“Bloody good luck to her,” Dan muttered.
“And they think we’re going to let her in.”
Dan grabbed Ezekiel’s arm. “If the Elders think She is moving, they’ll do anything to stop her. They’ll spread any lies they like, and the stupid sods’ll all lap it up and—”
“Aye, lad, I know. We’ve always been fair game, but this time, who knows how far they’ll go?”
“What’ll we do, Zeke? Where can we go?”
Ezekiel shook his head. “I don’t know, lad.” He slapped Dan on the shoulder and grinned. “There’s always the Garden.”
Ezekiel had heard the rumours, seen the reprisals, the blood on the streets. He knew the darkness creeping into the city was a reflection of the darkness growing in the minds of the Elders. Ezekiel was tall and strong and not too old to fight.
The other fathers, and mothers too, would all fight if their backs were against the wall. There had been massacres before, and they had always survived. But this time, Ezekiel had to admit, he feared the unspeakable was being prepared. The time had come for the Dananns to leave Providence and find the promised Garden. Unfortunately, none of them had the faintest idea of where it might be.
Dan grinned back. “Your Maeve’s always going on about it being time we sent out another expedition. Why not round up all the worst of the little bleeders, like Nat’s awful Ruairi and that little Psyche pest with the ginger plaits, and send ’em out to look for it?”
Ezekiel’s grin faded from his face. “I have a horrible feeling it might come to that, Dan, this time.”
Chapter 8
The bare cell where Deborah was expected to ponder on her sins and repent contained a narrow bed, a slop pail, and had one small window that looked down on the exercise courtyard. Over the wall of the House of Correction rose the ugly tenement blocks of the Ignorant quarter and beyond, the vague, brooding wasteland of the desert. No matter how long or how hard she stared, she could make out nothing in the thick, troubled air of the far side of the great crystal dome.
Within the Hemisphere the air was heavy and cloying, like tepid water with a little sugar in it. Beyond, in the desert chaos, the wasteland created by the war, who could tell how the air felt on the skin? The Elders said it was poisonous, like the breath of a demon, that the burning sand rasped the skin from the bone, that only evil could survive in it. Sometimes the erratic desert wind whipped up sandwraiths, twisting plumes of dark sand that danced high overhead in wider and wider spirals until they were lost from view.
Deborah stood on tiptoe and rested her chin on the high window ledge. She stared out, feeling bored and resentful. Her eyes narrowed to green slits as they always did when she was thinking deeply. As usual it was about the injustice of it all. Women must obey men, and all must obey the Elders. It was all in the Book, they said. If only we had lived by the teachings of the Book, the war would never have happened, and the desert would not now be swarming with devils and demons. But had anyone ever seen a devil? And what exactly would happen if a couple had two daughters instead of one daughter and a son? Or ten sons? Or none at all? And why was it sacrilegious to want to decide some things for yourself?
Deborah knew that simply thinking heretical thoughts made her a suspicious character to be shunned and avoided. Only Hera would have anything to do with her. With a twinge of guilt, the thought of Hera flitted moth-like into her head and out again. Hera was her friend, and Deborah did not wish any harm to come to her, but sometimes you had to take a stand even if it had uncomfortable consequences. She hoped Hera would understand. Then she forgot about her.
In the exercise courtyard the boy prisoners were walking round and round, reading aloud verses from the Book. One of the boys stood out from the group. He was not shuffling dejectedly like the others; one hand was stuffed in his pocket, from the other the Book dangled unread. As he walked, he kicked out at small pebbles, raising up little clouds of grey dust. Suddenly the boy crouched down, tossing the Book aside to peer at something, something fragile and fluttering that he held carefully in his cupped hands. The chanting stumbled to a ragged halt, and in the deafening silence, two supervisors came running over, their white trousers flapping like drying washing.
Deborah could easily make out the shrill abuse. She heard the sharp blow that sent the boy sprawling in the dust, the insolent reply he gave as he was dragged to his feet. She saw the flutter of delicate wings, a bright splash of colour against the dull stone walls, and the head of the boy turning to watch. There was a sharp clap, and the insect disappeared between the paws of a supervisor. The boy shouted shrilly and gave a hefty kick to the Book that sent it spinning across the yard, its cover torn.
Deborah jumped up and down on the floor clapping her hands in a wild burst of applause. She hauled herself back up to the window just in time to see the boy being pushed towards a small staircase, and his raised face as his eyes searched for the source of the applause. Stretching as far as she could, Deborah thrust a hand through the bars and waved.
* * * *
The sound of boots tramping purposefully down the corridor outside her cell made Deborah leap to her feet. The jingle of keys was followed by the grinding of the heavy lock, and the door swung open.
“Slopping out duty,” the guard bawled. Dark eyes flashed out of a face that was all bristling black brows and short square-trimmed beard. He moved aside, waiting for Deborah to pass. “Get a move on, we haven’t got all night,” he barked, pointing at the buckets standing outside each of the occupied cells. “Take them to the privy at the end of the corridor and empty them. The other prisoner washes them and you bring them back. Got it?”
Deborah nodded, thankful she wasn’t the one detailed to do the washing out. The buckets stank despite their closed lids. The privy stank worse. She tipped the contents of the first bucket down the shaft, and holding it out at arm’s length, handed it with a grimace to her companion. The boy ran the empty buckets under a tap, swilling them along a yellow-stained gutter that disappeared into a hole in the wall.
At the same time, Deborah noticed with distaste, he was splashing the ends of his trousers with the filthy water. The boy turned to take the next bucket and Deborah recognized the curly black hair and hawk nose of the hero in the exercise courtyard. Her heart leapt in spite of the unsavoury situation. He held out his hand for the bucket and nodded a sort of greeting.
Deborah smiled, eager to win the confidence of the rebel. “I saw you in the courtyard, it was me who waved. I clapped, I wanted to cheer.” Her voice rose in excitement.
The boy put a finger to his lips. “Not so loud,” he whispered. “They’ll hear.”
“Let them,” Deborah raised her voice a tone. “I don’t care. What can they do?”
The boy frowned. “If you don’t know what they can do, then you’d best be quiet. Tomorrow I will receive five lashes for blasphemy, and I hope I will bear it like a man. But I don’t want any more just because of some girl’s squealing.”
Deborah’s face was burning with confusion. Something about the boy had seemed…special. Something about him had made her think of the dream laughter, and for a moment she had wondered if…The thought dissolved into a sad puddle. This boy certainly never laughed like that. And now she had annoyed him. She found herself imagining his pale back ripped and striped with bleeding furrows.
“Come on,” he snapped. “Just give me the bucket or you’ll have the guards over.”
Deborah’s eyes narrowed as she thrust the slop bucket at the boy. “And I thought you were different.” Her lips twisted in scorn. “You’re just as much a coward as the rest.”
The boy raised himself to his full height and sneered. “And you’d know all about heroics, I suppose. Was it for heroics in a dark corner with some Ignorant boy they picked you up, then?”
“Oh,” Deborah gasped in indignation. “You arrogant little shit!” With a furious gesture she sent the contents of the slop bucket over the boy’s shirt.
“Hey, you two
,” the guard shouted. “If you like paddling in crap so much you can clean out the privy at the end of the week.”
They finished their turn of duty in icy silence. The full buckets were slopped into the privy, water from the tap swished round in the clean buckets, and splashed in the gutter. Empty buckets rattled and clanged as they were set back down outside cell doors. When the job was done the guards escorted them back to their cells. They parted without a look, in silent anger. The guards didn’t even notice.
Chapter 9
Zachariah threw his filthy shirt into a corner and crouched down on his mattress with his knees up to his chin in an attempt to stop all the heat escaping from his body. It was cold at night in Providence, and the blanket he wrapped round his shoulders was thin. Damp seeped up from the floor of his cell just below ground level and chilled him to the bone. The small window was out of reach, level with the ground of the exercise courtyard. All he could see was the vague grey mass of the prison.
The faint glimmer that fell from the window picked out the bridge of his nose and his high cheekbones, leaving his eyes in deep shadow. Hugging his knees, he rocked back and forth to keep warm, and wondered what was going to happen to him. He had no idea what his sentence would be, but his few days in the House of Correction had taught him that his crimes were far more serious than those of the other boys in his wing: pilfering from work sites, faked illnesses, and missed devotions.
Zachariah had sinned against the Holy City State of Providence. He had contravened one of the first laws handed down to the Elders by the Wise God, that the mother is a vessel to be filled and emptied. A vessel has one function only, useful and necessary, but one vessel is as good as another. Zachariah had pretended his birth mother was something more than a vessel, and he had dared to do what no child was allowed—to love his mother.
Sitting shivering in his cold cell, Zachariah made a resolution. He was not going to rot in the House of Correction. He was going to get out, get away. He should have known that, despite his schoolmaster’s request, he would never be accepted into the engineering college with the High Caste boys. But Zachariah wanted to learn all the things he was never taught. He wanted to explore beyond the Hemisphere, to feel the hot burning sand on his face, to discover what the Elders were so afraid of.
Another good reason for getting away was his impending marriage. On his eighteenth birthday, supposing he was out of prison by then, a bride would be chosen for him. Probably a former prisoner, perhaps even the vicious, pretentious slut of the slop buckets. His eyes narrowed at the thought of the foul words she had shouted at him. Zachariah had had few dealings with girls before, and he was not sure he had handled the situation very well. But who would have thought a girl, and an Ignorant at that, would be so forward?
He imagined himself briefly as some kind of avenging angel, sweeping away the Elders and their awful Book, setting free the boys forced to marry stupid, ugly girls they had never met and do stupid, boring jobs they hated. His eyes glittered. And he would stop the Giving.
The prisoners in the House of Correction were docile and low-risk, mainly unruly boys and sloppy workmen. Nobody could imagine them making trouble. Consequently security was slack. Zachariah was neither docile nor sloppy. He would find a way out.
* * * *
Deborah paced back and forth in her cell, her head spinning with confusing emotions. She had been so sure she was meant to notice the boy in the courtyard. It had been such a solid, warm impression. She had known so little warmth in her life, just the fading memories of her parents, the soft voice that she guessed to be her mother’s that comforted her when life was darkest, and the joyful laughter of the unknown boy.
She had recognised something in the boy in the exercise yard that made her want to trust him. She had wondered if he would know about the dark terror that beset her and help her fight it. She had hoped he laughed in a particular full-throated roar. That was why for the first time in her life she had made an overture of friendship to a stranger, and in return she had received a slap in the face.
She blushed again at the thought of the insult and bit her lip, trying to pretend she wasn’t hurt. It was easier to bear if she let herself get angry. Who did he think he was anyway? Well, she would show him she was no coward. She dared to stand up to them, even if he didn’t. Nobody was going to shut her up in a cell until she crawled on her belly and apologized.
Mother, she called silently to the dull sky. Mother! It was almost a sob, giving in to the misery she remembered from those first weeks and months after her parents were wrenched from her life. In reply, like a soft wave of the sea she had never seen, a sensation washed over her, a warm feeling of peace and calm. She could almost feel it on her skin, like the half-remembered touch of her mother’s lips on her forehead. Mother! As the echo of the cry faded in her head she was sure she heard her name.
Deborah!
Her mother was calling her.
* * * *
High above the sleeping city the creature clung, scaly fingers spread wide across the slippery surface of the crystal bubble, gripping with curved claws, its wings beating slowly. Eyes round and dark, rimmed with a yellow iris like a bird of prey, peered unblinking through the gloomy streets with their dim lamps. Placing a bat-like ear close to the crystal, it absorbed the vibrations and pulsations of the troubled night, sifting and analysing them, listening. The darkness surrounding the House of Correction crept up the windowless walls as more running shadows of hatred flooded the empty streets.
* * * *
The Ignorants felt the black waves passing. Down below in the crumbling tenements, mothers clutched their husbands tight and reached into cribs for newborn babies; fathers comforted whimpering children and checked the locks on doors and windows. Hatred was something they understood. It followed them like a shadow, never far away, crouching in the hearts of people they didn’t even know, ready to spring. They felt the shadows growing and they were afraid.
Chapter 10
In a prison cell in the One-Gated House sat a russet-haired man, haggard and thin, but with little laughter lines webbed about his eyes and the corners of his broad, mobile mouth. In his cell, locked up with the man, were the last books in Providence, possibly the last books in the world. The man was reading one of these last books. In the ten years he had been locked in the cell, he had come to know the books almost by heart. The light that fell from the window was faint, but he scarcely needed to see the words. Suddenly, a sound wrenched him from the world of his book. A woman’s voice, faint and distant, was calling his name.
The call went through the man like an electric shock, so fast he was left dumbfounded, and the precious book dropped from his fingers. So many years he had been waiting for this call, so many years of straining for the sound of her voice that he heard it in his dreams. The man opened his eyes, his mouth. He tasted, sniffed the sound, struggled to retain the words in his ear and savour them with all his senses. But the echoes faded and died, leaving a crashing silence like a mountain falling, crushing him. His eyes misted over, and for an instant, he felt like dying. Then he thought of the word, the familiar syllables that made a name, and he let the tears fall. He would hold firm, not give in. She was calling. At last!
* * * *
For days he had been buoyed up by hope; the woman torn from him ten years before was still alive, and she still thought of him. But the call had not come again, and hope was fading into a muddled dream as the blue eyes of Raphael, the russet-haired man, dimmed with sickness. The whites yellowed, the lids hung heavy and tired, and violet smudges deepened beneath them. His hand hung limp on the bed sheet, sweat pearled on his brow, and ran in little rivulets into his hair. His ears buzzed with fever. He hardly heard the bustling sound of footsteps around his bed, the urgent whispering as he was rolled onto a stretcher. But he felt the change of air on his face, the swaying movement as he was hurried away.
As he slipped in and out of delirium he wondered if he were dying. Could this really
be the end to the dream? He gritted his teeth and tried to rouse himself, swearing at his weakness. He refused to let them kill him, not now when he had heard her calling after all the years of waiting. In his fever, he imagined them poisoning him, getting rid of the last voice of dissent against the regime. There would be no public execution for fear of enraging the Dananns. They still remembered him and his wife, and they still had their hopes of freedom.
In moments of lucidity he told himself he was too valuable to kill. He was a hostage, and he was the last scientist. They would never dare kill the only man who knew anything about the reactor. He was simply sick. It happened. Then, in a period of calm, when the walls of the secure ward in the prison infirmary stopped throbbing and spinning, he heard the call again. The voice was faint, perhaps because the caller was so distant, perhaps because she was too feeble to call louder, but he heard. Hope lit up his face again and a faint smile curled the corners of his mouth. Suddenly he understood why he was sick.
She was drawing him to her, and he was following. In the only way he could.
Chapter 11
Footsteps stopped outside the cell door. A key rattled in the lock. The door opened and a guard entered, carrying a tray on which were placed a small loaf of bread and a pitcher of water. The guard grunted at the sight of the hunched shape in the bed.
“Exercise in ten minutes. Look lively, lazy son of a whore! Wake up call was quarter of an hour ago.”
The heap of bedclothes did not move, so the guard put down the tray and aimed a kick at the region of the hump where the kidneys should be. Before the boot made contact, a hand reached out from behind the door, grabbed the water pitcher, and brought it crashing down on the back of the guard’s close-shaven head. The guard, groaning and dripping with water, crumpled to the floor.
The Dark Citadel (The Green Woman) Page 5
