The Dark Citadel (The Green Woman)

by Jane Dougherty

  Deborah turned on her, eyes flashing angry sparks. “Exactly! Holy Mother of us all, Hera, if someone as stupid as Goodwife Fatima knows what’s going on, it isn’t because she worked it out for herself, it’s because she was told. There’s no secret, they really don’t see anything shameful in killing newborn babies.”

  Hera bit her lip and hung her head. “It’s grotesque,” she murmured. “How could they do it?”

  “Because our leaders are grotesque,” Deborah hissed angrily. “Now, will you believe me?”

  “I believe you,” Hera whispered, “but there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  “If everybody says that—”

  “Shh! Matron’s just come in.”

  The tall woman had floated silently through the door and was standing with military stiffness at the back of the refectory observing the scene. Even with the length of the room between them, and only daring the briefest of furtive glances, Hera could make out the thin-lipped expression of disapproval on Matron’s face. She knew Matron despised the givenchildren in general, and as the givendaughter of a packer at the pharmaceutical plant, Hera’s social rank was about as low as they came.

  But it was obvious Matron did more than simply despise Deborah. There was an open hostility in her attitude that gave Hera cold shivers. She didn’t know what Deborah had done to provoke such intense dislike, but in Providence, a low caste girl who had no friends and powerful enemies was destined for an even bleaker destiny than most.

  “I wonder what she’s plotting, the devil.” Deborah glared after the retreating figure of Matron. “Whatever it is, I know I won’t like it.”

  Chapter 4

  School was torture for Deborah. She hated the dim, dismal monotony of it, the endless prayers, and the insipid lessons about obedience and household rituals. This wasn’t learning. The Book, that was all they ever got, morning, noon, and bloody night! The only book Providence possessed, the fountain of all truth, all wisdom. The people needed no other, the Elders said. Books were knowledge, and knowledge was evil. It was knowledge and the quest for ultimate knowledge that had brought about the downfall of the world.

  Deborah felt a great void inside yearning to be filled. There were so many things she wanted to know, like what the desert was really like, how far it stretched, and what lay beyond. She wanted to know what would happen if people had ambitions and dreams, if they were allowed to create things and choose their own destinies.

  The principal’s remarks to her in the morning and Fatima’s revolting behaviour had filled Deborah’s head with thoughts about her parents. She wanted to know the real story about what happened to them, not the ugly lies invented by the Elders. But Matron’s voice droned on, like the buzzing of a bluebottle in a dusty room. Deborah let her concentration wander idly through the window and the brown air outside. It lingered awhile at the crystal barrier of the protecting Hemisphere before floating beyond, sounding the sand-filled sky, listening for the voice of her mother.

  Her gaze was drawn further and further, through the coils of wind-tormented dust, into a barren landscape of rocky pinnacles and bottomless chasms. She heard the howling of erratic winds, the cry of unknown creatures. She held her breath, afraid the slightest movement would muddy the picture.

  Then she heard it, echoing among the broken rocks of the desert, the voice she knew in her heart to be her mother’s. The voice called her name, not in anguish, not in fear, but in triumph.

  Deborah’s heart leapt with excitement. She was on the point of following its wild arc and bounding to her feet when another voice pulled her back to earth with a brutal jolt. Matron was making an announcement. Her dry, expressionless voice had taken on a new edge, almost as if she was enjoying herself.

  “…an exceptional honour for the class.” The corners of her mouth twisted into what passed for a smile. Deborah felt cold in the pit of her stomach. “The Elders, in their wisdom, have decided to bring forward the date of the marriage ceremony. The girls of this year will be married in two weeks time, rather than at the end of sixth month as programmed.”

  As an excited whispering swept through the classroom, Matron’s cold eyes turned from one face to another, finally resting for a triumphant instant on Deborah’s white, angry features. She raised an amused eyebrow at Deborah’s efforts to prevent her facial expressions revealing her inner turmoil and resumed her announcement.

  “I am sure each of you will be excited to know the identity of her betrothed.” Her lips twitched in a cold smile for Deborah’s benefit as she unfolded a sheet of paper containing a list of names. “Starting with social group one.” She beamed at the rich girls sitting at the front of the class. “Amina Deodata your betrothed is Ariel Aaronson.”

  A murmur of congratulation and envy rippled through the class; only the most important families had such a surname. Amina must be marrying the son of one of the city leaders, perhaps even a government minister. Matron ploughed her way through the list, sinking in order of importance, until only a handful of girls remained to hear their fate.

  “And last of all, social group six, the least fortunate among you.” Matron flashed her steely smile around the room, and a few girls hung their heads in shame. Matron stared intently at Deborah, and the smile became a diabolical grin. “Deborah Givenchild, you are to marry Hector Deodato, the executioner’s son.”

  A general snigger, rapidly stifled, was heard before Deborah leapt to her feet, an unruly lock of red hair dancing before her blazing eyes.

  “I am not,” she shouted. “I refuse. Lock me up if you want, but I won’t marry that scrawny pervert!”

  “Silence!”

  “I won’t be silent! Everyone knows he’s not right in the head. His body’s crooked and his mind’s warped. I won’t marry him and that’s final.”

  “Is that so?”

  Silence fell and heads turned to see Principal Anastasias standing in the doorway. He said something to one of the guards of his escort who nodded and disappeared back down the corridor.

  “Is that so?” he repeated in his unctuous voice and glided regally into the classroom.

  “It is,” Deborah repeated defiantly. “I won’t marry him, you can’t make me. Holy Mother, so help me, but I’ll kill myself first!”

  The principal’s lip curled with distaste as he pointed at Deborah. “Silence, harlot! How dare you? Only the Wise God is holy, a mother is an instrument, a vessel, nothing more. Guards! Take this Serpentspawn to the House of Correction and wash out the blasphemous filth from her mouth. The authorities have been alerted to her imminent arrival. Like her whore of a mother, she has chosen to defy the authority of the Elders and the teachings of the Book. She will be suitably punished.”

  Deborah wrenched her arm free of the guard’s grasp and marched up to the principal. “I’d rather be a whore than a slave to that stinking pack of lies of a Book.” She was so exalted she barely felt the blow that sent her crashing to the floor. She raised her head and, catching Hera’s eye, shot her a broad, unrepentant grin. “I’ve always said the Book was a pile of shite, haven’t I? Tell them, Hera! It’s no secret.”

  Principal Anastasias turned his icy stare from Deborah to Hera. “The Cells of Reflection for that one. She will see what it means to befriend a whore’s daughter.”

  As the guards pulled her to the door, Hera’s face turned a sickly shade betraying the shock and humiliation she felt.

  “Be brave, Hera, the Mother will watch over you,” Deborah called out. “You’ve done nothing wrong and nor have I.”

  This last statement was directed at the principal. Hera sighed and dared a last look filled with reproach at her friend. Deborah’s head was held high in defiance, pleased to have been able to use her friend’s punishment to chalk up another small victory for herself. She caught a last fleeting glimpse of Hera’s stricken face before the guards pushed her out of sight and was almost submerged by a wave of remorse for her gentle friend. But the principal’s patience was at an end, and in a white fur
y he slapped Deborah viciously in the face.

  “Get out of my sight, impudent witch’s get!”

  Deborah didn’t care—remorse faded as fury and loathing returned. She detached herself from her body and retreated into her thoughts with the pictures that flashed into her head. She was learning to hold onto them, to contemplate them for longer. One day she would walk into one of them and never come back.

  * * * *

  There were degrees of incarceration within Providence, and the House of Correction, where Deborah was headed, was a reasonably mild one. Deborah’s father was in the most feared, the One-Gated House, the prison of no hope, no return, the antechamber of death. It was rumoured the prisoners were fed starvation rations, and there was not even a visiting doctor when they fell ill.

  Her father had been there since Deborah was small, so young she hardly remembered him. Only the memory of his eyes, big, blue, and russet-lashed remained, and his smile. As they took him away, his voice had been calm and tender, telling her to be brave, that one day they would be together again. One day, Deborah promised herself, she would find him and release him, and they would run away again to join her mother.

  That was how Deborah comforted herself as the Black Boys jostled her unceremoniously out onto the street and pushed her in the direction of the Ignorant quarter and the House of Correction. At first she held her head high, defying the cold looks of the rare passersby, listening impassively as her name was whispered in disapproval. When the first catcalls started she shouted back, “Miserable bastards,” and got a belt round the head for her pains. She stumbled and almost fell, raising a roar of laughter from the grinning roadside audience. Her cheeks flaming with humiliation, she felt the pricking of tears welling up in her eyes. She gulped desperately to hold them back, but soon she walked through a watery blur.

  Mother, she sobbed to herself. Why did you never come back for me?

  It was only as they reached the grim prison entrance that fear leapt out of the shadows and dried her tears, a fear that drummed in her ears and parched her throat. She perceived rather than saw the darkness that was more than shadow that besieged the building. She felt the terror lurking in every dark window and doorway, and knew with certainty that no walls, no matter how thick, would keep it out.

  Chapter 5

  The private apartments of the Lord High Protector of Providence would have surprised, not to say shocked, the casual visitor, had a casual visitor ever been admitted. The Parliament Building, that some referred to as the Protector’s palace, was the same soulless grey concrete structure of all Providence’s public buildings, simply a shade taller. Armed guards flanked each staircase and each lift. Officials scuttled about their business, doors opened and closed with barely a click. Harsh white light flooded the building uniformly, revealing identical grey corridors bathed in a death-like silence.

  But behind the sleek, steel doors of the lowest level, below the storerooms, archives, boiler rooms and maintenance areas, deeper beneath the earth than anywhere else in Providence, beyond the morgue-light and the silent guards, lay a flickering half-darkness. Filled with shifting shadow and dark red light, this was the place the Protector called his Inferno.

  The faint sound of panting from strangled throats, gasps and twitterings of despair, seemed to emanate from the banks of darkness like the ghost of perverse Musak. The air was thick with whisperings, though not a living soul could be perceived. No living soul had ever penetrated the Protector’s private realm and returned to tell what they had seen. Certainly not the Ignorant children picked up in the gutters for the amusement of whatever it was lived in its deepest depths. Not even the Protector knew exactly what happened once their bare feet pattered across the threshold and the steel doors of the inner sanctum closed firmly behind them. But he heard their childish pleading and the piercing shriek of their last moments, and his eyes glittered with a mad delight.

  The apartments of the Protector contained a remnant of the world that was lost. Just as the crystal Hemisphere preserved the remnants of humanity, the steel doors enclosed a fragment of the oldest times, the oldest dark magic. In later times it had come to be called Hell. But the Protector knew that what coiled and murmured in the bowels of Providence was a miniscule sample, a grain of sand in the desert compared with what lay beyond the Hemisphere. The Protector’s secret was a mere jot compared with the immensity of the suffering and agony the bombs had torn from the heart of the world. Beyond the Hemisphere lay utter despair.

  Through the months of the war, while the bombs destroyed the world, Providence crouched beneath its protective double domes of steel and clear crystal. When the end was over, the outer steel Hemisphere was rolled back to reveal a universe of sunless destruction. The leaders of the city had known the reign of light was over, and the rule of darkness had begun.

  The present Lord High Protector was a worthy successor to those enlightened earlier leaders. Not only did he recognize the supremacy of darkness, he had succeeded in making contact with the power that had grown like a fungus in the decaying carcass of the outside world. He had burrowed deep into the afflicted earth and released the presence that lurked there. Soon the fears and terrors of the dark night of earliest humanity would take form and engulf the world, and the Protector intended to ride on the crest of the triumphant wave.

  The Elders were welcome to their Wise God, to mutter their prayers and bless the bowed heads of their slow-witted flock. They could pretend all they liked that their Wise God inspired the laws and traditions of Providence. He knew the Wise God was pure invention, delusion if he was feeling charitable. The Protector recognized the real force that powered the broken world, and he intended to befriend it before it claimed all that was left. This little cocoon of fear, where he was Absolute Master, Lord, God, was but a beginning. First the other memories of before had to be destroyed—the memories of the light. And the woman who held those memories in her poor, addled mind had slipped from his grasp.

  In the warm darkness, the Protector paced to and fro. His plump face frowned as he considered his options. The Arch Demon who called himself Abaddon was flexing his muscles. He demanded the destruction of the keeper of the memories, claimed her power was growing in a green place beyond the northern mountains, demanded the hostage be brandished to draw her into the open, prematurely, before her power was completed. A good plan, as far as it went.

  The problem was; the Protector did not exactly trust the Arch Demon. Who would? He had a long history of betrayal. Once the hostage had been used and the memories destroyed, why should the demon king keep his bargain to share power with the Protector? What was to stop him simply smashing Providence into dust?

  The Protector had a better plan. For the moment, the hostage was quite safe in the tender clutches of her givenparents, an ignorant schoolgirl with no more notion of her past or her future use than a chicken sitting in its cage. The Protector would use the hostage in his own good time, to draw out the keeper of the memories, the Green Woman as she styled herself now. But he wanted the green witches alive. Both of them, she and the brat she spawned. The memories had a nasty habit of being handed down from mother to daughter, starting with the arch whore herself, Eve!

  The Protector had spent many pleasant hours devising a means of gagging the two bitches without obliterating the memories completely. Drugs and possibly blinding should do it. Once they were under his control, the mere threat of releasing the memories of the world of light would be enough to keep Abaddon in his place.

  Smiling to himself, the Protector sat down at his desk of sumptuous red mahogany and composed a message. He would bring out his hostage in public all right, in a spectacle that would leave history itself gasping in horror. Wherever she was, the green witch, she would not fail to hear the cries of agony. And mingled with the voices of the victims would be the supplications of her own child—because the hostage was her daughter Deborah.

  Chapter 6

  Footsteps echoed in the empty corridor of the Sainte
d Elders Boys’ High School as a slim, dark-haired boy hurried, as quickly as he could without actually running, to his class.

  “Hey, boy! You’re late!”

  “Sir?” The boy stopped. Obviously he was late. He wasn’t training for a race walking competition, was he?

  The heavy-set man in the white robes and baggy white trousers of a supervisor glared at him, his arms folded across his fat chest. “The principal is about to begin.”

  Zachariah must have looked blank as the supervisor jutted out his chin and rolled his eyes.

  “The passing out ceremony, remember?”

  “But I’m not leaving, sir. My mathematics teacher said—”

  “Zachariah, son of Helios Deodato, roadmender?”

  Zachariah nodded, his tongue seemed frozen to his palette.

  “School’s finished for you, my lad. Your maths teacher must have got you mixed up with one of the High Caste kids.”

  “But Master Achilles said the engineering school would take—”

  The supervisor unwrapped his thick arms and raised a hand. Zachariah knew what that meant and stepped back out of range.

  “Main assembly hall! And jump to it!”

  * * * *

  With the piece of paper, his job assignation, clutched savagely in his hand, Zachariah turned for home. Behind him, a bunch of boys with similar bits of paper laughed and a few shouted after him.

  “Snotty little bastard! Thought you was too good for us didn’t yah? Thought you’d be off to do ’gineering or sumfink with the HCs, yah stupid little bollocks!”

  The handful of High Caste boys in the class had been selected to train as physicians, engineers, or accountants. They looked the other way, not joining in the taunting. It was beneath their dignity now. Zachariah, as from the end of the week, was a road mender like his givenfather. He was a nobody.