The Crow

by Alison Croggon

  He was Bared. He was lost and frightened and exhausted. His family was dead.

  Hem emptied his mind of everything except the desire for something to eat. His mouth fell slack and he began to drool slightly.

  The woman was gone a long time.

  Hem heard returning footsteps. Even before they entered the room, he knew that the woman was accompanied by a Hull. He fought his instinctive horror. Bared would not be able to sense a Hull. What would Bared think? Bared would wonder immediately if he was about to be given supper. Hem looked up, a starveling hope stamped on his face, and when he saw their hands were empty, he stared down again in dull disappointment.

  "Stand up when a master enters the room!" barked the woman.

  Hem stood up with dull obedience. Where was his dinner?

  "Tell the master your name and your story."

  Hem licked his lips nervously. "My name is Bared," he said, and stopped, flicking nervous glances at the two figures before him.

  "And how came you here?"

  "I-I don't know."

  The woman lifted her hand to slap him again, and he cringed away and started babbling.

  "My people are gone, my da, my ma – a terrible thing, fire and dead people, blood, all the screams... I run away. I been running and running. I couldn't find anyone. There are bad things in the dark and I'm lost and I'm so hungry..."

  Cramps of nausea were ripping his stomach; they were very like the pangs of tearing hunger he had often felt when he was a young child. For the first time he glanced at the Hull, and momentarily his sickness doubled and a cold sweat broke on his skin. He shifted his gaze so it was indirect, trying to see in his peripheral vision what form the Hull was assuming; his Bard eyes could see through the glimmerspell that cloaked the living horror of its face. Red-lit eyes glared from an undead skull, hairless parchment skin drawn tightly over bone. He dared not betray his visceral revulsion; to do so was tanta­mount to admitting that he was a Bard. He doubted that the Hull would come before a terrified child without a glamour to hide itself.

  To his relief, Hem finally caught a glimpse of the Hull's glimmerspelled form out of the corner of his eye. What he saw made him catch his breath with shock, as he focused his upper mind fiercely on his cramps. The Hull seemed a beautiful woman, dressed in a long, red robe, her dark hair falling freely down her back. She was tall and full-breasted, with a warm and gentle face.

  "You will be given food when you answer some questions," said the first woman in a softer voice. "Now, tell the nice lady where you are from."

  He looked up, steeling himself not to flinch at the Hull's masklike countenance, and smiled ingratiatingly through his tears. The woman Bared could see was kind, she would help him, she would feed him...

  "I was at Inil-Han-Atar," said Hem. He remembered the car­nage at that village and let the sobs well up again inside him. "It's all gone – no one left, no food left. I ate beetles..." He sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

  "And what is your name?" The Hull spoke for the first time. Hem knew that Bared would hear a mild tone, rather than the hollow, sexless voice he otherwise heard, and he let himself imagine it. He leaned forward eagerly, like a beaten dog craving a kind word.

  "Bared, miss." He sniffed again. "My name is Bared."

  "And what did you do in Inil-Han-Atar, Bared?"

  "Miss, I helped with the goats. Tanshun said I was no good, but I was good with them, I looked after them, and now they're all dead..." His face creased and he started again to blubber, hoping against hope that neither of the beings in front of him was familiar with Inil-Han-Atar.

  A chill shivered down his spine as he felt the Hull's mind probing his. It felt disgusting, as if slimy tentacles were caress­ing him intimately with a loathly gentleness. Hem was prepared for this: it was not scrying, but the mindtouching by which Bards sometimes communicated and which would reveal his conscious feelings. He had no idea if Bared would be aware of a Hull examining him this way, but he expected that he would sense something. Fortunately, Hem's nausea was so bad now it dominated everything; and he did not have to fake most of what Bared would be feeling. He was truly lost and frightened and alone.

  The Hull withdrew its attention, and turned to the woman. "He's a simpleton," it said. "A pup in a yearling's skin. They are often the best."

  The woman nodded. "No interrogation?"

  "No interrogation," said the Hull with a trace of distaste, and Hem's insides went watery with relief. "Give him some­thing to eat. I wonder that you bothered me with such a trifle."

  A flicker of fear passed over the woman's face. "Forgive me," she said. "I just wanted to be sure."

  The Hull nodded and left the room. The woman took a deep breath, and turned to Hem, who was staring at her pleadingly, thinking voraciously of food. "Come with me," she said.

  She took Hem to a huge, squalid kitchen and ladled him some cold dohl out of a rusty pot. He took the bowl, his guts churning; the last thing he felt like at the moment was food.

  "Eat," said the woman, pointing to a bench. "I will find where to place you tonight. You're one of the curs, now." There was no welcome in her voice, just a statement of fact. "You'll be assigned a block in the morning."

  Hem spooned the dohl into his mouth with simulated rav­enousness until, to his intense relief, the woman left the room. When he was sure she had gone, he hastily scraped the dohl back into the pot, and then vomited up the little he had eaten onto the floor. He scraped it under the bench; the kitchen was so filthy he doubted anyone would notice. When he had finished, he sat dully, waiting for the woman to return.

  He was too tired to feel any flicker of triumph. But he'd done it. He'd gotten into the camp.

  XIX

  SJUG'HAKAR IM

  The camp, crudely made and temporary as it was, had a name: Sjug'hakar Im. Hem didn't know what it meant until later, when the strange, clicking language of Den Raven began, slowly and clumsily, to form itself into words and then into short sentences; and when he worked it out, it scarcely seemed worth the puzzling. It meant, approximately, "Cur Camp One," or "The First Camp of Mongrels."

  As just another lost cur, Hem had been swallowed into the routines of the camp with scarcely a ripple. That first night, when he had dreamed of the monstrous wave, he had slept in the same building where he had been examined by the Hull, shoved into a room the size of a grave with no blanket or bed to soften the dirt floor, and told he would be collected in the morn­ing. Despite the sick apprehension that gnawed at him all night, the fear that perhaps his cover had not held and the interview had been a charade that would be exposed the next day, he slept. He woke bruised and itching with small parasites, and was given boiled pulses and some nameless dried meat he dared not identify. By now he was seriously hungry, and ate despite the foul greasiness of the food; but it was too much for him, and he vomited it up in the latrine. He spent the whole of that first day light-headed with hunger.

  His hair was cropped close to his head with a pair of shears and he was given a plain brown tunic and trousers. These, he was to discover, were the standard dress of every child in the camp. He was told, also, that he would no longer be called Bared: from now on his name was Slasher Blood. He nodded dumbly.

  He was shown to his block – a group of around a hundred children who shared three of the long, low, windowless huts that surrounded the training ground. There were ten blocks in the camp, each holding around one hundred children. His was the Blood Block, and the children there marked their foreheads with a vertical smear of blood to indicate their place. If they fought and killed, they would smear a horizontal line across it with the blood of the kill. In other blocks, some scarred their faces, or made primitive tattoos from berry juices and dirt. One, the Knife Block, cut off the little finger of their left hand to the first knuckle. The Blood Block considered themselves the elite corps of the camp and scorned such crude devices: each morn­ing they would make a small incision in their forearms, squeeze out some blood
and freshen their marks, continuously renew­ing their pledge.

  But pledge to what? Hem asked himself, watching wide-eyed from deep inside the war-stunned, imbecilic husk called Bared that was his disguise. That morning Bared, or Slasher, did as he was bid, and cut his arm with a sharp knife given him by a tall, dark boy. There was no ritual of initiation into the block, as he had half expected: the tall boy who seemed to be the hut leader – Reaver – gave him an indifferent glance and asked his name, but that was all.

  He was taken to the armory and fitted with armor and a weapon: to his relief, he was given a shortsword, vastly inferior to the one he had buried, its blade pitted and spotted with age, but still sharp and deadly He hid his skill, and picked it up warily, with the awkwardness of one unused to weapons. He was examined briefly by the storeman and handed a strange motley of armor – hardened leather and ceramic plates and a sleeveless jerkin of heavy mail and thick, greasy cloth to wind around his forearms as vambraces. He was allowed to keep his sandals and his spare jerkin and pack, but first they were closely examined. He watched as the storeman hunted method­ically through it, a worm of anxiety wriggling in his stomach, fearing irrationally that perhaps he had overlooked something, that some trace of his Banding might remain to betray him. But the pack was returned without comment.

  Reaver gave him a mirthless grin when he returned to the Blood Block. "Now you're a real snout," he said. Hem didn't know what he meant until later. The child soldiers always referred to themselves as snouts; it was not a name that came from the Hulls, so far as Hem could tell, but one they made up for themselves.

  Reaver showed him a pallet of straw and a blanket, which now belonged to him. It was crowded and stuffy inside the hut, but no one spilled through the door: instead each snout squatted on their pallet, busy with various inscrutable activi­ties. It was hard to tell the boys from the girls; in their identical tunics, with their roughly cut, short hair, they seemed curiously sexless.

  They did not have the blank faces that had frightened him so much when he had seen them on their mission into the Glandugir Hills. They chattered and bickered as much as any children their ages, and pursued the usual internecine fights and rivalries. But there was something wrong with their eyes, a kind of glaze that made Hem retreat into Slasher's supposed dumbness, instead of talking, as he had planned, in order to find out information. He stared uncomprehendingly at any overtures from those next to him, his mouth open, dribbling slightly, and they shrugged their shoulders, exchanged mock­ing glances, and left him alone.

  It was a rest day, Hem learned as he listened to their talk, which was why they weren't training in the yard. They sprawled at their leisure; some lay on their backs, staring up at the ceiling, throwing obscene comments now and again into the ceaseless chat that flowed about the room; others sharpened their knives or swords, or counted things they kept in rough bags patched together from scraps of leather and cloth. They gossiped about incidents at training or mocked the abilities of other blocks, or spoke of their commanders with a strange mix­ture of swagger and fear.

  After a while, Hem began to feel a huge boredom crushing him. It was more than tedium; it was like an active force that pushed his body heavily down on the pallet and made his bones feel like lead, something like a monstrous despair. There were around thirty children in the hut, and they jabbered all the time like monkeys; but not one of them was saying anything at all. One would make an observation, and another would respond; but it was somehow as if neither heard what the other was saying, or forgot it as soon as it had died on the air. It was as if they only made noises out of habit, to engorge the silence that would otherwise fill the hut.

  Hem listened hard for anything that might give him a clue about Zelika; any loose words about the foray into the Glandugir Hills five days before, or about a prisoner. As his boredom gradually shaded to an almost unbearable disgust, he felt his eyelids closing despite himself. He battled to keep awake, fearing to miss some glancing comment, some throw­away line that might give him an idea of where she was. Perhaps the foul sorcery of this place had already ensnared her, he thought; perhaps she was in another block, swapping obscene jokes with other bewitched snouts. But he heard noth­ing, only an endless litany of the same things, said over and over again – the same jokes, the same empty laughter, the same boasts, the same curses.

  At dusk a gong was struck, the harsh sound hanging in the darkening air, and the snouts filed out of their hut, signing for Hem to follow. They stood in orderly lines of about thirty each, row upon row of them pouring out of the huts and standing on the beaten red earth of the training ground. Everyone else seemed to know where to go: Hem just followed his block, and stood where he could find space. A Hull came out of the Prime Hut, the building where Hem had spent the previous night, and made an announcement that he could not hear. Then came a roll call. Three Hulls moved from block to block, a scroll in the hands of the tallest of them, and called out their names. Hem was now "Slasher, Blood Block Two"; when his name was called he didn't respond at first, and was nudged by his neigh­bors. The roll call took at least an hour, and the stars were shining fitfully through scudding clouds in the dark sky before they were summoned to the mess hall and their dinner. Nobody seemed to mind standing stiff and silent while the Hulls checked their lists, although Hem found his legs aching.

  Hem vomited up his dinner again; he held it down only long enough to make it to the latrines. Now he had not eaten since before the previous night, and a hollow ache was opening inside him. He thought it was probably the sorcery in the camp, the deep imbalance he felt there, which increased his constant, underlying nausea to the point where he could no longer con­trol it. But maybe it was simply the greasy, gristly stew, and the soggy mess of pulses that accompanied it, or the memory it called up of the kitchen he had briefly seen the previous night. Part of him began to worry. If he could not eat even such poor food as this, before long he would lose his strength; and he had never had such need of strength.

  He could go three days without eating, he knew, with no ill effects, and for the moment his hunger made him feel uncommonly alert. As surreptitiously as he could, he studied his surroundings, fixing details in his memory to sort out later, when he could think. One thing puzzled him: the burned-iron stench of sorcery around the camp was enough to make him feel sick, but it was not the kind of power he had expected to find there. If his estimate of close to a thousand children was correct, the Hulls would have to tap huge reserves of magery to keep each of them enslaved.

  Hem didn't know much about Hull sorcery, but he knew that Hulls were twisted Bards who swapped their Bardic Names for immortality. It seemed logical to assume that sorcery was kin to magery, that however twisted it might be from the ethics of Barding, its laws would at base be similar. He remem­bered uneasily how he had dreamed, long ago in Turbansk, that Light and Dark were somehow the same.

  The sorceries he furtively sniffed – vigilances at each door­way, sensate wooden walls, tricks of mind control and sur­veillance – were minor. They were not enough to account for the spellbinding of the snouts. Moreover, no one had tried to do anything to him. He was just one of the many others, ignored: nobody had tried to bewitch him or even tried any kind of mass mindcharm. As he lay on his thin pallet later, turning over his thoughts while the children around him snored and twitched and cried out in their sleep, he puzzled over what bound them. It was not bewitchment, or not the kind of bewitchment he had assumed. They must be using something else.

  He tried to mindtouch Ire that night. He waited until the small hours before he dared to begin. First, just to be sure that his magery would not be detectable, he wove another shield; this one, unlike the shield he used to hide his Bardic nature, was an external shield, a bubble around his body. Then he sent out the summoning, the vibration that only Ire could hear, that only Ire would respond to. It was a while before he got any response, long enough to make him anxious that some accident or worse had befallen his friend; but eventually
, faint and sleepy, he felt Ire's voice.

  You woke me up, you featherless witling, he grumbled. You all right?

  Yes, said Hem, grinning despite himself. As all right as I can be in this foul place. Did you see Hared?

  Aye, answered Ire. He was very angry. He wants to wring your neck. I have to report back in three days.

  Good idea, said Hem. Is he going to stay where he is?

  He'll move around. It isn't safe. And he has to go back to The Pit to meet Saliman. But he won't go back to Nal-Ak-Burat until he gets you back, he said.

  Hem breathed out in relief: he had feared that Hared, in his wrath, might abandon him. Good. Have you found the girl?

  No. Saying so hurt; it seemed to drive home the folly of what he was doing, of what he hoped to do. No, not yet.

  You'd better hurry.

  I'm trying. A sudden tired despair washed over Hem. He hated what he was doing. It was worse than he had imagined; it corroded his very soul. The sooner I get out of here, the happier I'll be.

  I miss you. I'm lonely, you braintwister.

  Hem was silent. He knew what he was asking of Ire. He was only a crow, however clever, and yet he was relying on him as much as on any Bard.

  I'm lonely too, he said at last, his mindvoice awash with feel­ing. I miss you something fierce, Ire. When we get out of this, I'll buy you a special spoon.

  Lots of spoons, said Ire. And some nice pretty gems. And even then –

  Hem sensed a vigilance begin to stir; perhaps the depth of his feeling had unsettled his shielding.

  I've got to go, Ire, he said hurriedly. Something's waking. I'll come when I can.