John and I had discovered this tunnel under the wall during the previous winter. It had not been there in past years when I explored the dry ditch that hugged the inside of the city wall. When I consulted him, John suggested that it might have been dug by the Jackal. I thought it was more likely a smuggler's route, aimed at avoiding the taxes on importation of goods from Daxis to the capital city. But we never met whoever had dug it, and as far as we could tell, no other boys had discovered it, for it was well hidden by a tree within the dry ditch.
Most likely the tunnel was of no interest to any boys other than ourselves. The main roads from the city departed from the east and west gates, and this tunnel only led south to the trackless mountainside. But it served as a great boon to me, for it saved me from having to walk down the winding road from the priests' house to the main road, and then travel from there to the west gate.
Now I scrambled out of the inner ditch, checking first, in proper soldier fashion, that no one would notice my unorthodox entrance into the city. As I emerged, I saw that further impediments lay on my journey. It was twilight, and the stall-keepers were beginning to close the market that spread from the open square before me to the northern side of Council Hill. Wooden boxes were being loaded onto carts, streams of men and women were entering a new tavern just opened on the square, and soldiers released from their day duties poured out of the army headquarters nearby. If I tried to take the straight route home, this crowd might delay me for ages.
Instead, I chose a road I almost never followed, partly because my father had long ago forbidden me from doing so. The other reason was because, on one of the few occasions on which I had disobeyed his order, I had run straight into a group of council lords. They had laughed and let me go my way, but I had learned my lesson.
It was a road that skirted the army headquarters, ran up the side of Council Hill, and passed straight through the hilltop courtyard between the magnificent Council Hall and the shabby wooden slave-quarters opposite. From there, the road led down almost directly to my own house, which was at the foot of the wooded hill-slope.
Judging that my father would have understood the necessity of haste on this day, I ran up the tree-arched road, my mind less on the news of danger I was carrying than on the grey-eyed boy whom I had seen. I wondered whether his father would allow him to witness the battle or whether, having disobeyed his father's order to stay in the cave, he would be punished by being left behind. To my mind, there was no greater punishment that any boy could endure than to miss seeing a battle.
My thoughts were so far from the present that I barely noticed when I ran under the low, unguarded arch leading to the council courtyard. I only became aware of where I was when I ran into a man.
Speaking swiftly in order to get my apology out before the nobleman before me grew angry, I said, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to—" Then I stopped. I had tilted my head back and could now see what I was speaking to.
He was holding me back from him – an automatic reaction, I imagine, since I had run straight into him. Now his grey-gloved hands fell to his sides, and he looked mutely down at me. He was dressed from toe to neck in funeral ash-grey, and this color was matched by that of the iron death-mask that he wore, like all corpses. I caught a glimpse of his eyes, staring at me with surprise, before I realized what I was doing and looked quickly away.
My heart beat hard. No one, I was sure, would report a young boy for talking to a slave, even if I had been overheard in this empty courtyard. But would the gods curse me for what I had done? I wondered how they would judge me for talking to a man who was god-cursed – a man who, though his body had mercifully been spared death, was now treated as though he were a living corpse, exiled from all human contact.
I could no longer see the slave's eyes, but as I moved past him – it, I corrected myself – I saw its shoulders slump and its spine bow forward. I had a sudden, terrible vision of what it must be like to live one's life under the complete mercy of others.
Since I could not know how the gods would judge my actions, I thought instead of John, for I was sure he knew what the gods wanted better than any of the priests. And I instantly knew that John would never silently pass by anyone who was suffering, god-cursed or not.
I turned back and said in a low voice, "I'm sorry."
The slave had been on the point of entering its quarters; now it looked back at me. Its expression was hidden under the mask, of course, and I could not tell what it was thinking. Unwilling to look at its eyes directly, and unable to voice the thoughts that were truly in my mind, I said softly, "I'm sorry, sir. I didn't mean to knock into you like that."
For a moment, the slave was still. Then its back straightened as though it had just been given a healing drink. With slow dignity, the slave bowed its head in acknowledgment of my forbidden words.
I waited for nothing more. Already warm with embarrassment and fear at what I had done, I turned and fled the courtyard. I did not stop running until I reached my house.
I paused at the open threshold, both to recover my breath and to steady my thoughts. My mother could not afford to light fires in the warm summer evenings, and so the room was dim with dusk-light. But I could hear the clatter of the loom, and between the rhythmic passing of the shuttle I could see my mother sitting, using the last fragments of daylight to finish her work.
She had already reached her twenty-fifth year. This was due to the fact that she had married late, provoking good-hearted jokes from my father about how he preferred mature women to youthful ones. I could detect a trace of silver in her earth-brown hair that made me wonder what it was like to grow old. For a moment I was glad that my coming of age would not take place for another eight years. Then my mother looked up and saw me, and her smile was so full of beauty and affection that I forgot all about pitying her.
The smile did not last long. In the next moment she had leapt up from her stool and was hurrying over to look at me.
"By the gods of day and night!" she exclaimed. "What have you been doing with yourself? Just look at those scratches, all covered with mud! Come over here and wash yourself— No, wait, drink this first."
I automatically took and drank from the small skin of wine that she pulled out of a chest and thrust into my hands. I was thinking that any other parent would have immediately scolded me for ruining my only tunic, but my mother, as usual, thought first of my welfare.
"God of Mercy, Andrew," she said with a laugh that indicated she had already forgiven me. "How do you expect to live long enough to become a soldier if you keep tumbling down the mountainside? You ought to let John plan your expeditions. He has sense enough to keep the two of you from trouble if you'd only let him have his way now and then."
I submitted to her vigorous scrubbing with a wet cloth only because I did not wish to fall into an argument about irrelevancies. "Mother, I saw the Chara! He's here with his army!"
My mother, who had been trying without much success to remove dirt from my long hair, stilled her cloth. "What do you mean? The Emorians are up north."
I explained, at first quickly; then, once I saw that I had a rapt audience, with as much detail as I could muster. Only two facts did I omit. One was the Jackal's strange assassination attempt, if that was what it had been. The other – for reasons I did not try to analyze – was my sighting of the Chara's son.
Not far into the story, my mother went over to the door and shut it, and then shuttered the windows so that we stood in near darkness. By the end of my narrative, I felt dizzy from the telling and went to sit on my floor-mattress, which was tucked into the corner of the single-chambered house. The pallet was big enough for two, and I had often wished that I had a brother or sister with whom to share it. Now it served as a place for my mother to join me as I finished my tale.
She interrupted me as I began to tell her about talking to the slave – I had long since forgotten about omitting irrelevancies, and in any case, I was hoping for her reassurance that I had done the right thing. My
mother, though, had her mind on other matters.
Fingering the slingshot she had taken from my belt, she said, "This tunnel through the wall – it's marked by a tree, you say?"
I stared at her. Then, feeling my head grow more fuzzy, I lay back against the pallet. "Does that matter?" I asked.
"If the Chara is trying to surprise our soldiers, he may want to steal into the city," my mother said slowly. "He may know about this tunnel from his spies' reports – or perhaps from the tales of a Daxion smuggler – and may use it as a way to sneak in some of his men."
After a moment, I thought to close my gaping mouth. "You ought to be a soldier," I said with open admiration.
"Your father taught me a lot," she murmured. She rose suddenly, put aside the slingshot, and brushed from her gown some of the dirt that had clung to her from me. "I'll be back as quickly as I can. If anything happens before I return, run next door and follow wherever Raoul and his family go."
"But I want to go with you!" I tried to raise myself onto my elbow, but some dark heaviness seemed to weigh me down.
"You can't," my mother said with a sad smile. "I'm sorry, but that was drugged wine I gave you. I thought you would need help sleeping tonight, what with all those scratches. I never would have given it to you if I'd known what you were going to tell me."
"You're as sneaky as the Emorians," I mumbled. I was too tired even to protest that I was missing my chance to be savior to the Koretian army. My eyelids began to plunge down; then I opened them again as I felt my mother touch me on the arm. She was still smiling.
"Thank you for coming to me with this, rather than rushing off on your own," she said. "I appreciate how you have trusted me."
"Well, you're a soldier's widow," I said sleepily. "You're more sensible than most women. When I come of age, I'll find myself someone who is as wise as you are. Soldiers need smart wives."
She laughed, kissed my forehead, and left me dreaming of the woman I would one day marry.
o—o—o
I awoke to fire.
Part of the roof crashing onto the loom undoubtedly saved my life, for I jerked awake from its sound to find myself choking on black smoke, as though someone were pouring earth down my throat. For a moment I thought I was trapped in a nightmare. Then I realized what was happening and scrambled to my feet.
I arose too quickly, though. My drugged head spun, the smoke pinned my lungs to the wall of my chest, and I fell to my knees, coughing and holding my arm against my face to protect it from the fire that was eating at the fallen timber around me.
The house contained a strange mixture of shadings: as dark as a night-black storm in the center and as bright as a noonday sun on the edges. Sweat oozed like a cool rock-spring onto my skin, released from my body by the heat of the fire. An ember, as red as a demon's eye, fell upon my bare leg, and I opened my mouth to scream, but was smothered by the blanket of smoke that forced itself into my throat, pushing back all attempts at breath. I flung my hands forward, trying to crawl blindly toward one of the fiery walls, then felt my legs shake and collapse.
For a moment, all was still. I heard nothing but the harsh tongue of the fire and saw nothing except the smoky darkness that had swallowed the house. Then something pulled at my shoulders, and I felt myself being dragged over the floor, pushed past flames that towered over me in an arch, and flung to the ground once more.
Fresh air, painful in its suddenness, poured into my mouth, and I began to cough again. I could do nothing for some time except crouch over the ground, first coughing, and then throwing forth the contents of my stomach. Finally, moist with sweat and spittle and sickness, I lifted my head and saw John.
He was kneeling beside me in the street, his tunic torn in spots, his body black with soot, and his hair singed short by the fire. He leaned over and shouted into my ear over the growing roar of the fire, "Your mother!"
I felt a jolt inside my rib cage before I remembered. "She went to the army headquarters!" I cried back.
"She'll be safest there," John replied. Tugging at my hand, he pulled me to my feet and began to half-lead me, half-drag me through the fire-flanked street.
The thundering shout of the fire was too deep for me to hear any cries, and the night-covered streets were oddly deserted, all living inhabitants having already fled. Only the dead lay strewn about the streets like pieces of rubbish brought out to be burned. The fire had already swallowed some of them. Since I had seen many a funeral pyre, it did not disturb me to see the Jackal eating his dead, as the Koretians put it. But John and I both halted abruptly when we rounded a corner and found, crawling on the ground before us, a glowing, screaming figure of a man, trapped in the flames that cocooned him like a well-fitted tunic.
His spirit was gone before either of us could react. We saw his body collapse and his untouched eyes grow dim. John recovered before I did, towing me past the body with a grip as tight as an eagle's talons. The fire around us grew brighter and louder as we ran.
Then he stopped again. I had to clutch the side of a building to keep from tripping over him. Peering cautiously over his shoulder, I saw that we had reached the market square that was our last stretch of ground before we reached the tunnel.
The brightly colored market stalls, made of thin wood and cloth, had already disintegrated into sullenly glowing cinders. All of the houses around the square were ablaze, and the fire was crawling its steady and deadly way over the fallen timbers in the square. Only a small patch of open ground remained between us and the tunnel – and in that area was an Emorian soldier.
He was lying front-down on the ground as we arrived. Then he rose to his knees, his back to us, and brought his sword down hard on some object hidden from our view. After that, he remained where he was, kneeling and looking at the object.
John shouted in my ear; it was as good as a whisper in the fire-storm around us. "We'll have to wait!"
"We can't!" I said. "Look at the fire!"
As I spoke, a house not far from us collapsed into the street, crumbling like a flame-deadened log. John looked over his shoulder at it, and then at the soldier, who had risen to his feet but was still lingering over the object before him. Finally John said, "I'll go first. If he doesn't see me, he won't see you, and if he sees me, it will give you time to get past him."
He had the look on his face that would accept no argument. Feeling bewildered that my plans to rescue him had gone awry, I let my gaze fall to the sheathed blade at John's side.
As I raised my gaze upward once more, my eyes met John's, and we stared at each other uncertainly. Then I used the one argument I knew John would accept: "It's dedicated to the Unknowable God, as you are. You keep it, and the god will tell you what to do."
After a moment, John nodded; then he turned without a word and began running as close as he dared to the facade of fire along the row of houses. He did not look the soldier's way, so I was the only one who saw the soldier raise his head as John darted by. I jammed my fists against my mouth, but before I had time to formulate a plan, the soldier turned his head away, clearly uninterested.
To me, the scene was like a note of victory on war trumpets. I pushed myself away from the house and began running the path John had taken, seeking to escape as quickly as I could from both the soldier and the agony of the fire's touch. I tried to keep my eyes on John, who had nearly reached the ditch, but I did not have his steadiness of purpose, and as I passed the soldier, I looked the Emorian's way and saw what it was that he had been loitering over.
I caught only a quick glimpse of the woman, clothed in blood, before I cried, "No!" I did not think of what I was doing as I swerved my path; I was not sure whether I was headed toward the soldier or his victim. But as I came close to them both, the soldier reached out with his arms and pulled me captive against his chest.
I struggled, of course, but it was like a struggle I had once seen and had had nightmares about for weeks afterwards: a slave had defied the gods by using his voice and had been burned on
a funeral pyre as punishment. Since he was one of the Living Dead, no effort had been made to kill his body before it was placed on the pyre, and so he had struggled in his funeral bindings as the flames approached him.
The soldier was growling words as I tried to break free of him. Under other circumstances, I would have considered this a fine lesson in Emorian curses. I tried to loosen the grip of his right hand – it had an old war-scar on it from thumb to index finger, and the hand was therefore awkwardly wrapped around his sword hilt. I managed only to swing our bodies in the direction I had been running, and in that moment, the soldier stopped swearing and I stopped struggling, for we had both seen what was running towards us.
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