The False Martyr (61 page)

“
Eselhelt is the last of
the distant lodges to arrive,” Juhn explained. “Mehret, Hvartin,
and Ostoff are close enough that their Mothers will not come until
tomorrow when the Thull and Callik are ready to begin.” The Order
Master had explained this to Cary the day after their meeting with
Nyel when they watched the representatives from Pada Por arrive. It
seemed tradition dictated that the representatives from each lodge
arrive in the order of their distance from Torswauk. Invermere and
Stermspek had already been present when Carry arrived, so he had
watched the others come day-after-day: Pada Por, Okotok, Inuvik,
and now Eselhelt. Cary could not tell the slightest difference
between any of them. Each lodge’s envoy consisted of a dozen or so
women on ponies – only men, it seemed, were restricted from riding
– and an approximately equal number of men on foot. Nyel and her
daughters would be there to greet each Mother along with a strong
showing of entirely female onlookers. From his perch in a hilltop
window, Cary could see little more than that they looked exactly
like the delegations that had come the day before.

“
Alright, but what am I
supposed to be learning that will help you and Nyel? I can’t even
understand what the Mothers are saying. How can I find out anything
that’s useful? Ambassador Chulters keeps asking me what I learned,
and I can’t tell him anything. He already thinks this is a bad
idea.” Cary trailed off in the face of Juhn’s seemingly complete
indifference to his frustration.

“
Are you starting to
understand the passages?” Juhn changed the subject.

“
I have them memorized,”
Cary answered with a sigh. He should have already known that it was
pointless to argue with a counselor, much less a full di valati, as
Juhn appeared to be. Still, it was true that his lack in pertinent
information was not a result of any lack of effort. He had spent
every moment he could creeping around the dark passages, finding
every nook, cranny, and peephole.

Juhn just nodded. “I must
be there to greet the Mother as she arrives.” He stood. It was the
same routine as the previous four lodges. Juhn brought him here,
said nothing, then left. Cary watched the delegation arrive,
watched Nyel greet them, then followed the new Mother through the
passages to whatever rooms she had been given. He then spent the
next hour listening outside that room, hoping to hear something
that might be useful. And it was very likely he had heard useful
things. If only he spoke Morg, he might know what they
were.

Cary sat back – the
Eselhelt delegation was now visible on the horizon but wouldn’t
arrive for another hour. He let out a sigh and looked around the
room. It was empty except for a number of cushions arrayed on the
floor and a rack of leather-bound books at the back. It was a room
that the women used to educate their children and it was exactly
like the nearly twenty others like it around the lodge.

“
Pay attention,” Juhn said
as he approached the door. “Eselhelt is different. You will soon
understand why. Until then, trust in the Order. Everything happens
for a reason. The thread has no concept of the pattern around it,
but that does not mean it has no role in creating that pattern.”
And with that pointless bit of philosophizing the Order’s highest
representative in the Fells stepped into the dark passage hidden
along the side wall and disappeared.

#

The Mother from Eselhelt
was certainly different. Cary watched the girl through the tiny
peephole in the side of the room she had been given. Placed away
from the secret entrance that led to the room, Juhn had told him
that only the order keepers knew of them. They were intended to
give the keepers some indication of what waited before they entered
a room – even the Order could not protect them if they entered a
room when a woman was occupied with her husband. No matter their
purpose, Cary generally found them worthless. From it, he could
view only a sliver of the room – typically the bed. Usually, he
gave up after only a few seconds. Today, he could not take his eye
away.

Despite what he had told
Juhn, he had gotten slightly lost in trying to follow the Eselhelt
Mother to her room. In fact, the order passage had diverted from
the path the Mother had taken. He had lost her then spent the next
hour searching rooms until he found the woman he had seen arriving
from the window.

She was alone, which was
unusual enough – the Mothers were typically surrounded by women –
but even stranger, she was young. Standing with her back to him,
Cary could see her long, golden hair hanging past her waist in
waves created by the braid she had just untied. Her shoulders,
broad and straight, stood out on either side of the cascade of hair
that hid her slender waist before giving way to round hips that
filled her tight wool dress. The dress ended just before her bare
feet, which were small and delicate. Cary knew from watching her
arrive that she was with child. Combining what he had seen from a
distance with what he could see now from behind, he guessed she was
of an age with Nyel’s youngest and every bit as beautiful.
Imagination running, Cary silently begged her to turn, to slip off
her dress. . . .

A pounding at the door,
made the girl and Cary nearly jump from their skins. Eye losing the
hole, Cary clutched one hand over his heart and the other over his
mouth. He was not sure that he had not made a noise when the knock
sounded. And even if his mouth had not betrayed him, he was afraid
his pounding heart or panting breaths would.

“
Wo bucht ta?” the girl
called, voice airy with fright and slightly distorted even in a
foreign language.

“
Zhurn ral Eselhelt,” a
man’s voice announced. “Tal ar grebt.”

Cary brought his eye back
to the hole just in time to see the girl walk out of his view. She
said a few words – a denial maybe but laced with fear. The man –
Cary had learned enough of the Morg language to know that he must
be her husband, Zhurn, the Father of Eselhelt – said something
sharp. The girl asked a question – trying to be strong but failing.
Her husband answered decisively.

Though he did not know the
words being said, Cary flashed immediately to the sounds he had
heard through the wall of their quarters when he was a child. It
was usually payday, every two weeks, when the men used their money
at the taverns down the hill. The head gardener lived next to them
in the row of three-room cottages that were reserved for the
estate’s most senior servants. Cary always knew when Mr. Polk
returned. That was when the yelling started, the hitting, the
screaming, the crying. He had heard it often enough that he did not
need to know the words. The tone, the pattern were obvious in any
language.

There was a pause. The man
changed tactics – you can’t yell a locked door down. He said
something gentle, probably, “I miss you.” “I want to see you.” “I
love you.” “Please let me in. I won’t hurt you.” There were many
variants, but the intent was always the same:
This time it will be different. I’m a changed man. I won’t
hurt you again.
It was a lie, both of them
knew it, yet it never failed to work. The girl was no exception.
She sighed loudly enough to carry across the room. Like so many
women before her, only the tiniest patch of wool was enough to
convince her that the wolf had changed his coat. She unlatched the
door.

Her husband crashed
through, slammed it behind him, and immediately started berating
her in a harsh whisper. “How dare you?” Cary translated from his
imagination. “I own you. You will never deny me. I’ll teach you,
bitch.” He expected to hear the crack of a fist hitting a face, a
body hitting a floor, the thump of a boot in a stomach, the cries,
the names. A child would start crying after that and the sounds
would begin again. The hitting, the yelling, the crying continuing
until every member of the family had been subdued, until the
gardener was spent, until he dragged his broken wife into the
bedroom and slammed the door – and Cary would know that he had a
few more hours to sleep before the crying started in the room where
he and his sisters slept. Cary expected those sounds, braced
himself to hear them, forced his mind to be in the present rather
than the memories of Mrs. Polk and her children . . . of Alyssa
years later.

To his surprise, there was
no sound of a fist hitting flesh. There was a whimper, a
constrained cry strangled by a hand. The pair appeared back within
the sliver of Cary’s view. The girl was on her toes backing toward
the bed, face twisted around the huge hand that covered her mouth.
Her husband was a big man, twice her size and strong enough to
handle her like a doll despite his age. And he was at least forty
years her senior. His long beard was more grey than blond. His head
was bald. His face, red with rage, sagged around his eyes and
cheeks. He wore one of the robes that Cary and his fellows had
donned after the baths, huge, meaty, age-spotted, arms half-covered
by the silk sleeves; trunk-like, but vein-lined, legs showing from
the knee, leading to white feet and crumpled yellow nails. His
other hand was clamped on the side of the girl, big fingers
squeezing her kidney. Hurting her without leaving a mark, Cary
realized. And by the look of it, he was succeeding. The girl was in
anguish. She wailed through her husband’s hand, but the sound
traveled only far enough for Cary to hear. Her body was stiff and
distorted, round expanse of belly jutted out in an attempt to
escape the hand at her back, toes scrabbling along the planks of
the floor as her husband carried her by her chin and
kidney.

Finally, he set her down
in front of the bed and removed his hand from her back. It went to
her hair, pulling her head back as his other ran gently around the
child she carried. The girl panted with fear and pain, waiting,
knowing that this was only the beginning. Her husband lowered his
mouth to her ear. His lips moved. Cary could not hope to hear, but
the girl’s reaction was enough. Her eyes popped beyond anything the
pain had produced. She released a great heaving sob. Her husband
just stared into her eyes as he pulled her head back by a handful
of hair. His other came up to her throat and encircled it, fingers
reaching all the way around the long, white expanse. He whispered
another threat. She nodded, almost imperceptible for the grip he
maintained on her. It was enough. He had won.

Zhurn threw her onto the
tall bed behind them. His robe went to the ground. Cary hated what
followed, but it did not stop him from watching.

#

When he finished, Zhurn
leaned over the back of his wife, clasping a handful of her hair so
tightly that she squealed into the mattress beneath her, and spoke
into her ear. As he spoke, he pushed her face into the sheets until
she was writhing for lack of air. Finally, he let her go. She
gasped to regain her breath but remained face down, back to Cary,
body curved around her unborn child, as her husband replaced his
robe, patted her on the hip, and turned to go. At the door, he made
a final comment that had the tone of a compliment. The girl just
moaned. The door latch clicked, but she did not move from the
harrowing position, and Cary did not stop watching.

“
I know you’re there,” she
said after what seemed like a long time. Cary had been so caught in
wondering what to do – tell Juhn, tell Nyel, tell Ambassador
Chulters, tell no one – that he thought he had missed someone else
entering the room. He did not even notice that she had spoken in
his language. He looked through the hole for some clues as to who
it might be, but the girl made no indication of another person
being there. She rolled gingerly to sit, holding her back with one
hand and neck with the other, face turned away.

Cary marveled. She had to
have the fairest, smoothest skin he had ever seen, the perfect
amount of plumpness about her hips and breasts. Her belly rose
round from beneath those breasts, but not so big as he had
initially thought – likely a couple of months behind Nyel’s
daughters. Despite the scene he had just witnessed, he felt himself
imagining himself in the position of her husband and growing hard
at the prospect.

“
I know you’re there,” the
girl said again and turned to look directly at him. Cary leapt from
the hole. Had she actually looked at him? Had she spoken in the
Imperial tongue? “I know you’re not an order keeper, so you must be
an outsider. I need only raise an alarm, and they’ll kill
you.”

By the Order, she knows
I’m here! She knows I’m an outsider. They’ll kill me. I’m
dead.
The same words ran through his mind
over and over. His heart felt like it would pound from his chest.
His whole body shook. His arousal turned into a prayer that he not
wet himself. Images ran through his mind of Morgs pulling from the
passage and chopping him to pieces. His only hope was that they
would start with his head.
You have to
run.
By the Order, run!

Cary didn’t run. He
returned to the hole, expecting to see the girl go to the door,
expecting to hear her call for help. Instead, she reached slowly to
the floor and retrieved her dress from where her husband had thrown
it. With slow, stiff movements, she slipped it over her head and
let it cover her. She turned back to the peephole, trying to be
threatening, but Cary was frozen by his first full view of her
face. She was beautiful – ice-blue eyes, light brows, strong and
angular jaw, long and lean neck. Full ruddy cheeks and lips
contrasting the porcelain white of her flawless skin. Yet the
beauty barely registered for the deformity that marred it. A gap
split the left side of her top lip, running like a chasm all the
way to her nose. Though it was not the first hair lip Cary had
seen, it was the most horrible for the beauty it had ruined. He
could not help but wonder at the cruelty of an order that could
create a woman so perfect then mar her with such as
that.