek. Faces I’ll never see again, of people I’ve known well alongside those I barely met before I saw them die. The man who attacked Ronan on the road back from Summertops, the para who died in a cell that should have housed potatoes rather than victims of torture – perpetrators of torture: I know he was that too.

  I can’t stay here. I know it suddenly, clear as if someone voiced it aloud in my heart. There has to be someplace where the answer to every threat isn’t violence.

  A foot falls behind me and I swivel, pulse leaping – but it’s Farra who stands there. Farra, who witnessed me saving one life by harming another. There’s nothing simple to the rights and wrongs of what we do.

  He presses his hand to the half-healed wound in his side as he struggles to catch his breath. “Sorry, lass,” he says at last. “Brenon asked me to keep an eye on you.” He shrugs. “We can’t yet assume there aren’t more paramilitaries about.”

  I curl myself tight on my rock, resenting Brenon’s intrusion. “I needed to be alone.”

  Farra turns in a slow circle, surveying the hills. “Gives you a sense of the scale of things,” he says.

  A bird calls, long and high; a lonely sound.

  I trace a fingertip across the rock slab beneath me. “Do you know what makes the stone glitter?” I ask, as if it matters.

  Farra cocks an eyebrow. “You should go into land-sci. They have answers for questions like that.”

  I raise my chin. “So you don’t think I’m right for Scouts after all?”

  It’s a spurious question, given the reason I’m up here, and Farra knows it. Still, he answers me gently. “There’s no one type of person goes into Scouts. We each have our own thoughts.”

  “What are yours? About – about the decision?”

  He shrugs. “Fear’s a powerful force.”

  “So is vengeance.”

  He leaves a pause before he answers. “We have to defend what we’ve struggled to build. If this is what it takes, I can accept it. Do you think we had any real alternative?”

  “We could have taken them back to Vidya so they could learn to be part of our way of doing things.”


  “Could we have trusted them?”

  “No.” I know my argument is flawed. “But we didn’t give them the chance to prove us wrong. We didn’t even ask them.”

  It occurs to me that may not be true. Brenon spent hours in the cellar in the days before the trial – though I doubt his motive was to discover each man’s hopes and intentions. He presented the information he’d forced from them – where their home base lies, how large a community they have, whether any escaped his attack – as if it justified the means he used against them.

  “It was wrong, Farra,” I say. “What Brenon did to the prisoners was wrong.”

  “Even though we can’t be safe without the information he gained?”

  “We can’t be sure it’s true. And even if it is, maybe they’d have told us anyway if we’d shown them compassion instead of violence.”

  Farra looks away across the hills for a full minute. When he turns back to me, his gaze is gentle. “If you knew which of them killed Esha, would you choose compassion then?” he asks.

  I’m silent. Farra selects a nearby boulder for a seat. “Life’s not simple,” he adds. “For myself, I prefer knowing the reasons they attacked us. If they’d had no motivation beyond violence alone, that would make it worse in my reckoning.”

  “You believe their story then, that they were driven out of their community?”

  “It’s possible.” Wind gusts along the slope, carrying the scent of wildflowers on its breath. I unfurl myself a little. “And it means there could be a way forward, if we can convince the group they came from to talk to us,” Farra adds.

  “You think it’s part of Brenon’s plan, to give them that option?”

  Farra shrugs.

  The silence that stretches between us is comfortable, my bitterness eased a fraction. A bird rounds the flank of the hill, tilts a wing to climb above us, circles once and is gone. Idly I wonder whether it was the same bird that called earlier and whether it’s searching for a mate, or food, or a place to belong. I wonder which of those things it might find.