Alexandria (34 page)

By and by, they peel themselves off the ground and leave behind two well-formed impressions of their bodies in the soft grass, with a little bridge between where their hands had clasped. They sit cross-legged, knees touching, and mend each other. Lia smoothes out the stained strip of cloth that serves as a wrapping for Jack’s arm and winds it round and round, tying it off gently at his wrist. He sits quietly and watches her work. She turns around, her back facing Jack, and he pulls the strap of her nightgown off her shoulder and swathes it with a long cloth that he weaves under her armpit and over the soft pronouncement of her clavicle, spreading it out flat so it covers every rank puncture. They work slowly and deliberately, completing each small motion with meditative concentration.

When their ministrations are complete, they stand and face southward. Their feet do not carry them forward. They simply stare off with the same long-range deadpan common to carnivorous hunters. They look past the rippling expanse, beyond the faraway mountain ranges gracing the horizon like brushstrokes, deeper and farther than the human eye can afford to see, and they imagine it there, Alexandria, the place that knows things, and each evokes in their own mind a vision of its beauty, their manifestations rivaled only by the greatest palaces of history gone by, a castle with spires of gold, or perhaps a floating city replete with meandering canals and monuments that bear testimony to the aspirations of highest spirit, and they can feel it breathing out there in the far-flung reaches… and it beckons them forth, and with tender boundless yearning they advance.

The manacles are not needed. Phoebe cowers in the corner like a fearstruck doe in the midst of a lion pride, too frightened to move, and the hammered iron cuffs lay coiled at her side, unfastened. Warriors have been circulating through the keep all morning, but she has grown accustomed to their presence in her years at the Temple and she does not recoil from them. The raving man shackled to the wall, however, terrifies her deeply. His body is more gruesomely broken than anything her lowliest nightmares have manufactured, and she shudders with revulsion each time he addresses her with his manic pleading eyes and dead wretched voice.

“I’m not gonna let them hurt you,”
he tells her, and she pulls herself into a tighter ball and buries her face in her folded arms and wheezes out a dry, keening sob. He will break free of his bondage, she is sure of it, and descend upon her like some feral gore-coated monster from one of the vile netherworlds she has been lectured to endlessly about. He is an emissary of the dark spirits of Fire, she believes, sent to reclaim her mortal flesh as punishment for some unknown offense. “I promise you,” Renning says, “I won’t let them kill you.” She blocks out his pleas and hums under her breath a lilting song of refuge meant to bring shelter and safekeeping.

Her tiny serenade feathers lightly through the dismal keep and a few of the craftsmen look up from their work and strain to hear above the wet slap-scrape of mortar being smeared across the courses of the stone barrier, captivated by her fitful rendition. As the song ends, her voice weakens and fades away and they turn their somber faces back to the work at hand. Their construction now follows a discernible layout, rows of stone cells lined up around a central corridor, receding all the way back to the furthest wall of the keep.

A familiar female voice carries from the antechamber and Phoebe rouses herself and looks toward the door.

“Let me in,” Ezbeth demands. “I want to see her.”

“No one is allowed in, I’m sorry.”

“Not allowed? I’ve never been forbidden anywhere in this Temple before. What have you done to her?”

“Nothing.”

“Then let me in to see.”

“You’ll have to wait for Keslin or King Nezra.”

“I’ll get them myself.” Her haughty footsteps rise in pitch as she ascends the staircase.

Renning’s chains jingle as he adjusts his posture, and for a long span the slapping and scraping of the masons are the only other sounds that permeate the keep. Phoebe is worn silent and she twirls a strand of hair vacantly.

Ezbeth returns at last, with Nisaq and Keslin, and the keep door is opened wide for them. She elbows past the sentries and rushes to the scared child in the corner.

“It’s okay, sweetie, Ezbeth’s got you.”

“Get her away from there,” Keslin says.

Two sentries walk heedfully toward Ezbeth and take her by the elbows and try gently to pry her away.

“Get your hands off me.”

“Leave the child be, Ezbeth. You’ve seen her, she’s alive, now leave it be. This isn’t your place.”

“The care of these children is most certainly my place. More mine than yours, and I’m taking her out of here.”

“No. You’ll leave her where she is.”

“What is wrong with you? What is this?”

“We don’t all get to play at games and maid work, Ezbeth, some of us are charged with defending this Temple, and I take that charge very seriously.”

“Defending us from this child? What’s happened to you?”

“They’ve brought their sickness here is what’s happened, and we’re going to dig it out.”

Ezbeth backs away from Phoebe and relents. The sentries release their grip. She rubs her elbows and scowls about the room at Keslin and the sentries. Hard, matronly creases run down the sides of her mouth.

“I have never been treated this way,” she says. Nisaq stands with his arms folded and watches acutely, his placid face betraying nothing. Ezbeth levels on him, pleading for an ally. “What about you?”

“I’m not sure this is any of our business. I’d just as soon not know what goes on down here.”

“How can you say that? After all we’ve done for them, the lengths we’ve gone through to rescue them, to bring them here and shape them into… into good people… only to have them locked down here and… and…”

“Please listen to her,” Renning croaks. The entire assemblage turns and looks at him, his head raised limply from wasted shoulders. “Please take this girl out of here.”

“See now, Ezbeth?” says Keslin. “See what you’ve done? You’re interfering with our work down here and I’ll ask you again to leave.”

“I’ll tell you,” says Renning, “I’ll tell you everything. Just please let her go.”

“There, Keslin, you’ve gotten what you wanted… now let the child go free.”

“He’s lying.”

“Nisaq?”
she pleads again. His face remains stony.

The slews of craftsmen work their trowels aimlessly, slopping mortar on the floor and leveling over areas they’ve already covered. Their faces are ruddy orange by the light of the flickering work lanterns and their ghostly visages look on with rapt conviction, absorbing every sight they see, and they shoot each other ominous glances when Arana enters the keep surrounded by his retinue of guards. He stops next to Nisaq and flicks his eyes around at the odd gathering.

“Ezbeth is here to check on the well-being of the girl,” says Keslin, “and she is satisfied and she is now leaving.”

She gives Keslin a dirty glare then strides to the threshold.
“King
Arana,” she says impertinately. “Is this what your father would have done? Torture children?”

“My father is not here.”

“She’s not even nine years, Arana.”

“Ezbeth, I think you’d best let this drop,” says Nisaq, his voice deep and comforting.

“Children
, Nisaq. How can you let them do this to children?”

“No one likes it, Ezbeth, but I’m afraid the times call for it.”

She lets out an exasperated sigh. Arana places his arm benevolently around her shoulder and leads her to the antechamber.

“I’m sorry, but they can’t be trusted. Their lives are not worth ours and I won’t have them put my family at risk.”

“But—I’ve put my life into making them civilized. I’ve cared for them.”

“They’re calling on dark spirits,” Keslin counters. He looks briefly to Arana, a knowing tell in his eyes. “They must be. It’s why all this has happened. They’ve brought their dirty rituals here with them and set up practice at our Temple.”

Keslin’s volley stuns Ezbeth and she works her stubborn jaw, trying to work out a response. “We’ve… we’ve unlearned them… we’ve scrubbed it all out of them.”

“You haven’t. Not completely.”

“There’s no way to know what they’re hiding.”

“I haven’t the barest hint that they’re hiding anything. I don’t know what more you want, I don’t know what more can be done for them.”

“Nothing more can be done. The matter is settled.”

“Is this your will,” she asks Arana, “or is it Keslin’s?”

She awaits no response and pushes briskly past and mounts the stairs as quickly as her withering legs will carry her. Arana watches her leave, confounded by her outburst. Keslin grins with sportive amusement.

“I’ll talk with her,” says Nisaq.

“Please.”

He nods loyally and ascends the stairs with dignified grace.

“She’ll come around,” says Keslin. “That talk of Fire will get her.”

“Mmm,” says Arana, squinting off philosophically. “And you? Do you think they call on dark spirits?”

“I think they’re raised as animals, and I don’t think you can tear it out of them no matter how hard you try. Whatever they’re calling on… it’s no good. But it doesn’t matter—either way, they’re not to be trusted.”

“No.”

“Now…”
Keslin steps back into the keep and holds the door for Arana like a dutiful porter. “I believe our man is finally ready to talk to us.”

“Send them away,” says Arana, nodding toward the dimly lit craftsmen carrying on their pretense of masonry.

“Of course.”

Keslin enters the construction area and releases the workers for the day. They set about stowing away their tools in worn wooden tool bins, slopping out the wet mortar from their buckets and smoothing over the last courses they laid.

“Leave your things,” says Keslin, “you can get them tomorrow.”

A couple of them start to make protest, then decide better of it, and they form a line and shamble out of the keep. Keslin closes the door behind them, leaving the sentries to stand watch in the antechamber.

Renning leers at Arana as he prowls across the keep and reaches his hand down to young Phoebe. She takes it without contest. He lifts her up, her thin body feeling much heavier than the scant weight she must carry, and he brings her before Renning and displays her proudly.

“This is Phoebe,” he says. He settles on the floor and places the girl in his lap. She shies from the grotesque figure chained to the wall and buries her small face against her protector’s chest to block out the sight. Arana reaches around behind him and pulls from its sheath a long, serrated blade, which he brandishes fluently behind Phoebe’s back. “Now, Renning, I think you have a story to tell us… and I think you’d better tell it true.”

“Hurry up, I can’t hook him.” Lia crouches on a greenish boulder at the edge of the stream, postured like a little gargoyle, holding a knobby oak branch out over the water and watching the line weave back and forth across the surface. Fastened to the end of the line is a knotted coil of wriggling earthworms, and fastened to the worms is a speckled and fire-colored trout. They had used thread from the fraying hem of Jack’s linen shirt, tying it together for double-thickness, with a flimsy wooden barb as the hook. “He’s getting away.”

“Hold on.”

Jack kneels in a grassy patch on the bank and holds a long, straight branch down on the ground, slicing off curled peelings of young oak and honing the tip down to a fine point, whittling it into a makeshift spear. He drags the blade across the tapered end twice more and slips the knife under his belt, then takes the spear and bounds over to the stream where Lia sits, and he eyes the precarious catch over her shoulder.

He tiptoes over to a slanted boulder, and then another, working himself into the middle of the stream. He steadies himself over the trout and raises the spear up high, studying his aim, then thrusts it down into the water, giving it a good hard jab at the bottom, and then swashes it back out with the trout flailing upon its point.

“Got it.”

Lia springs off her boulder and lopes over beside him and watches with a morbid grin as he slides the fish off the pointed tip.