Red Sister Page 3

  “You said you’d been friends with the warden since before Partnis Reeve was a baby!”

  “So you were listening.” The abbess steered them up a narrow alley, so steep it required a step or two every few yards and the roofs of the tall houses stepped one above the next to keep pace. The smell of leather hit Nona, reminding her of the coloured balls Amondo had handed her, as strong a smell as the stink of cows, rich, deep, polished, brown.

  “You said you and the warden were friends,” Nona said again.

  “I’ve met him a few times,” the abbess replied. “Nasty little man, bald and squinty, uglier on the inside.” She stepped around the wares of a cobbler, laid out before his steps. Every other house seemed to be a cobbler’s shop, with an old man or young woman in the window, hammering away at boot heels or trimming leather.

  “You lied!”

  “To call something a lie, child, is an unhelpful characterization.” The abbess drew a deep breath, labouring up the slope. “Words are steps along a path: the important thing is to get where you’re going. You can play by all manner of rules, step-on-a-crack-break-your-back, but you’ll get there quicker if you pick the most certain route.”

  “But—”

  “Lies are complex things. Best not to bother thinking in terms of truth or lie—let necessity be your mother . . . and invent!”

  “You’re not a nun!” Nona wrenched her hand away. “And you let them kill Saida!”

  “If I had saved her then I would have had to leave you.”

  Shouts rang out somewhere down the steepness of the alley.

  “Quickly.” The alley gave onto a broad thoroughfare by a narrow flight of stairs and the abbess turned onto it, not pausing now to glance back.

  “They know where we’re going.” Nona had done a lot of running and hiding in her short life and she knew enough to know it didn’t matter how fast you went if they knew where to find you.

  “They know when we get there they can’t follow.”

  People choked the street but the abbess wove a path through the thickest of the crowd. Nona followed, so close that the tails of the nun’s habit flapped about her. Crowds unnerved her. There hadn’t been as many people in her village, nor in her whole world, as pressed into this street. And the variety of them, some adults hardly taller than she was, others overtopping even the hulking giants who fought at the Caltess. Some dark, their skin black as ink, some white-blond and so pale as to show each vein in blue, and every shade between.

  Through the alleys rising to join the street Nona saw a sea of roofs, tiled in terracotta, stubbled with innumerable chimneys, smoke drifting. She had never imagined a place so big, so many people crammed so tight. Since the night the child-taker had driven Nona and his other purchases into Verity she had seen almost nothing of the city, just the combat hall, the compound where the fighters lived, and the training yards. The cart-ride to Harriton had offered only glimpses as she and Saida sat hugging each other.

  “Through here.” The abbess set a hand on Nona’s shoulder and aimed her at the steps to what looked like a pillared temple, great doors standing open, each studded with a hundred circles of bronze.

  The steps were high enough to put an ache in Nona’s legs. At the top a cavernous hall waited, lit by high windows, every square foot of it packed with stalls and people hunting bargains. The sound of their trading, echoing and multiplied by the marble vaults above, spoke through the entrance with one many-tongued voice. For several minutes it was nothing but noise and colour and pushing. Nona concentrated on filling the void left as the abbess stepped forward before some other body could occupy the space. At last they stumbled into a cool corridor and out into a quieter street behind the market hall.

  “Who are you?” Nona asked. She had followed the woman far enough. “And,” realizing something, “where’s your stick?”

  The abbess turned, one hand knotted in the string of purple beads around her neck. “My name is Glass. That’s Abbess Glass to you. And I gave my crozier to a rather surprised young man shortly after we emerged from Shoe Street. I hope the warden’s guards followed it rather than us.”

  “Glass isn’t a proper name. It’s a thing. I’ve seen some in Partnis Reeve’s office.” Something hard and near invisible that kept the Corridor winds from the fight-master’s den.

  Abbess Glass turned away and resumed her marching. “Each sister takes a new name when she is deemed fit to marry the Ancestor. It’s always the name of an object or thing, to set us apart from the worldly.”

  “Oh.” Most in Nona’s village had prayed to the nameless gods of rain and sun as they did all across the Grey, setting corn dollies in the fields to encourage a good harvest. But her mother and a few of the younger women went to the new church over in White Lake, where a fierce young man talked about the god who would save them, the Hope, rushing towards us even now. The roof of the Hope church stood ever open so they could see the god advancing. To Nona he looked like all the other stars, only white where almost every other is red, and brighter too. She had asked if all the other stars were gods as well, but all that earned her was a slap. Preacher Mickel said the star was Hope, and also the One God, and that before the northern ice and the southern ice joined hands he would come to save the faithful.

  In the cities, though, they mainly prayed to the Ancestor.

  “There. See it?”

  Nona followed the line of the abbess’s finger. On a high plateau, beyond the city wall, the slanting sunlight caught on a domed building, perhaps five miles off.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s where we’re headed.” And the abbess led away along the street, stepping around a horse pile too fresh for the garden-boys to have got to yet.

  “You didn’t hear about me all the way up there?” Nona asked. It didn’t seem possible.

  Abbess Glass laughed, a warm and infectious noise. “Ha! No. I had other business in town. One of the faithful told me your story and I made a diversion on my way back to the convent.”

  “Then how did you know my name? My real name, not the one Partnis gave me.”

  “Could you have caught the fourth apple?” The abbess responded with a question.

  “How many apples can you catch, old woman?”

  “As many as I need to.” Abbess Glass looked back at her. “Hurry up, now.”

  Nona knew that she didn’t know much, but she knew when someone was trying to take her measure and she didn’t like things being taken from her. The abbess would have kept on with her apples until she found Nona’s limit—and held that knowledge like a knife in its sheath. Nona hurried up and said nothing. The streets grew emptier as they approached the city wall and the shadows started to stretch.

  Alleyways yawned left and right, dark mouths ready to swallow Nona whole. However warm the abbess’s laughter, Nona didn’t trust her. She had watched Saida die. Running away was still very much an option. Living with a collection of old nuns on a windswept hill outside the city might be better than hanging, but not by much.

  “Master Reeve said that Raymel wasn’t dead. That’s not true.”

  The abbess pulled her coif off in a smooth motion, revealing short grey hair and exposing her neck to the wind. She quickly threw a shawl of sequined wool about her shoulders.

  “Where did— You stole that!” Nona glanced around to see if any of the passers-by would share her outrage but they were few and far between, heads bowed, bound to their own purposes. “A thief and a liar!”

  “I value my integrity.” The abbess smiled. “Which is why it has a price.”

  “A thief and a liar.” Nona decided that she would run.

  “And you, child, appear to be complaining because the man you were to hang for murdering is not in fact dead.” Abbess Glass tied the shawl and tugged it into place. “Perhaps you can explain what happened at the Caltess and I can explain what Partnis Reeve
almost certainly meant about Raymel Tacsis.”

  “I killed him.” The abbess wanted a story but Nona kept her words close. She had come to talking so late her mother had thought her dumb, and even now she preferred to listen.

  “How? Why? Paint me a picture.” Abbess Glass made a sharp turn, pulling Nona through a passage so narrow that a few more pounds about her middle would see the nun scraping both sides.

  “They brought us to the Caltess in a cage.” Nona remembered the journey. There had been three children on the wagon when Giljohn, the child-taker, stopped at her village and the people gave her over. Grey Stephen had passed her up to him. It seemed that everyone she knew watched as Giljohn put her in the wooden cage with the others. The village children, both littles and bigs, looked on mute; the old women muttered; Mari Streams, her mother’s friend, had sobbed; Martha Baker had shouted cruel words. When the wagon jolted off along its way stones and clods of mud had followed. “I didn’t like it.”

  The wagon had rattled on for days, then weeks. In two months they had covered nearly a thousand miles, most of it on small and winding lanes, back and forth across the same ground. They rattled up and down the Corridor, weaving a drunkard’s trail north and south, so close to the ice that sometimes Nona could see the walls rising blue above the trees. The wind proved the only constant, crossing the land without friendship, a stranger’s fingers trailing the grass, a cold intrusion.

  Day after day Giljohn steered his wagon from town to town, village to hamlet to lonely hovel. The children given up were gaunt, some little more than bones and rags, their parents lacking the will or coin to feed them. Giljohn delivered two meals a day, barley soup with onions in the morning, hot and salted, with hard black bread to dip. In the evening, mashed swede with butter. His passengers looked better by the day.

  “I’ve seen more meat on a butcher’s apron.” That’s what Giljohn told Saida’s parents when they brought her out of their hut into the rain.

  The father, a ratty little man, stooped and gone to grey, pinched Saida’s arm. “Big girl for her age. Strong. Got a lick o’ gerant in her.”

  The mother, whey-faced, stick-thin, weeping, reached to touch Saida’s long hair but let her hand fall away before contact was made.

  “Four pennies, and my horse can graze in your field tonight.” Giljohn always dickered. He seemed to do it for the love of the game, his purse being the fattest Nona had ever seen, crammed with pennies, crowns, even a gleaming sovereign that brought a new colour into Nona’s life. In the village only Grey Stephen ever had coins. And James Baker that time he sold all his bread to a merchant’s party that had lost the track to Gentry. But none of them had ever had gold. Not even silver.

  “Ten and you get on your way before the hour’s old,” the father countered.

  Within the aforementioned hour Saida had joined them in the cage, her pale hair veiling a down-turned face. The cart moved off without delay, heavier one girl and lighter five pennies. Nona watched through the bars, the father counting the coins over and again as if they might multiply in his hand, his wife clutching at herself. The mother’s wailing followed them as far as the cross-roads.

  “How old are you?” Markus, a solid dark-haired boy who seemed very proud of his ten years, asked the question. He’d asked Nona the same when she joined them. She’d said nine because he seemed to need a number.

  “Eight.” Saida sniffed and wiped her nose with a muddy hand.

  “Eight? Hope’s blood! I thought you were thirteen!” Markus seemed in equal measure both pleased to keep his place as oldest and outraged by Saida’s size.

  “Gerant in her,” offered Chara, a dark girl with hair so short her scalp shone through.

  Nona didn’t know what gerant was, except that if you had it you’d be big.

  Saida shuffled closer to Nona. As a farm-girl she knew not to sit above the wheels if you didn’t want your teeth rattled out.

  “Don’t sit by her,” Markus said. “Cursed, that one is.”

  “She came with blood on her,” Chara said. The others nodded.

  Markus delivered the final and most damning verdict. “No charge.”

  Nona couldn’t argue. Even Hessa with her withered leg had cost Giljohn a clipped penny. She shrugged and brought her knees up to her chest.

  Saida pushed aside her hair, sniffed mightily, and threw a thick arm about Nona drawing her close. Alarmed, Nona had pushed back but there was no resisting the bigger girl’s strength. They held like that as the wagon jolted beneath them, Saida weeping, and when the girl finally released her Nona found her own eyes full of tears, though she couldn’t say why. Perhaps the piece of her that should know the answer was broken.

  Nona knew she should say something but couldn’t find the right words. Maybe she’d left them in the village, on her mother’s floor. Instead of silence she chose to say the thing that she had said only once before—the thing that had put her in the cage.

  “You’re my friend.”

  The big girl sniffed, wiped her nose again, looked up, and split her dirty face with a white grin.

  • • •

  GILJOHN FED THEM well and answered questions, at least the first time they were asked—which meant “are we there yet?” and “how much further?” merited no more reply than the clatter of wheels.

  The cage served two purposes, both of which he explained once, turning his grizzled face back to the children to do so and letting the mule, Four-Foot, choose his own direction.

  “Children are like cats, only less useful and less furry. The cage keeps you in one place or I’d forever be rounding you up. Also . . .” he raised a finger to the pale line of scar tissue that divided his left eyebrow, eye-socket, and cheekbone, “I am a man of short temper and long regret. Irk me and I will lash out with this, or this.” He held out first the cane with which he encouraged Four-Foot, and then the callused width of his palm. “I shall then regret both the sins against the Ancestor and against my purse.” He grinned, showing yellow teeth and dark gaps. “The cage saves you from my intemperance. At least until you irk me to a level where my ire lasts the trip around to the door.”

  The cage could hold twelve children. More if they were small. Giljohn continued his meander westward along the Corridor, whistling in fair weather, hunched and cursing in foul.

  “I’ll stop when my purse is empty or my wagon’s full.” He said it each time a new acquisition joined them, and it set Nona to wishing Giljohn would find some golden child whose parents loved her and who would cost him every coin in his possession. Then at last they might get to the city.

  Sometimes they saw it in the distance, the smoke of Verity. Closer still and a faint suggestion of towers might resolve from the haze above the city. Once they came so close that Nona saw the sunlight crimson on the battlements of the fortress that the emperors had built around the Ark. Beneath it, the whole sprawling city bound about with thick walls and sheltering from the wind in the lee of a high plateau. But Giljohn turned and the city dwindled once more to a distant smudge of smoke.

  Nona whispered her hope to Saida on a cold day when the sun burned scarlet over half the sky and the wind ran its fingers through the wooden bars, finding strange and hollow notes.

  “Giljohn doesn’t want pretty,” Saida snorted. “He’s looking for breeds.”

  Nona only blinked.

  “Breeds. You know. Anyone who shows the blood.” She looked down at Nona, still wide-eyed with incomprehension. “The four tribes?”

  Nona had heard of them, the four tribes of men who came to the world out of darkness and mixed their lines to bear children who might withstand the harshness of the lands they claimed. “Ma took me to the Hope church. They didn’t like talk of the Ancestor.”

  Saida held her hands up. “Well, there were four tribes.” She counted them off on her fingers. “Gerant. If you have too much gerant blood you get big l
ike they were.” She patted her broad chest. “Hunska. They’re less common.” She touched Nona’s hair. “Hunska-dark, hunska-fast.” As if reciting a rhyme. “The others are even rarer. Marjool . . . and . . . and . . .”

  “Quantal,” Markus said from the corner. He snorted and puffed up as if he were an elder. “And it’s marjal, not marjool.”

  Saida scowled at him, and turning back she lowered her voice to a whisper. “They can do magic.”

  Nona touched her hair where Saida’s hand had rested. The village littles thought black hair made her evil. “Why does Giljohn want children like that?”

  “To sell.” Saida shrugged. “He knows the signs to look for. If he’s right he can sell us for more than he paid. Ma said I’ll find work if I keep getting big. She said in the city they feed you meat and pay you coins.” She sighed. “I still don’t want to go.”

  • • •

  GILJOHN TOOK THE lanes that led nowhere, the roads so rutted and overgrown that often it needed all the children pushing and Four-Foot straining all four legs to make headway. Giljohn would let Markus lead the mule then—Markus had a way with the beast. The children liked Four-Foot, he smelled worse than an old blanket and had a fondness for nipping legs, but he drew them tirelessly and his only competition for their affection was Giljohn. Several of them fought to bring him hoare-apples and sweet grass at the day’s end. But of all of them, Four-Foot only loved Giljohn, who whipped him, and Markus, who rubbed him between the eyes and spoke the right kind of nonsense when doing it.

  The rains came for days at a time, making life in the cage miserable, though Giljohn did throw a hide over the top and windward side. The mud was the worst of it, cold and sour stuff that took hold of the wheels so that they all had to shove. Nona hated the mud: lacking Saida’s height she often found herself thigh-deep in the cold and sucking mire, having to be rescued by Giljohn as the wagon slurped onto firmer ground. Each time he would knot his fist in the back of her hempen smock and heft her out bodily.