by Jo Clayton
The way back to her cell seemed endless, but all things end at last. One of her warders unbarred the door and pulled it open, the second guided her inside, silent at last. Tuli gathered herself, stood very erect, swaying a little as the woman took her hands away and left her. She didn’t move when she heard the door close behind her with a tidy click. Her eyes flew to her mother’s. Annic sat unmoving on the cot, smiling a little. Sanani stood beside her, hands opening and closing, full lips pressed together, dark eyes shining. The three of them waited together.
Several minutes passed. Tuli’s hands closed into fists when she heard the scrape of a sandal outside the door. After another minute she heard soft footsteps as the two women walked away.
Tuli staggered toward her mother, fell on her knees, pressing her face against her mother’s thighs, muffling the scream of rage that tore from her. Annic smoothed her short brown hair as she shuddered and raved and sobbed. Sanani eased off the blouse. With a small clicking of her tongue she used a bit of rag and water from the drinking bucket to bathe the weals crisscrossing Tuli’s slim back, trying to draw away the heat in them and with it some of the pain before Tuli dissipated her fury enough to notice the pain once more.
After a few minutes Tuli’s shuddering eased and her sobs quieted. When she lifted her head, Annic took the rag from Sanani and wiped away the tear stains. Pride gleamed in her eyes as she smiled down at Tuli. “You were splendid, little firehead,” she murmured. “Oh I did laugh at that dirty water streaming down Yastria’s ugly face and oh my child, you must learn to stay your hands because they won’t stay theirs.”
Tuli shook her head. “I can’t, Mama.”
Sanani began bathing Tuli’s back once more. “House of Repentance! Lock-up for rowdy drunks, that’s where we are.” Tuli winced as the rag moved across the weals with a bit too much force. “Sorry. It’s just … just everything. The Scribe’s the Agli’s thing, you saw what they did to the Maiden Shrine. They showed us, Maiden curse them, like they were proud of what they did.” She dipped the rag in the bucket and wrung it dry, the water making its own music, the only music in the small grim room. “Everything gone, taken apart, thrown away like five hundred years was worth nothing. The world has turned a page and everything is changed but us, we’re left over from the old page.” Her usually gentle voice held a colder anger than anything Tuli knew. She glanced over her shoulder, surprised. “Repentance.” Sanoni looked down at the rag in her hand, threw it across the cell. “For what!”
“For being alive.” Tuli’s voice was husky. “For being everything they’re afraid of, those small-life bloodsuckers who call themselves Followers.” She sighed, surprised at her own words. She seemed to see things (though she couldn’t have put in words what she meant by things) with an extraordinary clarity. She felt drained of strength and oddly peaceful. Yawning, she sat back on her heels, her eyelids heavy.
“Well.” Annic chuckled. “This is a change.” She rumpled Tuli’s hair. “Mayhap your father and me, we should have beat you before.”
Tuli giggled, then the giggling turned shrill, then she was sobbing again, rocking back and forth on her buttocks drowning in an anguish that seemed to have no source and no bottom to it.
Annic slapped her sharply, shocking her still, then rested her hand lightly on Tuli’s head. “Hysteria I won’t have. Control yourself, Tuli.”
Tuli swallowed hard. She felt like a bird on a storm-tossed branch, thrown helplessly about by the up and down of the forces struggling in her. She screwed her eyes shut, tightened her hands into white-knuckled fists. Her heart thundered in her ears, her throat swelled, shutting off her breath (or so it seemed to her) but when she opened her eyes again, the stone was solid and cold beneath her, the world stood steady around her and for the moment at least she felt steady enough inside.
Annic stroked a finger down her cheek. “That’s my brave girl.”
Tuli yawned, smiled tiredly at her mother and got to her feet, thinking a little wistfully of her own comfortable bed, so unreachable right now. She glanced at the window. It’s dark out, she thought and was startled to see it so. Lots later than I knew. When she’d doused Alma Yastria it couldn’t have been later than midmorning. Taunting she’d taken with silence; cuffs and pinches she endured; the interminable preaching that filled all the interstices of her day she tried to ignore, though that was the worst thing until Yastria started in on her mother. Without a word she’d scrubbed and rescrubbed the same length of corridor, knowing she’d done a good enough job, if not the first time then the second, knowing they were simply trying to break her spirit.
Three full days of this she endured without a word, only a few defiant glowers she couldn’t help. But when Alma Yastria, the hard-faced head warder in this antechamber to the deeps of Zhag, Aglu Urith’s chief bootlicker, when this woman turned her nasty tongue on Annic, when she grabbed her arm and jerked her around and began pointing out to her what a miserable wife and mother she was, how she’d failed in every sense to be a proper woman, when she started calling Annic whore and mother of whores, Tuli couldn’t contain the fury rising in her. On sore knees, holding the pumice block in hands rubbed raw, she stared at the square, lined face, watched the writhing of the thin lips. Quietly she got to her feet. Quietly she bent and wrapped sore fingers about the wooden bucket’s bail. She took the two steps needed, swung the bucket with all her strength, flinging the filthy, soapy water full in Alma Yastria’s face. And felt a vast satisfaction as she saw her suddenly wordless, saw the brown-grey runnels of water coursing down her face.
They put her in the Silence—a smal black box of a room, four feet on a side, windowless and utterly empty. They left her there in the velvet blackness until they came to fetch her for her flogging, thinking, she knew, that they were punishing her. She settled herself comfortably, legs crossed, back against one wall, and relaxed into the silence, understanding in those first few moments the real horror of never being let alone, never being able to get off by herself. She closed her eyes, smiling because she wasn’t closing them on anything, and thought about the nights she’d run under the scatter of Moons, Teras by her side, rejoicing in the cool silver calm, stalking lappets or scutters with sling and stone, laying their catch on the kitchen stoop and giggling together at the pretended wonder of Auntee Cook. As the minutes or hours (she couldn’t tell and didn’t much care) slid past, she drifted into sleep, a better sleep than she’d had stretched out on that straw pallet with the chill of the stone striking up through it and into her bones.
Restless, unable to relax, hands twisting behind her, Tuli prowled about the cell. Her bare feet squeaked on the grit scattered over the stone floor. She wrinkled her nose at the slop bucket. The evil old hags, they didn’t let Mama or Sanani empty it. Her stomach growled and she realized that half the shake in her legs was due to hunger. Nothing to eat since a bowl of watery porridge for breakfast. Gingerly she eased her back flat against the wall letting the cold stone soothe the welts. “Did they let you eat, Mama?”
Annic looked up. “Eat? Yes.”
“Bread and water,” Sanani said. “You?”
“No.” Tuli snorted. “Starve me meek, starve me mild, if beating won’t do it, hunger will. Hah, lots of luck.” The window beside her was shoulder high. She swung around and closed her hands about the bars. Standing on her toes she could see a bit of barren yard, but also a swatch of sky and the face of Nijilic TheDom with the smaller Dancers close beside him. The breeze, warmer than it should be, drifted in, carrying with it the dark pungent smells of night. At that moment she wanted to be out there so badly she nearly started clawing at the stone. She closed her eyes, tightened her grip on the bars, swallowed hard. When the need subsided a little, she pushed away from the window and started prowling about again. “I don’t think I can stand this much longer, Mama.”
Neither Annic nor Sanani answered. The only sound in the cell remained the pat-squeak of Tuli’s feet as she turned and turned in growing desperation. “If Alma Y
astria says a word—” she slapped at her side—“one word, one chinjy little word, I’ll bite her nose off.”
Annic sighed. “Sit before you wear us all out.”
“I.…” She wheeled, excitement blazing up in her as as a warbling whistle sounded close outside the window, the cry of a kanka passar as it drifted on its gas sacs, wing membranes extended in a hunting glide. She ran to the window, gripped the bars again and waited. The whistle came twice more.
Annic rose, reached her hand to Sanani. “What is it, Tuli?”
Without answering, Tuli moistened her lips, curled her tongue and produced the warbling exhalation.
“Tuli?” The word was a ghost of a sound carried in on the breeze.
“Here.” She stretched higher on her toes, thrust her arm through the bars as far as she could and wiggled her fingers. “Teras?”
“Got you. Hold tight, I’ll be there quick-quick.”
“Be careful.” She pressed the side of her head against the bars and closed her eyes, straining to read the air, but she heard nothing except common night sounds.
“Tuli?”
She sank back onto her heels, turned slowly to face her mother and sister. After one look at Annic’s worried face, she rubbed hard at her eyes, then grinned at her mother, grinned like a fool and she knew it and wasn’t able to help it; she wanted to clap her hands and dance around and around the cell, wanted to let out her tension in shrieks louder than any fayar’s hunting call. With some difficulty she pressed down her jubilation and said, fairly calmly, “That was Teras. He’s going to get us out of here.”
Annic stepped closer to Sanani, laid her arm on her daughter’s shoulders, frowning a little, a thoughtful glint in her eyes. But she said nothing.
Sanani leaned against her mother, reached up and pressed her hand over Annic’s. “Coming for us, Tuli?” When Tuli nodded, she sighed. “To take us where?”
“Away from here, does it matter?” Tuli lifted a hand, swept it around in an impatient gesture as if she brushed at spider webs in front of her. “Anywhere would be better than this.”
“For you.” Sanani spoke slowly, choosing her words with care, her eyes on Tuli’s face, measuring and considering what she saw there. “It’s different for Mama and me, Tuli.” She patted her mother’s hand. “I’m not like you, younger sister. I’m good at managing a house and I’m good with people, I can guide them and keep them happy with me.” She smiled, a warm glowing look that crept inside Tuli and teased away some of the tension growing in her, that invited her to share Sanani’s amusement. “Things you can’t say, sister.” Sanani lifted one small hand into the shaft of moonlight coming through the window. “Look at my hand, Tuli. What have I done with it? I never had the wish to run wild over the night fields like you and Teras. Of course we knew, we always knew, but what hurt was there in it? I can’t ride, Tuli. Macain frighten me. I can walk well enough, but that won’t do, not with guards chasing after us. I don’t know about Mama.…” She hesitated.
“My last ride was a long, long time ago,” Annic murmured. “I don’t think I can remember how.”
Sanani nodded. “You see?” She sighed. “Think, sister, what can they do to me here? Sometimes I get impatient, but I don’t really mind the scut work they make us do. I do … do mind about Joras, not seeing him, not wedding him next passage like we planned. I mind about Cymbank and the ties being thrown off the land. I worry about Father and about my oadats, especially the ones just hatched. I hate what’s happened to the Maiden Shrine. But, Tuli.…” She sighed. “I’m not like you. I don’t get angry at the same things or in the same way. When Yastria and the other warders preach at me or scold me or dig, at me, I just don’t let myself hear them. I think about Joras or my hatchlings. I remember them pattering about like balls of grey down, scratching awkwardly in the dust with all four legs or tumbling over when they get their legs crossed, their little beady eyes bulging, their limp beaks opening and closing as if they were saying the worst words they knew with no sound at all coming out. I almost laughed in Yastria’s face this morning. She looks twice as foolish as any oadat chicklet if you watch her lips wiggle and ignore the words. I don’t care what they make me do, Tuli, they’ll never touch anything that’s really me.”
Annic chuckled. “So that’s what happened with my scolds.”
Sanani leaned her head against her mother’s shoulder. “It was such good training.”
Tuli stared, winced at a sudden stab of jealousy. Then she remembered Nilis’s words and opened her eyes wide, seeing with a sickening shift of viewpoint a little of what Nilis had known all her life. With a shudder of revulsion she rejected the insight. No, never, no excuse for that betrayal. She pressed her hands flat against the stone, the cold hardness against her palms a reassuring solidity in a world turned strange. “Then you won’t come?”
“No. Mama?”
Annic shook her head. “Better not. For now, at least. Tuli, I want you and Teras to go after your father. Tell him what has happened to us all. That’s more important right now than getting us away.”
Tuli, happier now that she had something definite ahead of her, ran to the door, laid her ear against the planks. When she heard a soft rubbing outside, she took three quick steps backward, her breath coming rapidly.
The door swung open. Teral stepped inside. “Come on,” he whispered. “Hars bust the lock on a back door when he come for me.” There was urgency and excitement in his whisper. “The others shoved in with me, they already left. Any time now some snoop will see the cell’s empty and yell for the Agli.” His eyes flickered rapidly from one face to the other.
“They’re not coming, Teras.” Tuli took a step toward him, then threw herself at Annic. Her mother’s arms closed tight around her, her mother’s lips touched her forehead, then Annic turned her about and urged her toward the door. “Maiden bless you both,” she murmured.
Tuli put her hand on her brother’s shoulder, twisted her head around. “We’ll find him, Mama.”
“I know. Hurry now.” She nodded at Sanani. “We’ll be waiting. Be careful.”
“We will.”
Teras swung the heavy door shut, shutting away the image of Annic and Sanani standing with their shoulders touching, their hands clasped. Tuli helped him shove the heavy bar quietly back through the loops then she ran down the corridor beside him, her weariness and pain lost in rising excitement.
Teras pushed at the small door. It wouldn’t stay closed. “Hars did too good a job on this.”
“Hold on a minute. I got an idea.” Tuli darted away toward the river.
While he waited he ran his fingers over the broken lock and the bruised and splintered wood above the lock where Hars had jammed in the prybar, glanced up along the solid back of Center wondering if there was anyone behind the shuttered windows. Then Tuli was back, a stalk of bastocane in her hand. He frowned at the cane then rubbed his thumb across the crack between door and jamb. “That’s not thick enough.”
“Fold it till it fits,” she said with sharp impatience and gave him the cane.
While Tuli held the door shut by leaning the end of her shoulder against it, he folded and refolded the cane. It wasn’t wholly dried out so it was flexible enough to bend without shattering, though the hollow stem broke open in the folding, exposing knife edges he carefully avoided. When he was satisfied with the bulk of it he shoved the roughly wedge-shaped mass between door and jamb, wiggled it about until he forced it in as far as it would go. Cautiously he took his hands away. When it stayed in place he started walking to the river, Tuli beside him.
“Where’s Hars?” She followed him onto the river path. “You said he was waiting.”
“Other side the river. By the bridge.” Teras extended his stride until he was loping along the path through flickering leaf shadow and the undisturbed music of night life, sounds unchanged when everything else in his life had changed. He was suddenly and unexpectedly and deeply contented, as if he’d snatched back a moment from th
e blighting touch of the Followers.
Tuli sucked in a breath of the warm damp air, the horrid cramped feeling of the past three days melting out of her. She felt like laughing and she trembled with exhaustion. Despite the urgency in her head, her body had about reached its limit. She slowed to a walk so suddenly Teras ran on several strides before he noticed. He turned and came back to her.
“We’ve got to get on, Tuli,” he said. He passed a hand across his eyes, leaned closer so he could see her more clearly. “You look awful. What’s wrong?”
She grimaced. “No food all day and a ten-stroke flogging.”
Teras jerked back. He stared at Center’s watchtower looming over the tree tops, his face hard, a glassy look to his eyes that scared Tuli a little.
“No big thing,” she said quickly. “It’s just I’m tired and hungry.” She giggled. “Teras, you should’ve seen. I pitched mop water all over Alma Yastria. What they did was a nothing against the look on her face.”
Teras relaxed. A short while later, he grinned. “Might’ve known.”
Tuli started walking, pulling away irritably when Teras tried to take her arm. “I’m sick of people hanging onto me,” she said. “Even you, twin.” She walked in silence beside a silent Teras until she saw the old granary lit by red torchlight. “Another tilun?”
