Richard, galumphing down the ice steps after Baj and Nancy, puffing clouds of frost as he came, muttered "Frozen-Jesus ..." apparently praying for a rest.
But Patience, as if she were young again and tireless — though the side of her forehead showed deeply bruised — gave them no rest, but bounded down and around through two turns of stairs and landings, all cut from ice mature — blue, and hard as stone.
Then there was a pause. Baj heard the ring and clash of steel — and he and Nancy, turning the stairway's corner, saw Patience, scimitar drawn, fighting with two stripe-coated sentries. Five... six more men were coming up the steps at her.
Still alive by virtue of such close quarters, where the men's pole-arms were awkward, Patience hacked a man down and was wrestling with the other as Baj and Nancy dove into the fighting. The landing, skidding slick and close-walled, was a gift to scimitar and rapier-and-dagger, a curse to long-staffed partisans. The sentries would have been wise to drop those, and draw their knives, but were given no time for it. Pierced and slashed — another down — they staggered bleeding back as Richard came, stepped over a dying man and struck another with his ax, the Shrikes flooding after to fight down the steps.
Patience, cut and bleeding at the back of her left wrist, and limping — led them down the flight of stairs over still-moving bodies, their blood crawling, wrinkling as it froze over blue ice. One of the Shrikes, Ned — silent, and tall for his tribe — was left dying as well.
No one else had been lost, or dangerously wounded, though many had been cut or hammered — and Nancy had been badly bruised when she'd slipped, fallen, and been kicked hard in the struggle. Baj had stepped back then to stand over her against a sentry gripping his glaive short — -jabbing with the thing — until she got to her feet again to fight, snarling. Furious, she'd slashed out left and right, so both Baj and the sentry had stood away in almost comic agreement before the surge and striking drove all three of them apart — and the sentry into Shrike knives.
The stairs ended at a chained iron gate that stood sturdy under five swinging blows from Richard's ax — then broke by the key-turn at the sixth, and he drove through with the rest of them after.
One sentry, a man almost old and very frightened, stood waiting in a wide entrance hall, his glaive's heavy blade up to strike. He said, "Who are you?"
"You know me, Thornton." Patience took a step to him. "Put up, and come to no harm."
The man stared at her, then at the others. "No," he said, and stayed on guard.
Behind him, Baj heard Dolphus-Shrike say, "One chance is chance enough," then grunt with effort, and a javelin came hissing past — very close past Patience. The sentry had no time to see it before it struck him in the throat and sent him stumbling back to sit, then he on his side as if to sleep in the shallow bed of his blood. Dolphus went to tug his javelin free.
"You might have hit me," Patience said to the Shrike.
"Embarrassing, but unlikely." Dolphus shook red drops from the javelin's blade. "Where now?"
"Down to second-floor gallery," Patience said, and led the way — slower now, as if she were tiring at last — across the hall and down a narrower stair than those before.
"One more gate," she said.
"Well," Richard grunted, "I'll have no ax-edges left." And at the foot of the stairs, with Patience standing aside, he beat at an iron gate again, a Shrike clapping his hands to the rhythm of five ringing blows before the gate broke open.
Patience going slowly now, they filed out onto the widest landing yet, that opened onto a broad stairwell to the left — and a long, open gallery to the right, its ice pillars fenced between with tall iron bars from rampart to roof.
Past those barriers... out and two stories down, the narrow west roadway lay carved in the ice. Running alongside it, the great crevass yawned deep blue, to darker blue, to black.
Voices rose from the stairwell, and Patience led that way, but in no hurry.
They came onto the staircase — its wide ice steps descending — and were met by silence absolute, and the eyes of many women.... Many women, and girls not yet women.
"The Pens," Patience said, into that silence.
Baj saw, within a huge high-ceilinged chamber — lamp-lit as all the city's spaces — four wide, barred corridors stretching away, each lined down either side with ordered pallets and stools. The corridor bars for some convenient separation, apparently, though all four entrance gates now stood open beyond the foot of the stairs.... There were artful little flowers of colored ribbon tied to the bars here and there... and on several of the nearest pallets, small rag dolls lay as if asleep.
There was the salt-sweet scent of many women — an odor warm, even in freezing cold. That scent... a growing murmur... and the eyes of hundreds, staring.
Dolphus-Shrike looked across the great room as the women and girls, crowding from their corridors, gazed back, some now calling questions. Tribe-talk .. . book-English. "... There must be almost five hundred," he said, and shook his head. "Boston will not give us time enough to finish this." He tapped his javelin's butt on a step's blue ice.
As if that soft tapping had been a signal heard, the women and young girls — all in furs, none naked in Warming-talent — fell silent again in their barred corridors.
"No children," Nancy said. "But I was a child, here.... I know this place very well."
"No." Patience shook her head. "The girls and women only. Now, what... children... they breed, are soon taken from them."
The women stirred — talking, calling out — some coming running down the corridors, and Baj saw tribal tattoos, scarring, long hair pigtailed or twisted into particular knots.... Below the steps, a young girl shouted a question in some clattering tribe-talk — then was shushed to silence as others were quieted, so only Boston's great bell of alarm sounded, dull with distance.
Baj felt a deeper silence close beside him. Nancy's silence, and Richard's. Patience's silence, and the Shrikes'. It was a silence that seemed to have been slowly descending upon him through the years, so now he must speak to fill it.
"Do... what we are here to do," he said, and gripping his innocent sword, started down wide frost-crusted steps, the others shuffling to follow.
As he went down, one of the women — leaving the others after hugging, reassuring another — came up the stairs to meet him. She was tall, wore a torn, long sealskin cloak, and was smiling. Her teeth were filed to points, her braided hair gold and gray, and tribal tattooing laced her forehead. Her eyes were an older woman's, a weary dark brown.
"We heard the bell," she said, in fair book-English with a soft tongue-click to it. She stood an ice step down, but was so tall she and Baj were almost eye to eye. "Is there now a difference?"
"Yes," Baj said, but would not have known his voice.
"I have been here eleven years, and have been bred five times.... Young man, is it to be a great difference?" Baj saw hope rising in her eyes as the sun must have risen for Warm-time summers.
Other women began calling questions. Some in book-English, some not.
"My name is Mary-Shearwater," the tall woman said, "from the ice at Map-Roque Bluffs. My father is Elder Simon —" She stopped talking, and looked into Baj's eyes. "Have you come to take us free?"
"No, my lady."
She looked down at the rapier's blade. "You were sent. Did my father send you?"
"We were sent by... necessity."
"Ah... Now, I understand." She tried to smile. "You've come to take Boston's advantage from them. — Yes?"
"Yes."
She nodded. "As we would have done ourselves, and gone into the crevasse, but for the gallery bars. They have not allowed us means, though a few have hanged themselves. Though one swallowed sewing needles..."
"Dear lady," Baj said, "we have no time."
"Yes, the Talents will return, bring others, Constables. You have no time." She reached for his left hand, held it hard in both of hers, then let it go. "We of the Ice-coast are raised to
necessity."
She turned and called out to the others. "Listen!... Listen! These who've come, have work to do — great, great injury to Boston-town! But they have little time in which to do it. So —" Baj heard her take a shaking breath, "the brave among us will help them accomplish it quickly. Remember that Pen-mothers past are watching from the sky."
She turned back to Baj, and touched the fur cloak at her breast. "Tell my father," she said, "for his peace."
"I will." Baj — though not the Baj he'd always been — drew his left-hand dagger to spare his sword's honor, and thrust Mary-Shearwater through the heart.
CHAPTER 28
She fell away, fell down the ice steps, struggling with death. Baj saw her try to breathe, the fur at her breast soaking in blood from the ruined heart. She tried to breathe — then coughed blood, put her hands to her mouth, and died with red running through her fingers.
Screaming then in the Pens, a tumult of shouts and weeping. And although a number of women and a few girls knelt to await blade edges, some praying to the Jesus from their homes — others shrank back, withdrawing as a sea's tide falls away, crowding back into their corridors, calling for someone to help them.
"Baj — oh, my Baj." Nancy gripped his dagger wrist, made to force the blade sheathed again. "Wrong for you. Wrong for you."
Then Patience pushed past them and went down the stairs, calling, "Sorry! Oh, sorry, my sweet ones!"
Richard, muttering, lumbered down after her, his ax in his hand. The Shrikes rushed past, silent.
"Nancy," Baj said, and had to raise his voice over screaming, "— stay here."
"No."
Below, Patience called again she was sorry, struck and killed a small brown-haired woman who'd knelt waiting. Richard and the Shrikes were among the women — all of those the bravest, who knelt or stood still for the steel.
Nancy, her face white as fine paper, started down after them, but Baj gripped her arm and held her. "No, my dear. You are not needed. I'll slaughter for both of us."
"Not so."
"Obey me," Baj said, "so at least a part of us is saved." It seemed his fathers spoke through him, since Nancy, scimitar in her hand, stayed weeping on the stairs of ice while he went down.
... There was a difficulty in killing women. Their beauty, of course, and their value — so much dearer than a man's. Their very cushioned softness seemed to oppose the steel, making it appear so rude, so rough in what it did to them. Baj found, after the second one — the third, an older woman, had closed her eyes, bared her throat to make it easier for him — he found it a chore so odd, so dreadful as not to be real at all. It seemed no slender arms were actually raised to keep the dagger's long blade away. No delicate hands truly tried to guard, only to be struck aside. Certainly no lovely eyes were wide in terror, no screams sounded.... It was all imagined, though noisy, strenuous in its way.
What might have been blood, was only something like it.
Baj had a girl's white throat in view; she was backing frantically away, as if all were serious. The imagined dagger swung back to slash — when another blade, though unreal as his, blocked the stroke.
"Listen!" Patience forced his steel aside. "Listen...!" The great bell, that had rung its note so deep into them they hardly heard it, had been joined by a second sounding even through the screams. Another plangent shivering note, but higher, so the bells rang now in alternation, their sounds beating at the ear.
"The second!" Patience stood, mouth open as if for even better hearing. Her white hair was streaked red where blood had flung from her scimitar. She nodded, as if that tolling were some confirmation. "The second bell...! It has never ever rung. That call is Enemy-in-the-Town! It means defeat!"
Richard and the Shrikes, blood spattered, were still — held still, listening. There were the great bells, and the women's cries, their screams and weeping as they fled into their barred corridors.
"What...?" Baj said, speaking from his place of pretending, quieter than a dream. "What?" he said, but meant all questions he wished to ask. He and Patience, Richard and the Shrikes, stood bloody and quiet while the Pen's women, shrieking or silent, crowded back from dagger and scimitar, from ax and javelins, thrusting the youngest girls behind them as if sufficient softness, courage, or beauty might become armor adamant, and proof against the world.
"The Guard!" Patience spun in a circle as if dancing, her scimitar's blade flinging drops of blood. "The Guard is in Boston Town!" She turned, shouting at Richard and the Shrikes, "Put up blades! Kill no more...!"
If so, it seemed to Baj, as he roused, a miracle too late. Too late — and had been too late once his dagger thrust through Mary-Shearwater's breast.
"Not possible," Richard said, over a soft chorus of weeping, a shriek of agony from a woman wounded. "Not enough guardsmen to do it — not even with Sylvia commanding."
"The bells say so," Patience said. "— And have never rung together before." Distracted, she wiped her scimitar blade on her coat, wiping blood onto blood, and sheathed the blade dirty.
"What's happening...?" Nancy came down the steps. She looked to Baj so like the women, the girls he'd been killing....
"I hear drums." A Shrike named Porter cocked his head to hear better.
"I doubt it," Dolphus said. His furs were soaked, here and there. "Those bells are lying."
"Listen," Porter-Shrike said.
Then there was listening. Listening.... And softly through the sobs, the cries of women, softly between the distant sonority of the bells, came the faintest heartbeat thudding. And a trumpet's thready cry.
"Dear every Jesus," Richard said. "How is it possible! She hadn't the companies for it!"
Baj, awake, saw as if for the first time that girls and women were lying in little drifts of the dead and dying. There was an injured lady screaming, with Nancy kneeling beside her.... More than twenty-five. They'd slaughtered at least that many. More than thirty....
Baj recognized his second murder. Then his third, in running blood. And no longer shelter-dreaming — seeing now so clearly that his eyes ached with seeing — found that one was missing. He drew a rapier stained only by the blood of fighting men, and turned to Patience.
"Prince," she said, started to touch her scimitar's hilt, then saw there would not be time. And not time enough for rising in the air.
Baj had not seen her frightened before. "You were half-expecting the second bell. Listening for it. This was your planning, your doing. And now we have murdered for nothing."
Patience put her hands together as several of the dead women had put their hands together, waiting. "Prince," she said, "how could I have known ?"
"... I think you knew because your child dreamed the future for you. You knew at least the chance the Guard would win."
She shook her head, watching the rapier's blade. "No, no. Only perhaps — but he's just a baby, and might have been wrong. There are bloodlines he has no knowledge of." She took a deep breath, looked away from the blade as if not seen, it wasn't there. "— I knew only what was likely, and saw no way for the Wolf-General to win the city! No way... our duty could be avoided."
Baj said nothing.
"— If I had believed my Maxwell, you know I would have harmed no girl, no woman, here." Patience tried to smile, as Mary-Shearwater had tried to smile. "Prince, don't kill me. My son..."
Nancy crouched silent by the wounded woman. Richard was silent, and the Shrikes. None said a word for her — and so saved Patience. That little rest, the quiet of no argument, and silence but for weeping women, saved her.
"... For past kindness, past courage," Baj said, stroked his sword and dagger clean — criss-cross — on his parky's sleeves, and sheathed them. "How fortunate you are, that I am not my First-father... who, I believe, forgave nothing."
Then noise rose up as if it had been held down before. Injured women cried for help, girls for consolation for butchered friends.... Patience went to Nancy, and together they began binding, bandaging, pressing cloth to b
leeding injuries, murmuring "There... there, dear," to a silent, dying lady whose intestines were out.
The men stood stupid, but for two Shrikes who went down the barred corridors calling to the huddled women, "Mistake . .. mistake! Oh, how stupid we were. And now, all safe!" They called like boys who'd been bad.
Richard set his ax down on the ice floor, and made a motion of washing his great hands. "But how could the Guard do it?" he said.
A hint... then the fact of bell-staff music softly jangled in the air.
"Too many fucking bells," Dolphus said.
Patience looked up from binding a wound. "Constables."
Baj led Richard and several Shrikes at a run up the ice steps to the landing, then out onto the gallery. He pressed close against freezing iron bars, looked down — and saw many hundreds of Boston soldiers, ranked in their formations, coming marching along the crevasse road, halberds swaying together on their shoulders. Bell staffs struck and sounded — nearer music than Boston's great bells. Nearer than the trumpets of the Guard.
"My God." Dolphus joined them, pressed his forehead against the bars to see better below. "I thought the cowards who ran from here, were to bring back only a few. If that fucking regiment comes into the building, we might slow them on the stairs, but not for long."
As if to confirm bad news, the cavern winds gusted hard along the ice gallery, so the carved pillars moaned a rising note with it.
"If they come into the building," Baj said, his breath clouding, "— we go back up to the crest of the bridge." Giving orders had become as easy as those orders were unimportant, considering the women who'd just been butchered. "The crest is narrow, and footing treacherous enough for us to hold them there a little while. Perhaps until a Guard company comes."
Richard shook his head. "Too many, Baj. They'll march over us, and hardly know it."
"We'll know it — and deserve no better. If they come into the building, we go to hold them at the bridge."
"Well," Dolphus said, "this is terrible fucking luck. And I was just thinking to live forever."
"Where are they?" Patience trotted along the gallery, went to the bars and stared down."... I know them. The West-Gate Constables, all four formations. But here — not at South Gate. They weren't at the fighting!"
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