by Kaden, John
“Easy, Isabel, go easy,” the midwife says. As the gust of contraction starts to recede she says, “Now push, Isabel, nice and easy and push.”
Arana looks over her shoulder. His face takes on a pallor as the small, slick head starts to show.
Isabel crests over another wave of spasms and she’s told to push again. The midwife cradles the head and waits at attention for more to follow, and soon it does. The first fragile cries of life spring from the curled and purple form in the midwife’s hands, and she places him on Isabel’s chest and covers them both.
Arana pushes her aside and takes his place by Isabel, lifting the blanket and peering at the traumatized newborn. He has left this chamber before with false optimism, seeing eyes as light as his own at birth, only to have them darken to brown or hazel in the following months, but there is no mistaking this child. There is no gift from the Beyond in this room, no protector for the future, save Arana himself. He covers the baby and leans close to Isabel.
“Unworthy,” he whispers to her.
This is the seventh child she has born him, and that word from his cold lips sets her distressed mind on edge. She works a wad of saliva in her mouth and spits it out onto his face.
He brushes it away and turns to the nursemaids. “Take this boy to the nursery and see to him.”
Jack is flying above a magnificent city. Bracing wind ripples his clothing and pulls the skin back taut on his face. As he soars higher, the clouds recede and he rockets toward the edge of the sky and all the uncertainty that lies beyond it. What separates the earth from the firmament he does not know, whether he will emerge on the distant shore of some exotic world, or be ripped limb from limb in an epic annihilation that leaves not a speck of his mortal husk intact. Fearless, he ascends.
He rolls over and looks down at the earth, flat and never-ending, with the translucent spires of great buildings growing up like towering stalagmites. On the avenues that run between them, he sees people and machines flowing along in some invisible current, the blood of the city coursing through asphalt veins. A burning sphere zooms past him, hurtling toward the surface with a tail of black smoke streaming behind it. He watches helplessly as it strikes one of the colossal glass and metal structures and explodes with a low rumble. The impossibly tall building lists to the side—slowly at first until it reaches its tipping point—then it falls furiously, knocking down everything in its path.
More fiery spheres blitz down from the skies above. The magical tether keeping him aloft suddenly evaporates—the force of gravity reasserts its authority over his body and he plummets toward the ground. The entire city is burning, a raging inferno now, and as he freefalls he can hear the people’s screams rising from the blanket of smoke. He knows that he will join them, that his insane downward trajectory will land him squarely in the middle of this disaster, that he will alight like dry tinder and suffer complete immolation and know no more.
As the flames grow to encompass his entire field of vision he snaps awake.
Darkness.
A dank odor, with a hint of something more foul. Decay. The rat that he killed. He cannot see it, but he thinks it is there. It was yesterday, or maybe the day before, or maybe many days before that. In some indeterminate past, a rat crawled under the wooden trapdoor that confines him and he killed it. Or maybe it has yet to happen, and this thought and these smells are mere premonitions of some future event. He reaches his hands out and feels along the cold wet floor, padding them along the walls until they land on a stiff, furry lump.
There it is.
They come once a day, to bring water and thin gruel and to empty his bucket. He does not beg or plead with them. He remembers why he is here. At the beginning of his punishment, he thought that if given the opportunity to play events out differently he would have done exactly the same thing all over again. Now he is not so certain. The waking hours in this pit are exquisite torture, and with sleep it is always a gamble. He is not sure how much more of this his sanity will withstand.
He drops the rat in the bucket.
The dreams are not always nightmares. He dreamt once that he was a toddler again and that his father was holding him in his rough, strong hands while his mother laughed and cooed at him. He wished he could have frozen that moment and never woken up. It brought with it the recollection of his father’s passing, weak and feeble on his straw mat until one morning he was still. Keethan and Marni would sit vigil with his mother during the last days, and that was when he and Lia first became friends. Her older brother was taken by a similar mysterious illness, and through this she was perhaps uniquely able to help Jack cope with his loss. Other children, and even parents, were frightened of the sickness and kept their distance. She would hold his hand and walk with him through the forest, or just sit with him in their small cabin, and sometimes not a word was spoken between them and that was fine.
He thinks back to the day they were captured, when they sat around the campfire in their cages and Lia stared at him with that look of infinite compassion on her face. He closes his eyes and pictures her that way. Blocking out all else, he focuses intently and gazes back at her with his mind’s eye and wonders if she can somehow feel him looking.
He hears the creaking of hinges and his mirage fades. Sounds of footsteps—voices and crying. He stands and listens as they pull back the panel covering the pit next to him, and he winces at the sobbing of the new prisoner. With a harsh crack the door is slammed shut and locked, and the shuffling footsteps leave the keep and plod upstairs.
Through the thick trapdoor he hears soft, sniffling cries.
“Hello?” he says. The sniffling stops. “Who’s there?” he asks, louder. “I’m Jack. What’s your name?”
For a great long moment the steady dripping of condensate grime is the only noise heard. Finally, muffled and distant, he hears a young girl’s voice cut through the stillness.
“Isabel,” she says.
The sewing shop is a hive of activity, seamstresses bent over cluttered workstations, their dexterous fingers stitching nimbly. Young women stand still with their arms outstretched and a flurry of fitters whirls around them, pulling and tugging on their garments and making quick dashes in chalk to signal what must be taken in or let out. The bonding rights ceremony is three days away and they are sorely behind.
Elise leads Haylen and Lia down from the kitchen. Calyn has relinquished them for the day, at her request, to help meet the deadline.
“Since you girls are so good with knives I’ll have you at the cutting table,” says Elise.
She walks them past the sewing stations to a broad table at the rear, with several children working around it and many lengths of rough fabric spread out flat. Elise shows them how to take the small, sharp blades and cut around the tracings to create angular, oddly shaped swaths of fabric which they hand off to be fitted together and sewn. Eleta is working next to them, carefully razoring out the left hemisphere of a flowing gown.
“It’s easy,” she says. “Just make sure you don’t snag the threads.”
“Thanks,” says Haylen, settling in next to her. “Do you like it here?”
“Yeah, it’s okay usually. We’re too busy right now, though.”
“Where’s Phoebe,” asks Lia.
“She over there. All they let her do is spin thread. She hates it.”
Lia and Haylen look for her in the spinning room, glumly turning her staff while another girl winds the fibers into thread.
“She wants to learn sewing,” Eleta continues, “but they said she’s still too small. Jeneth is learning. She’s good.”
They busy themselves for a while, making small slices, then realigning the fabric and slicing some more.
“What’s it like in the kitchen?”
“It’s good,” says Lia.
“It’s so hot,” Haylen adds, “but Calyn lets us eat all the time.”
“I thought I saw you two!” says Jeneth, running up with a bundle of fabric in her arms. “Did you come t
o save us?”
“Yeah, Elise asked for us.”
“Ooh, good. Look at this…” Jeneth unfolds the fabric she’s holding, a long dress in mid-construction. She holds it up against her body and poses for Lia and Haylen. “I sewed this part myself.”
“It’s so pretty. You did all that?”
“Some of it. It’s going to have fur around the neckline, and there’s a shawl that goes around it like this—” She demonstrates, turning at different angles. “I’ve never worn anything this nice. Look at them,” she says, motioning to the line of elegant young maidens, flushed and smiling, standing still while attendants fit their dresses trimly against their curved physiques. “They all look so happy.”
Elise approaches and puts her arm around Jeneth.
“Jeneth, honey, how’s your stitching coming?”
“Almost finished. I just wanted to show Lia and Haylen.”
“She does good work, doesn’t she?”
“It’s beautiful.”
“Speaking of work, you’d better get back to it. We’re running out of time.”
“Okay.” She turns to go back to her station. “See you tonight. Don’t cut yourselves.”
“Did you get in trouble?”
For a while she can’t even respond to Jack’s question. Isabel is crimped over in her tiny cell holding herself, her mind an emotional cocktail.
“Yes…”
“Me too,” says Jack, and waits for her to say something else. He strains to hear her voice but the only noise is that steady drip and the endless scratching of the rats. “Are you okay?”
“No,” she says, “I’m not.”
“What happened?”
“I’m unworthy.”
“What does that mean?”
“My baby… my baby is not a gift.” She chokes up all over again.
“Is the baby okay? What do you mean?”
“He’s a good baby. He’s beautiful. There’s nothing wrong with him.”
Jack leans back against the cold wall and tries to untangle her words. She makes as little sense as most things here.
“Why are you here?” asks Isabel.
“I hurt a man bad.”
“Oh. Why did you do that?”
“He took something from me.” The moment replays, unbidden, in Jack’s mind.
“How long have you been here?”
“I’m not sure,” he says. “A long time. Will they ever let us out?
“Probably. Sometimes they don’t.”
Sometimes they don’t. Jack is not tall enough to reach the lid of his cell, when he jumps he can barely touch it. Even if he could reach, it’s doubtful he could work the lock and open it, and even then he would be confronted with more locked doors. He is trapped.
“Why… why are you unworthy?”
“What?”
“How come you’re unworthy?” he repeats, louder this time.
“Because… the Beyond wouldn’t send me a special child.”
“What kind of special child?”
“A child with spirit eyes.”
“Like the King has?”
“Yes. Like Arana’s.”
He learned about this at his lessons. There is power in the King’s gaze, and Jack would swear he almost felt it once.
“What happens to the babies? The ones that aren’t special?”
“The whole family raises them. He has fifty-three.”
“He has fifty-three babies?”
“Children. Some of them are grown. Seven of them are mine.”
Fifty three, Jack thinks. His entire village had a population of only a little more than twice that. “Are you the Queen?”
“No,” she says, sullen. “I will never be.”
They hear footsteps coming from the stairwell and cease their conversation. The door grinds open on rusty hinges and someone approaches the pits.
“Quiet,” the sentry shouts, and beats an axe handle against the wooden coverings. “And stay quiet if you want food and water today.”
They do as they are told.
The young women stand in a line at the head of the Temple Hall, dressed in their newly minted gowns and lavish jewelry, preening like ornamented pixies for the audience of rough-knuckled men. Ezbeth stands to one side of the spacious hall, checking her list against the faces in the crowd. Only one vacancy stands out, one man given bonding rights this season who is not in attendance because tonight he lies in the infirmary, the bones of his face as incongruent as unmatched puzzle pieces.
Sentries pull open the double doors and Arana steps into the Hall, dressed as simply as the other men in attendance. He meanders between the tables, greeting the spirited men and engaging them in bits of conversation along the way. The women smile and pose and watch him intently. He makes a round of the entire Hall, speaking to nearly every man, smiling and asking after their families or giving gracious accolades, eventually making his way to a thick wooden table at the front of the Hall.
When he is seated, the crowd quiets to a hush and Ezbeth commences the bonding rights ceremony. She froths on about what an honor it is to be chosen and how these are the most coveted proceedings at the Temple, and finally calls the girls forward one at a time and speaks to their virtues. The girls smile on all the while before giving sweet curtsies and retaking their places in line.
Arana is first to select and Ezbeth turns the ceremony over to him. He entered the room decided, and takes no time in calling the women forth.
“Mazi… and Freja,” he says.
They step demurely forward and approach him. He inspects them at length, feeling their waists and hips, turning them around and gazing into their eyes, separating their lips and rubbing the pad of his thumb across the fronts of their teeth. The women stand still and allow themselves to be handled thusly.
“I’ll have them both,” he says.
Ezbeth raises an eyebrow in mild surprise. “Of course,” she says quickly—with Halis absent there would be one girl unchosen anyway. Arana leads Freja and Mazi to the front of the Hall, where Ezbeth releases them from her guardianship and declares them bonded. A din of congratulations breaks out and Arana exits the Hall as he entered it, politicking every step of the way, until at last he reaches the doorway and lights off down the corridor with his new possessions at his side.
The doors crack shut and Ezbeth moves down the list, from warrior to craftsman, until all men have chosen and all women have been selected.
There is no view of the night sky from his subterranean pit, but if Jack could see it he would know that five full moons have passed their phases since his incarceration began. He itches all over from the cold, moldy air and his flesh is scabby. It is getting more difficult to grasp the distinction between dreaming and wakefulness, the two states blend together in a carnival of deranged visions. When he finds himself alone in his burning village with his mother shimmering in the distance, he is horrified to find her face has turned hazy, nearly as blurred as his father’s. When he awakens, the hallucinations take over where the dreams leave off and the nightmarish cinema continues.
He is in such a stupor when the trapdoor of his cell is lifted and dropped on the floor. Jack doesn’t bother looking. He expects to see his bucket hooked and lifted out of the pit by rope, but it doesn’t happen.
“Jack,” a familiar voice says from above.
He raises his head wearily and sees the King kneeling by the lip of his cell, reaching down into the pit.
“Take my hand, Jack. Don’t be scared.” Jack lifts his emaciated arm and Arana hoists him up and sets him on the ground. “That’s better. Not very nice down there, I imagine.”
Jack shakes his head.
“Do you understand why you’re here?”
Jack nods.
“Good. I’m not angry with you. And I’ve told Halis to leave you alone. What do you think of that?”
“Thank you.”
Jack watches his eyes, riveted, afraid they might emit some force that paralyzes him or
boils the blood in his veins, such as it’s been told.
“You were just doing what you thought was right, weren’t you? You were defending your family—that’s why you killed Vallen. You didn’t know any better.” Arana puts his arm around him. “You and I are very much alike, Jack. We both have an instinct to protect. Would you say that’s true?”
“Y—yes.”
“That same instinct that put you in this pit could do great things for you in the future, if you learn to use it to protect this family, to defend this Temple. Do you think you could do that?”
“Yes.” He speaks without thinking, his voice unfamiliar to him.
“You could make a fine soldier someday.”
Jack casts his eyes down and stares at the ground, wishing more and more that this entire conversation will prove to be an elaborate concoction of his crazed mind.
“You have a lot of time to decide. Come here.” Arana pulls him close and gives him a tight, fatherly hug. “I love you as one of my own, I hope you know that.” He releases his embrace and clasps him by his thin shoulders. “I only want to give you mercy, Jack. Please let me know when you are ready to accept it.”
Arana lowers him into the pit and replaces the hatch and locks it, then pivots to leave, his footsteps echoing up and out of the keep.
Jack plunks down on the floor of his cell. Strange emotions stir inside his weary mind.
“Come out, little mice,” chants Lia, “come out, come out.”
The girls open their eyes and break from their circle by the fireplace and start to crawl about on all fours, squeaking and chittering their front teeth together. They scuttle around the room, clinging to the walls and turning over baskets, foraging around in the cubbied shelving. Sena turns round and round watching them, giggling to herself.
Jeneth opted out of the game, feeling more mature than all this, and she rocks by the fire holding Sena’s baby girl, lost in her own world. One of the little mice clops around the foot of her chair and squeaks at her.
“Very cute, Phoebe.”