The City (35 page)

The horror had happened so quickly that the other boys were running to help, unaware that Jan was dead before they had even moved. Two boys, their swords out, reached the corpse at the same time as the other dogs arrived. One ran his sword through the dog which had Jan’s leg in its jaws. The thrust was sure and the dog died instantly. Another, a grey animal with heavy, dripping jaws, leaped at the boy, then collapsed, whining, as Arish’s sword hacked at its neck.

Arish shouted, ‘Back! Back!’

‘We can take them!’ Ranul cried, turning towards the black beast which was crouched at the corpse’s shoulder, chewing, its tiny black eyes never leaving the boys.

‘We can’t, Ranul! If they attack as a pack we can’t survive.’

As Ranul approached the black leader, his eyes fixed to the dog’s, his sword up, a second animal ran in suddenly from the side and leaped at the boy. At the last moment Ranul brought his arm up so that the beast missed its target and instead caught the boy by the upper arm. The two fell in a writhing, struggling heap and the other boys ran forward. A blow from the hilt of Ranul’s sword forced the dog to let go and retreat. Ranul, his face white, blood pouring from bites in his arm, was helped back to the safety of the fires. Arish and Sami stood with swords raised, ready to spear any dog that followed, but the pack were only interested in dismembering Jan’s body. The two boys backed away behind the fires.

Ranul tore off his sleeve and looked at the jagged wounds. His face was white as he wiped off the saliva and blood.

‘We were lucky,’ he confessed. ‘By rights they could have had us all. Jan was stupid,’ he added. Arish thought he had been stupid too, but he said nothing.

When his wounds had been dressed, Ranul looked up at Arish. ‘Climbing a tree seems a good plan,’ he agreed. ‘But then what? We are still without water and food. Our people will not come looking for us for days. Then they will find only starved corpses hanging from a tree.’

‘One of us can run for rescue,’ Arish told him. ‘The dogs will not chase running meat if it is hanging in a tree just out of reach.’

‘One of us?’

‘I will go.’

‘So you run to safety, Cub, while the rest of us act as bait?’

Masking his irritation, Arish shrugged. ‘You run then. Or Riis. Or Parr.’

‘It’s a good plan,’ admitted Sami quietly. ‘And Arish is the fastest runner. He should go.’

Eventually the dogs finished their meal and trotted away from the mess of red and white bones, no doubt seeking somewhere to rest. The boys all rested too, until the sun was high in the sky. Then they set off, burning brands in hand, each of them trying to look all ways at once, towards the treeline. At last they found a tree that was perfect. It had no branches lower down and the bigger boys had to boost the others up. But the branches on which they perched were heavy and thick, and ran parallel to the ground. When they were all safely up there, out of the pack’s reach, they relaxed for the first time in two days. Except for Arish, who was busy packing all their remaining water into his backpack, with Sami’s firesticks and a little dried meat. He glanced at the sun and saw he had several hours before it set. If he did not reach safety by then, he would have to find another tree to roost in.

The dogs were not in sight, which meant nothing, but even if they could see him he thought it was unlikely they would follow, with rich boy-meat in their bellies. His brain told him this, but his stomach was uncertain. Trying to think only of the map he held in his head, he slithered down the tree and without hesitation set off for the northwest.

For the first few leagues the boy ran with his heart in his throat, spooked by every sound. At times he was convinced he heard padding paws behind him, but when he looked round there was nothing. After a while he began to relax, his breathing became even and his stride lengthened. He ran with the falling sun at his left shoulder, and he rested that night in the branches of a giant oak.

When the sun reappeared the next morning, he realized he could see the blue roof of the Adamantine temple gleaming through the trees. He was only a short walk away from his target. He reached the building shortly after dawn and blurted out his story to the waiting
soldiers. A detachment of riders, with spare horses, set off the way he described, and by sundown the five other boys had been brought back in safety. They were all, even Ranul, laughing and joking about the close shave they’d had, preening themselves in front of the seasoned soldiers who had rescued them.

The next day the six boys were arrested and charged with killing the emperor’s dogs, for which the penalty was death.

IT WAS JUST
before dawn at old mountain and the sun still lingered below the jagged horizon. The sky above was the colour of opals but the land was dark. The mountains all around were painted in various shades of black, crowned or capped in wet grey mist. Between them the deep valleys, clothed in lush rainforest, lay waiting for the sun to adorn them in shining droplets of diamond and pearl.

Indaro was dressed in leathers and furs, but the moisture from the low-hanging clouds had seeped through the gaps in her clothing, dripping from her hair down under her collar, trickling into her boots. Her feet were bare in the fur lining, because she liked to feel the soft rabbit pelt between her toes, but she had been standing on the mountain for more than an hour and the coney was starting to feel clammy against her skin.

She cleared her mind of thoughts of discomfort and closed her eyes. She could feel the sun’s growing light on her face and soon she would feel its warmth. This was the fifth morning in a row she had made the long climb in semi-darkness up to the top of the mountain, hoping to see the sunrise. Sheeting rain and heavy cloud had been her reward on four occasions. Mason had predicted she would be lucky today, and it appeared he was right. Indaro stretched her spine, lifting her face, ready for the touch of the sun’s rays. Nudged by the movement, a cold trickle of cloudwater ran
down her back and she shuddered. She cleared her mind again and waited for the sun.

She waited and waited then, rising impatience bursting through her practised calm, she opened her eyes. Out of nowhere the mist to the east had thickened. Ahead of her the Gate of the Sun – the deep cleft between the mountains where the new sun should appear – had completely vanished under a blanket of cold dark cloud. There would be no sunrise today. Again.

Behind Indaro the two girls giggled and she turned and frowned down at them.

‘I don’t know why you think this is funny,’ she said grumpily. ‘It means you’ll both have to climb up here again tomorrow.’

They laughed out loud then, as though they could guess what she said. They both jumped up and, gesturing her to follow, started bounding back down the mountain, confident and sure-footed in their hide boots despite the poor light. She trailed down more slowly, watching her feet, knowing they would have to wait for her to catch up. They were supposed to be her guards, after all.

This morning marked the end of her hundredth day of captivity.

At first she had tried to escape. In her small white cell there was a window, open and unbarred, high above her head, and she spent fruitless hours plotting how to reach it and wasted all her energy trying to do so. There was no furniture in the little room, only a clean mattress to sleep on and a bucket. Try as she might, she could find no way of fashioning an escape device with a soft mattress and a wooden bucket. But frustration led her to throw herself at the wall, leaping over and over again to reach the high sill. Twice she knocked herself out, and in compassion or perhaps irritation her captors finally moved her to a cell with no windows.

She had spent the first days in the prison at Old Mountain fearing the horrors of torture and slow death, and as these fears slowly faded they were replaced by anxiety for Doon and Fell and the others. But it was more than a month before she was able to ask after her friends, for none of her captors spoke her tongue. The women were small and neat, with dark skin and eyes, dressed uniformly in wool shirts and skirts, and they smiled at her when they brought her food and emptied the bucket. After a while she started talking to them, telling them about her father and the grey house on the Salient, and her brother Rubin, and her friendship with Doon, but she did not
speak of the war or the battles she had endured. They listened to her politely, and she watched their eyes as she spoke, occasionally saying something to shock or surprise, but their faces stayed polite but bland and she truly believed they did not understand her.

On the first chill morning of autumn she had spent a sleepless night trying to keep warm under thin blankets when there was a knock at her cell door and, after a courteous delay, a man walked in carrying a pile of blankets and a second mattress. He placed them on the bed, saying, ‘You’ll need these. The nights will get colder.’

Backed against the wall, she watched him, afraid for the first time in weeks. A man who spoke her language, and could understand her words. Would the interrogation start now? Was he what they were waiting for?

He looked around. ‘I meant to bring a stool to sit on,’ he told her, then shrugged and sat on the floor, his back to the closed door. He was beyond middle age, burly, clean-shaven, with grey hair and a lantern jaw. ‘My name is Mason,’ he said.

She was silent, and he added, ‘And you are Indaro Kerr Guillaume.’

A thousand times she had contemplated her interrogation, particularly in the dark hours at dead of night, and she had resolved to say nothing, ask nothing. But, lulled by her treatment thus far, she found herself asking, ‘What of my friends? Are they alive?’

Mason nodded. ‘They are very much alive. Stalker had surgery on his ankle. He may be walking again soon, though he will always carry a limp, the surgeon tells me.’

He watched her, waiting for another question, a comment, but she was silent and she remained wordless for many days.

Climbing back down the mountain in the dawn light she broke out from the jumble of thick vegetation on to the lip of a path where her two guards waited for her before plunging down the final stretch to their mountain home. Indaro paused, as she always did. Old Mountain sat on a sloping saddle of rock slung between two mountain peaks. At the highest end of the saddle were low, grey buildings huddled around a massive stone keep. Lower down, to the west, the land sloped more steeply and had been terraced to offer flat terrain for crops. Sheep and goats were brown and white dots. On either side of the saddle, the cliffs dropped vertically to deep green river valleys far below. There was only one way up to Old Mountain,
she had been told, which is why it had never been conquered. Taken by treachery, besieged and starved out, but never conquered.

Indaro looked around her at the jagged green and grey peaks stretching off into the distance on all sides. She could hear nothing but a distant bleating. She took a deep draught of morning air. Its cleanness and clarity fizzed through her veins like wine, and she wanted to laugh out loud. The two girls looked up at her.

‘Let’s go,’ she told them, and together they walked back down to her prison.

After that first visit Mason came to see her most days. She refused to speak to him and he seemed not to mind. He was happy to listen to his own voice, telling her stories of Old Mountain, tales of his childhood, musing on philosophy and history and the music of the stars. He seldom asked her questions, but when he did and she did not answer he would nod to himself, as if she had said something insightful, then carry on talking. She wondered who he was and why he was devoting so much time to a common soldier. He had been a warrior himself, she was sure, by the way he held himself and by his vocabulary. He spoke with no accent, and could have blended easily with the residents in the City. He was not dark-skinned like her little guards or the leader of the riders who had brought them here. But the enemy came in many skin shades. Mason was not a cruel man, she decided, but neither was he her friend.

One day he stopped coming, and she missed his visits more than she would have expected. The subsequent days crept by with appalling slowness until one morning a guard, whom she called Gala, entered the cell with a pile of books in her arms. She squatted and placed them neatly in the corner of the cell and, gesturing to them, said, ‘Mase.’ She tipped her head and Indaro nodded.

‘Mason,’ she said. ‘From Mason.’

They were all on the subject she had listened to him talk about so many times – the history of Old Mountain and its people. But their range was wider and deeper, and the books dealt with not only far-ago history but more recent days, their allied neighbours, and politics. Reading for hours each day she absorbed the stories uncritically. And when she first read about the City she did not recognize it immediately, for it had another name. When she realized what she was reading about she threw the book down in disgust. On Gala’s next visit Indaro pressed the books into her arms and gestured
to her to take them away. She was offended that Mason believed her so naïve, such an easy dupe.

The next day he arrived at her cell at the usual time, the wooden stool in one hand.

‘You didn’t want the books I sent you?’ he asked, seating himself against the door.

‘I am not a fool, Mason,’ she said, although she knew it was pride talking and he had used it against her to make her speak.

‘I was not aware I had treated you like one.’

She convinced herself she was justified in speaking in defence of the City. ‘I am not a child to be influenced by … fantasies of the tyrannical City and the peace-loving Blues.’

He shrugged and spread his hands. ‘I thought you must be bored and I found some books for you. This is a fortress, not your Great Library. There were few books to be had, particularly in your tongue. I’m sure you are familiar with all the arguments for and against the war, and whether it can be prolonged without the deaths of all of us. I’m sure these are common currency among both our peoples, in inns and homes throughout the City as they are in our own. I did not seek to offend you by offering you such familiar arguments.’