Alexandria (10 page)

Lia sits on the corner of her small bunk and runs her fingers through her long hair to loose out the tangles. The other girls are bustling about, making their beds and folding their nightgowns, stowing them away in their little cubbies and getting dressed for the day. They smooth down the wrinkles on their linen dresses and pull on their leather slippers. Sena sits calmly by the fire, nursing one of her babies. She has taken to bringing them around to show off to the girls. The other infant rests in a low bassinet off to the side of the mantle and Jeneth makes googly eyes at her. The baby girl peels out a spirited giggle when Jeneth pops up, then returns immediately to stoic seriousness every time she ducks away and hides. Phoebe watches with total amusement.

“She likes you,” says Sena.

“I love babies. She’s so quiet, doesn’t she ever cry?”

“She’s my good one. This little guy here is the troublemaker.”

“Can I hold her?”

“Of course, here.” Sena scoots forward and helps lift the baby into her arms.

Jeneth’s eyes mist over as she looks at the tiny face. “Oh, I want one just like her.
She’s so cute.”

Sena smiles and rocks back. There is a knock at the door.

“Lia, Haylen,
you ready to go?”

It’s the kitchen steward come to round up the girls for their morning duties. Everyone is running late today—they stayed up well past their bedtime, playing games and talking around the fireplace.

“Hold on, almost ready,” yells Haylen.

Lia pads across the hardwood floor and waits outside by the door. She looks beyond the amphitheatre and off in the distance some of the young boys are being led to the fields for a day of planting. Jack is nowhere to be seen. She hasn’t seen him or heard of him in over a month and it worries her. She bottles it up and puts her smile on.

“Good morning,” she says to the steward.

“Good morning, Lia. What’s taking Haylen so long?”

“She’s lazy,” she says, and sways back and forth, twirling her dress. The steward laughs.

Finally Haylen joins them and they make the slow climb up the service stairs to the top floor to start work.

Calyn swirls around the kitchen like a tornado, stoking fires and shouting orders. They are preparing a lavish dinner for Arana and his warriors, and the frenetic pace keeps the girls busy, moving from pantry to prep room and back again. On the central island there are dozens of quail laid out, their tiny eyelids closed and their limp bodies looking oddly peaceful.

“Girls, good, come over here.” She beckons Lia and Haylen to join her by the array of dead quail. “Have you gutted a bird before?”

“Ewww.”

“I take it you haven’t. It’s easy enough. Haylen, I’ll have you pluck and Lia, you’ll gut.” Calyn pulls them around to the far end and picks up one of the floppy birds and demonstrates how to fix it. Lia scoops up the bird as though she might still hurt it in death, then reaches inside the cavity carved out by Calyn and grabs the slimy innards with her petite hand and drags them out onto the countertop.

“Easy as that. Good job, now toss them in the bucket.” Calyn pats them on the shoulder and scurries into the prep room to get everyone organized.

Lia and Haylen set themselves to their task, chopping, plucking, slitting and gutting until one side of the counter is piled high with bald, eviscerated quail.

A sunny young woman with her hair wrapped around her head in braids walks through the service entrance and takes a few steps into the kitchen. She bites her lip and looks around.

“Calyn?”

“Who’s that?” says Calyn from the prep room, wringing her hands into her apron.
“Elise.”
They hug each other like sisters and Calyn takes her hand and leads her inside. “Lia, this is Elise. This is the young woman I told you about.”

“Hello, girls. We’ve been so busy downstairs I could hardly get away until today. How’ve you been, Calyn?”

“Getting along. Say hello, girls.”

“Hello,” says Haylen.

Lia looks up shyly, her arms covered to the elbow in blood and gore. “Hello.”

“Keeping the girls busy, I see.”

“Always a big rush. Go ahead and get cleaned up, girls, it’s about time for a break anyway.”

Lia washes off in a scrub bucket and Calyn sets a few chairs around a small table situated in a corner nook.

Calyn calls Bree in from the prep room. “Would you run and tell Ezbeth that Lia and Haylen will take their lunch up here with me today? Come here, Elise, let me look at you.” She holds Elise’s blushing face in her hands. “Pretty as ever. Sit down, make yourself comfortable, I’ll fix us something to eat. Lia, would you grab that little bowl of fruit I set up on the shelf there?”

Calyn fetches some slices of salted pork from the pantry and has Haylen fix a few vegetable salads, and they spread this small banquet out on the table in the dining nook. They sit down to eat and Calyn and Elise get carried off in small talk, going on about their families and their work.

“Jorrie made me this,” says Elise, showing off an intricate metal broach with turquoise stones set in a star pattern, pinned at her right shoulder, holding her robe-like gown together.

“It’s beautiful. He does good work.”

Elise turns to the girls. “What about you two? How are you doing?”

“Fine,” Haylen murmurs.

“Do you like working with Calyn?”

“Yes, she’s nice. She gives us sweets.”

“Oh, I remember that.” She looks at Lia. “And you? How are you getting along, dear?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“Okay, you guess?” She shoots a quick glance at Calyn and takes Lia’s hand. “Calyn said you might be a little sad still. She probably told you how much I used to cry when they first brought me here.”

Lia nods.

“Well, all I can tell you is that it gets better all the time.”

“Don’t you… miss your parents ever?”

Elise adjusts her posture. “Sometimes, but not as much. In my old home, when a baby was born, we’d be lucky if it would live to see the first year pass. It was a hard life. I don’t miss it much anymore. I’ve got three boys and a girl growing healthy and I’ve had no losses at birth. I’m thankful I’m here. I’m thankful for all I have now.”

“You have a husband?” Haylen asks.

“Yes, I do, something like that.”

“How did you meet him?”

“He chose me.”

“What does that mean?” asks Lia. “How did he choose you?”

“He chose me at the bonding rights. He’s a decorated soldier and he had first pick. He picked
me
. He said it was because I had pretty eyes. You have pretty eyes too, Lia, I’ll bet you get a good man too, someday.” Lia wrinkles her nose at the thought. “You’re still young, but in a couple years you might decide you want that.”

Lia shrugs. The part of herself that she allows out during the day envies these happy girls. Just a little. Her mask slips a bit and she thinks on Jack. He’s the only boy she’d ever want to be chosen by, and she doesn’t even know where he is or what they are making him do. She thinks about the way she always used to pick on him, and the way he always took it so sweetly. She remembers the time they were playing in the woods and she ambushed him with a clod of mud, laughing ecstatically, and even though she could tell he was kind of mad he still held her hand all the way back to the village because it was getting dark and she was scared.
Stop it
, she tells herself. There is another quake and her mind bifurcates just a bit more. She smiles and looks Elise squarely in the eye.

“That sounds really nice,” she says.

The sledge crew arrives back just before sunset, haggard and roadworn, and Jack and Aiden go to meet Braylon. He is laughing and joking with the rest of the crew, looking like a clan of long lost brothers coming home to a reunion. Jack and Aiden wave, and Braylon runs up and claps them both on the back.

“It feels like it’s been forever since I’ve seen you. How’s the quarry?”

“Boring. Same thing all day. How was the sledge crew?”

“All right, I guess. Probably better than being cooped up here. It took us six days to move that block to the Temple.”

“What did you do?”

“They gave me a rope and told me when to pull. What about you?”

“Hammered rocks all day. My arm hurts.”

“That’s nothing, look at my hands.” Braylon turns his palms up and splays his fingers, showing off a cluster of ripe red blisters. “We wrap them up, but it doesn’t help much.”

“That’s pretty nasty.”

“Yeah,” says Braylon, scratching his arm and peering around. “I’m starving, is there anything to eat?”

“There’s stew at camp.”

They plod toward the rickety shelter and Braylon stows his gear away and settles around the campfire, scraping soup out of a bent metal bowl.

“Did you see anyone while you were back there?” asks Jack.

“Not really. I saw a few boys out in the fields on the way back, but they were far off, I didn’t get a good look at them.” He’s old enough to sense what Jack is getting at. “I heard Lia was on kitchen duty. Her and Haylen.”

“Sounds better than this,” says Aiden, pitching rocks into the fire.

They sit around until the immense strain from the day weighs their bodies down, and when they rise it takes all the last strength they have to drag themselves to their narrow cots at base camp and pass out cold. The blackout of sleep is so opaque that when Jack opens his eyes in the morning it feels like he has lost time, as if he had just laid down only moments earlier. He tugs on his leather boots with muscles that are inflamed and aching and has a cumbersome time getting his shirt over his head.

Outside Karus is already full of harsh vigor, spurring the weary crew to climb down into the quarry and start cracking. Jack is one of the first ones out. He slings his pickhammer over his shoulder and heads down the dusty ramp to his station. It’s a gorgeous day, warm sun with a perfect cool breeze. The kind of day he used to pine for in the old village. Jack lines up and drops the day’s first flurry of hammer strikes, then flips the handle over in his hand and scrapes out the loose rock.

While he works, he wonders about running. He calculates his chances alone in the wilderness, no tools, except maybe this cursed hammer, no bow for hunting, not that he’d be able to kill anything anyway. He grits his teeth and swings the hammer down hard, rattling his small frame, barely noticing the pain, then he winds back for another strike. Just as he’s drawn his arm back, just as the hammer is at the top of its arc, momentarily suspended and weightless feeling, a sharp pain blasts his side. The pickhammer falls limply from his hand and he doubles over, holding his kidney and grimacing in agony.

“You dropped your pick, Jack.”

He struggles to his hands and knees and Halis launches another rock. It thunks off Jack’s back and knocks him prone on the ground again.

“Leave me alone…”

“No.”

Jack pushes himself up on shaky legs and lunges. Halis shoves him back down and sits on top of him, with his knee on his chest, digging his knuckles into Jack’s ribs.

“You’ll have to do better than that. You’re not very strong, are you?”

“Get off me.”

“You know, maybe we’re even,” says Halis. “You took one from me, I took one from you.” He stands, satisfied with his torment.

“What… does that mean?”

“Haven’t you ever wondered which one of us slit your mother’s throat?”

As Halis turns away the full weight of his words wind their way into the darker recesses of Jack’s mind, and the anger and bile that course through him give his young muscles an extraordinary spur and he hefts the pickhammer and swings it easily through the air, connecting with Halis’s face and shattering his jaw, gouging a rough jagged tear across his cheek. He emits a sickening guttural sound that Jack has only heard from an arrowshot animal and falls on his back. Jack is upon him, hot tears burning his cheeks, his little balled fists pummeling the mangled mess that Halis once called a face, bits of blood and jawbone spitting up into the air.

Jack is vaguely aware of a far off distant voice, and it takes him a moment to realize it is his own ragged scream, ancient and primal, shredding his vocal cords. Halis floats away and he looks wildly to his side and sees the men holding his arms, dragging him backwards, his heels digging parallel trenches in the dusty sandstone.

Chapter Five

Soft cries and a few high-pitched wails radiate from the nursery, and in the maternity chamber down the hall one single prolonged shriek cuts through them all. It rises and falls in waves, a piercing siren that spirals down the Temple’s corridors, and has carried on as such since before sundown. Isabel lies on a bed in the center of the stifling chamber, her chestnut hair drenched with sweat. An old, wizened midwife sits at the foot of her bed with a look of acute apprehension. She murmurs to the nursemaid, and the young girl fetches a bucket of cool water and sponges it onto the Isabel’s forehead.

Arana paces behind them. “Why is it taking so long?”

“Some births are harder than others,” comes the midwife’s response.

From the corner, Keslin looks on sardonically.