“Damn!” The guard had backed half way across the room, his face pale. “He’s got the bloody pox. The stuff spreads like wildfire.”
The other guard, a thin wiry man with a two day growth of beard started laughing. “Won’t make much difference what he’s got, once we throw im into the Vale. One more day and they’re gone and we have a nice quiet dungeon again. Ye know they don’ keep the scum they find on the beaches very long. The gods they need their sacrifices. Until then the animals still gotta be fed, so go an get their food, Breno.”
“Yer a pain in my ass, Raik.” The heavy set guard grumbled, but he went to get the food.
Jineva collapsed in the back of the cell, making loud wheezing noises. Inside she was laughing at her small triumph.
Chapter 2
Thin sunlight streamed through the bars in the high window when Jineva woke. Two different guards were on duty now, and their glances passed over her as they would over a piece of bad meat. She sighed in relief, and suddenly realized that the constant pain she’d felt in her head since awakening in the dungeon was gone. She felt good in fact; hungry, but good. She coughed and wheezed and burbled a little, strictly for the benefit of the guards, and slowly pushed herself up into a sitting position. Neither head turned in her direction.
Drawing her knees to her chest, she squeezed her eyes shut as the full import of what had happened since she caught the shining fish on the rear deck of the trireme. Her family was dead, and in just over a day she would be joining them when her captors threw her into the Vale of Tears. She thought of her father’s face, and her mother’s body lying cold and still on the deck in a pool of blood; of her brother’s hand disappearing beneath the waves, and she began to cry.
Meara let her cry for an hour before she broke in. The mental voice in Jineva’s head was hard and unsympathetic.
Meara sighed.
Jineva was silent for some time before she continued.
Meara laughed lightly.
Later that day one of the bored guards pushed two chipped wooden bowls into her small cell, and two more into the adjacent chamber. One was filled with brackish, foul smelling water and the other held a thin gruel, with bits of unidentifiable meat floating in the greasy gray liquid. As an afterthought, the guard tossed half a loaf of moldy bread onto the floor at her bare feet before leaving. Jineva looked at the bowls with revulsion.
Jineva swallowed, and shut her eyes, picturing her uncle sitting at her side, lecturing her calmly in his deep gruff voice. Try as she might, she just couldn’t picture him dead.
“The first thing you have to do to survive.” He had told her. “Is not to panic. Panic will kill you fer sure. The second is to assess your situation. Deal with the immediate threat. If you are in a burning house—get out. If you are being attacked—kill the attacker and escape. After that you can plan for your long-term survival. You will need air, shelter, water, food and security; usually but not always in that order.” His smile had sent a chill down her spine. “Then you can think about revenge, but...” He had taken her two small hands in his two large callused ones. “Remember this: ‘Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.’“ She hadn’t understood the meaning...then.
A shaft of bright sunlight was streaming through the upper window when they came to take her away. Jineva stumbled and drooled, and made her captor’s jobs as difficult as she could. The old man in the next cell, she couldn’t tell if he was living or dead, sagged limply in the guards arms as his heels bounced on the cold stone floor.
The guard she had come to know as Breno was holding one of her arms and Raik, his sullen partner, the other. She had bitten her tongue again, purposely, and the blood was running down her chin. Turning her head to look at Breno, she coughed as she watched him with watery eyes.
>
“Ye watch out fer him, Raik. Eees sick I tell ye.”
The sullen guard looked at his whining partner as they hoisted Jineva up a long set of stone stairs. “I’ll wipe me ands after we dumps im, Breno. Stop yer bitchin.” Breno’s face turned surly, but he shut up.
Jineva’s eyes widened in surprise when they reached the top of the stairs and finally broke into the bright sunlight.
Raik noticed her start, and laughed. “Behold the Temple of Tepoztecam, the greatest temple in the world, and the last thing yell ever see.”
The great blocked pyramid rose three hundred feet above the dirty, hovel-filled city that surrounded it. Massive white blocks thrust up into the air that reeked of incense and the sweat of the guards. The grim party continued to climb a short set of steps that led to a large platform on the top of the pyramid. From here Jineva could see that long stairs led down three of the four sides of the pyramid, while on the fourth, in the place of stairs was a smooth polished ramp, more of a curved slide that led out to...Jineva blinked. Nowhere. The ramp simply descended out past the bottom edge of the pyramid and into open air. It was then she realized that she was looking at the means of her death.
Dressed in crimson feathers and leering red and black facial paint, the priest was already raising his tattooed arms to heaven, intoning strange prayers in an even stranger language. Yellowed bone bracelets hung from his thick wrists, and bone earrings pierced his long earlobes. Greasy plaited brown hair adorned his head, and his black eyes held the same cordiality as a feeding shark. Draped loosely across his shoulders and back, and almost brushing the ground, was a long woven cape in iridescent blue.
At the priest’s curt gesture, the first two guards casually tossed the old man’s body onto the ramp. Jineva followed the progress of the body down the slide with her eyes, knowing with a sickening certainty that she would be next.
Breno grabbed Jineva’s unresisting arm, and began to drag the docile girl toward the long ramp. Raik just stood back, wiry arms crossed, grinning. The grin faded, however, when Jineva pulled her arm roughly away and spun to face the priest.
“I need that!” She jerked the cloak off the startled priest’s shoulders and in one jump hit the slide. Three shocked faces followed her progress until, at last, she shot into the open air. The tops of the clouds seemed miles below her.
Vale of Tears: A Thalassia novel Page 2