by Geoff Rodkey
As they dragged me deeper into the square, the individual voices kept falling away as we passed, like people were stopping their conversations to stare at me.
By the time they quit dragging me forward, it was nearly silent. The warrior who’d been pulling me by the head let go with no warning, and I fell to the pavement.
There was a little ripple of laughter from the crowd.
I looked up. I was in front of the temple steps. Three men were staring down at me.
The first was the old grasshopper with the headdress.
The second was the big ox of a chief.
The third was Roger Pembroke.
PEMBROKE
His clothes were dusty and grime-streaked from traveling, and there was a week’s growth of beard on his sun-browned face. I’d never seen him like that—to me, he’d always been a creature of the frilly white shirts and velvet cushions of Sunrise Island.
But he seemed to thrive on it. As he stared down at me with his ice-blue eyes, he’d never looked more powerful or alive.
“Where is Millicent?”
“Gone away,” I said.
“Gone away where?”
“Leave ’im be!” Dad’s voice rang out. Getting to my feet, I turned toward the sound of it, and for the first time I got a look at the crowd.
It was much smaller than I’d expected. There were just twenty or so Rovian soldiers, and maybe twice that number of horses, all weighed down with provisions. There were about a hundred Moku, most of them armed warriors.
Several of the Moku surrounded Dad, their rifles trained on him as they waited for orders.
“Oh, my…” I heard Pembroke say. I turned back to him. He was looking at Dad with wide eyes and a hint of a smile. “This is rather curious.”
Pembroke looked at the Moku chief. “Ma le ba?”
The chief gave him a long answer. Pembroke’s Moku must have been pretty good, because he seemed to follow along with no trouble. Occasionally, he interrupted with a question.
Their tone and body language were casual, like they were speaking to each other as friends, or at least equals.
That struck me as a very bad thing.
Dad was trying to push his way toward us, but the Moku guarding him were having none of it.
Still explaining things to Pembroke, the Moku chief gestured to the top of the temple, where Venus lived.
“Aaaaah…,” said Pembroke, nodding. He started to say something to the chief, but I broke in.
“They think my sister’s an Okalu goddess,” I told him. “And they’re going to sacrifice her to their god. Please tell them—”
Something struck me hard in the back of the knees, knocking me to the ground.
As I scrambled to get back on my feet, I heard Pembroke say something in a sharp tone, like he was telling the Moku who’d just hit me to cut it out.
“Wot’s this, boy?”
Dad was staring at me, confused.
“They’re going to sacrifice you both!” I yelled to him. “At the next thunderstorm!”
I turned back to Pembroke. “Please don’t let them do it.”
Pembroke’s eyebrows rose along with his shoulders, like he was helpless to do anything. “I’m afraid I’m just a guest here. It wouldn’t be my place to question their religious practices.”
“Look here!” Dad bellowed. “I got no quarrel with yer lot. This boy don’t, neither. Leave us be, we’ll make our way out with no harm done.”
Pembroke pursed his lips and nodded thoughtfully, like he was considering the offer.
“The trouble of that is…” He gestured toward me. “This one’s got something I need.”
“Ye don’t give us no trouble, I’ll see he gives it to ye,” Dad said.
“I do appreciate the offer,” said Pembroke in a mild voice. “But I have to admit, I’m a trifle confused as to why you’re dictating terms to me.”
Dad drew himself up straight, squaring his wide chest. He raised a meaty hand to point to the temple, just like the Moku chief had done.
“Me daughter’s up in that temple. Wotever she is to this lot, fact is they do as she says. I say the word, she’ll call this whole pack o’ savages down on yer heads.”
“Will she, now?” Pembroke was smiling so wide I could see his teeth.
“Dead certain,” said Dad. He started toward me. “Come on, boy. We’re leavin’.”
The Moku warriors closed ranks, blocking Dad’s way. He shoved the nearest one aside, grabbing the man’s rifle barrel as he did. They began to struggle over it while Moku converged on Dad from all sides.
As I watched, terrified, I could hear Pembroke and the Moku chief behind me, exchanging words in low voices.
The warriors had just about overpowered Dad when the chief barked a command, and they all let go in an instant. Then they stepped back, leaving Dad alone with a rifle in his hand and a look of surprise on his face.
The chief gave another order.
“Move back. Give him room,” Pembroke ordered his own men.
The Moku and Rovian soldiers standing between us melted away, leaving a clear path between me and Dad.
“Terribly sorry,” Pembroke said to Dad. “Let my emotions get the best of me. It’s a perfectly reasonable offer. So why don’t you collect your daughter, and as soon as your boy gives me what I need, you can all be on your way?”
Dad looked wary. I had my doubts, too.
Pembroke called out to a Rovian soldier in the group. “Bring me a pen and ink. And some parchment. Should be on my packhorse.” Then he turned back to Dad.
“Go ahead and fetch your daughter. We’ll still be here. The boy’s got a bit of writing to do.”
Pembroke said something to the chief and the grasshopper, and all three of them stepped aside, moving away from the temple steps.
Dad approached me, a bewildered look on his face and the Moku’s rifle in his hand.
“If I give him the map,” I whispered, “he’ll find the Fist of Ka. We can’t let him have it.”
“Don’t be a fool, boy. Give him wot he wants. Rest of it ain’t yer concern.”
Pembroke was still speaking in Moku with the chief and the grasshopper. Dad called to him.
“Me daughter’s gonna need some convincin’. She ain’t got a mind to leave.”
“Don’t worry about that,” said Pembroke. He nodded to the chief. “Kala-Ma here will follow you up. He’ll make things perfectly clear.”
“I thought you weren’t going to question their religion,” I said.
Pembroke gave me an easy smile. “It’s the prerogative of an educated man to change his mind.” He waved Dad toward the steps. “Please, Mr. Masterson—go and fetch your daughter. Before I change my mind again.”
They were all watching Dad, waiting for him to start up the steps.
“I don’t like this,” I whispered to him.
“Be awright,” he said. “Back in a few.”
He gave me a pat on the shoulder and walked to the tall steps. He climbed the first three. Then he paused and looked back at the chief.
“Ye comin’?”
Pembroke said something to the chief. In response, the chief turned to his warriors and said, “Krav.”
The warriors raised their rifles as one and shot Dad from three sides at once.
DARKNESS
Dad’s body pitched forward. I screamed and ran to him, leaping over the lower steps.
He’d landed on his side on the third step. Blood was running fast out of the ragged holes in his back. I pulled him toward me and got one long, awful look at his glassy eyes before his body tumbled from the step and knocked me off my feet.
I landed hard, hitting my head on the bottom step.
I heard Pembroke curse.
“Mind his head! It’s valuable!”
A pair of Rovian soldiers stood me up by the arms.
Pembroke stepped over to me. He lowered his chin and stared into my eyes.
“Once again—where is Milli
cent?”
I spat in his face.
His eyes flashed with anger. He took a few steps back, out of spitting range. Wiped his face with his hand. Wiped the hand on his pant leg.
“You’ll find that sort of behavior is unhelpful to your interests.”
The soldier he’d sent off for parchment and ink appeared at his side, holding a long wooden box and a ribbon-bound leather sheaf. Pembroke eyed them for a moment, then shook his head.
“Put them back. Bind him up for travel.” He jerked his head toward me. The soldier ran off again toward the packhorses.
Pembroke walked back over to the Moku leaders and restarted their conversation. As I watched them, out of the corner of my eye I could see Dad’s body lying crumpled on the steps. No one cared.
I tried to move to him, but the Rovian soldiers held my arms tight.
I was turning my head away so I wouldn’t have to look when I heard Millicent’s voice, choked with tears.
“Daddy!”
She was running toward him from the avenue, Moku warriors on all sides of her. Pembroke called out an order in Moku. The chief repeated it, and the warriors dropped back to give her space.
Pembroke began to stride forward to meet her, and as the space between them closed, Millicent began to beg through her sobs.
“Daddy, if you ever cared for me at all—if I ever meant anything to you as a daughter—”
He reached her just then, and struck her across the mouth so hard she fell.
“No daughter of mine would disrespect me this way,” he said. “You’re going back to your mother. And if I ever see you again, you’ll regret it.”
He turned on his heel and left Millicent on the ground for the soldiers to pick up. I called out to her, but just then the soldier with the parchment came back and shoved a gag into my mouth.
Then the blindfold went on, and my world turned black.
THE BLINDFOLD STAYED ON for two days, all through the Rovians’ quick departure from Mata Kalun and a hard ride broken by only a few hours’ sleep. Late on the second day, we started up a hill thick with trees, and even with my hands tied to the saddle horn, stray branches kept knocking me off my horse. The soldiers must have gotten sick of having to stop and pick me up, and they finally took the blindfold off so I could duck the branches.
Until then, I didn’t know where we were going or who was with us. I didn’t know anything, except that Dad was dead and Millicent was caught and my sister was doomed and my friends were in a bad way and it was all my fault. And I was too sick and numb and tired and thirsty and hungry to think about anything. There was no point to it anyway, because all my thinking had done was wreck things for everybody, myself included.
When the blindfold came off and we topped the hill, I realized we were on the ridge that separated the Valley of the Flut from the lowlands where we’d first escaped the slave ship. At the bottom of the hill, we stopped to camp for the night—which struck me as odd, because we were close enough to make the ship with just another hour in the saddle, and I figured that was where we were headed.
When we camped, I discovered there were only a dozen soldiers in the group, about half the total I’d seen in the city. Pembroke was with us, but Millicent wasn’t. That might have been worth puzzling over, if I’d been able to see any point to puzzling over anything.
They kept me apart from the group, and I couldn’t hear any of their conversations. One of the soldiers took my gag off and gave me hard biscuits and water, which I ate on the ground with my hands tied in front of me. Then I slept on my side, with my forearms over my cheek to try to keep the mosquitoes off my face.
We set off again at daybreak. I’d expected us to head into the swamps, where the slave ship had been anchored, but instead we turned inland.
After a few hours, I realized we were going to Pella Nonna.
That didn’t make a whole lot of sense. According to what Angus Bon had said at the dinner party in the palace—looking back, it was hard to believe it hadn’t been more than a week or two ago—Cartage had passed the Banishment Laws specifically to keep Pembroke and his slavers out of the New Lands, so I knew they wouldn’t be welcome in the city.
But knowing we might be headed there set a faint light of hope in the darkness of my head. People knew me in Pella—and they liked me, even if it was only because I was Guts’s friend. I might have a chance there.
But a chance of what? Staying alive? Stopping Pembroke? What did I even want anymore?
I wanted Dad to be alive. And I wanted to be with Millicent. But one of those things was impossible now, and the other nearly so.
Pretty quickly, I had to force myself to stop thinking again. It hurt too much.
They’d left my blindfold off, and by now, the scenery was unfamiliar—we were going over ground that I’d last covered while blindfolded and trussed across the Moku slaver’s horse.
It was pretty land, I suppose. Not that it mattered.
The sun set. We kept going. We were on a road now—not a paved one, like the road through the Valley of Ka, but a wagon-rutted dirt road, winding through low hills.
Then we came out onto some cropland, and after a few miles, I saw city walls up ahead in the moonlight. I thought it was Pella, but I’d never seen it from that side, so I wasn’t sure until I got a glimpse of the palace roof peeking out over the wall.
One of the soldiers called out to the guards on the wall. To my surprise, they answered in Rovian.
The gates slowly swung open.
The city guards staring down at us from the wall wore Rovian uniforms.
Pella Nonna didn’t belong to the Cartagers anymore.
The courtyard was deserted, and the horses’ hooves echoed against the walls as we crossed it. When we neared the far end, Pembroke and two of the soldiers split off and headed for the palace. The rest of us took the main street toward the port.
There was a burnt smell in the air, and several of the buildings along the main street had been reduced to nothing but stone chimneys rising out of a pile of ash. The streets were empty, and if it hadn’t been for the occasional candle in a window, I would’ve guessed all the people had fled. When we lived there, they came and went even in the middle of the night, talking and laughing and singing. Now it was a ghost town.
We reached the port and turned left, toward the piers where the giant Cartager men-of-war had been docked. At first, I thought they’d been put to sea. But as we got closer, I saw the tops of three masts rising from the water like the fingers of a skeleton, and I realized at least one of the warships had been sunk where she berthed.
We turned right at the north end of the port, onto the long finger of land that led out to the fortress. It had taken a lot of damage as well, with a section of the wall nearest the city partially caved in.
There was another exchange in Rovian between the soldiers and the fortress guards before the gates opened to let us in. In the courtyard, they took me down from the horse, cut free the strips of cloth tying my hands, and replaced them with heavy iron manacles.
Then they led me through a door and down two flights of stairs to a long corridor, lit only by a torch one of the soldiers held. We passed a series of iron doors before we came to an open one.
They pushed me into a dank, stinking room not much bigger than a closet, with rough stone walls and an earthen floor.
Then they shut the door, and my world turned black again.
THE MAP
I don’t know how long they kept me in that cell. The only way I had of marking time was by how often they fed me. They brought six meals in all, so I might have been there six days, or only three, or maybe even just two if they were really being generous.
They gave me beef and milk as well as bread and water, and early on, they brought in a pallet for me to sleep on. Whatever they had planned for me—I was sure it involved writing out the map, but beyond that, I had no idea—they didn’t want me too hungry or tired to be useful to them.
I tried not
to think about what was going to happen next. Seeing Pella Nonna in Rovian hands—and watching Roger Pembroke trot off toward the palace like he owned the place—had snuffed out the last of my hope that things might turn out okay. So I tried to spend the time living in my memories—of the better times with Millicent, and with Guts when we were first in Pella, and even the odd moment with Dad growing up on Deadweather.
Those two days with Dad at the end put a whole different color on my memories of him. Looking back, I found moments—like when he wrote “MUST ONE BOOKS” (he wasn’t much of a speller) on the ad he placed for a tutor, because he knew how much I loved to read—where it was clear he’d been looking out for me in a way that I was pretty sure proved he loved me.
I wished I’d told him I loved him, the way I had with Millicent. But the truth was, I didn’t realize it myself until he was gone for good.
And he’d never been much for that kind of thing, so maybe it was best left unsaid.
There were bad memories, too. I tried to keep them out of my head, but there was one in particular that wouldn’t let go of me—or maybe it was the other way around.
It was the old man with the frightened eyes and trembling lips. The one I couldn’t kill. I’d done a lot of stupid things to wind up in that cell, but none of them tore me up inside like that one did.
If I’d just had the guts to kill him, it would have all been different. I’d probably be with Millicent and my friends in the wilderness somewhere. Dad might even have joined us. Even if he hadn’t, he’d still be alive.
I could’ve done it. I had the stone in my hand and all the time in the world to bring it down on the old man’s head. Why didn’t I?
Was it mercy? Was I a good person for not having done it? Was it better to have spared the old man’s life, even though it cost Dad his, and was about to cost me mine?
Or was I just a coward?
There’s a line about courage in my favorite book, Basingstroke. The main character, James, gets impressed into the army, and they’re marching off to battle, and the lieutenant tells his men, “Show me courage!”
