In Bonds of the Earth (Book of the Watchers 2)

by Janine Ashbless

  “Yes, I am sure,” she said, and mocked me over her shoulder at her friends as she passed on my pathetic plea.

  “Please, has anyone here got a phone?” Though who the hell I’d ring…

  “What can you give me?”

  “I…I don’t have anything.”

  She shook her head. “When you think of something, we speak.” They started to walk away.

  “Please!” I didn’t care how coldhearted she was, at least I could talk to her. Just to be able to communicate felt like divine grace right now. “What’s your name?”

  “Fuck you, American bitch,” she said cheerily, not looking back.

  I moved back out into the courtyard, and sat in the tiny strip of shade against a wall, my arms around my knees and my head sunk on my breast. There was nothing I could do except keep out of everyone’s way.

  I’m not an extrovert. When I panic I don’t run around shrieking; I lock down instead. And I was panicking now. I’d survived incarceration at Father Velimir’s hands, but he had at least locked me in a private cell and kept me fed. He’d wanted to keep me alive. Here I couldn’t even get something to drink. There was every chance that I could die of dehydration here, I thought sickly, and no one would care. I’d been forgotten by the world.

  Had Azazel forgotten me too?

  He’d need me eventually, whatever he was up to, I told myself. He’d never stayed away for more than a week or so, and I could survive a week here, surely? Perhaps. Sooner or later he’d come for me. If he was okay.

  Maybe he’s more than okay, said the treacherous voice in the back of my mind. Maybe he’s happy with his soul-mate Penemuel and he doesn’t need you anymore. They’re out there chasing comets and having massive jiggy angel-sex and he’s never coming back.

  My mind’s eye kept spooling the scenes from the crypt. Saint George, dead yet walking. The blood. The flames, and the savagery. Azazel had gone crazy when Saint George ran Penemuel though with his spear. He hadn’t worried about collateral damage, not to me and not to his own daughter.

  What sort of a man acted like that?

  Friendly fire, I thought bitterly.

  Christ, Roshana had looked really badly burnt. Was she alive? Conscious? However much I searched my memories, I couldn’t be sure one way or the other. And yes, my feelings about Roshana were not exactly uncomplicated; it wasn’t as if I really liked her or anything. But I didn’t want her maimed and suffering like that.

  I certainly didn’t want her in Uriel’s elegant hands.

  I have to warn Azazel.

  I rolled my head. I felt like I was going mad. How could it have all gone so badly wrong? How could I be so helpless, so useless? If roles had been reversed, I berated myself, if I’d been the one killed and Roshana the one dumped here to rot, then she would have worked this. She’d have talked her way into an alliance with Red Scarf and her clique already. She’d be up there now flirting with the guards, miming her way to a mutually beneficial relationship. She’d be organizing a prison breakout. Whilst I was just sitting here, wobbly with thirst; inexperienced and terrified and clueless.

  I only had one good card left to play.

  They’d taken away my jacket, and reduced me to pants and blouse. But they’d also left my hidden security wallet on. I could feel the nasty nylon strap that ran under my bra. If I knuckled myself under my breasts, I could feel the bulge of the pouch there. It wasn’t very big, but it was supposed to be emergency backup if we ever got mugged and needed a taxi back to the hotel.

  So, in theory, inside that pouch was our hotel card, four hundred and forty birr in bills—twenty dollars more or less, maybe enough to bribe Red Scarf, assuming she didn’t just rob me, but not enough to buy the prison warden or a lawyer—and most important of all, my rubbishy old phone, the one that I barely used because I didn’t have anyone to call. I’d brought it along in case I needed to text Roshana from my bedroom. I couldn’t remember charging it since we got to Ethiopia, and I was already cursing myself for my negligence.

  There was no point in calling Roshana; that ship had sailed. But I had Egan’s number on my SIM.

  I didn’t dare look though. Not with everyone watching.

  So I sat and I concentrated, squeezing every mental muscle. I have connectivity. I have connectivity. I have bars, and battery, and the phone is still working. And Egan’s still here.

  Yes, I knew it would be a desperate move, to throw myself on the Church. But I was desperate.

  As the sun started to dip over the compound wall, people began to file into the yard and queue up in front of the standpipe carrying plastic washbasins and old Abyssinia and SPA mineral water bottles; maybe a couple of hundred women along with their children. I watched Red Scarf and her gang strut their way to the front of the line, along with those young women who seemed to be in with the guards. But most waited their turn patiently, and when the guards came around and turned the tap on, I joined the queue near the back.

  Just standing up made me feel faint.

  Slowly we wended our way toward the front. As women turned away with full bottles and basins, they headed across to a second line on the far side, where some sort of food was being doled out of big aluminum pots. I couldn’t even think about food right then—all my focus was on the tap and its glorious gush of life-giving water, growing closer moment by dragging moment.

  Then I spotted the female guard watching me. I couldn’t read her expression, but she said something in an aside to her colleague. And I saw one of them glance at his plastic wristwatch, and look up at the setting sun.

  What if they shut it off just as I get there? I thought. Then: they’re going to throw me out of the queue, aren’t they? Just to put me in my place. The headache contracted around my skull like a twist of string.

  I glanced behind me at a young woman in a teal flower-print skirt. She was holding a baby in one arm while a little boy, barely walking age, clutched at that pretty skirt. Her face was masklike, but I could see the anxious flick of her eyes, measuring the distance before us.

  I couldn’t bring myself to speak through my sticky mouth, but I stepped silently to the side and gestured her in front of me.

  There was a stir amongst those few behind her, and the next person, an old woman, pressed forward. I didn’t stop her, or the ones who followed. I didn’t object. I just dragged my feet across the packed earth and broken concrete to the back of the line.

  And I waited.

  Maybe my siren body doesn’t need water. Maybe it’s that good. Maybe drinking is just a habit.

  When I got to the standpipe, the last of all, the woman guard stared me in the face. I met her eyes only for a second, before ducking to plunge my hands under the flow.

  She didn’t stop me.

  Perhaps I’d just been paranoid. Perhaps…no, I don’t know.

  The ungumming of my throat was almost painful, as if I was tearing something. I had no bottle and no bowl to fill. I just knelt and sucked water from the faucet until my stomach ached, and it was a pleasure I’d rank right up there above all others—above sex with Azazel, even.

  When I’d drunk all I could I went and sat down a little way away, picturing the fluid soaking through my insides and rehydrating my aching muscles. I was only surprised from my stupor when someone moved in front of me, blocking the light.

  It was the mother in the teal skirt. She sat down before me and handed over a large, grayish pancake pocked with holes. She handed one to her son, and kept a third for herself.

  For a moment I didn’t know what to do, and then I remembered to smile. “Thank you,” I husked. I pointed at my breastbone and ventured, “Milja.”

  She smiled tentatively. Her hair was bound up in complicated knots and her cheekbones were sharp, but that smile lit her eyes. “Deborha,” she said.

  “Milja. Deborha.” I gestured questioningly at her toddler.

  “Emanuel. Menas.” That was the baby.

  I nodded, smiling, as we tore pieces off our pancakes and
started to eat.

  I’d tried this food before, when I first arrived in Ethiopia. It was injera, the staple carbohydrate of the country and reputedly packed with nutrition. I’d found it truly disgusting, like a piece of cold carpet underlay soaked in vinegar, but here in the prison it seemed to taste a whole lot better. But now my stomach was full of water, and after eating two thirds I handed the rest of my injera over to Emanuel.

  “I can afford to lose some cocktail calories,” I said.

  He didn’t understand a word, of course.

  After our meagre dinner the guards locked us back in our barrack. Deborha made room for me on her bed, which was beyond kindness as far as I was concerned.

  As soon as I’m back with Azazel the first thing I’ll do is get him to come here and free her. No—I’ll get him to bust the whole place wide open. He’ll enjoy that. He hates cages.

  I spent the evening in that stifling room curled up with her children. I had to get up once to use the toilet, which was a stinking squat-style hole in the ground, in a cubicle off the main room. There was no door, not even a curtain, and a whole semi-circle of children formed to stare at my weird white body, but I didn’t care by this point. I’d shut down every emotion except a focus on my plan for tonight. That was the only thing that mattered. My dignity could go take a flying leap.

  I will have bars. I will have battery.

  It was easy not to sleep. The room was so humid with body heat, and so airless and crowded, that my great worry was that no one else would be sleeping either. Children cried and adults bickered. Insects—whether fleas or mosquitoes or something else, I had no idea—were having a go at any patch of exposed skin.

  It doesn’t matter. I will keep going.

  I have bars. I have battery.

  When it all went quiet at last, and the moonlight had disappeared from the slit of a window, I reached furtively beneath my clothes and—so slowly, so cautiously—slipped my phone out of the hidden security pouch. When I woke it from sleep the eerie blue light of the screen lit my face, making me blink, almost blinded, and I rolled over to huddle above it, trying to hide that giveaway illumination.

  I had only a few moments, I knew.

  And I did have a bar of connectivity—but only the very last sliver of battery life.

  Not enough to call. Shit.

  I fumbled desperately down the menus to Egan’s phone number, my thumbs tripping over themselves as I texted:

  SOS SOKOTA PRISON HLPM E PLS

  A hand shot over my shoulder and grabbed the phone. I rose with a shriek and threw myself on the thief—it might have been Red Scarf, but to be honest I didn’t see and didn’t care. I punched and ripped and kicked at her until she dropped the phone and then I grabbed it back.

  They descended on me after that, taking a collective revenge with fists and feet, and they took my phone away for good, but I didn’t care by then. I’d hit the right button and got Message Sent.

  12

  A COMPLICATION WE DON’T NEED

  They came for me two days later. I heard the word feranji being shouted around the yard and then they came in, two guards with guns slung, and ordered me to go with them. They flanked me while we passed out of the main gate and into another building and down a concrete corridor. I didn’t resist or show any emotion, not even fear. To be honest I didn’t dare let myself feel any fear, or any hope, or anything at all. I just walked and watched and listened, waiting for the next jolt on the track of my fate.

  Until I walked into that room and saw Egan standing by the desk, that is. There was a man sitting behind the desk too, wearing some sort of uniform, watching me with studied disdain, but all I could see was Egan—and that was when the fear hit me, the terrible fear that hope would be snatched away once more and this time forever. He was my last and only chance of freedom. My knees nearly buckled beneath me.

  I think he was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and at the same time looked absolutely terrible—his face swollen and bruised up one side, his left eye half-closed and flooded pink with blood. There was a dark split in his lower lip. He still managed to frown when he saw me, just for a moment.

  Oh, it’s my goddamn bleached hair, I thought, a sudden irrational terror sweeping through my veins that he wouldn’t recognize me at all.

  “This is your sister?” the man behind the desk asked.

  “Yes. He held out his arm to me—just one arm, because the other one was in a cast and sling. “Oh yes—Milja.”

  I lurched into his lopsided embrace and the guards didn’t try to stop me. I pressed my face to his shirt, feeling the hard chest beneath. He smelled amazing—a scent of clean skin and laundry soap that I could hardly remember. I wanted to burrow into his chest. I wrapped my arms around his waist, clinging to his shirt.

  “Are you okay?” he said, low and urgent into my hair.

  I couldn’t speak, but I nodded. My heart was banging so hard it hurt.

  “Well,” said the man in charge. There was a shuffling of papers and feet. “All is well, then. Take her away. Ciao, Mr. Kansky.”

  That was it—incredibly brief. One moment I was the prisoner, the next I was under Egan’s wing being steered out through a door into the light and across a street toward a dusty 4WD whose driver was standing watching us with arms folded across his chest.

  “Are you okay, Milja?” Egan repeated. “Did they hurt you?”

  He meant rape, I strongly suspected. “No…no, I’m okay.”

  One foot in front of the next across the road. Pause to let a donkey clatter past. I didn’t dare look up, or meet the donkey-owner’s gaze. Was it all a cruel joke? Would they rush out behind me and haul me back into prison?

  “I came as quick as I could. Your man back there said he didn’t have your passport. Is that true?”

  “I haven’t had a passport since Podgorica.” And Egan had been there for that disaster.

  “Just like old times, heh? You don’t make it easy for me.” He snorted. “Still, he pretty much cleaned me out there already. I probably couldn’t afford your passport too.”

  I leaned against the car as we reached it, twisting to look up into his face.

  “You bribed him?”

  The skin creased around his one good eye. “Sure, the accountants are going to kill me when I get back.”

  I reached up and touched his injured face gently. “Thank you. Thank you for coming for me. I mean it.”

  He grimaced, his gaze holding my own. “One question: where’s the Fallen?”

  “I don’t know.” I took a deep breath. “I genuinely don’t know. Something’s gone wrong, some—”

  “Okay, not here.” He ran his hand over my faded locks, cupping the back of my head. “Get in the car. We’ll talk later.”

  I obeyed, grateful to slide onto the old rug spread over the back seat. Egan climbed in beside me, moving his injured arm and shoulder gingerly, then passed me a bottle of water from under the seat.

  “What happened to you?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

  “Alright so,” he told the driver. “The airport now.”

  That gentleman rather pointedly started to wind the windows down.

  “No, keep them up,” Egan snapped.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled, between glugs of water. “I must stink.”

  “That you do,” said Egan, without the slightest interest. As we bumped down the unpaved street, away from the unassuming facade of the prison, he checked through all the vehicle windows, as if worried someone might come running after the car. Only when he was satisfied did he lean back in the seat and return to my question. “And this? I got mugged a couple days back. Greenstick fracture, nothing to worry about.”

  I felt sorry for anyone who’d tried to get the better of Egan. He might look mild and easy-going, but I’d seen how he fought. If they’d damaged him this badly they’d been putting real effort into it. I put my hand on his in concern. “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where are
—”

  “Talk later.” The merest flick of his eyes suggested that the driver might be better not overhearing anything. He knotted his fingers in mine and squeezed my hand. “Get some rest, Milja.”

  I did more than that. I hadn’t slept properly in days, and my head was swimming. I passed out before we even left the town boundaries and slept, slumped against him, until we reached our plane.

  Calling it an airport was flattering it, to be honest. In the pre-dawn murk it looked like a strip of flat dust scraped into the surrounding weeds. A single plane sat there facing away from a concrete hut, its twin propellers pointing at the hilly horizon, and it wasn’t a big plane either, by any description. I stood around yawning and shivering and watching the red streaks of sunrise as Egan paid off our driver and talked to the man who seemed to be in charge of the aircraft. He didn’t look Ethiopian, I thought; too heavyset. And from the way he and Egan greeted each other with backslaps, they were old friends.

  Then Egan hustled me up through the plane’s rear door. There were only seven seats in the tiny passenger cabin, and he gestured us into two that faced each other. He slung his rucksack into the seat beside him; that was all the luggage we had between us, it seemed.

  There were no other passengers.

  I had to help Egan buckle in, because he was down to one arm and even attempting that for himself made him wince. In fact, studying his pallid face and the prickle of sweat on his upper lip, I thought he was in a lot more pain than he’d let on.

  “Are you okay?” I demanded. “You look awful.”

  He pulled a grin, lopsided so as not to split his lip again. “I had to discharge myself to come find you. Probably need some more meds. One of the guys who came at me had a machete…and I don’t think it was very clean.” He gestured at his bandaged side.

  “What?”

  “It’s not as bad as it sounds—I mostly managed to keep out of the way. Just some nicks, really. The other guys looked a lot worse by the time we were done.”