Red Sister

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 like 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.

Nona set to scraping the goo off as soon as he set her down on the tailgate.

‘What’s a bit of mud to a farm-girl?’ Giljohn wanted to know.

Nona only scowled and kept on scraping. She hated being dirty, always had. Her mother said she ate her food like a highborn lady, holding each morsel with precision so as not to smear herself.

‘She’s not a farm-girl.’ Saida spoke up for her. ‘Nona’s ma wove baskets.’

Giljohn returned to the driver’s seat. ‘She’s not anything now, and neither are the rest of you until I sell you. Just mouths to feed.’

Roads that led nowhere took them to people who had nothing. Giljohn never asked to buy a child. He’d pull up alongside any farm that grew more weeds and rocks than crop, places where calling the harvest ‘failed’ would be over generous, implying that it had made some sort of effort to succeed. In such places the tenant farmer might pause his plough or lay down his scythe to approach the wagon at his boundary wall.

A man driving a wagonload of children in a cage doesn’t have to state his business. A farmer whose flesh lies sunken around his bones, and whose eyes are the colour of hunger, doesn’t have to explain himself if he walks up to such a man. Hunger lies beneath all of our ugliest transactions.

Sometimes a farmer would make that long, slow crossing of his field, from right to wrong, and stand, lean in his overalls, chewing on a corn stalk, eyes a-glitter in the shadows of his face. On such occasions it wouldn’t take more than a few minutes before a string of dirty children were lined up beside him, graduated in height from those narrowing their eyes against the suspicion of what they’d been summoned for, down to those still clutching in one hand the stick they’d been playing with and in the other the rags about their middle, their eyes wide and without guile.

Giljohn picked out any child with possible gerant traits on a swift first pass. When they knew their ages it was easier, but even without anything more than a rough guess at a child’s years he would find clues to help him. Often he looked at the backs of their necks, or took their wrists and bent them back – just until they winced. Those children he would set aside. On a second pass he would examine the eyes, pulling at the corners and peering at the whites. Nona remembered those hands. She had felt like a pear picked from the market stall, squeezed, sniffed over, replaced. The village had asked nothing for her, yet still Giljohn had carried out his checks. A space in his cage and meals from his pot had to be earned.

With the hunska possibles the child-taker would rub the youngster’s hair between finger and thumb as if checking for coarseness. If still curious, he would test their swiftness by dropping a stone so that it fell behind a cloth he held out, and make a game of trying to catch it as it came back into view a couple of feet lower. Almost none of the children taken as hunska were truly fast: Giljohn said they’d grow into it, or training would bring their speed into the open.

Nona guessed they might make ten stops before finding someone prepared to swap their sons and daughters for a scattering of copper. She guessed that after walking the lines of children set out for him Giljohn would actually offer coins fewer than one time in a dozen, and that when he did it was generally for an over-large child. And even of these few hardly any, he said, would grow into full gerant heritage.

After Giljohn had picked out these and any dark and over-quick children, he would always return to the line for the third and slowest of his inspections. Here, although he watched with the hawk’s intensity, Giljohn kept his hands to himself. He asked questions instead.

‘Did you dream last night?’ he might ask.

‘Tell me … what colours do you see in the focus moon?’

And when they told him the moon is always red. When they said, that you can’t look at the focus moon, it will blind you, he replied, ‘But if you could, if it wasn’t, what colours would it be?’

‘What makes a blue sound?’ He often used that one.

‘What does pain taste of?’

‘Can you see the trees grow?’

‘What secrets do stones keep?’

And so on – sometimes growing excited, sometimes affecting boredom, yawning into his hand. All of it a game. Rarely won. And at the end of it, always the same, Giljohn crouched to be on their level. ‘Watch my finger,’ he would tell them. And he would move it through the air in a descending line, so close his nail almost clipped their nose. The line wavered, jerked, pulsed, beat, never the same twice but always familiar. What he was looking for in their eyes Nona didn’t know. He seldom seemed to find it though.

Two places in the wagon went to children selected in this final round, and each of those cost more than any of the others. Never too much though. Asked for gold he would walk away.

‘Friend, I’ve been at this as long as you’ve tilled these rows, and in all that time how many that I’ve sold on have passed beneath the Academy arch?’ he would ask. ‘Four. Only four full-bloods … and still they call me the mage-finder.’

In the long hours between one part of nowhere and the next the children, jolting in the cage, would watch the world pass by, much of it dreary moor, patchy fields, or dour forest where screw-pine and frost-oak fought for the sun, leaving little for the road. Mostly they were silent, for children’s chatter dies off soon enough if not fed, but Hessa proved a wonder. She would set her withered leg before her with both hands, then lean back against the wooden bars and tell story after story, her eyes closed above cheekbones so large they made something alien of her. In all her pinched face, framed by tight curls of straw-coloured hair, only her mouth moved. The stories she told stole the hours and pulled the children on journeys far longer than Four-Foot could ever manage. She had tales of the Scithrowl in the east and their battle-queen Adoma, and of her bargains with the horror that dwells beneath the black ice. She told of Durnishmen who sail across the Sea of Marn to the empire’s western shore in their sick-wood barges. Of the great waves sent up when the southern ice walls calve, and how they sweep the width of the Corridor to wash up against the frozen cliffs of the north, which collapse in turn and send back waves of their own. Hessa spoke of the emperor and his sisters, and of their bickering that had laid waste many a great family with the ill fortune to find itself between them. She told of heroes past and present, of olden day generals who held the border lands, of Admiral Scheer who lost a thousand ships, of Noi-Guin scaling castle walls to sink the knife, of Red Sisters in their battle-skins, of the Soft Men and their poisons …

Sometimes on those long roads Hessa spoke to Nona, huddled close in a corner of the cage, her voice low, and Nona couldn’t tell if it were a story or strange truths she told.

‘You see it too, don’t you, Nona?’ Hessa bent in close, so close her breath tickled Nona’s ear. ‘The Path, the line? The one that wants us to follow it.’

‘I don’t—’

‘I can walk in that place. Here they took my crutch and I have to crawl or be carried … but there … I can walk for as long as I can keep the Path beneath me.’ Nona felt the smile. Hessa moved back and laughed – rare for her, very rare. She told a story for everyone then, Persus and the Hidden Path, a tale from the oldest days, and even Giljohn leaned back to listen.

And one day, wonder of wonders, the twelfth child squeezed into the cage, and Giljohn declared his wagon full, his business complete. Turning west, he let Four-Foot lead the way to Verity, soon finding a wide and stone-clad road where four hooves could eat up the miles double quick.

They arrived in the dark and in the rain. Nona saw nothing more of the city than a multitude of lights, first a constellation hovering above the black threat of the great walls, and once through the yawn of the gates, a succession of islands where a lantern’s illumination pooled to offer a doorway here, a row of columns there, figures hidden in their cloaks, emerging from the blind night to be glimpsed and lost once more.

Broad streets and narrow, cut like canyons through the neck-craning height of Verity’s houses, brought the wagon in time to a tall timber door. A legend set in iron letters above the door declared a name, but recognizing that the shapes were letters took Nona to the borders of her education.

‘The Caltess, boys and girls.’ Giljohn pushed back his hood. ‘Time to meet Partnis Reeve.’

Giljohn pulled up in the courtyard that waited behind the high walls and ordered them out. Saida and Nona clambered down, stiff and sore. Before them a many-windowed hall rose to three times the height of any building that Nona had seen until she reached the city. The yard was largely deserted, lit by the flames guttering in a brazier set at the centre. Peculiar equipment lay abandoned in corners, including pieces of leather-bound wood the size and shape of men, set on round-bottomed bases. A few young men sat on benches beneath the lanterns, all of them polishing pieces of leatherwork, save one who was mending a net as if he were a fisherman.

Partnis Reeve kept the children lined up for more than an hour before he emerged from his hall. Long enough for dawn to infiltrate the yard and surprise Nona with the knowledge that a whole night had passed in travel.

Saida fidgeted and pulled her shawl about her. Nona watched as the sun edged the ridge of the hall’s black-tiled roof with crimson. Beyond the walls the city woke, creaking and groaning like an old man leaving his bed, though it had hardly slept.

Partnis came down the steps, always taking the next with the same leg. A heavy-featured man, tall and well fed, with iron-grey hair, dark eyes promising no kindness, wrapped against the cold in a thick velvet robe.

‘Partnis!’ Giljohn held his arms wide and Partnis Reeve copied the gesture, though neither man stepped forward into the promised embrace. ‘Celia well? And little Merra?’

‘Celia is … Celia.’ Partnis lowered his arms with a wry grin. ‘And Merra is living in Darrins Town, married to a cloth merchant’s boy.’

‘How did we get so old?’ Giljohn returned his arms to his sides. ‘Yesterday we were young.’

‘Yesterday was a long time ago.’ Partnis turned his attention to the merchandise. ‘Too small.’ He walked past Nona without further comment. ‘Too timid.’ He passed Saida. ‘Too fat. Too young. Too ill. Too lazy. Too clumsy. Too much trouble.’ He turned at the end of the line and looked at Giljohn. They were of a height, though Partnis looked soft where Giljohn looked hard. ‘I’ll give you two crowns for the lot.’

‘I spent two crowns feeding them!’ Giljohn spat on the grit floor.

The haggling took another hour and both men seemed to enjoy it. Giljohn enumerated the reasons why the children would become valuable fighters in Partnis’s contests, pointing out gerant or hunska traits.

‘This girl here is eight!’ Giljohn set a hand to Saida’s shoulder, making her flinch. ‘Eight years old! Tall as a tree. She’s a gerant prime for sure. A full-blood even!’

‘Even a full-blood’s only got labour value if there’s no fight in ’em.’ Partnis barked a wordless shout into Saida’s face. She stumbled back with a shriek of fear, raising both hands to her eyes. ‘Worthless.’

‘She’s eight, Partnis!’

‘So her father said. She looks fifteen to me.’

Giljohn grabbed Saida’s arm and pulled her forward. ‘Feel her wrists!’ He pushed her head forward and ran a finger over the vertebrae knobbling the back of her neck. ‘Look here!’ He straightened her by her hair. ‘Fathers lie, but bones don’t. This one’s a prime at the least. Ain’t seen a gerant to beat her this trip. Could be full-blood.’

Partnis took Saida’s wrist and squeezed until she whimpered. ‘She’s got a touch, I grant you.’

‘Touch? She’s no damn touch.’

‘Half-blood if you’re lucky.’

And so it went on, Partnis allowing some of the children might be a touch or even half-bloods, Giljohn insisting they were all primes or even full-bloods.

Nona and a boy named Tooram he claimed showed clear evidence of hunska bloodlines. He slapped Tooram, then tried again and the boy interposed his arm before the blow could land. When he tried it on Nona she let him slap her, the hard length of his hand impacting the side of her head, leaving her ear buzzing and her cheek one hot outrage of pain. He did it again, with a scowl, and she scowled back, making no effort to avoid the blow which took her off her feet and replaced the grey sky with bright and flashing lights.

‘… idiot.’

Nona found herself on her feet, her shoulder in Giljohn’s iron grip, blood filling her mouth. She remembered the force of the slap, how her teeth had seemed to rattle.

‘You saw how fast she turned towards me.’

It was true – Nona’s lips felt four times their size and white spears of pain lanced up her nose. She had faced into the blow at the last moment.

‘I must have missed that part,’ Partnis said.

Nona swallowed the blood. She let the pain run through her – the cost she paid for taking money from Giljohn’s pocket. Some of the children, sold by their own fathers, almost saw the child-taker as their replacement. Stern, certainly, but he fed them, kept them safe. Nona took a contrary view. Her father had died on the ice and what memories she kept of him warmed her in the cold, tasted sweet when the world ran sour. He would have known how to treat a man like Giljohn.

The gerants had no such choice to make, their size argued their case without need for demonstration. Though in Saida’s place Nona thought she might have agreed with Partnis when he accused her of being fifteen.

Partnis took them in exchange for ten crowns and two.

‘Be good.’ Giljohn, a father to them all for three long months, had no other words for them, climbing up behind Four-Foot without ceremony.

‘Goodbye.’ Saida was the only one to speak.

Giljohn glanced her way, stick half-raised for the off. ‘Goodbye,’ he said.

‘She meant the mule.’ Tooram didn’t turn his head, but he spoke loud enough for the words to reach.

A grin slanted across Giljohn’s face and, shaking his head, he flicked at Four-Foot’s haunches, encouraging him through the doors that Partnis’s man had set open once more.

Nona watched the wagon rattle off, Hessa, Markus, Willum and Chara staring back at her through the bars. She would miss Hessa and her stories. She wondered who Giljohn would sell her to and how a girl unable to walk would make her way in the world. She might miss Markus too, perhaps. The miles had worn away his sharp edges, the wheels had gone round and round … somehow turning him into someone she liked. In the next moment they were all gone.

‘And now you’re mine,’ Partnis said. He summoned the young man mending the net, lean but well-muscled under his woollen vest, hair dark, skin pale, but not so dark or so pale as Nona. ‘This is Jaymes. He’ll take you to Maya who is your mother now. The slapping kind.’ Partnis offered them a heavy smile. ‘I don’t expect to notice any of you until you’re this high.’ He held his hand to his chest. ‘And if I do, it will probably be bad news for you. Do what you’re told and you’ll be fine. You’re Caltess now. Bought and paid for.’

Maya stood more than a foot taller than Partnis, arms thick as a man’s thighs, her face red and blotched as if a constant rage held her in its jaws. To compensate for her complexion the Ancestor had given her thick blonde hair that she braided into heavy ropes. She stood on the attic ladder after shepherding the new arrivals up it, only her head and shoulders emerging into the gloom.

‘No lanterns up here. Ever. No candles. No lamps. Break that rule and I break you.’ She made the motion with heavy-knuckled hands. ‘When you’re not working you’re up here. Meals are in the kitchen. You’ll hear the bell when it’s time. Miss it and you won’t eat.’

Nona and the others crouched close to the trapdoor, watching the giant. The musty air reminded Nona of James Baker’s grain store at the village. Around them the shadows rustled. Cats most likely, rats and spiders of a certainty, but also other children watching the new arrivals.

Maya raised her voice. ‘Don’t pick on the new meat. There’s time enough for that down below.’ She stared at a patch of darkness seemingly no darker than any other. ‘I see any lumps and bumps on Partnis’s new purchases, Denam, Regol, and I’ll knock your heads together so hard you swap brains. Hear me?’ A pause. ‘Hear me?’ Loud enough to shake the roof.

‘I hear you.’ A snarl.

‘Heard.’ Chuckled in the distance.

The others emerged as soon as Maya withdrew. Two long-limbed boys dropped from the rafters into the midst of the newcomers. Nona hadn’t seen them lurking there. Others scampered in from the shadows, or strolled, or crept, each according to their nature. None of them as small or as young as Nona, but most of them not many years older. From the direction in which Maya had stared came a huge boy, a scowl beneath a thick shock of red hair, muscles heaped and shifting below his shapeless linen shift. Moments later a lad near as tall but willow-thin joined him, black hair sweeping down across his eyes, a crooked smile hung between the corners of his mouth.

A throng gathered, many more than Nona had anticipated. Huddled and watchful, waiting to be entertained.

The red-haired giant opened his mouth to threaten them. ‘You—’

‘Oh hush, Denam.’ The dark-haired boy stepped in front of him. ‘You’re newbies. I’m Regol. This is Denam, soon-to-be apprentice, and the toughest, fiercest warrior the Caltess attic has ever seen. Look at him wrong and he’ll chew you up then spit out the pieces.’ Regol glanced back at Denam. ‘That’s the gist, ain’t it?’ He returned his gaze to the newbies. ‘Now we’ve got the chest-thumping out of the way and saved Maya the bother of spanking Denam you can find yourself a place to sleep.’ He waved a hand airily at the gloom. ‘Don’t tread on any toes.’

Regol turned as if to go then paused. ‘Sooner rather than later someone will try to convince you that the reason so many of us up here are titchies like yourselves is that Partnis eats children, or there’s some test so deadly that almost nobody survives it, or sometimes Maya forgets to look before she sits down. The truth is that you’ve been bought early and cheap. Most of you will be disappointments. You won’t grow into something Partnis can use. He’ll sell you on.’ Regol raised a hand as Denam started to speak. ‘And not to a salt mine or to be used as the filling in a pie – just to any place that has a need you can meet.’ He lowered his hand. ‘Any questions?’