by Pedro Urvi
They did not move for hours, waiting for something to happen. But nothing did. Discouragement and uncertainty grew with the passing of time; they seemed to be floating in the air they breathed, like a ghost of dark wings waiting for the right moment to bear them to the underworld.
Yosane gave a broken sigh. “Why us…?”
“Who knows… the Golden Gods are whimsical and pitiless…” Kyra replied with a shrug. “They’re used to summoning whoever they please, for reasons only they know.”
“But they usually summon men…”
“Sure, to send them to forced labor.”
“This was different…”
“Why do you think so?”
Yosane breathed in deeply.
“I was in the great square of the capital, Osaen, when the Summoning came. I saw the giant Sacred Monolith of the Gods shimmering at the top of the square. The four sides of the polished black surface began to shine and I got scared, very scared. Then the humming began and the tremors, for a moment there I thought the monolith was going to collapse, that the whole hundred and twenty feet would fall on the crowd, crushing hundreds of people. But luckily it didn’t. First there was this blinding flash and then a deafening boom, and that produced the giant wave of energy of the Summoning. It spread out in all directions, like the ripples a pebble makes in the water of a lake.”
“So the Summoning was generated by this giant monolith?”
“Yes, it was the monolith, I swear, I saw it with my own eyes.”
“Go on, what happened next?”
“It swept through the whole square, the whole city, and it hit me so hard it threw me backwards on to the ground. Then the Eyes-of-the-Gods arrived with their Executors. There were hundreds of people in the square, all of them lying helpless on the ground. For a long time they were searching among the people and finally they reached me. My Ring was shining brightly…”
“Yes, mine too. Did you see whether anyone else’s was shining as well?”
“No, only mine. When I saw it shining brightly like that I was scared and looked around, but mine was the only one… Then this being arrived… the Eye-of-the-God, the front of his helmet split in two and I saw the Eye appear, I nearly fainted with fear… then everything went black.”
“It’s not the first time that women have been called.” Kyra said. “But why us I have no idea.”
“We must have something different. They’ve chosen us for something, for some specific purpose, this isn’t by chance. Just think, out of all the people in that square I was the only one selected, and there were lots of other people there… Why didn’t they summon other women?”
Kyra pondered on that for a moment. She had not thought about it, in fact it had not even occurred to her. “You like to think about things, don’t you? Now you’ve made me wonder… Perhaps you’re right, but that doesn’t change our situation.”
“But, why do you think we’re here?” Yosane asked, sounding more curious now.
“I don’t know why we’re here, but I fear it’s not for anything good…”
“Yes… I suspect that too. If they’d chosen all the girls in that square, I would’ve guessed it was to do forced labor or service. But if they only chose a few… that means there’s some very specific reason behind it. We’ve been chosen among so many for something specific, and it’s because of something we have in common.”
“You certainly like to think,” Kyra said with a giggle, surprised by her companion’s intelligence.
“Sorry, I can’t help it. I’m always going over things in my mind.”
“That’s a good quality, in my opinion. And one I don’t have myself…” Kyra said with a cheerful laugh. “I’m more about acting on impulse, or at least that’s what my brother Ikai says. To be honest, I have quite a temper, and sometimes it gets me into trouble.”
“I’m pretty much the opposite… very quiet, prone to thinking things over a good deal before I do anything. It’s very hard for me to make up my mind to act. I hardly ever do… I’m quite shy… and I scare easily…”
“Well, then we’re a good pair of opposites, the two of us. This goes against your theory that we’ve been chosen for something we have in common.”
“Maybe… or maybe what we share is not a character trait, but something else.”
“You’ve lost me, Yosane,” Kyra said, and gave her a friendly shove with her shoulder. “I think you’d better keep searching, and I’ll take care of defending us.”
“What do you think they’ll do to us?”
“Nothing good, I’m afraid.”
“They wouldn’t… abuse us, would they?” Yosane asked, fear showing clearly in her voice.
“You’d better be prepared for the worst. But if anybody dares lay their hand on me, they’ll regret it. And if they try the same on you, I’ll defend you. My brother taught me to fight, and I will.”
“I’ve heard rumors in the capital… when they take pretty girls away they’re never seen again… they talk of sex-slaves… and worse…”
“I don’t know what’s in store for us, and that might be our fate, but I’m not staying around to find out.”
Kyra had also heard those rumors, and others that spoke of sacrifices of maids to the Gods. Unfortunately, there’s no smoke without fire… so she decided to act. She stood up and began to feel the wall.
“Let’s look for a way out,” she said to her companion.
For an entire day they tried to find some crack to escape through. The dungeon had neither doors or windows, but was of solid rock, and to her surprise it was spherical. They had felt every inch of the room in search of a possible way out, and Yosane had marked the exact dimensions of the dungeon on the wall with a piece of stone. But they had not succeeded in finding a possible exit.
Kyra could not explain how they had been put in there, but there did not seem to be any opening. At one end they found a kind of drinking trough made of stone, with water in it. Beside it, in another stone trough, they found dried meat and black bread. Yosane had suggested rationing the food and water so that they could hold out for as many days as possible. She had to admit she would never have thought of that herself; she would have eaten all the food to keep up her strength in case she needed to face danger. A little further right there was a bronze bowl with a heavy lid, which they used as a latrine.
For some reason their captors kept them alive, albeit totally isolated. By the third day they were as blind as moles in that enclosed darkness. Discouragement wore away Kyra’s spirit, and the relentless blackness weighed on her heart like lead. They had been abandoned to their fate in that strange, cold, gloomy chamber.
Two more days passed, and discouragement gnawed at what remained of her fighting soul. Kyra tried to shake off that feeling of defeatism. Their situation might be disheartening, but whatever happened she had to survive, and survive she would. She would fight to her last breath, she would not let herself be beaten by the Enforcers of the Gods even if they kept her locked up there for the rest of her days. Only one thing cheered her up: chatting with the bright Yosane, who seemed to have an answer for almost any question.
“Tell me, Yosane, where are you from? What’s your job? Something tells me you’re not a plain peasant girl from the Sixth County like me.”
“There’s nothing wrong about being a peasant… you shouldn’t be ashamed of it, we all produce for the Gods, one way or another.”
“Some ways are more dignified than others, and some lives are more comfortable …”
“You’re right here… I won’t argue with that.”
“Give me your hand.”
Yosane stretched out her arm, and Kyra ran her fingers over the engraving on her Ring.
“The Fox. You’re a Craftswoman.”
“That’s right.”
“What kind? Your hands are soft, you’re not a smith or carpenter. No, you don’t work with your hands but your head, am I right?”
“Yes, you’re right. I’m a Builder. L
ike my father and my grandfather and their father and grandfather too before them. We build for the Regent in the capital.”
Kyra grunted under her breath.
“I was starting to like you, till now… if your family builds for the Regent in the capital, his family and yours must be related. It’s an important job, and Sesmok only assigns important jobs to his kinsfolk.”
Alarmed, Yosane hurried to deny this. “No, honestly, it’s not like that at all. My family has a good reputation, our buildings speak for themselves. We’ve been working in the Second and Third Counties for generations. One day my father was called to the capital, by the Proxy Jaisme, one of the Regent’s cousins, who’d been told good things about my family’s work. He interviewed my father, and since then we’ve been working in Osaen for Sesmok. At the moment my father’s building a new extension to the east wing of the Regent’s palace.”
“I see…” Kyra said quietly, and Yosane’s relieved sigh reached her ears.
“So you know how to read and write, not like me. Because I’m a peasant I’m condemned to be illiterate and half-witted.”
“Yes, I know how to read and write, plus some other more advanced concepts, like geometry. In construction you need to understand a lot of mathematical concepts so that the buildings aren’t just beautiful, they don’t fall down under their own weight or as a result of a storm.”
“And do you like it?”
“All my life, ever since I was a little girl, I’ve lived among manuscripts, drawings and calculations, listening to my father and his colleagues argue about a thousand and one theories. I have to admit I love it as much as my father Sistas does. He’s a man to be respected, with exceptional intelligence and knowledge. There’s nothing I’d like more than to go on learning the trade, design new buildings like you’ve never seen before, buildings to put the Regent’s palace to shame. But there’s another area which appeals to me even more: building great riverboats. It fascinates me. I’d love to be able to design and build great cargo barges that would sail up and down the river Zibai. I’ve been studying the subject a lot with a friend of my father’s, and it honestly has me in its spell. Do you know it’s possible to carry enormous blocks of granite in giant barges that won’t sink under the weight of the cargo? It’s amazing! Simply amazing!”
“Oh, I can see you love your profession,” Kyra said with a laugh. “Me, on the other hand, I hate anything to do with working the fields from sunrise to sunset. There’s nothing I hate more. Well, yes there is, the Enforcers of the Gods. Do you have any brothers and sisters?”
“No, I’m an only child. I live with my father and my mother Alea, in the Crafts quarter in Osaen.”
“I’d never met anybody who was educated before. Well educated, I mean. There’s a smith in our village, but his knowledge isn’t very advanced — in fact he can barely read. In the Sixth County we’re almost all farmers, there’s only one small town: Tisota, the capital, and the rest are just small villages devoted to farming. And we’re a long way away from Osaen. Is it true what they say about the Sacred Monolith? They say it was erected by the Gods themselves, using their Power.”
“There are theories about that, and two are the commonest. Nobody knows which of them is true, but if you like I’ll tell you which one I think is the most likely.”
“Yes, please, do.”
“A thousand years ago the great monolith was put up where it is today. The monolith itself contains Power, and it’s made of a material we know nothing about. That means it’s not the work of men, or the Enforcers, because they don’t have the Gods’ Power either. It was built by the Golden Ones themselves. I have no doubt about that. As to who raised it and put it where it now stands, there are two schools of thought. One says it was the Gods themselves, using their immense Power, who came down from their Eternal City and raised the monolith. The other says it was their Enforcers, using thousands of slaves, who raised it. My father and I both think it was the second one.”
“Did they know how to do that a thousand years ago?”
“If they didn’t know how, the Gods transmitted the knowledge through the Eyes-of-the-Gods. It’s happened with other materials, like steel. Copper wasn’t strong enough for the Gods’ needs, but that was all we knew. The Gods taught us to make steel, to forge it, not out of the goodness of their hearts but because they needed it for their great city. Before the arrival of the Gods we were a people with a very rudimentary technology, very primitive. We knew the wheel, copper, pottery, simple adobe houses and the building of small fishing boats and seafaring vessels with just one sail. During these thousand years of slavery, the Gods have been giving us more and more morsels of technology which we’ve used to produce goods and build cities. The Gods don’t only enjoy a Power capable of destroying everything on the ground, their technology is very advanced.”
“I’m well aware that everything they do is for their own good. Just as I know that anyone who can’t produce what they want is executed.”
“What do you think it’s for?”
“The great Monolith?”
“Yes, I often wonder, apart from the Summoning, of course.”
“That’s another interesting question… there are a great many theories which we have no way of checking. In my humble opinion I think it’s a tool of the Gods with something of their Power in it, and I’m not sure how, but I believe it’s connected with the Boundary.”
The two girls chatted a while in the darkness. Hours went by and sleep overcame them.
On the sixth day of their imprisonment, once she had eaten her day’s ratio Kyra felt melancholic. She began to think about her mother, wondering how she might be faring — she had left her badly wounded, and without Ikai to help her she feared the worst. To get rid of the anxiety in her chest, she began to sing one of the songs they always hummed while they worked the fields. It was an ancient song which Solma had taught her, and which she in turn had learnt from her mother.
Yosane came closer and listened until Kyra finished the song.
“That’s a beautiful song, full of tradition.”
“Thank you. It’s about Oxatsi, Mother Sea and how she misses the Senoca, her people, who were taken from her one day and who she’s waiting for with open arms. My grandmother used to say it’s as ancient as the time we’ve been imprisoned within the Boundary. It’s a song of hope for our people, who once lived by the sea and off the sea, and now can only dream of being able to do so again.”
“I love the tradition of our people, the myths and legends about Oxatsi, about what our nation was before it was enslaved by the Gods, about how we lived off the sea and for the sea. I think in part, that’s why I’m fascinated by ships. It’s hard to believe that once we were a nation of fishermen who sailed the endless ocean, exploring new and distant lands in fragile vessels with just a single sail.”
“Do you follow the ancient traditions?”
“Do you mean the old beliefs or the tattoos?”
“Both.”
“I still believe in our heritage as a people, I don’t believe the falsehoods the High Priest Torkem and his clergymen try to get us to believe,” Yosane said in a very low voice, as if she were afraid they might overhear her. “As for the tattoos… I know it’s traditional, that the point of them is to remind us of who we were, the things we knew… so they don’t fade from our people’s memory as time goes by. I know it’s very laudable, brave even, as it doesn’t please the Regent and his kind… but I’m terrified of having one done.”
“Terrified?”
“Of the pain…”
Kyra laughed, holding her stomach. “I honestly don’t know how someone as learned and intelligent as you can be so scared and fearful. A kick in the shin is more painful!”
“I know, I know, don’t tease me. I know I’m a coward for not following our people’s tradition, for not passing on our cultural heritage to the next generations on my own skin, but my fear’s too strong and I just can’t. I want to but I don’t dare. An
d there’s nothing I’d like more than to overcome this fear that paralyzes me, I just freeze and go to pieces at the thought…”
“Don’t worry, your secret is safe with me.”
Yosane sighed deeply. “I guess you must have a tattoo of some sort…”
“Yes, on my right leg I have a stingray flying out of the sea towards the sun. When I see the damned Ring on my left arm, I look at the stingray leaping free and it gives me hope, it cheers me up. Besides, they say certain varieties of stingrays do really sting their enemies, like lightning in a storm. They seem wonderful to me. Can you imagine being able to do that to an Enforcer? I’d give anything to …”
“Kyra…” Yosane warned her in a low voice, “you shouldn’t say those things, they’re punishable with death… and in any case only the Gods can do things like that through their Power.”
Kyra remained silent. She knew Yosane was right. She remembered the fateful incident, what had happened and how the Enforcers had taken her father… Because of her own fault… Now she had to live with that weight forever, for the rest of her life. And it was a tormenting weight which oppressed her heart and brought tears of sorrow and rage to her eyes. She held her tears and passed her arm across her eyes.
“You’re right, it’s just that I hate them bitterly,” she said in a whisper. “They took my father…”
“I’m so sorry, Kyra…”
“Thank you… it was because of me… it’s something I have to live with.”
“Don’t torment yourself. If they took him, it’s not your fault. Be clear on that. It’s them who enslave us, it’s them who take away our loved ones. Don’t torment yourself.”
“Thank you…”
“Keep your hopes up, he must be alive somewhere, working in the quarries or in the Eternal City where the Gods live. Always think that he’s alive, don’t let despair get the better of you. You’re strong, you have a fighting spirit, don’t give up, you’ll see him again someday.”
