Dark Age

by Pierce Brown

  “She stabs their eyes out,” Freckles adds. Several of the girls repeat it around Tails until she covers her ears. I lean in front of her. “Remember.” I bring my finger to my lips. “Shh.” I leave as dramatically as I can, but a thought catches me. “Can you read?” I ask her.

  She shakes her head.

  And now I’ve got a backup plan.

  They collect us midmorning when a rumble comes through the walls. A transport waits outside. Some of the relatives of the girls come to see them off, the rest hide from their own shame in their chores, making up the boats and chiseling snow off the roofs. Some of the girls cry as we’re pushed onto the transport, but none as loud as poor Tails. Others tongue their gums till I shoulder them. Lion and Freckles glare at the Red Hand militia as we board up. I slump forward and sit on the freezing metal bucket seat, keeping my eyes down as the door clamps shut. The guards don’t chat much to us. They just smoke their burners. Some few women are with them. They think they’re men, or at least they think they’re better than us dumb sows because they’ve got guns and knives and pants, and we’re in skirts.

  A few of the girls are nauseous by the time the shuttle sets down. Freckles pukes a little in the corner. There aren’t any windows, so the first time we get fresh air is in some cavern hangar that was carved ages back by clawDrills.

  This is their fortress? After seeing the Citadel of Light, I almost laugh.

  Ambient light dies as we’re led away into the main of the mine. Maybe I thought the Red Hand was something big back when I was in 121, but next to the Citadel Lionguards or Barca Sols and especially the Ascomanni, these louts are a joke. We spot maybe a couple hundred as we are led down an ancient gravLift into the township. A few boys whistle at us as we go. A few run up and pinch our cheeks before getting clouted by Picker and Duncan, who smiles at us as if being nice will save him from bad dreams.

  They dump us in some old barracks for Grays. Everything’s rusted except the small sad affectations they added for the sake of us womenfolk. There’re beer bottles with wildflowers. HCs playing old comedies. And a couple old hens who introduce themselves and inspect our armpits. They check our teeth for cavities, and when they see our irritated gums they murmur to themselves about gum disease. Then they bring in an old Yellow man with a limp to check between our legs for lice and other maladies, as if we’re the ones who’ll have them.

  It’s all I can do not to crumple the Yellow’s skull with a beer bottle when the cold forceps spread me so he can look inside. He pats me gently on the knee and looks at me in sorrow. When we’re done and I’m confirmed not-diseased, they let us alone with the other newcomers from other towns along the coast. No one mingles. Freckles eyes the other girls like intruders. I see Tails taking a step toward them and click my tongue. She stops and stares at the ground.

  They give us a precious pack of burners for being “honorable lasses” and treat it like it’s Venusian chocolate. The girls look like idiots smoking them down. Most have never even had tobacco. A few puke. I take the burner from Lion’s fingers and tear it apart.

  “How old are you, even?” I ask.

  “Eleven.”

  “Going on forty,” Freckles says. “She’s crazy, that one.”

  “I ain’t crazy,” Lion protests. “You’s the one in love with a Gray.” Of the other girls, she seems to respect only Freckles’s opinions. I raise an eyebrow at Freckles.

  “Grays are risky business.”

  “So mind your own. When we gonna do it?” she asks.

  “Like I said, when they pair us off. We’ll be alone then and able to get their guns. Make sure the other girls remember.”

  “We gotta wait that long?” She glances back at Tails. “Known her since I was five. She’s gonna tell them soon as we split up. Soon as we can’t see her rat.”

  “You know that for a certain fact?” I ask.

  “Well as I know anything.”

  I glance at Tails, who sits in the corner by herself. Freckles is right. She watches the two hens chatting with each other on the far side of the room.

  “Make a distraction for me,” I tell Freckles.

  “What you gonna do?”

  “Fix it.”

  She’s about to press for particulars, when Lion, who was eavesdropping, screams at the top of her lungs and runs for the hallway. The hens curse and pursue. I bolt up, only the girls in the room now. I slip toward Tails. She looks up as I approach. I kick her hard as I can in the jaw. Something pops. She sprawls sideways with a cry. I can’t take chances, so I pull back the hands covering her face and try to stomp on her jaw. Finally my heel gets through and her hands go a little slack. I stomp again until I hear the bone crack like wet wood. I wheel back around locking eyes with the staring girls. “I don’t like rats,” I say. The newcomers look away. My girls are horrified. I return to Freckles and sit back down, throbbing all over. Tails sobs through her broken jaw like she’s dying.

  “Shit,” Freckles mutters. “What you got against rats?” Her smile sours till her face mirrors mine as we listen to Tails’s moan until the hens come back. They drag a crying Lion by her ears. No one sits within ten meters of Tails. The hens demand to know what happened. After seeing what I did to Tails, the girls greet the question with ominous silence. Tails’s explanation comes out as a pathetic moo. She’ll live, but she won’t be talking for a while.

  Stupidity is not a victimless crime.

  I won’t let these girls pay for her big mouth.

  The hens feed us after the burners and make us each drink a cup of bitter wine, making sure it all goes down. It’s got something in it. I feel the buzz right off, a slow warmth and wooziness. The whole time they’re talking about what an honor we’re about to receive. Freckles glowers as they feed Lion the same size of cup they gave us.

  They line us up in a big room like dolls. I think it’s around nighttime. Hard to tell because the mine’s shut off from light. Didn’t feel this as a girl. Days had rhythm in Lagalos. Could tick the clock on paper by the measure of my mother’s sounds and smells. Door creak. Five in the morning. Coffee smell, five-twenty. Click of tin breakfast plates. Five-thirty.

  Here there’s no rhythm, because there’s no life.

  Just like the cell.

  Can already tell there’s too many young men, and not enough to distract them or keep ’em loyal. If the Obsidians are tearing them apart bad as everyone says, then they must be wondering why they’re fighting, why they’re not trying to make it in the city like sane people.

  This ain’t the Red Hand we feared. I don’t need the parasite to smell the decay. Is it right to risk these girls? Is it better if they just take it and survive? If I can’t find Volga and Victra, if they can’t somehow help us, I think I just signed the death notes for nearly twenty girls.

  But it’s too late to go back.

  We wait in the lines in a big cold room where mine tinpots used to practice their shooting. The burning of candles and the carpets they’ve put down on the floor can’t obscure the old purpose of the room or the holes bullets chewed in the far wall. We wait till my lower back starts to ache and Lion starts to whistle, to the annoyance of the hens. One smacks her ear. Lion just grins up at her.

  Then Picker comes in with Duncan trailing behind him and tells us to mind our manners. To be polite. To curtsy because we’re about to meet the Red Mother herself. Maker of the Red Hand. Sister of Ares, Narol O’Lykos. But the Reaper’s uncle wasn’t Ares, and all the girls know it. Another ten minutes. Then some mean, mean bastards come in and face us down like a firing squad, but they don’t have that many guns. Most are men, a few women. Not boys like the others, but hard and rangy and evil, with eyes like Picker’s and a quietness about them that’s so inhuman I think all the girls will shit themselves and spill our plans. Good thing I took out the rat.

  Then She comes in.

  The
woman has filled my nightmares from the bunks of the Telemanus estate to the freezing holes I slept in next to Volga and Victra. The woman who made red butter of Tiran’s head. Who I remembered ruining my family every time Volga taught me to strip down her rifle. My fingers would shake from the cold, from the fear of the pursuing hunters, but all I had to do was picture her face to remember why I wanted to learn Volga’s weapons.

  Harmony’s face is half hell, half faded beauty. And she was a beauty. There’s lines there now, sour crow’s-feet. But in her time, she woulda outstripped my sister by a kilometer. She woulda made the boys beg for a twirl of the skirts.

  Harmony stalks forward now with a weird, lazy carelessness that I’ve only seen in soldiers. No preening. No boasting. Just a slump of the soldiers and a forward trajectory.

  She looks at us.

  Then she smiles with her eyes. A brilliant, incandescent loveliness that makes me tilt my head wondering if I got it all wrong. Or am I that drunk?

  “Sisters,” Harmony says before rushing forward to greet us, going down the line, cupping our faces, kissing us on the foreheads, on the mouths, on the eyes. “Sisters,” she says. “Sisters. Tonight you receive an honor most Red women only dream of. Tonight you will be chosen as wives by heroes of the Red People.

  “How fearful you must be, standing here on the precipice of a life more glorious than you could know. There was life before this. The life you thought you had, that they trained you to be accustomed to. The life you thought was your destiny. That life was a lie. The life of a slave is no life.

  “And there is this life. The true life. The second life of liberation. The life not of clan, but of the People. One People united against oppression. United against the cruelty of the slavers who once called us by numbers, and those who still seek to shackle us.” She sees a girl crying, not one of mine. “I know you’re fearful. I feared once. I feared when my children were dying of a cancer of the lung. I prayed to the Reaper for them. The real Reaper who guards the Vale, not the man who turned his back on his people. I prayed to the Reaper to judge them innocent and lovely and keep them in this world. But the Reaper sorts only the just and the pure in the next life. I prayed and prayed, but who was there to answer my prayers in this life? Who was there to save my children? No one. They died.”

  She scoops a handful of dirt and lets it trickle out her clenched fist. “I watched them wither. I watched my husband wither after them. I watched the Sons of Ares wither, not to death, but to the temptations of this world.” She discards the dirt. “When I was afraid, I always prayed, as you pray. But no one is there to answer. Our salvation comes in the next world. We must make our own in this one. That is why the Red Hand fights.”

  She looks at each one of us, eyes lingering on Lion. She smiles down at her.

  Lion does not smile back.

  “You are the bravest of our people. You do not hold weapons. You do not fight. But you carry the banner of liberty.” She looks at Freckles. The girl can’t meet her gaze. “You carry the bloodline of our people. Without women, without wives, what are a people but a doomed matchstick? To blaze and glare light, and then to die.” She looks at me. It is the hardest thing I have ever done to hold her gaze and nod, but I do. “But you are the wildfire. The fire that spreads. Without guns, without ships, you are the soldiers that bring us the future. You are the wives of Red! I envy you.” She nods so convincingly. “I envy you. If I could still bring life into this world, I would not need this.” She rests her hand on her pistol. “But we all have our duty. Mine is to protect you. If your husband beats you. If he is cruel to you…come to me, or any of the women you see here today. And we will sort it.”

  Duncan takes a swig from his flask and stares at the ground in the line of Red Hand militia. But the Red Hand women with Harmony nod, brainwashed, pathetic, or evil. I hate them so much more than the men.

  Many of the girls, especially the newcomers, find themselves nodding too. Either they buy the bullshit or are drunk, or afraid, or wanting the approval of the older women. Most of my lot stand rigid or shake with fear, not because they’re smarter than the other girls, but because we have a plan. And once they’ve grasped the wheel, tiny as it may be, they feel they have control. They have a chance.

  I know because it wasn’t Victra who saved me from the Ascomanni or from getting sucked out her ship. Volga and I did that. It made me feel alive in a way I never had.

  “One day you may hold a weapon,” Harmony promises, “but today, your duty to your people is to bear the seed of your husband to fruition. To grow our union with new blood and foster boys that will become warriors, girls that will become wives and one day warriors as well. I salute you. You are the best of our kind. May the Vale wait for you, and may the blood of our people flow strong!”

  THE SOUND OF ZITHERS wails through the concrete halls as we’re led in a line down to the township common, where several hundred bearded men and boys with smears for whiskers laugh and drink at long tables.

  Some few fighter women join them, hair done short like the men. Oil fires burn in metal barrels. Boys race men to see the bottom of their mugs. The stolen wealth of other races decorates their coats. Gold sigils clatter as they laugh. Obsidian arm torcs encircle the necks of their childwives. The richer they are, the less the women can move. They look like birds sitting at their tables set back from the fighters, gossiping or staring at the cups before them, wishing what’s inside would numb them faster.

  The men cheer as we’re brought in, but it’s short-lived. It all becomes solemn as we’re lined up in another row of dolls. Girls stare at their feet. Some brave ones like Freckles look on ahead like they’re at the gallows. Harmony takes her place of honor at the head table. Mugs are slammed in unison making a mockery of the Fading Dirge until she raises her hands and quiets all.

  I scan the township levels, trying to piece it all together and figure where they keep Victra and Volga.

  “Hail the children!” she says. “Hail the wives. But above all, hail the fighters!” Harmony calls. “Coran O’Boetia!” The men roar and slam their mugs. “For the killing of five Obsidian barbarians, and the taking of forty torcs in the highlands, you are a boy no more. It’s time a wife made a man of you! The prime pick is yours.”

  A drunken man-boy, uncommonly tall and handsome except for the case of childhood pox, manages to stand straight under a barrage of backslaps and jeering. With a shy grin, he makes his way down the line, glancing at each of our faces, passing mine without pausing until he comes to Freckles. She almost cracks her tooth then and there. He bows unsteadily and extends a crumpled haemanthus. I wince as she glances back at me.

  One of the hens comes behind her and, pinching the small of her back so the men can’t see, whispers in her ear. Freckles takes the haemanthus, hands shaking so bad she nearly drops it. The fighters roar in approval as Coran takes her hand and they walk to an empty table and sit. He pours her ale and downs half a mug himself.

  Sixteen times the choosing ritual is repeated, until Duncan tucks a flask away and whispers to Picker. Picker cackles and shoves him forward.

  “Duncan O’Cyros has finally dropped his balls! He wants a lass! What do you say, Mother?”

  Harmony snorts. “He waited long enough. Go on, lad.”

  Only three of us remain—old hag me, Lion, and a plump newcomer. Duncan takes a haemanthus from the barrel, walks straight up to me, and offers it. I almost forget to take it.

  Lion is picked last by a man of fifty. Even some of the Red Hands watch him with disdain as he leads his childwife away.

  The farce of a ceremony is a blur. Whatever they gave us in the wine took a bit to start. It numbed me at first, but now it creeps up on little cat feet as we stand together between the braziers and some man babbles on about duty or somesuch. Many of the words are the same I heard when my sister married. Feel a little sick hearing them now. My hand’s clutching
dirt with Duncan’s, both wrapped together by a bloodstained cloth woven by the wifeslaves. He’s shifting nervously foot to foot, his early confidence in shambles for some reason. I watch the acrid black smoke from the braziers weave upward to the roof of the mine. All this is a lie. All this pretending the world ain’t changing. I was jealous of my sister, but I never wanted a husband, not me. Maybe I thought I wanted one. But that was just because it said something that I didn’t have one. That I got skipped over at wedAge.

  I feel sick inside that it happens like this.

  I repeat some words that I can’t remember even as my mouth’s saying them. That wine’s something fierce. The other girls are like warm dolls. Wavering there with all the steadiness of riverside cattails. I’m wondering if it was a good idea to give them the teeth. How many will yellow out? How many will rat on me soon as they get their wits? Tails can’t be the only coward. Maybe the wine’s good. Makes them slow and easy, instead of twitchy and fearful.

  I still gotta find the big girls.

  Fortunately, the men are nearly as drunk as we are, especially Duncan. For courage? For fear? For weakness? Fuck knows. Maybe they’re just tired of getting butchered by Obsidians. Some swill and new cunny must be the Vale itself after fighting Sefi’s beasts. The few amongst the Hand who ain’t drunk are the old boys. Grizzly lechers who are corner-looking out their eyes at their wives. I want to retch knowing what Lion’s old man is thinking. Did any of them rape my sister? Did Duncan? I look over at him. He’s so young. So handsome. So vile.

  I know the marriage is done when there’s a cheer. For all his smiles and earlier politeness, Duncan gives me about two seconds before I feel his cold tongue probing between my clamped lips. I let him in and he sticks it almost to the back of my throat, cupping my ass with his hands. He smells of shit tobacco and bitter swill and body odor and mint. He sighs into me, hungry.

  That was quick.