She never took more than she needed, and she never felt pleasure at having to steal from others, but despite her own misgivings and the threat against her continued existence, she knew with certainty that she simply didn’t have a choice.
In those first days after leaving her parent’s home, she had tried other paths, at first. Her first choice had been to simply beg on the streets for coins, or food, or both. Once she had left her home behind, she made a beeline straight for the market plaza just a block and a half down from where she had lived, somewhere with lots of people and where she needn’t fear simply being taken off the streets by someone without being able to call out for help. She didn’t really have much confidence that calling out would save her life necessarily, but she believed it was better than nothing.
The hardest part for her was just getting there. She had made the trip with her parents dozens, maybe even hundreds of times, since she was old enough to walk, but it was quite different now that she was on her own and unable to see where she was going. She decided to follow the worn and eroded curbs that lined each street, and count off the number of steps from the stoop of her old home to the plaza where the merchants sold their goods.
Even so, she moved slowly and carefully, hands slightly extended in front of her, listening intently to everything, smelling for animal waste or other obstacles she might step in or on. Catelyn also said silent prayers to the Divines over and over again, seeking for Them to guide her steps.
It took four hundred and thirty two steps, that she deliberately counted, to reach the market plaza, which she identified by the feel of the worn smooth cobblestones under her feet. Remnants of an earlier time, the stones were polished by the steps of millions of people over many hundreds or thousands of sojourns, even to the time preceding the Before some people liked to say.
She heard the gasping of people as she passed by, and realized that she must look hideous. But she no longer cared. Now that she had her bearings, she pictured the market plaza in her mind, and how the merchant stalls were always laid out in a ring around the area like spokes on a wagon wheel. Where she was standing she imagined as the bottom of the wheel, where it would touch the road. And the merchants were all around the wheel, like the curve of it as it rose towards the top of the wagon.
Before she had lost her parents, she remembered seeing dozens of beggars on the street and around the stalls ringing the market plaza. Most of them adults, but every now and then, a chosen family would fall on hard times or be killed, and their child would later be found holding out a cup and asking warily for help. More often than not however, orphaned children were taken, or sold or put to other uses, none of which Catelyn liked to think about.
The beggars she had always seen congregated in one or two areas, and she made her way toward one of them, careful to try to avoid walking into the stalls or merchants.
“Over here,” a voice called.
It was gruff and mid-ranged and Catelyn honestly couldn’t tell whether it was the voice of a man or a woman, but she didn’t care. She had a direction to go now, and she quickened her steps towards where the voice had originated.
When she got close, she jumped as a hand grabbed her by the shoulder and stopped her, turning her around without a word and then was just as suddenly gone.
“Thank you,” Catelyn said softly, but sincerely.
A noncommittal grunt was all she got in reply.
She stood and raised her hands up, extending them in front of her, and tried to make herself look as miserable as she felt.
For half a span, Catelyn spent her days standing or squatting in the market plaza, begging for the pittance of the people who were visiting the marketplace, and at night she returned to a burned out building across the street from where her home had been, to sleep. Or at least, to try to, when the nightmares let her.
She and some of the children had found a hole in one of the walls that led to a space between the walls, and inside you could find places to put your hands and feet and climb up to an unknown attic. Boys routinely tried to get girls to climb up with them so that they could play kissing and touching games, but although she had been curious about what that might feel like, Catelyn had been too careful to go up there with anyone she didn’t trust. She had been up there only a handful of times before, and each time the only thing that was memorable about it was that she had been frightened by the darkness and the cramped spaces.
But after what she had just been through, and with her only alternative being to sleep on the streets, in the open, it felt like the safest place she could imagine. When she reached the crawlspace above, she curled herself up into a ball, hugged her knees, and sobbed quietly until exhaustion claimed her.
Those first few nights, she was awakened by terrible dreams and panicked trembling, and she wished so much that she could run to her parent’s beds and climb in, the way that she always did whenever she was frightened by a nightmare. Without that possibility, she turned to chanting a devotion to the Divines, whispered in the dark, while the soft voice of doubt whispered back into her ear.
One morning, she woke in time to prevent a trio of huge rats from beginning to nibble on her fingers and toes, and she almost cried out, but she simply shoved them aside and edged along the beams until she reached the gap in the wall and climbed back down.
It had actually been the rats that had awakened her to her capabilities, quite literally. Those first few nights hiding in the crawlspace after her days of begging had been harrowing, full of terrifying dreams and sleepless nights. And the rats. Always, the rats.
They would squeak at her as soon as she returned to the crawlspace each evening, warning her away from their nest most likely. If she’d had anywhere else to go, she would have given them back their territory, but she had no choice now.
Oh, she had considered wandering from building to building, scouting for a new place to rest at night, but her head always returned to her secret lair hidden behind the walls because she knew that there were worse things than rats out there in the Seat.
So once she had resigned herself to the fact that she was going to remain in the building, she determined that she would have no choice but to deal with the rats. And she knew that the situation between them and her would need to change soon. Her level of exhaustion was affecting her during the day, as she found herself nodding off at inopportune times, which was deadly for a young girl alone in a place like the Seat.
She had seem them everywhere in the Seat back when she’d still had her eyesight. She had always thought that they looked harmless, honestly, but she also knew that if she was going to remain living in the building, it was either her or them. She was the one moving into their territory, so she knew that the odds were going to be stacked against her.
And so she began to focus some of her daytime activities around finding a solution to the problem. When she was idle, she tried to formulate a plan of attack to get rid of the pests and when she wasn’t, she was scavenging through long-picked over ruins in the hopes of finding something she might use to trap the creatures. She didn’t want to kill them if she could help it, but she very well knew it might have to come to that. She hoped though, to be able to catch and relocate them, or if that wasn’t possible, to find a way to drive them away.
Most of the ruins in the Seat had already been cleared of anything valuable by generations of scavengers, but Catelyn’s needs were much different than most, and she hoped that she might get her hands on materials she could use to build a rudimentary cage.
Days of looking hadn’t turned up anything useful, and the nights had been a constant battle of wills between her and the established residents. Thus far, they were winning.
It was during one of those first nights in her conflicts with the rats when Catelyn, despite her complete blindness, began to sense something as the rats scurried past her feet, nipping at her toes and ankles. As always happened when the rats made one of their assaults, Catelyn was standing in the attic, her back pressed agai
nst the wall, her ears tightly focused to any sound. She’d learned in prior encounters with them that if she simply stood still they would make their threats, then grow tired of squeaking and turn to watching her in silence, and she could at least have a few prayers of peace and quiet in which to sleep.
They were still screeching at her, but it was getting better, and she felt like she could almost feel them getting bored, tiring of their verbal assault. It would end the moment she moved around too much, so she tried her best to remain in one place, and used that as an opportunity to hone her sense of hearing.
She had become intimately familiar with the squeaking each of the rats made, and after the first few encounters with them, she became convinced that she could tell the rodents apart by the sound of their squeaks.
She believed that she was able to distinguish three separate individual rats. Each of them “spoke” to her in a slightly different way, and after getting to know them and their habits around her intrusive presence into their home, she began to assign them different personalities and even named them to make it easier to tell them apart.
Bossy was the name of the rat who she imagined was calling out orders to the other rats. His squeaks came most frequently, and were not directed just to her, but to the other rats as well. Bossy was the only one of the rats she called by a gender. “He” just sounded like a “he”, at least to her ears.
Whiny was the second rat she could easily identify. That one’s squeak was more plaintive, like it was constantly annoyed by something. That annoyance was probably her.
And the last one she dubbed Chirpy, because its squeak sounded just like a bird chirping; short, sharp squeaks.
She knew that naming the rats might actually make it harder to get rid of them when the time came, but she couldn’t help it. They really did sound different and it seemed like the appropriate thing to do under the circumstances. But in so doing, and in listening to each of the rats squeak at her in their own particular “voices”, she began to feel like she was seeing them, without actually seeing them. A mental image, like a map of the crawlspace, appeared in her mind.
There was Bossy, standing on his hind feet as he always did when he screeched at her, just half a pace away, but even less distance from the hole in the floorboards that the rats were using to get in and out of her hiding place.
And now Whiny shot past her as he always did, scratching at her foot with a claw before bounding behind a piece of broken ceiling tile. Chirpy never came close to her, it simply chirped away over by the corner where the crawl space opened up into the passage down to the first floor.
Catelyn realized that it was very possible all of this was just her own imagining, and that she was simply going crazy in the dark all by herself.
I’m blind, she thought. How could I possibly know where they were?
And yet, as crazy as it seemed, something about her perceptions was telling her that there was truth in what she was sensing. She decided to test herself, and bent down to pick up some of the chips of roof tile that were scattered throughout the attic. As soon as she moved, the rats returned to squealing at her in earnest, and she heard one or more of them bound away, their small claws scrabbling across the floor.
With three piece of tile chips in her possession, she held two in her left palm while she took hold on the largest piece in the fingers of her right hand, stood back up and put her back against the wall, sweating from the stress of being harrowed night after night, and trembling from the exhaustion of standing when she was so tired. But she also felt a rush of excitement at the idea that she was about to test, and she forced herself to stillness once again.
Once the cacophony of squeaking died down somewhat, Catelyn ever so slowly raised her right hand up, the piece of tile gripped tightly as she listened for all she was worth. She heard Bossy screaming from his usual spot and she let the sensations from all of her senses wash over her. She felt an instant change in her perceptions as she let them in.
And as she used all of her senses together; hearing the cacophony of squeaks from all three of the rats, smelling the combined odors of the mold and mildew from the attic and the stench of the rats and their nest, tasting the dirt in the air of the enclosed space, feeling the rough, jagged edges of pieces of clay in her hands and the soft, damp wood under her feet, even the scratching of her own filthy clothes and layers of grime on her skin, she felt those senses coalesce in her mind, blossoming from a simple mental image of the space she inhabited and into a tightly accurate and refined image of the things within that space.
In her mind’s eye, she imagined herself standing as though she were in the middle of a bubble, and whatever was inside that bubble with her was known to her. With that in mind, she tuned her hearing to listen for just a breath, and within that bubble, she believed that she could determine precisely where the three rats were.
She turned her body towards where Bossy seemed to be in her bubble, and she heard his squeals of protest and she smiled, then threw the chip of roof tile.
The roof tile was not aimed well, and Catelyn heard it clatter onto the floor near where she had believed Bossy to be and in her mind she saw the rings of sound it made as the impacts rang off the surfaces of the attic, just missing him. She heard him squeak in offense at this new attack, then she heard him scrabble away towards the hole in the floorboard, and squeeze himself through, his cries receding into the distance until he was no longer within her bubble of awareness. She felt a rush of exhilaration at her success, and she focused on the next two rats as she swapped another chip of tile from left hand to right.
The next two throws were more accurate. She actually hit Whiny with a well placed chip, and he screamed at this direct attack, but immediately scrambled away to the hole to follow his friend. When she threw at Chirpy, he was already moving to exit the attic, clearly seeing that the odds had shifted out of the rats’ favor. And then, she was alone.
Once the rats were gone, Catelyn stood and breathed slowly. The only sounds she could hear were her own. Her breath, her heart beat. She turned down her senses and the bubble faded into the background again leaving her in darkness and ignorance again. In a panic, she tuned into her senses again and felt the bubble reform.
Just like before, she felt herself at the center of her senses, and although there was no more screeching of angry rodents, she could hear other sounds now that she hadn’t even known were there. The chirping of some insect under the floorboards, the everpresent shifting and settling of the building, even the dull buzz of the steam pipes under the building and in the alley nearby. She smelled beyond the mold and mildew and detected the faint odors of tobacco and the rotting rind of a citrus fruit. She didn’t try to taste anything deeper in the air, for fear of what might be there.
As she explored each of her senses in turn, she began to understand that she could see the world in her mind’s eye. And she realized that there had been more than just awareness in that bubble.
There had been freedom.
She wanted to continue to explore this new feeling, this amazing gift from the Divines, for that is truly what it must be, but her body was exhausted and she needed to take full advantage of the quiet to grab sleep while she could. She stepped lightly over to the corner where she slept, curled up on the floor, and passed out with a smile on her face.
She woke the next day, and when she heard the commotion of sound echoing down the street indicating that the merchants were setting up their stalls, she returned to the market plaza. Catelyn had shaken like a leaf every time she heard someone approach her, but perhaps because of her scars and her damaged eyes no doubt giving her a wretched appearance, a handful of citizens took pity on her and she earned enough coin and food in those first days that she didn’t starve.
Standing there for days gave Catelyn time to think, and despite her initial good fortune, she knew that she would need to do something besides beg if she was going to do more than simply survive. She also knew that every day she dallied in the
market plaza was another opportunity for someone to prey upon her. Children in the Seat were highly prized for a variety of reasons, and Catelyn knew that she wouldn’t be able to stay on the streets long without attracting the wrong kind of attention.
Catelyn’s parents had warned her about the many perversions of human desire, and what that could mean for a child alone on the streets. Even if none of that was a factor, begging relied on charity, which was in short supply in a place like the Seat, despite her early success. Eventually, the novelty of her appearance would fade, and she would become just as invisible as the rest of the beggars. And so Catelyn’s first days of begging alone on the streets only lasted that long on her own.
Scavenging became Catelyn’s second attempt at survival, and after the first span of begging, instead of going to the market plaza, she would roam the streets and alleys, smelling for trash heaps or other refuse left behind by others, and growing more confident in her steps and moving around without the use of her sight. But with the amount of crime and poverty in the Seat, it had become the default life path of every failed citizen in the city, leading to rampant and violent competition over the scraps of others.
Two near confrontations with a pair of scavengers threatening her if she showed her face near them or their territory again had shown Catelyn that if she was going to survive, she would need to find a way to do so invisibly. To take what she needed without anyone being the wiser.
This, like everything about her life now, was easier said than done.
The day after mysteriously distributing her parcels of food to the residents of the Seat who lived in the tenements and apartments near her, Catelyn found herself once again lounging upon the smooth clay tiles of a roof, trying not to let the heat overwhelm her, and listening to the hollow echoes of the empty priory below her bouncing up through the metal venting.
Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth) Page 6