The City (58 page)

She was aghast. Until then she had refused to take the words ‘suicide mission’ to heart. ‘Will you not come back?’ she asked him.

‘If we survive,’ he told her, gazing into her eyes to see if she understood him, ‘I will return for you when I can, but it might not be for a while, so you must be patient. Yes, we might not come back at all. There is another soldier you can trust. His name is Riis. I have told him where you will be. If he lives, he will come to you and see you are safe.’

He fell silent and she stared at him. ‘If,’ he said at last, ‘no one comes for you after several days, then you must assume the mission has failed and we are all dead.’

‘And Father? What will happen to him now?’

‘I expect they have taken him to the dungeons. I will find him.’

‘The dungeons?’ A flicker of memory teased the back of Em’s mind.

‘He will not be killed immediately, or he would have been left dead in the barn. And from tomorrow the palace will be in too much of an uproar for anyone to bother with one old man. If we succeed I will get him out. I promise you.’

‘We owe you so much,’ she had said simply.

He had shrugged, as if he did not care what she thought. He was so brave. She wondered if there had ever been a time in his life when he was frightened, or apprehensive, as she always seemed to be. She thought it impossible.

So she lay in her bed and watched him sleep and willed the day to pass slowly. It had started raining again.

Bart’s belly was empty when he was captured at dawn, and it was not long before it began to cramp. He endured the pains stoically, trying to ignore them, trying to sleep on the cold wet prison stones, trying not to think. The cramps slowly drifted away, as he knew they would. It was not the first time he had been half starved.

But when the torment of thirst started to claw at him, the old soldier abandoned his plan to give in and die. He rolled slowly over and sat up. He dragged out a shirt-tail and tore off a strip to use as a bandage. The pain of forcing his broken fingers back into place
was almost more than he could bear. He sat sweating and nauseous for a long while. Then, using one hand, he crawled over to the door. He felt around in the dark. The door joined the floor snugly; he could not even get a finger under it. But the cell had clearly been flooded more than once. Firmly putting aside that thought, he found a place where the wood was soft, almost spongy, and picked at it with stubby fingertips, trying to find some purchase, but he merely got splinters in his good hand. He needed a tool of some sort. He started methodically searching the floor of the cell, first the drier part then, reluctantly, the flooded area. He found debris aplenty, all of it rotted and slimy. And he found the end of a narrow pipe where clearly water flowed into the cell or out of it again, but it was firmly cemented in.

When he was close to giving up he found something hard under his searching fingertips. He held it, turning it round and round, feeling its contours. It was metal, thin as a pin but flaring at one end, about the length of his thumb. It felt frighteningly flimsy, but it was all he had. He dragged himself back to the door and started to pick at the wood.

As he worked he realized he was not in the Dungeons of Gath, as he had first believed. Those dreadful cells were for prisoners who were to be kept alive, for torture, or for some other purpose of the emperor. To be kept alive they had to be fed, however frugally, and all the doors were reinforced at the base with metal, and fitted with grilles which opened for food to be slid in.

This chamber, into which a hundred men could have been packed, was either an oubliette, where prisoners were locked away and simply forgotten, or a temporary holding cell. He had heard the main palace dungeons were underwater, but there were other prisons beneath the palace. He did not know them all. He briefly allowed himself a happy fantasy in which the invading soldiers of Fell’s army would find his cell and release him, and he would join them, storming up the tunnels, bursting into the Keep, capturing the emperor and condemning him to death as he begged and wept.

Sitting in the pitch dark, scraping at a stout wooden door with a tiny pin, his courage faltered suddenly and he sat in hopeless misery for a while. Then he roused himself and started again.

No sounds reached him in the cell, no distant crying or screaming, no shouted orders or whispered conversations, nothing but his own rasping breath and a sinister glugging from the pipe in the corner
of the chamber. And the scuttling and scratching of rodents. So he heard the clump of boots at some distance and he stopped, waiting. The bootsteps became louder and he dragged himself away from the door.

The painful glare of light poured in and he put an arm across his eyes, cowering against expected violence. There was a soft thud of something being thrown on the floor, then the door slammed and the bootsteps marched away. Bartellus felt around and found a soft cloth with hard shapes in it – biscuits. He thrust them into his shirt before the rats could get them. And a water skin. He drank gratefully, knowing now that he was to be kept alive – for what?

When he went to work again it was with a fresh urgency.

It was after noon and Evan had been down to the bakery and returned with a fresh loaf. He and Em sat on their beds eating the warm, pungent bread, while he told her one of his stories about a battle he had been in with her father, although Bartellus had been general and Evan just a dirty grunt, he said. It was a tale full of heroism and humour and Emly drank in every word, her eyes wide, her lips parted in anticipation of the next adventure. She knew it was partly, possibly all, invention, but she loved to hear him talk and she knew he loved to see her so entertained.

He roared with laughter when he finished his story, and she laughed delightedly, although the punchline was baffling to her. Then he leaned back against the wall, finishing off the last crumbs of bread that had fallen down his tunic.

‘Where do you come from, Evan?’ she asked, keen to keep up the intimate atmosphere. But his good humour slipped away like water down a drain, and he narrowed his eyes. Then, as she watched him, he relaxed again. She guessed it was a reflex in him to be suspicious of questions.

‘From a country far in the north-west. Its people call it Gallia, but in the City it is known as the Land of Mists.’

‘Is it beautiful there?’ Em could not remember a time when she had not lived within walls of stone and brick. She glanced out of the grubby window to see rain sheeting down a brick wall an arm’s length way.

He shook his head. ‘I left when I was a child. I do not remember it. Sometimes,’ he paused, his eyes gazing into the past, ‘sometimes
I think I remember a blue lake and a waterfall. But perhaps it was something someone told me.’

‘Did you come here with your parents?’ She was always eager for stories of mothers and fathers, of families living their lives together.

He picked more crumbs off his chest. ‘No. I was brought here as hostage. There were many of us boys, sons of distant kings and tribal leaders, all allies of the City. We were brought here to be trained in the ways of war, and as hostages for our lords’ good behaviour. I was the very last, the youngest of them. Me and my brother.’

‘Where is your brother?’

‘Dead.’

‘What was his name?’

‘Conor.’

‘I have a brother too. His name is Elija.’ Then she said, ‘Did you ever go home again, to your parents?’

‘No.’

‘What happened to them?’

‘They died.’

His face was sad, but Em felt a selfish spark of satisfaction, for it was another thing that tied them together – they were both orphans.

She thought about what he had said, then wondered, ‘Why were you the last? Did the emperor decide it was cruel to treat little boys that way?’ For it certainly was, she thought, unconscious that as a child she had suffered in ways that were unknown to him.

He grinned at her, his good humour restored. ‘No, I don’t think the emperor saw the error of his ways. There are no more allies,’ he explained. ‘No more kings to pay tribute. They’ve all been destroyed by the armies of the City.’

‘All of them?’

‘There are lands far away, across the sea, where maybe they don’t fear the City. But everywhere we know, for hundreds of leagues around, there is only desolation and death. The City has no allies left, only enemies, and soon it will have destroyed them all.’

She had never spoken of this with anyone before, because Bartellus refused to discuss politics, as he called it, and poor Frayling, the only other constant in her recent life, knew nothing of events outside the walls. She felt very grown-up, discussing these matters with a warrior of the City.

She hesitated, for she was reluctant to offend him, but she asked in a small voice, ‘But you are a soldier. You have been part of this.’

She thought he was not going to answer her, but at last he looked at her and asked, ‘Have you seen those big flocks of birds? In the autumn. They fly around in the sky, they look like smoke, twisting and turning all together, like one big smoke-bird. Have you seen them?’ He waited for her to nod, then said, ‘You have never seen one bird decide to go another way, have you, for it would die on its own. Soldiers are like those birds. They do what all the other soldiers do, or else they will die. And when you’re fighting each day, just trying to stay alive, and keep your friends alive, you don’t think of what you’re doing, whether it’s right.’

She held her breath, not wanting to break his thread of thought. He said, ‘It takes something … valuable to happen to make you see what you’re doing is wrong, to set you back on the right path.’

‘Did something valuable happen to you?’

‘I met someone,’ he said absently, staring at his hands.

She waited, but he was not going to explain. She guessed he meant Fell Aron Lee, the warrior hero whose fate would shape all their futures. Evan’s face was tender, reflective. He was drifting away from her, no longer thinking of her. His dirty blond hair, which was shaved short as any soldier’s when they first met, had grown over the months and now it curled in tendrils at his neck. He was clean-shaven and she could see more than one scar marking his face. She remembered the S-shaped brand on his arm, and felt a movement in her loins that was painful in its intensity. She moved from her bed and sat beside him. She put her arms around his chest and nuzzled her face into his neck. He smelled of sweat and bread and an exotic male smell which made her heart race.

She felt him tense, then he carefully disengaged her arms, picked her up by the shoulders and placed her back on her own bed.

‘We should have sex, Evan,’ she said, trying to sound matter-of-fact, as if suggesting a walk in the rain.

‘No. We shouldn’t,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

‘You are too young.’

Brought up in the Halls as she had been, Emly was very familiar with human congress in all its forms. And she knew she was not too young. Her body was shrieking to her that she was not.

‘No, I’m not,’ she stated, and she smiled at him knowingly and thought she saw a flicker of indecision in his eyes.

‘And you are the daughter of Shuskara,’ he added. ‘He would cut off my balls and string them up to make a necklace with my ears and toes.’ He grinned at her and she knew she would not sway him. Then he suddenly stood. ‘I must go,’ he told her. ‘I’ll be back before nightfall.’ And he left the room before she could take a breath.

The rain was so heavy, the attic room so dark, that it was hard for Em to tell when the long day came to an end. She waited, anxious and bored, playing over and over again in her mind her advance to the soldier and his reaction. She tried to think about her new life with the librarian, as housekeeper, but she could not picture it for if it came to pass it would mean that her father and Evan were both dead.

When he came back the room was dark, lit only by the two oily candles. He was carrying his worn leather sword-belt and a roll of cloth which he dumped on the floor. It clattered, metal on metal, and she guessed it contained more weapons, knives perhaps. Evan was preparing for war, and she could not go with him.

She was lying under her winter coat again, for the bakery had closed hours before and the room was cooling quickly. Evan glanced at her, his face expressionless. She wondered what he was thinking. Lifting her hands to her hair, she pulled out the ribbon and let it down, then sat up so it flowed over her shoulders. She looked into Evan’s face and, holding him with her eyes, she threw off the coat and stepped out of the bed, naked. She walked up to him and stood close, her nipples brushing his chest. He did not move. She reached up and put her hands round his neck, then stood on tiptoes and kissed him. He was much taller than her and she had to draw his head down. For a moment she thought he was going to reject her again, but then his mouth softened against hers. He kissed her for a long time, and she felt his body heat and his hardness.

He picked her up and laid her gently on his bed.

RIIS THOUGHT THE
booming beat of his heart must be audible to anyone as he crept through the corridors of the midnight Keep.

He had spent his soldiering career facing his enemies from horseback, bearing down on them with a scream, protected by his armour and a moving mountain of flesh and bone. He was unused to stealth in any area of life. And the profound silence all around oppressed him more than the dark and the atmosphere of dread in the emperor’s redoubt.

The two guards at the doors to the Keep had presented no problem. They had stood obediently to attention, staring ahead, as the new commander of the Thousand wandered by. He had placed himself between them, greeting them amiably. With two swift strokes of his long knife he slashed the throat of one and spun on the other, who only had time to get his sword half raised before the knife pinned him through the eye. Easy, Riis thought. Too long at their posts, bored beyond reason. When was the last time they had been attacked here in the heart of the palace? Never.

He had debated if it was worth disposing of the bodies. No guards at the door would raise the alarm as swiftly as dead ones. But in the end he dragged them to a dark spot under nearby stairs – it might give him a few moments.