The City (4 page)

‘You are thin-skinned and quick to anger,’ he commented mildly, as if it were of no consequence. ‘If you were one of my soldiers I would not let you bear a fruit knife, far less a sword.’

The woman leaped from the table, blade in hand, but a soft voice said, ‘Indaro.’

Bartellus looked round. A newcomer stood in a narrow archway half concealed by a wall hanging. Her long hair was white as ice, and her face was lined. Like the girl Indaro, she wore a close-fitting leather tunic. But while the younger woman wore leather leggings, like a cavalry officer, the elder wore a long midnight-blue skirt above shiny boots. Round her shoulders was draped a brown greatcoat. On her breast silver gleamed.

‘He is right, girl. You are too eager to take offence,’ she said. Indaro made no reply, but at a nod from the woman she stalked out of the room. ‘If she were one of your soldiers, general, she would be dead long since,’ the woman said when Indaro had gone.

Bartellus felt his chest tighten. For all the horrors and deprivations of the Halls, he had become used to being an anonymous old man, no longer harried and chased.

She walked across to the table and poured a glass of water. She handed it to him. She was tall and graceful and he wondered who in the name of the gods of ice and fire she could be.

‘Do I know you?’ he asked.

She looked at him curiously. ‘Do you not?’ she answered. Then, ‘I am Archange Vincerus. What do you call yourself?’

He hesitated. ‘Bartellus,’ he said finally.

‘A good name. And common enough. Particularly among our men at arms.’ She turned and picked up the platter of food and handed it to him. He took a biscuit and crunched into it. The surge of flavour and sweetness in his mouth made his head spin, and he slowly took a sip of water.

‘Archange. I know that name.’ He cursed his treacherous memory, in which his experiences swirled and drifted, ebbed and flowed, like mist over ice. ‘Who are you, lady, and why are you living in this sewer?’

‘I do not live here. I merely visit,’ she said sharply.

Bartellus was suddenly tired of these women and their haughty ways. Why did he care what they thought of him? He took the platter of food and, sitting at the table, started to eat with unashamed need. She sat too and there was silence for some time as he devoured the meat and more of the biscuits. He drank two tall glasses of fresh water. It tasted like morning dew on grass.

Then, ignoring his companion, he closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the high-backed chair. He found his mind was clearer. He allowed himself to think of those other two children, his sons, he had seen waving goodbye in a sunlit garden as he left them for the last time. Joron, the elder, was waving above his head a wooden sword he had made him just that day. The toddler, Karel, was waving excitedly too, following his brother’s lead, but he was too young to understand what was happening. He stopped waving when he spotted one of the new puppies. He toddled over to it, and Snowy the white hound wandered across the garden to guard her pup. Bartellus’ last sight of his smallest son was with his chubby arms round the patient hound’s neck, his father forgotten.

Tears coursed down his face.

His wife Marta had not been outside to see him off. She lay in bed, exhausted by the last stages of a hard pregnancy. He had kissed her goodbye, and promised to be home for winter. He had no real fears for her; her two previous labours had been difficult, but their sons were born healthy, and she had regained her strength within days. He was sorry he would not be there to see his daughter born. He was sure it would be a daughter this time.

He could not remember kissing Marta goodbye. He was certain he had done so, for he always did. But he had been distracted by the
coming campaign, and he had kissed her without thinking, a casual buss on the cheek. The last kiss.

Then he had ridden away with his old friend Astinor Redfall, who had come to summon him. He did not know, on that shining morning, that he was being taken to his brief trial and awful punishment. He did not know then, or for more than a year afterwards, that within the hour his family all lay dead, his longed-for daughter spilling from a great gash in Marta’s belly.

WHEN BARTELLUS OPENED
his eyes again, the woman was sitting at the table with him, a glass of water to hand, her gaze unfocused. She had seen his tears but he found he did not care. He wondered how much time had passed.

‘Have we met before?’ he asked.

‘Just once. A long time ago.’

‘Why did you rescue us?’ he asked.

‘Perhaps you were swept here by the flood waters.’

‘The flood waters which considerately left us together, the child safely beside me, in your antechamber?’

She sighed. ‘It is a sad reflection on your life that you ask why someone should save another from drowning.’

He knew she was familiar to him. He racked his mind but nothing came to him. So much of his history had been washed away in blood and pain. Memory was a sly and fickle friend to him now. There were times when he could not bear the visions of his wife smiling up at him, his boys waving goodbye in the sunlight, but
that
memory pursued him relentlessly and remained crystal clear. Yet his days of glory, times he wanted to savour for they would never change whatever happened in the future, these shimmered and shifted, shifting sands in his tired brain.

‘Are there others here like Indaro?’ he asked Archange.

‘Why?’

‘Because she is fit and strong and claims to be a warrior. Why is she not in the army? Is that what this place is, a sanctuary for cowards who do not want to fight for their City?’

‘People escape to the sewers for many reasons – they are not all cowards,’ she replied pointedly. ‘But there are easier ways for women to avoid military service. They can become pregnant. No woman carrying a precious child is allowed to serve, as you know, general.’

He could not allow that to pass twice. ‘I am not a general.’

She shook her head in a gesture of impatience. ‘Then you should not speak so casually of
your
soldiers. No one would take you for a scribe or an innkeeper. Besides,’ she added, smiling, ‘you
look
like a general.’ The years fell from her face.

For the first time in many days he realized he probably stank. Yet he felt comfortable, sitting in a chair with a full belly and, he had to admit, a pleasant companion. The air was warm and his clothes had dried for the first time in days. He sat back and looked around. The room was of cold stone, and the tables and chairs simple, but they were made of rich woods, and the wall hanging was heavily embroidered with fierce beasts and strange flowers. In the bottom corner a gulon stared balefully out at him.

‘We are still in the sewers here, in the Halls,’ he said, ‘but you do not come and go through the tunnels. So there must be an exit to fresh air?’

She shook her head. ‘This is called the Hall of Watchers,’ she volunteered. ‘Centuries ago, perhaps hundreds of centuries, it was part of a great palace. Then the palace fell, or there was an invasion or an earthquake, I don’t remember, and the ancient palace disappeared under a new one. And then another. There are many layers of old cities, most of them destroyed. But some buildings remain intact, like this, deep in the ground. We are very far below the present City.’

‘That is the first of my questions you have answered.’

‘I am not here to answer your questions.’

‘Why
are
you here?’

He caught her eye and they both smiled.

‘We are both too old for such prevarications,’ she told him. She sighed again and shrugged the greatcoat off her shoulders. It was a silver crescent moon glimmering on her breast. ‘I can do nothing more to you than the world has already done.’

They were silent for a while, then she offered, ‘You ask about my friend Indaro. She was at the First Battle of Araz.’

Vile memories danced in his mind. ‘So were thousands of others,’ he replied. ‘Tens of thousands.’ Including me, he could have told her.

‘Just a child really, gently raised.’ She looked at him. ‘Many people believe women should not be fighting this war.’

‘I am not one of them,’ he told her, not entirely truthfully. ‘The City would have been lost long since without its women warriors.’

She shook her head sadly. ‘The men guard our City’s past,’ she quoted. ‘The women guard our future.’

It was a familiar argument. ‘If the City is lost then no amount of children and babies will help us,’ he retorted.

‘The City
is
lost. It was lost long since.’

‘Not while our armies defend it still.’

In his heart he knew the City was reaching a vital crossway. The enemy cities were subjugated, their armies conquered, fortresses taken, yet still they fought on. The City was besieged, albeit from a distance. And it was casting its women into the war machine in a last desperate throw to win the war, at the risk of future population catastrophe.

‘The City is great,’ he said stoutly, although he knew it was not true. His words echoed emptily in the stone chamber.

‘The City is dying, Bartellus. How can you spend a single day down in the Halls with the other Dwellers and see lives lived in absolute wretchedness, then claim that the City is great?’ Her tone was calm, her face grave.

‘The City is
all
its people, including the Dwellers,’ he argued. ‘How can
you
spend time with them, if indeed you do, lady, and not see their strength, their toughness, the uncompromising spirit that has helped the City survive centuries of war?’

‘I cannot believe,’ Archange said, ‘that you are using the Dwellers as an argument for the City’s greatness. No great city, by definition, should have people living in its
sewers
. Any city should be judged, at least in part, on how it looks after its poor, its frail, its dispossessed.’

As so often in the past, he found he was arguing something he did not entirely believe. They were circling around a subject which was never spoken aloud by the wary. Yet in this hidden place he could bring himself to say the words. ‘The Immortal is pursuing this war. It will end only if the emperor wills it.’

She eyed him gravely. ‘People who have told him that have been cruelly punished.’ She took a sip of water, then said, ‘We are talking about two different things. If the City is great it is due to the courage and resilience of its people. But the war has brought it to the brink of ruin. As you say, it is the emperor who is responsible for that war. But he will never end it.’

‘How can you be so sure of that? And if Araeon himself will not end the war then Marcellus could.’

She frowned at him. ‘Marcellus is loyal. He would never act against his emperor.’

He did not pursue it, conscious that their words were beyond treasonous. But it was good to have a conversation again, to think about something other than where his next food was coming from, or how badly his skin itched from the lice bites, or how he could exist for one more day without falling into madness and throwing himself into the river of death.

Eventually she said, ‘When my daughter was small I told her the story of the gulon and the mouse. Do you know it?’

‘Of course. A child’s tale.’

‘The gulon and the mouse go on a long journey together. When they reach a far city the mouse says to the gulon, “Let me sit on your shoulder so I can see this city and not be trampled underfoot by its people.” So the gulon picks him up and puts him on his shoulder. But then the people of the city think the mouse is the master and the gulon only the servant, and they point at them and laugh. The gulon is angry and plucks the mouse from his shoulder and puts him down and the mouse is immediately squashed under someone’s heavy foot. And the gulon has lost his best friend for the sake of his pride.

‘And do you know what my seven-year-old daughter asked me when she heard this story?’

‘Tell me.’

‘She asked, “What is a far city?” When I told her it was another city a long way away she was baffled, for she believed this City was the whole world.’

‘Your daughter was not alone. Many people believe this. You have to see the City from outside to fully understand. Few people do, except its soldiers.’

‘Yet everyone knows we are at war.’

He shrugged. ‘The enemy, the Blues, have been demonized,
necessarily. People cannot fight a war, suffer its deprivations for so long, if they believe the enemy are human beings just like them. They think they are subhuman, incapable of building cities.’ She shook her head but did not reply, and at last he asked, ‘How old is your daughter now?’

But she did not answer him, merely stared at the glass in her hand.

He said, ‘We saw a gulon in the Halls, not long before the storm broke.’

‘Where?’

‘At what they call the Eating Gate. Do you know of it?’

‘Certainly. It is an important cog in the underground machine. It is a long time since a gulon has been seen that deep in the Halls. It is a symbol of the City to some. They consider it a good omen to see one.’

He snorted. ‘Someone should tell that to the gulon. It was an omen of death and despair for many Dwellers this day.’

He thought of their doomed hunting party crossing the high weir, and his mind moved on to the corpse they had found. Biscuit crumbs lay thick on the table in front of him and he gathered them together, then spread them into a smooth layer. He drew a sign in the crumbs. ‘Do you know this mark?’ he asked the woman.

She looked at him curiously. ‘An S? What of it?’

‘A backwards S. I saw it on the shoulder of a corpse earlier.’

‘A soldier? Tattoos are common among the soldiery.’

‘Yes. He was covered in pictures. Like a child’s story book.’ She smiled, and Bartellus added, ‘It was not a tattoo, but a brand, burned deeply into the skin.’

‘Foreign slaves are sometimes branded.’

‘But there are few slaves left in the City now. And they are mostly young women from the east. This was a man, pale and middle-aged. Well fed.’

‘Floating corpses always look well fed,’ she replied. ‘Is it important?’