Some time after Lightning left the meeting, it ended and the Eszai dispersed. Over the next five days I flew errands for them. Each evening I had piles of correspondence to digest and report to the Emperor; mostly badly spelled semaphore transcripts.
I returned to my desk in the corner of the hall. I started writing but I could hardly concentrate. I kept wondering about Cyan’s Challenge and Lightning’s strange behaviour. I stared at the piles of letters, under the glass jam-jar of worms I was using as a paperweight. The worms didn’t seem to be moving very much. I leant forward and peered at them. They were all limp and flaccid, coating the bottom of the jar. I picked it up and shook it, and they put out a pink, braided-together tentacle and tapped on the glass.
The worms arced up in the middle and raised two perpendicular strands. A sagging worm swung across from one to the other and joined halfway up. It looked like the letter H. It collapsed back into the feebly writhing mass. Weakly they sent up another string from which three comb-like projections shot out: E. A single thread with a right angle of worms at the base: L; and it summoned its energies for a thick strand that curled round on itself at the top: P.
I picked up my paperknife and poked some holes in the lid. The worms sprang to life, stretched up eagerly forcing their tiny mouths against the underside. They pushed ineffectually at it, swaying like animated hair.
They dropped down and started swirling around the jar, in one direction like water going down a plughole. They became a whirlpool of worms, riding up the inside of the glass with an indentation in the middle. I thought they were trying to push the glass apart so I gave it a shake and they slumped again. They started throwing up angry tendrils so quickly I could scarcely make one letter out before it was replaced by the next. An L, an E and a T. Let. A U, an S and an O. What? A U and a T. Us Out. Let us out. Y-O-U-B-A-S-T-A-R-D.
‘There’s no need for that,’ I said, and placed the jar back on top of my correspondence. The Vermiform furiously started cycling letters. As it warmed to its task it threw up whole tiny words, the letters made of one or two worms apiece.
L-E-T-U-S-O-U-T
L-E-T-U-S-O-U-T
I signed a missive, blew on the ink, folded the paper. I dropped some sealing wax on it and embossed it with the garnet sun emblem seal which I wear as a pendant.
L-E-T-U-S-O-U-T
LET! US! OUT!
PLEASE
‘That’s better,’ I said, and was about to flip the jar’s clips when I was struck by a thought. ‘If I free you, promise you won’t harm me?’
The worms paused.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘You’re staying in there.’
I looked up across the hall and saw Rayne approaching, carrying an envelope. I didn’t want her to see that I had stolen her sample of Vermiform worms so I picked up the jar and slipped it into the big pocket of my coat folded under the table.
Rayne looked over my shoulder. ‘You’re transcribing code,’ she observed.
‘It’s shorthand. What can I do for you?’
She offered me the letter in her clean, smooth palm. ‘Could you take this t’ Cyan?’
‘Are you sure? It’s nearly midnight.’
‘Jant, think of wha’ she mus’ be going through up in t’ peel tower. She knows she’s made a fool of herself.’
‘Well, I’m not sympathetic.’
Rayne nodded sagely. ‘Neither am I, bu’ I do like her. She’s a smar’ girl. When t’ Circle broke three times, we were in t’ coach between Slaugh’er bridge and Eske. Cyan consoled me. I’m grateful for tha’. We talked all nigh’. Can you take i’ now? I’m up t’ here with work in t’ hospi’al.’
I stood up and gathered my coat. ‘Of course.’
The full moon’s light basted the surrounding moorland grey and smooth. Like a ball of butter, it rolled along the top of a platter of thick, opaque cloud and lit up the margins from behind with a creamy glow. Silver noctilucent clouds hung in the western sky over the foothills; the last light ebbing from their thin streaks gave enough illumination for me to see Insects hunting by scent in the valley.
Small bats were fluttering in circuits around the top of the peel tower. I could hear their squeaks as they passed me.
I have had planks nailed out from the window ledges of each peel tower’s uppermost room. I swept up to this one and touched down on the end. The plank bent like a diving board. I shuffled up to the shutters of the bow windows in the hoarding. The shutters, as large as gates, were closed. I splayed both hands on the splintered and weathered wood, bent down and put my eye to the crack.
Cyan stomped past the slit, lit by a lantern outside my field of vision. She disappeared and then stamped back again. She was muttering to herself and biting the end of a pen.
I knocked on the shutters and she looked up. She rushed over and pushed them wide. They flew open and hit me in the face. A brief whirl of the sky; I flapped my wings powerfully, cart-wheeling my arms. I toppled off the plank, caught its edge with both hands, and dangled there for an instant before I kicked my legs, flexed my arms and drew myself up again.
‘Careful!’ I hissed. ‘You nearly broke my nose!’
‘Good!’ said Cyan, and drew the shutters to. I pulled them wide and stepped down into the room.
The tower-top room was big, ten metres square. A single bed and side table by the fireplace were the only furnishings apart from empty crossbow bolt racks on the walls. It was ill-lit, no fire burning in the huge stone grate, but lamplight shone up through holes in the floor, through which arrow sheaves could be hoisted. Cyan’s lantern gave a pool of colour on the table next to her silver plate and fork and a chessboard that seemed to have stalled halfway through a game.
Lightning’s dog rushed up from the bed, barking, then recognised me and sat down by my feet. I closed my wings, the primaries sliding over each other like fans. ‘I only have an hour.’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t be here.’
‘Well, I’ve been trying to write to you for hours,’ Cyan retorted. ‘Where have you been? What’s going on? No one’s visited me. I haven’t spoken to anyone except the guards for five days!’ She retreated to sit on the plain bed, leaning on a blanket roll against the wall, and gave me a baleful look. ‘Will you let me out?’
‘I’m sorry, Cyan; no. The least the Castle can do is save your life.’
‘You could rescind Daddy’s orders if you wanted, and the guards would release me. Why are you so afraid of him?’
‘I’m not.’
Her forehead furrowed. ‘After the guards dragged me out, what happened? What did Daddy say?…No, don’t tell me. I hate him. Old titwart. I can’t believe he’s done this to me!’
I stalked across the room, pushed my ice axe hanger behind me and sat down on the fireplace surround. I ached all over and I felt sick. The constant undercurrent of panic and sleep deprivation we were all living with was taking its toll. I said, ‘I brought a letter from Rayne.’
‘One letter in five days!’
‘You don’t know how hard-pressed we are-’ I gestured at the window in the direction of the town. ‘Everyone’s terrified and San is driving us like pack horses. I’ve been sending dispatches to position battalions for the advance in two days. I spent the last hour fending off journalists and checking Lord Governor Purlin Brandoch’s cavalry slinking in on second-rate nags. In an hour’s time I have to collect letters for your father-’
‘Huh!’ she cried.
‘Hand-deliver the important ones and collect replies. I think I’ll report that you’re still furious.’
‘I’m fine,’ she said, not looking it.
‘Do you have a message for him?’
She glared at me defiantly. ‘If the bastard is in a good mood, tell him I’m dying of melancholy. If he’s feeling miserable, tell him I’m singing like a lark.’
‘I can’t fathom what mood he’s in. He’s bottled everything up, and he seems very detached, as if he isn’t allowing himself to think about it.’
I pulled a sheaf of letters from my coat pocket and leafed through until I found Rayne’s envelope. Cyan accepted it and scratched the seal off with her fingernails.
‘Is Rayne the only person who’s thought of me?’ she asked.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. No. Hasn’t Lightning given you his dog for company? He’s been sending you the best food, otherwise you’d be eating biscuit and salt beef, like the rest of the Zascai.’
‘So he hasn’t forgotten me?’
‘No. He’s incredibly busy too.’ I sighed, wondering how I could make her understand what was happening. ‘This is the biggest advance of all time. When they start lining up in formation, you’ll see what I mean.’
Cyan lay back on the bed. ‘I tried to write to you but I couldn’t concentrate. I made a complete arse of myself.’
‘Yes, you did. I wish I’d-’
‘Oh, I don’t care what you’d have done. I wasn’t Challenging you.’ She put an arm across her eyes and said, ‘Pissflaps. Will you let me free, Jant; please?’
‘Look, Lightning put you in here for a reason. If I let you out, and you get killed, he would shoot me. If through your actions, you get someone else killed, I would be blamed. And I don’t fancy that.’
‘It’s like being in prison!’
I stared at her. Her truculent tone was beginning to pique. ‘Trust me, it’s nothing like being in prison.’
‘Oh, Jant’s angry.’
‘Stop that! Behaving like a ten-year-old is what landed you in here.’
‘Please set me free. I’ll reward you. I’ll give you-’
‘It won’t happen, so don’t try to tempt me.’
The deerhound leapt on the bed and Cyan took its head in her lap. ‘Good dog, Lymer.’
I knew she had never really seriously considered joining the Circle. Everybody harbours a secret wish to be immortal. Everyone, now and then, wonders what it would be like. But like most people Cyan had never genuinely entertained the thought, and I bet, in her head, she keeps repeating over and over what she did and imagines the Eszai laughing at her.
I knelt down with a cheerful air and began to build a fire in the grate, refusing to be overwhelmed by the awkward situation. Cyan watched me with animal antipathy.
I said, ‘I recognise a spur-of-the-moment Challenge when I see it. All Eszai recognise bluster, too. We’re often Challenged by people who know they’re not capable of beating us but simply want the attention. By the Castle’s rules we have to take each and every one seriously, and separately, because you never know when one is a true talent…’
‘I don’t withdraw my Challenge, if that’s what you’re driving at.’
I gathered handfuls of the dried moor grass, heather sprigs and sprays of thyme strewn as a floor covering. I used them for kindling and lit some skilfully with the last of my matches. I swung the kettle spit above the flames and began to make some coffee.
‘Rayne was recently Challenged,’ I continued. ‘By a healer, some Awian noblewoman. High Awian is a useless language for science, and Rachiswater university mainly teaches arts. They’re not far behind Hacilith though. This woman believed in the properties of precious metals to cure diseases. She made gold mirrors and shone light into the patients’ eyes. It was no laughing matter…her bedside manner was so good many patients were cured by their own expectations. Rayne set her a Challenge at the front, and she learned that no shiny mirrors or soothing music can stuff a patient’s guts back in.’ I shrugged. ‘Only three places in the Circle have never changed hands: Rayne’s, Tornado’s and your father’s. Everybody who Challenges them makes a fool of himself. You’re not the only one.’
‘It was his fault,’ she said. ‘He pushed me to it. In front of the Emperor and everything.’
‘Cyan, I’ve better things to do with my free hour than talk with a stroppy cow.’
‘Please tell the guards to release me.’
‘No. After seeing you make an exhibition of yourself and humiliate Lightning, even though I told you to sit down, I’m surprised I’m here at all.’
‘I don’t regret it,’ she said.
‘He’s been the best archer for over fourteen hundred years!’ I tried to make her understand that length of time. ‘Awndyn didn’t exist when he was mortal. Or Peregrine. They didn’t have highways, they didn’t even have coaches. They used to have ballistae and now we have espringals, thanks to the effort of San knows how many Artillerists. Lightning improved bows, from the early awful type they had before the Circle, to the shit-hot bows you use now. He’s lived through all this, and been on top all the time! It’s as much his day now as it was then. So it’s bloody stupid to Challenge him.’
‘’Spose you’re right.’
‘He’s seen the four corners of the world…Five, including Tris.’
‘In the past, though. He lives in the past. And Swallow lives in the future-but I live in the present.’ She got up and crouched in front of the fire, rubbing some warmth back into her hands. ‘He hasn’t been a father to me at all. He’s been more of a father to you than to me.’
‘Not really. I-’
‘That’s what he is, your substitute father. It makes me sick how you’re blind to his faults.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘Yeah, well why are you defending him so much?’
‘I don’t need a father. I survived by myself for years in Hacilith. Worse than anything you’ve seen. And-’ I swept a hand, rattling the bangles around my wrist ‘-for example, these peel towers. I won a battle myself at the furthest one, at Summerday in nineteen ninety-three. Yours truly and Shearwater Mist beat the Insects before Lightning had even ridden out of Awia. We were the only Eszai in command; the brains and the brawn.’
‘Which one of you was the brains?’
‘Me! Damn it.’ I poured hot water into two cups of coffee. ‘Mist was bitten through the shoulder and I had to look after him almost as much as the Zascai.’
‘I wish I could be involved in something like that.’
I would have laughed if she had led with a trace of humour in her voice. ‘You’re not joking, are you?’
‘No, I’m not…I want out.’
‘Stay here, Cyan. Insects are running everywhere. These towers provide enough shelter to last a swarm. There are rainwater butts on the roof and enough stores in the cellar.’
She said, ‘I’ve been watching the archers drill all afternoon. I can see everything from up here. Daddy was riding up and down in front of the ranks as if he’d forgotten me. There are two enormous women soldiers guarding me and all the money stored here. Not men, worse luck; “Bitchback and Nobless” from Midelspass.’
‘Really?’
‘Mm. They don’t pass on my messages. They don’t listen to me, even.’
‘Wonder where Lightning got them from?’
‘I don’t know but they adore him. They’re so desperate that if they knew a man was up here they’d strip-search you…And the lake reeks,’ she went on. ‘All day when the wind was gusting I could smell it.’
She pushed Lymer aside and lifted the chessboard onto her knees. ‘Do you want a game?’
‘Huh? No, I don’t know how to play.’
‘In all this time, you haven’t learnt chess?’
‘No. Can you fend off wolves using only a sling?’
‘No.’
‘Well then.’
‘I’ll teach you,’ she said.
‘It’s a stupid game. I can’t think of one good reason for it, and besides, my time’s nearly up.’
‘You mean you don’t have the patience.’
I picked a lancer and offered it to her, but palmed it so Cyan found herself grasping at empty air. She giggled. I placed it back with a click on the board. ‘Check! Now, why don’t you read Rayne’s letter? She likes you.’
‘Yeah, I like her too…but I find her accent a bit impenetrable.’
‘That’s the seventh century for you.’
Cyan unfolded the letter. ‘Rayne must be an amazing doctor to hold her title for as long as Daddy.’
‘She is. As time goes on, it seems less likely that she’ll ever lose a Challenge. The mortals’ behaviour benefits her, I think.’
‘Why?’
‘Other doctors all stunt each other’s growth. They never share their discoveries because they all want to Challenge her. Rayne’s fond of saying that the branches of science wouldn’t be so separate if scholars were less secretive.’
‘I suppose, living in the university, she’s the first to hear of anything new.’
‘Yes. She loves it when novices notice something different. She encourages them. Otherwise they’d just follow her and ape her experiments.’
Cyan read the letter for a few minutes while I played with the chess pieces and sorted out my eyeliner, and then she passed me the letter. ‘Why not have a look while I write a reply?’ She pulled a pillow from the bed and sat down on the floor next to the low table, her long back rounded above it. She began to fiddle with the nib of her pen.
While she scrawled her reply, I perused Rayne’s pages of neat, close writing.
Slake Cross Hospital
17th May
1.30 a.m.
To be delivered by the hand of Comet
Dear Cyan,
I know you are trapped and must be feeling miserable. Your father’s rage seemed shocking, but I hope at some time in the future you will agree he may have saved your life and that life is indeed more precious than you currently hold it. Lightning loves you with all his heart but you simply refuse to understand how much strain he’s under. He does not want to lose you and he must concentrate on reaching the dam. I didn’t think he would do anything like this no matter how hard you pushed him, but San has never put us under this pressure before.
In the coach on the way from Hacilith I enjoyed our conversation. How agreeable it was, for an old lady who does not need much sleep, to talk through the night with a young lady who is too excited to sleep. And then when the Circle broke and you consoled me…Please turn over in your mind the tales I told you of your father’s life, and understand that in Hacilith you were fed a lot of slander. It shouldn’t colour your opinion of him now.
Once you realise of how little consequence you are in the immensity of time, you gain a great power, a liberty and you can follow your own path in peace. Bide your time and learn.
You probably don’t feel lucky, but let me tell you, you have been living in a time of such equality and freedom it almost seems to me that the people of this era act like spoilt children. People like myself have toiled over decades and centuries so that you may have such freedom. I expect you feel you have little choice in life but in times past you would have had even less. When I was mortal, girls could not be students and few people could read. I guided Hacilith University to develop in the image of the Castle, so it’s run by merit, not by dodderers. These days an applicant to the university must have worked in the outside world for two years, so the prospective students are people who know how to put in a day’s work and their mature approach recognises the great worth and luxury of study. You never needed for anything, Cyan, so you never needed to learn until now. I urge you to put your time to good use.
Watch your father from the window as he leads the battle. Would you be able to do what he does, so well? As a Challenger you seem to think you could do better. Lightning and the others who surround you are not simply faces, not simply there to grant your wish but every one has a long and complicated history to which his reactions pertain, just as much as they do to you. The road to becoming immortal is so uniquely steep and tortuous that every man travelling it has a story to tell. Your father is no exception.
Lightning and I discovered the privileges and tribulations of immortality at about the same time, though it meant different things to us both. During six nineteen, when the Emperor’s First Circle was defeated, I was scrubbing out the washing coppers in Chattelhouse’s laundry room. We were aware that San was losing Awia but the intense fighting was happening somewhere far off in the north. We could only keep going and wait until the Insects arrived at the walls of Hacilith. Every day the news came, the atmosphere grew more and more ominous and we lived under a constantly encroaching threat. How Lightning can call it a golden age I don’t know.
Until I was about ten years old I lived on the street with no roof over my head, but I hung around the gates of the College of Surgeons as if drawn to them. I was sitting playing knucklebones on the track outside when I saw the cleaner being sacked. She hefted her bags and stomped away in a huff. The porter began to close the gates but I slipped between them and begged to be allowed to clean the floors. He rolled his eyes but he hired me and I became the most lowly servant to the Guild of Barber-Surgeons. Guilds disappeared before the close of the first millennium, but they were very influential when I was mortal.
I dreamed of being a subsizar, a scholar’s assistant, but girls were not permitted and, besides, they would never employ an orphan with no clue as to her parentage.
After I turned thirteen, the gentlemen students sometimes offered to let me stay in the rooms they hired in town or in Chattelhouse, the wattle-and-stone residential hall. I’d move in, then be ejected back to be bullied in the deprived and unbearable servants’ quarters, until I could find another Chattelhouse room. The boys never gave charity freely; they always pressed for sexual favoursin return. Indeed, one of them suggested that I become a prostitute so he could make some money-but I all wanted was to talk about medicine with them!
Many’s the time I tried to sleep on a boy’s couch and late at night he would loom in the doorway, turn back the covers and slip in next to me, his hands on my breasts and his penis hard. One man in particular would strew his apartment with pornographic pamphlets as a hint, and every morning he would demand…Well, Cyan, the things that happened were so awful I will not set them down on paper.
By the time I was thirty, Chattelhouse employed me as charwoman and cook in exchange for board. Some of the fourteen-year-old scholars grew to regard me as a mother far more approachable than the one who sent them away to study logic, rhetoric and grammar. One boy, whom I’ll never forget, developed an infatuation and spent his afternoons teaching me to read. He stammered and blushed his way into finding me a better job. At long last I could mop the Surgeons’ lecture theatre after lessons. The chalk scrawls left on the blackboard enthralled me. If I made myself scarce during the anatomy sessions I was allowed to lay out the instruments and clean them afterwards. Eventually I had my chance to attend! I placed the scalpels and saws on the bench, and then hid in the equipment cupboard and peered through its slats. If I had been discovered spying they would have cast me out, but I learnt exactly which implements to lay out for each lesson, so nobody had occasion to open the door.
Huddled in the dark with chinks of light shining on my face, I watched the dissections for years and years until I knew the procedures by heart-and here was the strange thing-they never changed. It was as if the professors couldn’t add to their knowledge because they had mastered everything-which, I reasoned, could not be the case if patients still died.
The young men on the tiered seats either sat carving their names in the benches or lapped up the professor’s witticisms. But I peered at the cadaver. Of course blood couldn’t move through the septum of the heart, which had no holes. Of course ligation after amputation would reduce deaths from shock caused by dipping the stump in hot pitch. He told them that dead flesh spontaneously generated maggots, while flies buzzed round his head and laid eggs on the hanged felon’s body right there on the bench.
He propounded the myth that Awian hearts are larger than those of humans because Awians have a higher sensibility for love, without considering for a minute that their wings might need a larger blood supply. He told them that Rhydanne children grow rapidly because they are savages, no better than animals. It never occurred to him to ask how else they would survive the mountain winters. It was clear to me that Rhydanne have short pregnancies and small babies because their mothers have narrow hips to make them better sprinters, a trait Rhydanne must needs inherit if their females choose to be caught by the fastest men.
It was unthinkable that a woman should set foot in the Barber-Surgeon’s library. With hindsight I’m thankful that I wasn’t filled with the books’ received wisdom. I had no framework to force my observations into. But I was consumed by my interest in medicine; I had to find out more. It was what I was for. Cyan, sometimes in life you will have to admit that you are wrong and alter the way you think. Cherish that process. Why do you think I’ve lasted so long? The entire discipline of medicine we have today owes itself to my belief, then as now, that knowledge can only be recovered from nature by close observation and practice, not through revered manuscripts or bombastic speech.
My dear, I am remembering my aggravation and losing the thread of my story, so let me simply say that I wondered why their wisdom did not accord with my notes. I questioned whether the gentry really knew better than me. Suffice it to add that Chattelhouse’s ‘long room’ latrines were over a cesspit so vastly deep that it was only emptied every two hundred years. And they wondered why they got plague.
Try to imagine me at the foot of a narrow spiral staircase to the dormitory, mopping the flagstones. It was evening so the tiny arched windows high on the walls gave no light whatsoever.
A student bounded down the stairs, making the rush lights gutter in their sconces. He tripped over my bucket and fell headlong measuring his considerable length on the floor. Dirty water slooshed down the corridor. The dice he had been tossing up and down in one hand rolled to a halt in the puddle at my feet and showed double six.
‘You stupid beldam!’ he howled, rubbing his knees. Although he was a vain Awian, he had adopted Morenzian clothes against the cold and damp-well, the style we wore in the year six twenty. He had a knee-length robe with the cape of his hood around his neck. His hood’s pointed tippet end hung down his back. He’d rucked the robe up in his belt, from which a silk purse dangled, the only ornamentation in his drab garb. The tops of his woollen hose were tied somewhere up under the robe with strings, his ankle boots were soft leather, and now they were soaking.
Lightning was dazzling in comparison, the first time I saw him. He had a white tunic with a long toga wound around his waist and over one shoulder, the one pulled back to keep his bowstring drawn and-well, I am getting ahead of myself.
I offered the hearty boy a hand to pull him up but he ignored it. ‘Look at my robe!’ he said petulantly. ‘It’s ruined! This cost more than you’ll ever see. Now I shall be late for the gaming table!’ He squeezed water out of his curly hair. ‘You seem to be amused. It’s not bloody funny. I shall report you to the Housekeeper.’
I began to answer but he stopped me. ‘I do not speak to servants. Obviously you don’t know who I am, but-’
‘You’re from Awia.’
‘I am the son of the Governor of Foin-third in line anyway. So you may-’
‘Everyone in your country seems to give themselves a title, so I’ve read.’ I righted my bucket and sloshed my mop about. The water was soaking through my shift and making my legs itch.
He retrieved his dice without answering. ‘Something you read…Hm?…Servant? You can read?’
‘Yes. Come with me and I’ll dry your clothes. I’ll make up some liniment for your knees as well. A bruised knee can swell badly since the body tries to cushion damaged joints.’
‘You sound more like a prelector than a servitor,’ he said carelessly.
‘Would that you could write my essays as well.’
‘Oh, but I can.’
That night, I did not sleep. I had explained all to Heron and my thoughts were in turmoil. I knew what to do, what I must do, and wondered if I dared. I heard the students clatter to the refectory. I opened the shutters and found it was already morning.
I began, behind the scenes, to do Master Heron Foin’s homework. At last I could air all my observations, my theories! I wrote the methodologies of his experiments, delineated hypotheses in novel articles. Heron became suddenly famous, and he knew how to use it; he was a consummate self-publicist. He set himself up as the foremost student, the pride of the college. He brought me more books, though he could never fathom why I wanted to learn.
Far from suspecting the fraud, the Chancellor awarded him the acclaimed prizes in anatomy, physiology and penmanship. He was even recommended to succeed Professor Pratincole. Heron’s conceit grew deeper. He loathed and resented the fact he was simply an actor, a mouthpiece for my work, while all and sundry told him he was a genius. They expressed surprise that he could pay so little attention to lectures, spend so much time on the playing fields and still make groundbreaking discoveries. He began to believe that he was doing the work, not me. He would throw me a half-remembered essay question. ‘And it has to be done tonight! If you don’t, I’ll tell the Housekeeper how often you hid in that cupboard. Just bear in mind what you owe me, Ella. You’re my servant, I raised you from “below stairs”, and you’ll have to go back there, anyway, because the damn freshmen are hinting at all kinds of relationships between us.’
Thank god I was grown too old for their sexual advances.
Then on the first of July the Emperor came to Hacilith. Governor Donacobius accompanied him into the town square. Everyone poured out and crowded around their caparisoned horses. I left my washing soaking in lye, dropped the shirt I was squeezing around a wringing post, and dashed to the window to listen. The Emperor himself proclaimed the Games. He announced that every man and woman regardless of age or background was welcome to compete in organised tournaments. San would share his immortality with the winners providing they were prepared to act as leaders in the war.
Many students left to try their skill at the Games, but as far as I could tell, they all came back in the following weeks, and very chastened. Life at the guild went on as normal.
Until, that is, Heron disappeared. On my morning visit I found his rooms vacated and I panicked. His landlord told me he’d gone to the front. Heron had been in communication with the Messenger and had suggested that the Circle needed a doctor. San agreed and asked him to come to Rachiswater to be tested by treating the casualties of the ongoing massacre. Everything I had worked for vanished instantaneously-what good was a rich student’s famulus without the student? Devastated, I returned to darning socks.
Less than a month later a letter arrived from the front, from my ‘grandson’. Its ink had run where Heron’s tears had hit the page. He begged me to come and help him. He was completely out of his depth with the number of men slashed and disembowelled. We had never seen an Insect up close and the injuries they caused horrified him. He had never dirtied his hands in the operating theatre and hadn’t the first idea how to organise a hospital. The assistants were afraid, he had lost his authority over them, and the Messenger was too busy to listen to his excuses.
Heron had included enough money in the scroll for me to bribe a fyrd captain to ride pillion on his cart when the next draft left town. So I came to the grimy field hospitals of Rachiswater and I soon had them under control. I know when a floor hasn’t been cleaned properly and I was not above showing the assistants how to do it. I improved or made comfortable the majority of the patients, organised supply chains of medicine from the capital, and upbraided Heron as if I really was his grandmother.
San noticed the progress and visited the infirmary. Heron greeted him and showed him in, bowing low and explaining the enhancements he had made, whilst blocking San’s view of me. The Emperor looked past him and saw me bloodied up to the elbows, trying to stabilise the condition of a maimed soldier. He came to question me and quickly understood that the improvements had coincided with my arrival so, as I worked, he joined me to the Circle and made me one of the immortals. It was my dream, what I was made for! At last I was in the right place!
That night, I was shown to a pavilion that would temporarily serve as my scriptorium. I sat down to write. Heron burst in, stinking of brandy.
He disentangled himself from the tent ropes and slurred, ‘I know the rules, you old bag. I’ve always learned the rules so I can work the system.’
I said, ‘Yes, and that’s all you do.’
He sneered. ‘San wants the best specialists. I suggested the Circle have a Doctor, and you walked in. That’s not fair. Well, I’m the next best doctor, so if you were to die I’d take your place.’ He drew his dagger and dived at me. I tried to dodge but his fist on the hilt caught my eye such a crack that I fell off the stool, onto my back on the grass.
In a trice he was on me. He raised the dagger above my throat. I had a vivid image of myself as a cadaver on the dissecting table. Female, aged seventy-eight, note cause of death; a single deep puncture. Carotid cut, thyroid and oesophagus pierced, sixth cervical vertebra shattered, spinal cord severed. I’d make a fine lesson! I braced myself to feel my blood spray.
The point arced down. A shout made Heron flinch. His dagger deflected and tore through my hood.
‘Fuck!’ he said, and glanced behind him. Then he turned as pale as if he’d been bleached.
The Castle’s Archer was standing at the entrance, bow flexed and an arrow unerringly trained on Heron. He said, ‘I only have to let go. And believe me, nothing would give me greater pleasure.’
Heron collapsed into a kneeling position.
Seeing his face, the Archer looked surprised, but only for a second. ‘Heron Foin?’
‘I’m sorry, my lord prince, I’m sorry.’ To my astonishment Heron began to grovel at the Archer’s feet. He changed to High Awian and wept apologies into the grass.
The Archer lowered his bow. ‘I know of you, Heron Foin. I know your father. Go home to the backwater little manorship you crawled from. If you harm our genius surgeon or even show your face here again, my brothers and I will take your hall apart until it is nothing but a field with stones in. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Yes! Yes!’
‘Get yourself out of my tent.’
Heron kissed the ground, jumped up and sped out. I never saw him again. I unpinned myself from the grass and dabbed my black eye with a handkerchief. I had never before heard a voice with such natural authority; it made even the professors sound strained. The Archer helped me to my feet, then bowed low and kissed my hand. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I would be honoured if you would call me Saker. What is your name?’
So, Cyan, you see how much I owe your father. Imagine how overwhelming life must have been for him in the early days of the Circle. Before the Games, the First Circle were no more than boastful mortal warriors leading a mass of untrained fyrd with swords and spears. The First Circle had lasted for two hundred and five years since San first drew them from three countries, but they gradually gave ground to the Insects all that time and left northern Awia to the Paperlands.
There was no effective way of fighting Insects then. The nobility and peasant levies simply fed the hordes and although the First Circle fought, manor after manor fell. We thought we were doomed. Your tutor may have taught you this, but don’t forget it really happened, and Lightning was there. A million corpses is not some story you tell children at bedtime!
The blizzard winter of six nineteen put an end to the First Circle. Those who weren’t eaten died of starvation, disease and exposure in snow holes by the Rachis river. Deep drifts covered the ruins of Murrelet.
San realised that the First Circle’s brave but stupid warriors weren’t enough. He needed the best to train fyrds. He needed an infrastructure to keep supplies flowing-cooks and doctors; and to keep knowledge from being lost-agriculturalists and armourers. He needed an administration to take decisions on his behalf on many battlefields simultaneously. In short, he needed people who could think in the long term, as he did.
When San revealed he could make other people immortal, everyone suddenly saw him in a new light. Before, he had relied on the goodwill of the governors to raise and lead fyrds; now everyone clamoured to join the Circle.
San also knew that the celebrations and ceremony of the Games would raise our hopes. He let us see our own capabilities. Our fighting spirit soared.
San kept his personal symbol, the Imperial Sunburst, and extrapolated it to invent all our Eszai names. With the First Circle gone, the Castle’s Breckan and Simurgh Wings stood empty, waiting for the victors of the Games. It was an exhilarating time. It threw us together, people from every stratum of society across the world and some with naught but the clothes they stood up in. I heard that Lightning arrived with a retinue of eight carriages of belongings and attendants, to discover that the rooms he was allocated by ballot were tiny compared with those he was used to. He divided his treasures among the new Eszai and filled all their rooms.
In the seventh century I discovered that sexism was not a glass ceiling but is present at all levels, in all classes. It was a glass web, and I threaded my way through it, cut by the strands I broke. San was the first to see my merit and your father was the first man truly to see me as an equal.
Since he has confided in me on many occasions, I suppose I am even more indebted to him for his friendship. It is impossible for you to understand a friendship of fourteen hundred years. You discover things about a person that you might not like, but it makes their virtues all the more admirable. I have the measure of Lightning and he has the measure of me.
I hope I have given you food for thought.
Send word with Comet if you need anything.
Love, Ella Rayne
That is food for thought. I folded the letter and placed it on the table. Cyan was putting the finishing touches to hers. ‘Will you deliver this?’ she asked. ‘I don’t have any sealing wax. Actually I don’t have bloody anything here.’
‘It’s all right, just fold it. I can take it to Rayne unsealed.’ I slipped her letter into my coat pocket and said, ‘But she might be too busy to reply. I haven’t seen anything like the crowds down there in my whole life before.’
‘Will you be able to come back at least?’
‘I’ll try to.’
‘You’re the only person who’s noticed me.’
I patted her shoulder but she shrugged away. She smelt of soap and birch bark chewing gum, reminding me how young she was for her years. Other seventeen-year-olds don’t make idiots of themselves by Challenging Lightning.
I went to the window and opened the shutters. In the still night I could hear the clucking of the hens kept by the guards in their room downstairs. Very bass in the distance, the bass toll of the town’s gatehouse bell rolled out over the moorland, thinning as it filled the expanse.
‘Midnight. I have to go.’
Cyan tried again, ‘This is a prison.’
‘Honestly, it’s for your own good. You should thank Lightning.’
‘I’ll kill him!’
‘Shame. Thought cage birds sang more sweetly than that.’
‘Well, if you won’t free me, then bugger off!’
‘I’ll send you up some bread and water ha ha.’
I climbed onto the plank, ran along it and launched myself off. I flapped to the town with broad, uneven strokes, and landed on the hall’s roof. I sat down on the ridge, wings drooping, and shook my hair down my back.
Below me the square was bustling with people. Around fifty of Rayne’s orderlies with their white sashes were pulling tables out of the tavern and constructing beds. Fyrd squads were sitting on the tables, assembling arrows from piles of shafts and glittering points. The hall was packed with governors, wardens and captains as Lightning briefed them on the advance.
All the oil lamps and spotlights burned fiercely. The stars were dim in comparison, while the thick clouds at the edge of the sky seemed banked up above the town walls, hemming us in.
I unfolded Cyan’s letter and read it.
Peel Tower Ten
Thursday
Dear Rayne,
Please will you help me get out of here? It’s not fair that i’m locked up-it’s just not fair. Daddy is cold & distant-like he always has been-and Jant says Daddy is like that most of the time. Will you ask him for me?
Apart from you and Jant everybody is ignoring me. I try to be independent, and i’m punished. Typical. Even Jant says i made a fool of myself. But i have put it behind me & i’m not thinking of it any more.
I don’t want to be stranded in here during the battle-i’m not afraid of what may happen. I want to see the advance-i can come to help you at the infirmary. I’m sick of trying to be a good girl, i just want to be free-please, if you’re really my friend, send a note to the guards and cancel Daddy’s orders. Thank you for writing-please write again.
Yours,
Cyan xxx (Lady Governor Cyan Peregrine)
Slake Cross Hospital
18th May
2.30 a.m.
Dear Cyan,
I’m sorry but neither Jant nor myself can let you out of the peel tower, given what is happening down here at the moment. But please do not despair, my dear. Bear out your imprisonment patiently and in time the awful things that are happening will bring you wisdom.
You are intelligent but you are not yet wise. Do not blind yourself with opinions drawn from your own intelligence, because even the cleverest people can be wrong if they do not examine solid facts.
Wisdom never comes from staying at home and avoiding unhappiness. In order to become wise you must go out into the world and be tossed about in its storms, stripped bare by terrible experiences and confused by good ones. After a long time you learn to see and control the effect those circumstances have on yourself. Then it will never matter one bit where you find yourself in the world, because you will be able to cope with it. The top of a peel tower or a Hacilith bar will be all the same to you if you are comfortably at home with yourself.
Now you are a little uncomfortable you are crying out for help. But you are a Challenger! You can’t be Eszai material at all if you are disturbed by a little inconvenience. Every Challenger is prepared to forgo pleasure and comfort in the pursuit of success. You are now a Challenger, so what are you complaining about? Hadn’t you better prepare yourself for the competition instead? In a sense it’s already underway, your father made the first move and now you are in check.
I thought you wanted to rebel, to put distance between yourself and Lightning. Then why on earth have you Challenged him as if you are yet another good archer? Everyone expects Lightning’s daughter to have a modicum of archery. I thought you were trying to re-create yourself. You must know that if you follow the career of a great man like your father, you will have to accomplish twice as much to shine. You won’t be able to shine in your own right if you’re known as another archer, because everybody knows Lightning is the best archer.
I doubt you have even thought about it-but of course, you don’t really want to compete with Lightning, you just want to escape from his shadow. Consider this-every Eszai and Challenger must submit to a much greater authority: that of the Emperor. None of us can escape San: not even Lightning. You rebel against your father and come under the power of a more authoritative man. Oh, Cyan, when you become wise you’ll realise that freedom is a teenager’s aspiration and illusion, and the world actually consists of varying degrees of compromise.
You say that Lightning is cold and distant. My dear, nothing could be further from the truth! He is passionate in the extreme! He must hide from his passions because they’re so strong. I could give plenty of examples, but I only have time to tell one, a secret to which Lightning never refers, and the other Eszai are too polite-or afraid-to mention.
Eighteen nineteen was a year in which everything changed. It was the year after Jant joined the Circle. Lightning was married and widowed in the same night, and his grief for Savory threw him into an almost catatonic state.
There had been no letters from Micawater. I taught doctors in the university. I sat in my room and read books. I did my daily rounds of the general hospital and came home tired but only in body; I was wondering how Lightning was. He was missed in court and at the front, at the King’s table and in the hunting stables. He had sequestered himself, to the exclusion of the real world. I am very much of the real world and, as his closest friend, I decided to pay him a visit.
Eighteen nineteen passed into eighteen twenty. On a freezing January night I arrived at your father’s palace to find the Lake Gate locked. The stone winged hounds stood rampant on the gateposts, rain dripping from their paws. I peered through the fine drizzle, but saw no lights shining in the bulk of the palace beyond the river.
I left my coach and followed the estate wall in the dark, until I came to the tradesmen’s little arched entrance. I hurried through and across the soaking lawns. I passed the grand staircase and instead knocked on the door of the kitchens in the basement.
Lightning’s steward brought me in and gave me supper. As well as his white apron, he wore a black crepe armband. He gathered a candelabra from the dresser and took a taper from the stove, talking all the while. He bent close to light the candles and whispered, ‘M’lord scares us. He sits alone for days, no meals, no sleep. He doesn’t bother to open the curtains and we don’t dare light the lamps in Main. Doctor, he’s wound up in himself and the manor go hang. Thought it best to warn you.’
He guided me, up out of the Covey cellars and through the silent, unlit palace. I think even you would find it discouraging, the building so majestic I felt it extending on both sides of me as we ascended to the main floor. The steward pressed on, past the drawing rooms.
Mourning cloths covered all the statues in the niches, reducing them to featureless, barely human shapes. The portraits had been turned to the wall; their blank backs faced us. I wondered at them, when there had never been any changes in your father’s house before; now I believe he wanted to rid himself of the mute, accusing glare of his ancestors.
The rooms leading off from the corridor were in impermeable darkness, but when light from the candelabra flickered in I glimpsed the furniture and objects of virtu standing in shades of grey. Dust sheets had been thrown over them, as when the servants expect Lightning to be absent for years on business. The chandeliers hung in thick wraps. Black linen masked the deep-framed mirror in the salon. The great gold clock had been deliberately stopped.
The ceilings may have been painted by the world’s greatest masters, but we walked past like thieves without looking up. A glimmer of candlelight shone under the door to the dining hall. The steward hesitated and looked at me anxiously. I nodded to reassure him; he gave me the candelabra and showed me through, then bowed and made a hasty retreat.
Lightning sat at the very end of the long table, halfway down the hall. He was leaning forward with his head down, resting in the crook of his arm. His reflection was blurred in the polished marble.
He was not aware of my presence. He picked an orange desultorily out of a bowl with his free hand and rolled it down the table without looking up. It rolled through the small gap between the legs of the silver centrepiece, out the other side and on for another five metres until it dropped off the end of the table beside me.
I put the candelabra down but Lightning did not acknowledge me. He picked another orange and sent it trundling straight down the middle of the table, through the centrepiece.
He was wearing a silk dressing gown and, over it, a very dirty and bloodstained Cathee plaid. He had wound it around his waist and over one shoulder with an automatic gesture from back when he used to wear a toga.
The rear of the hall was invisible in the gloom. I looked past Lightning, and at the edge of the darkness stood his grand piano, wreathed in paper music. Its keys were smeared thickly with dried blood.
The centrepiece was the same then as now, the small statue of a girl reclining on a couch. Lightning rolled another orange between its legs with an accuracy that was both considerable talent and long, long practice. The orange fell off the end of the table and joined several others on the carpet.
‘Talk to me,’ I said, but the room was so sombre it came out as a murmur. I pulled up a chair and sat down. His breath misted the table top. I touched his arm. ‘Come on, Saker. Speak to me.’
‘That chair…is two hundred years old.’
‘I’m not going to break your chair.’
He said nothing else.
‘What happened?’
‘I was married…’
‘I can see that.’
‘I was…’
‘Saker…’
‘…Married.’
‘I really think-’
‘Do you really? Leave me, Ella, please.’
He was still looking away from me. I put my hand to his cheek and turned his head. He complied, though his eyes were blank.
I said, ‘I’m-’
‘Going to leave me alone?’
‘Saker, please tell me the matter.’
‘Savory was killed. I tried to shoot the man but I…I missed my shot…I missed.’
‘It’s been three months,’ I said gently.
‘Three months is nothing. Nothing.’
‘Long enough for Challengers to prick up their ears.’
‘Challengers,’ Lightning sighed. ‘How you worry me. My heart is torn from my body and I’ll never heal. Ever. No matter how long I live. I weep every day. Savory was real, she was strong. In an ugly, unworthy world I had seen a hundred thousand and found just one to love…And everything I’d been through seemed worth it.’
His washed-out voice continued ‘…When I close my eyes I see images of her. Smiling in the village. Shooting at the butts. My mind flicks through still pictures shockingly quickly, as if I’m constantly waking from sleep…It seems odd that I was really in Cathee.’
‘Yes.’
‘How could Savory have come from among such a people? They…I should…well, in a hundred years the birds will have eaten them every one…’
For all my fourteen centuries I hadn’t lived long enough to know what to say. I tried, ‘You’re missed at the Castle.’
‘Already?’ He looked away abjectly. ‘I feel that if just one more thing goes wrong, everything will fall apart. Just one tiny thing and I’ll go mad. There were hundreds of things I should have told her and never had the time.’
‘I’m sure she already knew. Sentiments sound crude when voiced, precious when understood in silence.’
‘Oh, Ella. She was perfect, and I’m such a fool.’
‘You are no fool.’
‘Maybe I have been…but now I have some of her blood in me. I can carry it for the rest of immortality.’ He began to stroke his palm.
‘Let me see your cut.’
He extended his hand to me and opened it. I saw the wound shining, encrusted with dried blood. He had kept it open to the white fan of bone.
So, Cyan, you must see Lightning as a person, not just as your father. There is no point in thinking about death because no amount of thinking will arrive at an answer. He had to return to the Castle. He still has not properly recovered from Savory but the Circle needs him. The Kingdom of Awia needs him, too; who’s to say that without Lightning’s generosity and sense of order their aristocracy wouldn’t have dissolved into something akin to the pack of wolves who run Morenzia.
Cyan, I must go now. I have been writing this letter in between giving orders to prepare for tomorrow’s advance. I apologise for my deteriorating handwriting: it is about four a.m.
The Eszai and soldiers will be exhausted for days after this-I have seen men in full armour come in off the battlefield and sleep where they fall. For twenty-four hours straight they’re even oblivious to the cries of the wounded and nothing rouses them except extreme physical danger. So, Cyan, if nothing seems to be happening directly the dam gates open, and if Jant doesn’t visit you, be patient.
I shall give this letter to him now and go to check the preparations in the hospital.
Yours with love,
Rayne
I collected the letter from Rayne with a stack of last-minute dispatches. The rest I gave to my couriers to deliver.
Rayne’s scale of organisation was incredible, and only one part of the preparations heaving the town into action. She had called all her surgeons and doctors drafted with the rest of the fyrd and given them their chain of command. Anyone else in the fyrd who had medical knowledge-first-aiders and nurses-reported to the doctors.
She was preparing to take over the hall as well as the hospital and tavern, because as soon as San is out of the hall tomorrow morning it will be the overspill for intensive care. The medical supplies had been divided into each site and guards kept a sharp eye on them.
Her hundreds of stretcher teams had received their orders. She was stocking the two enormous pavilions inside the canvas city’s gate to be used as triage. Dressing stations were being set up on the road behind the troops, as the battalions were already starting to assemble. She had girls at every station to count the casualties coming in, or record dog tags and remove the dead.
The dawn air was cool and fresh. The first light of a new day rose pale gold on the horizon. A last word with the Emperor as the Imperial Fyrd were arming and I swept up into the air. One hundred and fifty thousand men were marching out of town to take up their positions.
I helped direct each battalion into the enormous formation. From the air, the ground filled with men like a fluid jigsaw, pouring into squares of colour. The battle array was one of our many familiar standard plans-Insects are predictable so we have honed the perfect ways to face them in different situations. But this was on a massive scale, taken to an extreme. We had never fielded anything like these numbers before. The front of the host was three kilometres long. It was incredible, just incredible.
I was busy keeping the multitudes in line, with some difficult flying between the enormous host, the town and the canvas city. While one battalion was being eased into place, the next was lining up behind it, then decanted up along the flank to fill their patch. I ordered, threatened and encouraged the wardens depending on their personality. I wove an aerial web linking the Eszai to one another. In the distance I could always see the lake and the dam. The lake was silted and filthy, coffee-coloured brown, with fuliginous shapes and rafts of detritus bobbing in it like broth.
Sirocco the Javelin Master’s ranks were filling in behind Lourie’s pikemen. The Javelin Master arranged his battalions with great expertise so, while the last ranks were aligning, the front didn’t lose coherence. I had a spare second, so I swept away to the edge of the field, and Cyan’s peel tower.
The shutters were hooked back wide. Cyan was leaning out, her bare shoulders high as she propped herself with straight arms on the ledge. She was watching the movement of people on the entire ground: from the fresh earth embankments of the canvas city into the extreme distance the road was solid with tight companies of lancers trotting past archers on foot, trailed by dogs pulling diminutive arrow carts, whole divisions of infantry sitting on the verge awaiting their turn to march.
I dropped down, feet together, onto the plank. The draught of my wings tangled Cyan’s hair.
‘What do you think?’ I leant back, sweeping my arm at the colourful, clinquant steel expanse of troops behind me.
‘It’s exhilarating! The Empire’s sheer might.’
I nodded. ‘Here’s a letter from Rayne.’
A gust of wind snatched it out of her hand, but I caught it. ‘Don’t drop it! And for god’s sake don’t let anyone else read it. If I were you, I’d burn it when I’ve finished with it.’
‘How do you know?’ asked Cyan.
I boinged up and down on the end of the plank. ‘I just imagine it’s full of Rayne’s advice. You don’t necessarily have to listen to her. Other people’s advice is from their own experience and you won’t reach your full potential following it.’
‘Not more advice.’ Cyan gave a mock grimace. She shrugged and her ruby pendant rolled down the cleft of her breasts in the bodice.
I pointed at the dam. ‘Watch for the great wave when we open the gates!’
‘Will you come back and tell me the news?’
‘Your wish is my command!’
‘I wish that was always the case.’
I grinned at her and raised my arms, bouncing on the end of the board. Two more jumps, higher, and I sprang up, arced out backwards, hugged in my legs and described two perfect somersaults.
Falling high above the road, I stretched out my arms in a swallow dive. I opened my wings and curved out over the soldiers’ heads, gliding so fast I didn’t have to beat my wings once.