by E. C. Blake
“No,” said the girl, tugging on her trousers. Both knees were torn out, the cloth around the holes stained rust-red, and scabs covered the skin the holes exposed.
“No?” Mara looked down at herself in dismay. “Then how often?”
“Once a week,” the girl said, and limped away.
Mara followed the other women to the mess hall, the cold wrapping itself around her wet hair like a vise as she left the baths. Like everything else in the camp, it seemed, eating was segregated by gender: a wall separated the men and boys from the women and girls. The only time the two sexes met was in the mines . . .
...or wherever the trustees and Wardens live, Mara thought uneasily.
Without Katia, she had no one to talk to. She sat by herself at the end of one of the long tables and devoured the too-small portions of coarse bread and black bean soup she’d been given. The soup had bits of fat floating in it. She hated the texture and the slightly rancid taste, but she ate it anyway. Her body demanded it. She remembered what Hayka had told her. “Once a week, they give us meat.” It seemed this, unfortunately, was not meat night.
For drink, there was tepid water. And then the gong sounded again, and it was back to the longhouse.
There was little conversation before lights out, and what there was seemed to be private, between pairs of women, some of whom went on to share bunks once the Watcher had come and gone. Katia did not come back that night. Three other girls Mara had seen the previous night weren’t there, either. Four she hadn’t seen before, all barely older than she, were.
Mara lay beneath her thin blanket, cold, lonely, homesick, hurting, more miserable and frightened than she had ever been in her life: but exhausted by her day in the mine, her body plunged her into unconsciousness before she could even summon the energy to cry herself to sleep.
In sleep, however, she could no longer push away the images of Grute. He came toward her again, naked; again she seized magic and flung it against his head; again his head burst like an overripe fruit . . . again, and again, and again, and each time she screamed and screamed and . . .
She woke to a stinging slap across her face and jerked upright, gasping. In the dim light of the fire pit’s dying coals she could just make out the face of the oldest woman in the longhouse; Mara didn’t know her name. “Stop it!” she hissed. “Stop screaming or I’ll suffocate you where you lie!”
Mara gasped. “It was—I was . . .”
“A nightmare. I don’t care. Keep it to yourself. Sleep is precious. You hear me? Precious as food and water. You steal our sleep, and we won’t stand for it. None of us!”
How can I keep myself from screaming in my sleep? Mara thought, but, terrified, all she could do was nod.
The woman padded away to her bed. Other beds creaked as their owners rolled over. She heard a few muttered curses.
Burying her face in her pillow, she waited for sleep to come again, but the image of Grute swam up before her once more, and the horror of that memory and her fear of what would happen if she cried out again kept her from sleep for a very long time.
And then, of course, the gong sounded, and she jerked awake to the awful realization that ahead lay another day in the mines, and beyond that another, and beyond that another.
It was all she could do to force herself upright, fighting not just fear but the pain and stiffness of her battered body and aching hands. It was almost more than she could do to stand in line for the latrine, to slop down porridge for breakfast and tuck black bread and hard white cheese into a napkin for lunch, to join the long line of the day shift waiting its turn on the man-engine under the hard, watchful eyes of the trustees, while the weary night shift shuffled away toward the baths and mess hall and their own day-long rest.
Katia had not been at breakfast, but she was waiting at the top of the stairs and fell into line beside Mara. She looked even paler and somehow thinner than the day before, almost transparent, as though a puff of wind would blow her away. She didn’t meet Mara’s eyes, and held her upper arms with her hands, hugging herself; and while it was certainly chilly in the early morning air, with their breaths coming in white clouds, Mara did not think the chill she sought to ward off had anything to do with the temperature.
She didn’t know what to say to Katia about what must have happened to her the night before, didn’t know how to bring up the subject, and strongly suspected Katia would just as soon she didn’t. So all she said was, “Hello.” She got a tiny, barely visible nod back, and then they both sank back into their own weary misery as the line inched forward.
The terror of the descent on the man-engine and the necessity to carefully judge each step from platform to platform sharpened Mara’s senses temporarily, but as she pushed her basket and candle lantern through the tunnels to the rock face, she could feel that false energy slipping away. With both of them suffering from lack of sleep and preoccupied with their own dark thoughts, the accident was perhaps inevitable. The only wonder, Mara thought later, was that it had not happened sooner; because in fact they grimly pounded away at the rock for seven hours without incident.
Truth be told, though, Mara was hardly conscious during that last hour, swinging the steel bar almost without thinking, her body an undifferentiated mass of pain, her brain fogged, her memories locked on her murder of Grute, her sleep-deprived mind for some reason dwelling on the incongruous juxtaposition of the beautiful, shimmering, multicolored liquid light that was her sense of magic with the red and ruined horror of the headless, naked Grute. It was that image that filled her mind, not the faint outlines of the chamber in which they labored, when a lucky blow with her iron bar broke off a large chunk of rock that fell toward Katia, and she reached for it without noticing what Katia was doing—
—with the result that Katia’s iron bar slammed into her forearm with all the force she’d intended to use to slam it against the rock.
Mara heard a sound like a green branch snapping, and then came the pain, an agonizing wave of it up her shoulder and into her body. She jerked her arm back with a strangled scream. Now, too late, she was fully present in the chamber, all thoughts of Grute fleeing as she stared in horror at her suddenly misshapen arm, her wrist bending where it shouldn’t bend, her hand useless, white bone poking through skin, blood pouring out around it. Katia gasped. “Mara, I’m sorry—we’ve got to get you back to the surface—”
“How?” Mara wanted to ask. She wanted to point out that she couldn’t crawl. She wanted to scream and sob. But what she really did, as shock drained the blood from her head and filled her ears with roaring, was pass out.
FIFTEEN
An Unexpected Visitor
GRUTE STOOD BEFORE HER, naked. Again she reached out with magic-covered hands, again his head burst apart at her touch. But this time he didn’t fall, he kept coming, reaching for her, and then she heard laughter off to one side and looked down to see that his head hadn’t exploded at all, it had simply fallen off, and it was laughing at her, maniacal, crazed laughter pouring from parted lips beneath staring, blood-filled eyes . . .
Mara tried to scream, but couldn’t, and the effort to make a noise brought her suddenly awake, gasping and choking.
She stared up at a strange ceiling of whitewashed planks. She had no idea where she was. She lay on a narrow bed, but that ceiling belonged neither to her room in her father’s house, nor the longhouse.
The flickering yellow light meant candles, and when she turned her head, that was all she could see at first: a candle, its light blotting out everything beyond it. For a long time she just stared at its flame, mesmerized. But gradually, like a bowl gathering raindrops, she began to fill with more sense of herself, and finally the bowl filled to the point where she jerked, blinked hard, and sat up to look around . . .
...or tried to. Her left arm was bound tight across her belly. She used her right to lift the gray blanket that covered her and saw that she wo
re a white—and blessedly clean—shift. And beneath it . . . she explored, and her cheeks flamed. Was that a diaper?
Her scalp felt odd, too, and she raised a hand to discover a bandage wrapped around her head.
She levered herself up with her good arm. Her head swam for a moment, but then steadied. She looked around.
She lay in a bed, one of thirty arranged, fifteen to a side, down the length of a long room: another longhouse, although quite unlike the one in which she’d spent two nights. For one thing, it was a lot warmer, with proper iron stoves at both ends and in the middle.
Most of the beds were occupied. Across from her lay a woman, silent and pale, eyes closed, face slack, black hair spread across her pillow. From the bed to Mara’s left came a constant, low moaning, rhythmic and hopeless, and Mara, looking that way, saw a young woman curled on her side like a baby, rocking. Not all the patients were women: a teenage boy sat up bare-chested two beds down, bandages wrapped around his torso; he glanced her way, face expressionless, then looked away again, staring down at his hands, folded in his lap. She saw a few other boys and men farther down.
A man in a pale-blue Mask moved slowly down the length of the longhouse, stopping at each bed. Beside him walked a white-Masked woman, pushing a wheeled table with an opening in the top into which was set a bowl of black stone. Mara saw a multicolored shimmer of light around its rim.
Magic! she thought. That man must be a Healer. And this must be the camp hospital.
She was almost surprised there was a hospital. But then, she’d been surprised there were baths, too. They don’t want to kill us, she thought. They want to use us. In more ways than one. And the best way to keep us useful is to keep us reasonably healthy . . .
...for a few years, anyway.
The Healer had reached the moaning woman. He looked at her, shook his head, and then came over to Mara, ignoring the motionless woman in the bed across from her. Neither his eyes nor what she could see of his mouth betrayed any expression. “Good,” he said. “You’re awake. My name is Athol. And you are . . . ?” He glanced at his assistant.
“Mara,” the woman supplied.
“Mara,” Athol said. He looked back at Mara. “Are you in pain?”
Mara considered that. “No,” she said in some surprise. “But I don’t understand why not. My arm is broken, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Athol said. “You also have multiple bruises and scrapes, and you suffered an injury to your head that required five stitches.”
“But I don’t feel anything!”
“I took away the pain,” Athol said. “I also set your arm, and bandaged you, and stitched your head. Finally, I placed you in an induced sleep. You have been unconscious for three days.”
“But . . .” Mara couldn’t believe it. “I’m not hungry or thirsty.”
“I brought you to semiconsciousness on several occasions to give you water,” Athol said. “As for hunger, I have simply masked that sensation. We’ll provide you with a light meal shortly, and your appetite will return to normal soon thereafter.”
Mara didn’t ask about the diaper; she didn’t want to know. “But if you did all that, why do I still have bandages? Why didn’t you Heal me completely?”
“I am not a particularly good Healer,” Athol said. “Or I would not be here.” He made no effort to hide the bitterness in his voice. His eyes glittered behind his Mask as he studied her. “You also scream in your sleep.”
“I have . . . bad dreams,” Mara said.
“To stop bad dreams is beyond my skill.” And with that he turned away, walking back down the length of the hospital to the door at its far end, the assistant trundling the cart with its basin of magic in his wake. They disappeared into a back room, leaving Mara with a thousand unanswered questions, starting with: How had she ended up with a concussion and five stitches in her scalp? She remembered the iron bar slamming into her arm, the horrible sound as the bone snapped, but the bar hadn’t touched her head. Unless, when she’d fainted, she’d struck it on a rock?
She learned the truth a little later when Katia arrived at her bedside, the skin of her face white and somehow stretched, dark circles under her eyes. “You look worse than I feel,” Mara said, hoping to evoke a smile.
But Katia’s expression didn’t lighten. “It’s my fault,” she said in a low voice. “I broke your arm.”
“No,” Mara said. “It was my fault. I was an idiot for reaching across like that.” She touched her bandaged scalp. “But I don’t remember anything after that. Did I hit my head when I fainted?”
“Not exactly,” Katia said. “I couldn’t drag you out by myself—I had to go back to the shaft. The shift supervisor sent the bucket boy back with me. He banged your head on a rock pulling you out.” She grimaced. “Blood everywhere. I thought he’d killed you.”
Mara winced. “I’m glad I missed it.” Then she frowned. “But how did you get me up the shaft? The man-engine can’t—”
“You went up in the ore bucket,” Katia said. “That’s how casualties are always taken up. Or the pieces of them,” she added under her breath.
Shimma. “I guess you’ll need another partner for a while.”
Katia shook her head. “I’m out of the mine.”
Mara stared at her, wondering why she’d said it in that tone of voice, as though it were a death sentence. “That’s good, isn’t it?”
“It means . . .” Katia stopped, and looked down. Her hands convulsively twisted the gray blanket on Mara’s bed. “It means I’m now a barracks maid,” she continued in a low voice. “I’ve spent three nights in there already, since the accident.”
“Oh, Katia . . .” Mara whispered. “Punishment?”
Katia nodded, eyes still on the blanket. “For carelessness. They blame me for Shimma. And now for you.”
“How long . . . ?”
Katia’s head shot up and Mara drew back involuntarily at the fury in her face. “How long will I be the Watchers’ nightly plaything?” she snarled. “Not long. I’ll—” She bit off the remaining words, took a deep breath. “Never mind me. At least you’re in luck. A real Healer arrived today from Tamita. She’ll fix you up and you’ll be back in the mines in no time.”
“That’s luck?” Mara said, trying to make a joke of it, though she felt sick at the thought.
Katia’s eyes narrowed. “It’s the mines or the barracks.”
“What if I told them it was my fault, what happened?”
“Shimma wasn’t your fault.” Katia somehow dredged up a small smile, or, at least, the phantom of a ghost of a wisp of a smile. “Don’t worry, Mara. I told you. I won’t be in the barracks long.” She reached out and squeezed Mara’s good hand. “I’m glad we met. Think kindly of me.” And with that she turned and walked away.
“Katia?” Mara called after her.
Katia didn’t look back.
Mara worried about the other girl’s strange statement for the rest of the afternoon, though it didn’t stop her from devouring, awkwardly and one-handed, the much-better food she received (mashed redroots again, at last, plus a plump chicken breast and a bowl of dried apricots). After that, Athol allowed her to get up and use the latrine (much cleaner and slightly less smelly than the one by her bed in the longhouse) and remove the embarrassing diaper. Back in bed, she continued to worry . . . right up until the Healer arrived.
She had just dozed off when she jerked awake to a hubbub of voices through the door to her right. Then the door swung open, letting in cold air from the entry room beyond, and three people entered: Athol, a Watcher—and a short, round woman wearing a bright-blue Mask decorated with green gems. Mara’s heart leaped.
Ethelda!
The Palace Healer ignored her. Athol’s assistant had just emerged from the door at room’s far end with the trolley bearing the basin of magic. Its wheels rattled over the floor’s uneven
planking as she pushed it toward Ethelda, whose attention was on the unmoving woman in the bed across the aisle. “Condition?”
Athol shook his head. “She breathes. But that is all she does. She has been unconscious for six days. I have not been told how she came to be in this state, but her neck is bruised. I suspect strangulation and a destructive interruption in the flow of blood to the brain.”
“Strangulation?” Ethelda leaned forward to examine the woman’s neck. When she straightened, her own voice sounded strangled. “Those are handprints. Someone choked her. Has someone been punished for this?”
“No,” Athol said. He sounded uncomfortable. “She was not . . . she has not been in the mines. She has been in the barracks. For . . . several weeks.”
Ethelda stood stock-still for a moment. The Watcher who waited nearby was likewise as still as a statue, but even without being able to see his eyes, Mara could tell all his attention was focused on the Healer to see how she would react.
In the end, she simply . . . didn’t. When she spoke, her voice remained calm, but it had an edge to it, a hint of strain, revealed by the pitch, just a little bit higher than it had been before. “Does she take fluids?”
“No,” Athol said. “She will not swallow.”
Ethelda nodded. “What is her name?”
“Nola,” said Athol. “Her name is Nola.”
Ethelda leaned forward and peeled open the unconscious woman’s eyes. “Nola!” she shouted. “Nola!” She lifted the woman’s arm and pinched it, hard. The woman didn’t stir. Ethelda studied her for a moment, then turned to the basin of magic. She dipped one finger into the bowl, drawing it out sheathed in blue light, then turned and touched Nola’s forehead. The light slid from her finger into the woman’s skull but nothing changed. No expression flickered across Nola’s slack face. Ethelda took a deep breath, and straightened. “This woman is dead.”
