by Kate Elliott
On we walked past a dye works with its pungent odor and thence along a lane of dreary one-story brick warehouses. The steady roar of the mills serenaded us.
“This racket will drive me mad!” cried Bee.
“Aren’t you mad already?”
She essayed a punch to my shoulder, but her heart wasn’t in it. The day’s walk and last night’s escape were taking their toll even on her resilient frame, and the constant ringing, thrumming clatter was surely enough to unsettle the firmest resolve and drum into oblivion all coherent thought. We walked the length of Calders Mill and onward toward the twin stacks of Matarno Mill, at the end of the race.
Men winched bales out of a barge and loaded them onto a flatbed wagon. Bales of finished cloth had been stacked on another barge for the journey downstream. Dusk turned the water black; even the last glancing rays of the sun could wake no glistening shimmer on that foul liquid. A pack of scrawny boys fished from the bank, shivering without coats. Two braced themselves each on a crutch; one was missing his right leg below the knee, the trouser leg tied off with a bit of string.
A long, low howl scraped the air like a wolf marking its prey. A second, shorter blat replied, and a coughing toot-toot-toot roused briefly and wheezed to a halt.
All my life in Adurnam I had heard echoes of these calls from the comforts of the Barahal house. Only now did I see what they announced.
The rhythmic scratching brawl of the looms stepped down piece by piece. Within the queer alteration of sound formed by its cessation, the ringing clamor of the mules fell silent, and slowly the din settled and the ground ceased humming beneath my soles until all I heard was a buzzing in my ears. In the fury’s wake, an avalanche rumbled into life. A man unlocked a chained set of double doors on the ground floor of Matarno Mill, and workers spilled forth like stones and dirt racing down a cliff in an unstoppable tide. They wore wooden clogs rather than the leather shoes we could afford, and the noise made by feet striking stone, wood, and earth washed all before it. But most striking was their silence. You would think that after a day hammered by noise and unable to exchange a single civil word in a normal tone, folk would be ready to chatter about their thoughts and hopes and gossip. By the worn and exhausted faces flooding past us, I could see that no one had the strength to speak.
Just before the first wave reached us, I looked at Bee, and Bee looked at me. We needed no words to share what must have been obvious to both of us. It simply had not occurred to either of us that the mills would shut down for the night, because they relied on daylight for their workers to see. Then the wash hit us, men and women and children in faded and mended clothing, the women with their hair covered by scarves and faces pallid or ashen, depending on their complexion. So thin they were, faces pinched, hands trembling; one young woman was rubbing her right ear, and a man with stooped shoulders leaned heavily on a comrade, as though he were about to faint. A boy no older than Hanan passed, his gait made awkward by the evident pain caused him in his right leg, for he grimaced each time that limb pressed into the ground. A very small girl passed holding a bloody rag to the back of her head and crying, although not one soul paid the least attention to her.
Bee pushed forward against the tide, and with an elbow here and a shoulder there, we pressed through the crush toward the mill’s doors, where a pair of foremen watched as the workers departed. In such a commotion, it was easy enough to be what I was not. I was not walking into the mill but rather was part of the outward flow; Bee was twisting her bracelet, as if anxious about a missed tryst, no one important. Hidden within the glamor of misdirection, we got inside the stairwell; very dim it was, with no windows and only one lamp burning midway between each floor. The clomping of many feet echoed in the stairwell as folk pushed down.
Shoved against the brick wall, we swam like birds against the current upward, for laborers from the upper floors were only now coming down. At the first landing, we slipped into a vast, low room with big windows where the encroaching dusk gave us little enough light to see by. Brushes were hung from a rack on the wall. Spinning mules stood in their ranks, fiber pulled in long threads but now still. Bee knocked her knee against a wheel, and I jammed my toe when I kicked a runner lying so low along the floor I had not expected it. White flickers of lint drifted and warmth lingered. Dust tickled in our nostrils. A bloody knot of human hair lay on the floor.
“Did you see how young those children were?” whispered Bee.
Footsteps clumped behind us. We turned.
A night watchman with a lantern and a knotted whip walked in. “Here, now, off you go, girls! I’ve no time for your malingering! We’re closing up!”
We hurried away down the long room to the opposite door, by now drowned in gloom, down the cold, silent stone steps, and again outdoors. Out back, connected to a one-storied annex, rose the engine house, where the engine still hissed and wheezed. A pair of watchmen stood by the door, talking and laughing. Bee grabbed my arm and tugged me with her as she marched to the door. As they looked up to see her, she bobbed her head and rubbed her hands as if nervous.
“Begging your pardon,” she said in a soft, un-Bee-like voice, “but we’re come up from the country for we were told we could get jobs here.”
“What kind of job were you thinking?” asked the younger man.
The elder gave a frown. Bee burst into tears.
I said, “Oh, please, we’re good girls. We were sent up to live with our cousin on Wellspring Terrace and take a job here, for there’s no husbands for us at home. But she died, and her husband said a terrible thing to my sister, like he meant to… to mistreat her. We’ve just enough coin to make the trip home, but nothing for a roof tonight, and it’s so cold, and we’re so frightened.”
Bee bleated out another anguished sob.
“All we ask is one night. In a safe, warm place, like you’d hope for your own sisters and daughters.”
“Probably that bastard Tom Carter,” said the elder. “For his wife died three months back. Some say he shoved her down the stairs, and her pregnant! The baby died, too.”
Bee wept noisily.
“All right, then,” continued the elder with a sigh, “and don’t you go being disrespectful,” he added, with a stern nod at the younger man. To us, he said, “I’ll tell them to let you lie on the floor just inside the door. But how much sleep you’ll get I could not say, for it’s a cursed din.”
“Do they keep the furnace lit all night?” I asked, hoping he would say yes.
“Yes. It’s easier that way than drawing it up each morning.” He opened the door.
And, indeed, inside the stone walls of the engine house it was smoky and noisy and hot, but it was combustion, and if anything would hide us from the mansa, it was combustion.
We curled up against a wall, out of the way, in our coats. The workers in charge of the furnace ignored us. It was smoky, and noisy, and hot, but we slept.
31
A horn blast woke us before dawn. The hard planks had bruised my right shoulder, and my neck ached from lying crooked all night. My stomach felt hollow, and worst of all, the smoke and heat had parched my lips until they were flaking. The older watchman appeared as, from far off, a roll like thunder rose.
“Best you get moving, then,” he said in a loud voice above the steadily increasing rumble. “May the gods watch over your travels.”
Bee got quickly to her feet. “My thanks to you,” she said with real gratitude, and she kissed him smartly on the lips, which made him flush and then smile. We hurried out into icy dawn, where the silence was shattered by the clatter of hundreds of workers surging along the streets, entering the factory doors, and clomping up the stairs in their wooden shoes.
We joined the stream, going up one floor to the long room with the spinning mules. I grabbed a pair of brushes from the bar, and Bee and I set to work brushing beneath the thread as more workers streamed into the spinning hall. They looked as weary in the gray pallor of morning as they had under dusk’s gentle g
low.
“Here! You two!” A man with a weathered face and a scar across his nose called us out. “Who are you?”
“Maester told us to start by brushing,” said Bee. “Was it wrongly done, maester?”
“Out with you,” he said. “You don’t belong on my floor.”
“But the maester told us—”
He raised a hand in which he carried a knotted whip. “Before I have cause to use this on you!”
We scuttled toward the door. Fortunately, he turned away as, with a hiss of steam, the gurgle of water, and a clunk, the workings began turning over. A low roaring bass and a high, bell-like ringing combined to create a humming clamor. Scarcely had we reached the door than we heard the pop of the lash and a child’s shriek, but we dared not turn around. We paused on the landing, shivering, for it was cruelly cold, and we were stiff and hungry and our voices more like croaks from being so dry.
“Now what?” Bee asked. Even with a brick wall between us and the spinning hall, I could barely hear her.
“Let’s go up! We must pray that the mills’ voice and the combustion that powers the machines will conceal us from the mansa.”
We climbed to the next floor and peeked in to another wide room of spinning mules. The clamor and constant movement; the men and women tending the machines; the children on a constant plodding track between threads needing to be pieced while others crept beneath the wheels, sweeping up lint and dripping grease with their hand brushes; the simple exhaustion of every soul there: all this protected us from scrutiny. No one had time to look our way, not until a foreman strolled down the center aisle with a whip in hand, his restless gaze raking the ragged children in case one might sag to grasp a breath of rest. The heat was beginning to rise, and a mist of pale fiber dust floated with it so with each breath I began to feel the urge to cough.
Bee nudged me. The foreman had seen us.
We retreated, and thence up again on the deserted stairs to the top floor. Just beyond the landing we discovered a blind corner, a stub end of the stairs on which we could sit in darkness, for there were no windows in the stairwell, and chafe our hands against the cold as the mill roared beside us. The vibration ground into our bones. Beyond all that, I could still feel and hear the other two mills besides, a clashing, dinning storm so relentless that it enveloped you like a blizzard. We breathed lint and tasted cinders, and Bee cradled her cheeks on her palms with her fingers covering her ears as if that could banish the tumult. Nothing could, just as nothing could banish the tumult of my thoughts.
How foolish to believe sunset would free us. Four Moons House might have no contractual power over Bee once she made twenty, but they could easily squash her vain attempts to maintain her independence by using their influence, wealth, and magic to force her into a cage, or even a new contract, of their choosing. What independence had we, really? Without money of our own and without influential patrons, we might soon find ourselves scrabbling for work in the brutal factories or standing in our rags at the door of a mage House or prince’s dun begging to be taken on as a client, our lives and labor forfeit, in exchange for their protection. Had we sacrificed Rory for nothing? Was the outcome already determined?
I did not hear or see Bee’s tears; I smelled them and I felt them, and so I threw an arm over her shoulders. For hours we hid, concealed by the busy turbulence of the mill that, like a huge beast, lived oblivious to our insignificant existence, two tiny sparks amid its oceanic vastness. We dared not speak, lest we be discovered, and we could not speak, because we could not hear each other. Cold, hungry, thirsty, tired, and exhausted, we sat in a shivering stupor. There was nothing we could do but survive this day.
And then I felt a change in the humming pulse, a tremor in the air, a shift in the harmonics of the conjoined hum of the three mills.
I grabbed Bee’s arm, my hand tightening. She gulped down her tears and straightened. I did not think she could hear what I could hear. Not above Matarno Mill’s tumult.
The music and beat of distant Toombs Mill was faltering, and the counter-rhythm it played into the whole stuttered and failed as the entire mill went silent. Dead.
I stood and pulled Bee up behind me, hit the stairs running, down and down, and we hit the great double doors, slammed right into them, but they were locked and chained from the outside. I hammered at them with my fists until Bee yanked me away.
“What is it?” she shouted. “What is—?”
Calders Mill began to die. With my head pressed to the doors, I heard the change fall in the same way one sees light shift before a storm, lowering, darkening. Silence can herald peace, or it can herald death.
The hooves of many horses beat a pattern on the dull earth; their noise drummed up through my feet and into my heart. Folk were shouting, yet at such a remove I could not hear their words; I could only feel the tide of the mansa’s power approaching us like a katabatic wind blasting down off the ice.
There had to be another way out of the mill.
We started back up the stairs. The lamps flickered and went out. In icy darkness we climbed, saying nothing, for there was nothing to say. We needed our breath to run.
Below, the lock on the outside doors shattered with a splintering explosion, and the machines on the ground floor shuddered, and sputtered, and lugged to a halt. We burst through the doors into the spinning hall, with its machines set transversely to the windows to make the most of the light. Oddly, as we ran for the door on the far side, jumping over runners, stared at by the workers, shouted at by the foreman, I was reminded of the tables in the academy’s library, set transverse to the tall windows. There, for the first time, I had seen Andevai, although I had not known who he was or that our paths would collide so fatefully.
Bee reached the door before me and yanked hard on the lock fixed to the latch. The thrumming that pervaded the structure began to thin and fade as the mansa mounted the steps behind us. Somehow, a hairpin had remained stuck in Bee’s curls. Without a glance behind her—for who needed to look when we could feel the machines shudder and die at his approach?—she pulled the hairpin from her hair and set it into the lock mechanism, her expression fixed with concentration and her eyes closed.
As the machines fell silent and the wheels ceased, children crept under the threads to hide, and women and men turned to stare at the opposite door. Whip raised, the foreman advanced on that other door, ignoring us. He halted dead as a man stepped over the threshold and into the hall.
The mansa had come.
His was a presence one could never forget after meeting him: tall, imposing, and utterly commanding. A woman dropped to her knees, sobbing. His gaze, across the length of the hall, caught me. Pinned me.
“Got it!” said Bee triumphantly.
With a snick, the lock opened. She flung open the door. We bolted, and I slammed the door shut behind us, then leaped down three steps at a time after her, down into a black pit, for the lamps had all gone out.
On the stairwell’s ground floor, we had a choice of three doors. I yanked at the doors leading outside, but they, too, were locked and chained. We could go back through the ground-floor hall of the mill, where we knew his soldiers had entered, or out through the weaving shed that was attached as an annex to the main building. In the weaving shed, looms still clattered, the floor humming beneath our feet as the machinery vibrated in full spate.
The door, unlocked, opened easily and we plunged over the threshold into a long, wide building whose timber roof was inset with windows. People bent over their work, oblivious to our entrance, unaware of the changed tenor of the mill, subservient to the deafening roar whose rhythms fell like a dance around us. Bee’s mouth moved, but I could not hear her. Far, far away, down the length of the shed, stood a double door, our last hope for escape.
The machines closest to the stairwell shuddered and coughed, missing their beats. The engine in its adjoining house thudded and hissed and whined as the magister’s descent down the stairs killed the fiery heart of its comb
ustion. The laborers did begin to look up then. A woman wiped strands of hair from a sweaty forehead. A man stood poised with shuttle in hand, looking confounded and bewildered. We ran the length of the weaving shed—a good, long way—as the looms one by one fell silent behind us like voices smothered.
We ran, but it was already too late.
The far door opened and armed men wearing the fine jackets and bearing the bows and spears of mage House troops walked through. They halted, blocking our escape. Midway, we stopped and surveyed the walls of the structure. The windows were too high to reach. I turned, and Bee turned beside me, as the mansa and his attendants swept into the weaving shed. The last looms thunked and shushed in a kind of choking clut-clut-clut as they wheezed out their death rattle.
We had nowhere else to run. Even if I might hope to conceal myself and sneak past them, I could not conceal Bee. And I would not abandon her. Never.
“Bee,” I said in a low voice, “if you grab a spanner and climb up on one of the looms, maybe you can reach and break one of the windows and climb while I rush him.”
“Cat, I can’t reach.”
“But he’ll kill me and force you to marry Andevai. Or himself!”
“He can try,” she said ominously.
“He has the right. It’s in the contract.”
“I’m beginning to wonder what that troll would say about the legality of that contract, if it was forced on the family when they were under duress. As I’m sure it must have been.”
“Too late to ask her now. If you run while I attacked—”
“With what? Sarcasm?” She took my hand in hers. “We’ll face this together.”
The mansa was a storm whose strength could not be evaded. He had a breadth of shoulder that made him fill whatever space he stood in, and a bold, striking face whose lineaments were stamped by both his Celtic and Afric forebears. He wore his silver-streaked black hair in many small braids tied off with tiny amulets. He was a man to respect, but also to fear, as we must fear him, because whatever else he might be, however fair a ruler of his House, however wise or capricious, intelligent or heavy-handed, in his command, he had already demanded my death.