On its perch on top of the Eating Gate, the gulon stretched its paws and laid its scrawny length along a piece of timber. Through slitted eyes it watched as scores of Dwellers were swept under the rolling barrels of the gate and pulverised. It closed its eyes and slept.
The boy Elija was dragging himself step by step across the thrashing bridge when it was torn apart by the stormwaters. His only fears were for his sister. I cannot rescue her if I die, he thought, and he clung desperately to a wooden plank and tried to survive. For a long time he was battered and flung about by the water, then at last he stopped moving and he realised he could breathe. He gratefully took a painful lungful of air, his thin chest sore and bruised. Opening his eyes, he found he was in total darkness. He was upside down and entangled in ropes, perhaps the ropes of the bridge. He could still hear the crash of water close by. Anxiously he tried to move his arms and legs. Everything ached, but nothing appeared broken. He could move, but he could not free himself. And if I do get free, he thought, where will I go in the dark?
Trussed like a goat for sacrifice, hanging helpless from the wall of a sewer in total darkness deep in the bowels of the City, the little boy started to cry.
When Bartellus rose to consciousness he realised instantly that the atmosphere had changed. Gone was the stifling foetid odour that had pressed on his senses for wretched days beyond counting. Now the air was lighter, and smelled of wet hay, rotten fruit, smoke and, faintly, flowers. He lay on his back, his body an old wooden raft barely floating in a sea of pain. There was a weight on his chest and, when he opened his eyes and stretched his neck, he saw it was the little girl, motionless. He thought she was dead, but when he tried to sit up his involuntary groan woke her and she scrambled away from him, eyes huge in her pinched white face.
Then the girl gazed up and around her, and for the first time it occurred to Bartellus that he could see. They were in a round stone chamber. All around torches in brackets cast moving shadows on the dripping walls. There were black and white pictures on those walls, faint and faded, of soaring birds and flying feathers. Bartellus and the girl were on a sturdy ledge high above the stream, which glided in a deep channel through the centre of the chamber. Bartellus laid his head back and rested for a while, watching the birds as they flickered eerily in the torchlight. He could do no more.
Then he heard a whisper of sound and lifted his head again. Floating like a mirage in the deserts of the south, a cloaked and hooded figure walked towards them through the yellow light. All his soldier’s instincts deadened, Bartellus lay vulnerable as the figure approached and stopped before them. The old man saw the tip of a sword blade below the lower edge of the cloak. He thought he ought to move, to defend himself and the child, but he had no power.
“You are not dead,” said a woman’s impassive voice, echoing a little off the wet stone. Bartellus was uncertain if this was intended to reassure or was merely a statement of fact.
“We were caught by the stormwaters,” he explained, noting as he said it that an explanation was scarcely necessary. Understandably, the woman did not reply. She loomed over him silently. Her presence was unsettling. He sat up with difficulty. His whole body seemed bruised and his back screamed with pain.
“This girl needs dry clothes, food in her belly and fresh water to drink,” he told the woman.
She took a moment to answer. Then she said coolly, “I am sure you are right. But why are you telling me?”
Frustration overcame his exhaustion, and a rare spark ignited in his chest.
“The wretches who live here are the dregs of the City,” he said. “Yet in my experience, young woman, none of them needs it explained why a half-drowned child needs food and drink and comfort! If you can’t give this girl the help she needs, lead us to whoever can.”
His words sounded pompous, even to him, and the child started to cry. Bartellus realised helplessly that he had frightened her.
The woman gazed at him unmoved. “This is not a market stall, or an orphanage, or a hospital, old man.”
This time he held his temper. “No,” he told her reasonably, “but you are well enough fed, by the look of you, and there is clearly organisation here. I cannot believe you cannot bring this child and a plate of food together. Is this so much to ask?”
“Why do you think there is organisation here?” the woman asked.
He nodded to the torches. “Elsewhere in the Halls any unguarded torch would be stolen within moments. There is authority in this place, and one that is respected.”
She nodded in the darkness of her hood. “Very well. Come, child,” she said, turning away and walking back across the bird-haunted chamber.
The little girl looked to Bartellus, who smiled reassuringly, and she trailed after the woman, glancing back often to see the old man was still there.
When the two had disappeared Bartellus raised himself up with an effort, marvelling that he had no broken bones. He walked to the edge of the stream, where he relieved himself long and luxuriously. Feeling remarkably cheered by this simple act, he followed the woman and child.
As he passed through the circle of torches darkness closed in again, and he blinked the grime out of his eyes until he saw a faint glow. Light was filtering through an archway to his right. There was a barred gate, open, and he passed through it, following the glow until he came to a round chamber lit not by the acrid light of torches but by soft candles, dozens of them. He squinted. All around were stone pillars, their capitals carved in the shapes of perched and watching birds. The room was very old and the stone stares of the carvings weighed down on him.
There was no sign of the girl, but the woman sat on the edge of a wide wooden table. She had thrown her hood back, and her hair was dark red in the torchlight. He saw her face was young, but lines of experience were already gathering at the corners of her eyes, which were the violet of flowers. An unsheathed sword lay across her thighs.
“Where is this place?” he asked her.
“The Dwellers call it the Hall of Watchers. They fear to come here. They fear my colleagues and me.” She laid her hand idly on the sword’s hilt.
His dislike of her rose quickly again, and he told her, “If your colleagues are anything like yourself, they probably fear sharp tongues more than they fear sharp swords.”
She scowled at him. “First you ask for our hospitality, then you insult me?”
He glanced around the room, as if uncaring of her words or sword. On another table lay a jug of water and a platter of meat and biscuits. His stomach lurched with craving. He let his eyes pass casually over the food. He would starve to death before showing his need to this odious girl.
“You are thin-skinned and quick to anger,” he commented mildly, as if it was of no consequence. “If you were one of my soldiers I would not let you bear a fruit knife, far less a sword.”
The woman leaped from the table, blade in hand, but a soft voice said, “Indaro.”
Bartellus looked round. A newcomer stood in a narrow archway half concealed by a wall hanging. Her long hair was white as ice, and her face was lined. Like the girl Indaro, she wore a close-fitting leather tunic. But while the younger woman wore leather leggings, like a cavalry officer, the elder wore a long midnight blue skirt above shiny boots. Round her shoulders was draped a brown greatcoat. On her breast silver gleamed.
“He is right, girl. You are too eager to take offence,” she said. Indaro made no reply, but at a nod from the woman she stalked out of the room.
“If she were one of your soldiers, general, she would be dead long since,” the woman said when Indaro had gone.
Bartellus felt his chest tighten. For all the horrors and deprivations of the Halls, he had become used to being an anonymous old man, no longer harried and chased.
She walked across to the table and poured a glass of water. She handed it to him. She was tall and graceful and he wondered who, in the name of the Gods of Ice and Fire, she could be.
“Do I know you?” he asked.
>
She looked at him curiously. “Do you not?” she answered. Then, “I am Archange Vincerus. What do you call yourself?”
He hesitated. “Bartellus,” he said finally.
“A good name. And common enough. Particularly among our men at arms.” She turned and picked up the platter of food and handed it to him. He took a biscuit and crunched into it. The surge of flavour and sweetness in his mouth made his head spin, and he slowly took a sip of water.
“Archange. I know that name.” He cursed his treacherous memory, in which his experiences swirled and drifted, ebbed and flowed like mist over ice. “Who are you, lady, and why are you living in this sewer?”
“I do not live here. I merely visit,” she said sharply.
Bartellus was suddenly tired of these women and their haughty ways. Why did he care what they thought of him? He took the platter of food and, sitting at the table, started to eat with unashamed need. She sat too and there was silence for some time as he devoured the meat and more of the biscuits. He drank two tall glasses of fresh water. It tasted like morning dew on grass.
Then, ignoring his companion, he closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the high-backed chair. He found his mind was clearer. He allowed himself to think of those other two children, his sons, he had seen waving goodbye in a sunlit garden as he left them for the last time. Joron, the elder, was waving above his head a wooden sword his father had made him just that day. The toddler, Karel, was waving excitedly too, following his brother’s lead, but he was too young to understand what was happening. He stopped waving when he spotted one of the new puppies. He toddled over to it, and Snowy the white hound wandered across the garden to guard her pup. Bartellus’ last sight of his smallest son was with his chubby arms round the patient hound’s neck, his father forgotten.
Tears coursed down his face.
His wife, Marta, had not been outside to see him off. She lay in bed, exhausted in the last stages of a hard pregnancy. He had kissed her goodbye, and promised to be home for winter. He had no real fears for her; her two previous labours had been difficult, but their sons were born healthy, and she had regained her strength within days. He was sorry he would not be there to see his daughter born. He was sure it would be a daughter this time.
He could not remember kissing Marta goodbye. He was certain he had done so, for he always did. But he had been distracted by the coming campaign, and he had kissed her without thinking, a casual buss on the cheek. The last kiss.
Then he had ridden away with his old friend Astinor Redfall, who had come to summon him. He did not know, on that shining morning, that he was being taken to his brief trial and awful punishment. He did not know then, or for more than a year afterwards, that within the hour his family all lay dead, his longed-for daughter spilling from a great gash in Marta’s belly.
Chapter 3
When Bartellus opened his eyes again, the woman was sitting at the table with him, a glass of water to hand, her gaze unfocussed. She had seen his tears but he found he did not care. He wondered how much time had passed.
“Have we met before?” he asked.
“Just once. A long time ago.”
“Why did you rescue us?” he asked.
“Perhaps you were swept here by the floodwaters.”
“The floodwaters which considerately left us together, the child safely beside me, in your antechamber?”
She sighed. “It is a sad reflection on your life that you ask why someone should save another from drowning.”
He knew she was familiar to him. He racked his mind but nothing came to him. So much of his history had been washed away in blood and pain. Memory was a sly and fickle friend to him now. There were times when he could not bear the visions of his wife smiling up at him, his boys waving goodbye in the sunlight, but that memory pursued him relentlessly and remained crystal clear. Yet his days of glory, times he wanted to savour for they were never-changing, would never change whatever happened in the future, these shimmered and shifted, shifting sands in his tired brain.
“Are there others here like Indaro?” he asked Archange.
“Why?”
“Because she is fit and strong and claims to be a warrior. Why is she not in the army? Is that what this place is, a sanctuary for cowards who do not want to fight for their City?”
“People escape to the sewers for many reasons—they are not all cowards,” she replied pointedly. “But there are easier ways for women to avoid military service. They can become pregnant. No woman carrying a precious child is allowed to serve, as you know, general.”
He could not allow that to pass twice. “I am not a general.”
She shook her head in a gesture of impatience. “Then you should not speak so casually of your soldiers. No one would take you for a scribe or an innkeeper.
“Besides,” she added, smiling, “you look like a general.” The years fell from her face.
For the first time in many days he realised he probably stank. Yet he felt comfortable, sitting in a chair with a full belly and, he had to admit, a pleasant companion. The air was warm and his clothes had dried for the first time in days. He sat back and looked around. The room was of cold stone, and the tables and chairs simple, but they were made of rich woods, and the wall hanging was heavily embroidered with fierce beasts and strange flowers. In the bottom corner a gulon stared balefully out at him.
“We are still in the sewers here, in the Halls,” he said, “but you do not come and go through the tunnels. So there must be an exit to fresh air?”
She shook her head. “This is called the Hall of Watchers,” she volunteered. “Centuries ago, perhaps hundreds of centuries, it was part of a great palace. Then the palace fell, or there was an invasion or an earthquake, I don’t remember, and the ancient palace disappeared under a new one. And then another. There are many layers of old cities, most of them destroyed. But some buildings remain intact, like this, deep in the ground. We are very far below the present City.”
“That is the first of my questions you have answered.”
“I am not here to answer your questions.”
“Why are you here?”
He caught her eye and they both smiled.
“We are both too old for such prevarications,” she told him. She sighed again and shrugged the greatcoat off her shoulders. It was a silver crescent moon glimmering on her breast. “I can do nothing more to you than the world has already done.”
They were silent for a while, then she offered, “You ask about my friend Indaro. She was at the First Battle of Araz.”
Vile memories danced in his mind. “So were thousands of others,” he replied. “Tens of thousands.” Including me, he could have told her.
“Just a child really, gently raised.” She looked at him. “Many people believe women should not be fighting this war.”
“I am not one of them,” he told her, not entirely truthfully. “The City would have been lost long since without its women warriors.”
She shook her head sadly. “The men guard our City’s past,” she quoted. “The women guard our future.”
It was a familiar argument. “If the City is lost then no amount of children and babies will help us,” he retorted.
“The City is lost. It has been lost long since.”
“Not while our armies defend it still.”
In his heart he knew the City was reaching a vital crossway. The enemy cities were subjugated, their armies conquered, fortresses taken, yet still they fought on. The City was besieged, albeit from a distance. And it was casting its women into the war machine in a last desperate throw to win the war, at the risk of future population catastrophe.
“The City is great,” he said stoutly. Although he knew it was not true and his words echoed emptily in the stone chamber.
“The City is dying, Bartellus. How can you spend a single day down in the Halls with the other Dwellers and see lives lived in absolute wretchedness, then claim that the City is great?” Her tone was calm,
her face grave.
“The City is all its people, including the Dwellers,” he argued. “How can you spend time with them, if indeed you do, lady, and not see their strength, their toughness, the uncompromising spirit that has helped the City survive centuries of war?”
“I cannot believe,” Archange said, “that you are using the Dwellers as an argument for the City’s greatness. No great city, by definition, should have people living in its sewers. Any city should be judged, at least in part, on how it looks after its poor, its frail, its dispossessed.”
As so often in the past, he found he was arguing something he did not entirely believe. They were circling around a subject which was never spoken aloud by the wary. Yet in this hidden place he could bring himself to say the words, “The Immortal is pursuing this war. It will end only if the emperor wills it.”
She eyed him gravely. “People who have told him that have been cruelly punished.”
She took a sip of water, then said, “We are talking about two different things. If the City is great it is due to the courage and resilience of its people. But the war has brought it to the brink of ruin. As you say, it is the emperor who is responsible for that war. But he will never end it.”
“How can you be so sure of that? And if Araeon himself will not end the war then Marcellus could.”
She frowned at him. “Marcellus is loyal. He would never act against his emperor.”
He did not pursue it, conscious that their words were beyond treasonous. But it was good to have a conversation again, to think about something other than where his next food was coming from, or how badly his skin itched from the lice-bites, or how he could exist for one more day without falling into madness and throwing himself into the river of death.
The City Page 3