In the cities, though, they mainly prayed to the Ancestor.
There. See it?
Nona followed the line of the abbesss finger. On a high plateau, beyond the city wall, the slanting sunlight caught on a domed building, perhaps five miles off.
Yes.
Thats where were headed. And the abbess led away along the street, stepping around a horse pile too fresh for the garden-boys to have got to yet.
You didnt hear about me all the way up there? Nona asked. It didnt seem possible.
Abbess Glass laughed, a warm and infectious noise. Ha! No. I had other business in town. One of the faithful told me your story and I made a diversion on my way back to the convent.
Then how did you know my name? My real name, not the one Partnis gave me.
Could you have caught the fourth apple? The abbess responded with a question.
How many apples can you catch, old woman?
As many as I need to. Abbess Glass looked back at her. Hurry up, now.
Nona knew that she didnt know much, but she knew when someone was trying to take her measure and she didnt like things being taken from her. The abbess would have kept on with her apples until she found Nonas limit and held that knowledge like a knife in its sheath. Nona hurried up and said nothing. The streets grew emptier as they approached the city wall and the shadows started to stretch.
Alleyways yawned left and right, dark mouths ready to swallow Nona whole. However warm the abbesss laughter, Nona didnt trust her. She had watched Saida die. Running away was still very much an option. Living with a collection of old nuns on a windswept hill outside the city might be better than hanging, but not by much.
Master Reeve said that Raymel wasnt dead. Thats not true.
The abbess pulled her coif off in a smooth motion, revealing short grey hair and exposing her neck to the wind. She quickly threw a shawl of sequined wool about her shoulders.
Where did You stole that! Nona glanced around to see if any of the passers-by would share her outrage but they were few and far between, heads bowed, bound to their own purposes. A thief and a liar!
I value my integrity. The abbess smiled. Which is why it has a price.
A thief and a liar. Nona decided that she would run.
And you, child, appear to be complaining because the man you were to hang for murdering is not in fact dead. Abbess Glass tied the shawl and tugged it into place. Perhaps you can explain what happened at the Caltess and I can explain what Partnis Reeve almost certainly meant about Raymel Tacsis.
I killed him. The abbess wanted a story but Nona kept her words close. She had come to talking so late her mother had thought her dumb, and even now she preferred to listen.
How? Why? Paint me a picture. Abbess Glass made a sharp turn, pulling Nona through a passage so narrow that a few more pounds about her middle would see the nun scraping both sides.
They brought us to the Caltess in a cage. Nona remembered the journey. There had been three children on the wagon when Giljohn, the child-taker, stopped at her village and the people gave her over. Grey Stephen had passed her up to him. It seemed that everyone she knew watched as Giljohn put her in the wooden cage with the others. The village children, both littles and bigs, looked on mute, the old women muttered, Mari Streams, her mothers friend, had sobbed; Martha Baker had shouted cruel words. When the wagon jolted off along its way stones and clods of mud had followed. I didnt like it.
The wagon had rattled on for days, then weeks. In two months they had covered nearly a thousand miles, most of it on small and winding lanes, back and forth across the same ground. They rattled up and down the Corridor, weaving a drunkards trail north and south, so close to the ice that sometimes Nona could see the walls rising blue above the trees. The wind proved the only constant, crossing the land without friendship, a strangers fingers trailing the grass, a cold intrusion.
Day after day Giljohn steered his wagon from town to town, village to hamlet to lonely hovel. The children given up were gaunt, some little more than bones and rags, their parents lacking the will or coin to feed them. Giljohn delivered two meals a day, barley soup with onions in the morning, hot and salted, with hard black bread to dip. In the evening, mashed swede with butter. His passengers looked better by the day.
Ive seen more meat on a butchers apron. Thats what Giljohn told Saidas parents when they brought her out of their hut into the rain.
The father, a ratty little man, stooped and gone to grey, pinched Saidas arm. Big girl for her age. Strong. Got a lick o gerant in her.
The mother, whey-faced, stick-thin, weeping, reached to touch Saidas long hair but let her hand fall away before contact was made.
Four pennies, and my horse can graze in your field tonight. Giljohn always dickered. He seemed to do it for the love of the game, his purse being the fattest Nona had ever seen, crammed with pennies, crowns, even a gleaming sovereign that brought a new colour into Nonas life. In the village only Grey Stephen ever had coins. And James Baker that time he sold all his bread to a merchants party that had lost the track to Gentry. But none of them had ever had gold. Not even silver.
Ten and you get on your way before the hours old, the father countered.
Within the aforementioned hour Saida had joined them in the cage, her pale hair veiling a down-turned face. The cart moved off without delay, heavier one girl and lighter five pennies. Nona watched through the bars, the father counting the coins over and again as if they might multiply in his hand, his wife clutching at herself. The mothers wailing followed them as far as the cross-roads.
How old are you? Markus, a solid dark-haired boy who seemed very proud of his ten years, asked the question. Hed asked Nona the same when she joined them. Shed said nine because he seemed to need a number.
Eight. Saida sniffed and wiped her nose with a muddy hand.
Eight? Hopes blood! I thought you were thirteen! Markus seemed in equal measure both pleased to keep his place as oldest, and outraged by Saidas size.
Gerant in her, offered Chara, a dark girl with hair so short her scalp shone through.
Nona didnt know what gerant was, except that if you had it youd be big.
Saida shuffled closer to Nona. As a farm-girl she knew not to sit above the wheels if you didnt want your teeth rattled out.
Dont sit by her, Markus said. Cursed, that one is.
She came with blood on her, Chara said. The others nodded.
Markus delivered the final and most damning verdict. No charge.
Nona couldnt argue. Even Hessa with her withered leg had cost Giljohn a clipped penny. She shrugged and brought her knees up to her chest.
Saida pushed aside her hair, sniffed mightily, and threw a thick arm about Nona drawing her close. Alarmed, Nona had pushed back but there was no resisting the bigger girls strength. They held like that as the wagon jolted beneath them, Saida weeping, and when the girl finally released her Nona found her own eyes full of tears, though she couldnt say why. Perhaps the piece of her that should know the answer was broken.
Nona knew she should say something but couldnt find the right words. Maybe shed left them in the village, on her mothers floor. Instead of silence she chose to say the thing that she had said only once before the thing that had put her in the cage.
Nona knew she should say something but couldnt find the right words. Maybe shed left them in the village, on her mothers floor. Instead of silence she chose to say the thing that she had said only once before the thing that had put her in the cage.
Youre my friend.
The big girl sniffed, wiped her nose again, looked up, and split her dirty face with a white grin.
Giljohn fed them well and answered questions, at least the first time they were asked which meant are we there yet? and how much further? merited no more reply than the clatter of wheels.
The cage served two purposes, both of which he explained once, turning his grizzled face back to the children to do so and letting the mule, Four-Foot, choose his own direction.
Children are like cats, only less useful and less furry. The cage keeps you in one place or Id forever be rounding you up. Also he raised a finger to the pale line of scar tissue that divided his left eyebrow, eye-socket, and cheekbone, I am a man of short temper and long regret. Irk me and I will lash out with this, or this. He held out first the cane with which he encouraged Four-Foot, and then the callused width of his palm. I shall then regret both the sins against the Ancestor and against my purse. He grinned, showing yellow teeth and dark gaps. The cage saves you from my intemperance. At least until you irk me to a level where my ire lasts the trip around to the door.
The cage could hold twelve children. More if they were small. Giljohn continued his meander westward along the Corridor, whistling in fair weather, hunched and cursing in foul.
Ill stop when my purse is empty or my wagons full. He said it each time a new acquisition joined them, and it set Nona to wishing Giljohn would find some golden child whose parents loved her and who would cost him every coin in his possession. Then at last they might get to the city.
Sometimes they saw it in the distance, the smoke of Verity. Closer still and a faint suggestion of towers might resolve from the haze above the city. Once they came so close that Nona saw the sunlight crimson on the battlements of the fortress that the emperors had built around the Ark. Beneath it, the whole sprawling city bound about with thick walls and sheltering from the wind in the lee of a high plateau. But Giljohn turned and the city dwindled once more to a distant smudge of smoke.
Nona whispered her hope to Saida on a cold day when the sun burned scarlet over half the sky and the wind ran its fingers through the wooden bars, finding strange and hollow notes.
Giljohn doesnt want pretty, Saida snorted. Hes looking for breeds.
Nona only blinked.
Breeds. You know. Anyone who shows the blood. She looked down at Nona, still wide-eyed with incomprehension. The four tribes?
Nona had heard of them, the four tribes of men who came to the world out of darkness and mixed their lines to bear children who might withstand the harshness of the lands they claimed. Ma took me to the Hope church. They didnt like talk of the Ancestor.
Saida held her hands up. Well there were four tribes. She counted them off on her fingers. Gerant. If you have too much gerant blood you get big like they were. She patted her broad chest. Hunska. Theyre less common. She touched Nonas hair. Hunska-dark, hunska-fast. As if reciting a rhyme. The others are even rarer. Marjool and and
Quantal, Markus said from the corner. He snorted and puffed up as if he were an elder. And its marjal, not marjool.
Saida scowled at him, and turning back she lowered her voice to a whisper. They can do magic.
Nona touched her hair where Saidas hand had rested. The village littles thought black hair made her evil. Why does Giljohn want children like that?
To sell. Saida shrugged. He knows the signs to look for. If hes right he can sell us for more than he paid. Ma said Ill find work if I keep getting big. She said in the city they feed you meat and pay you coins. She sighed. I still dont want to go.
Giljohn took the lanes that led nowhere, the roads so rutted and overgrown that often it needed all the children pushing and Four-Foot straining all four legs to make headway. Giljohn would let Markus lead the mule then Markus had a way with the beast. The children liked Four-Foot, he smelled worse than an old blanket and had a fondness for nipping legs, but he drew them tirelessly and his only competition for their affection was Giljohn. Several of them fought to bring him hoare-apples and sweet grass at the days end. But, of all of them Four-Foot only loved Giljohn who whipped him, and Markus who rubbed him between the eyes and spoke the right kind of nonsense when doing it.
The rains came for days at a time making life in the cage miserable, though Giljohn did throw a hide over the top and windward side. The mud was the worst of it, cold and sour stuff that took hold of the wheels so that they all had to shove. Nona hated the mud: lacking Saidas height she often found herself thigh-deep in the cold and sucking mire, having to be rescued by Giljohn as the wagon slurped onto firmer ground. Each time he would knot his fist in the back of her hempen smock and heft her out bodily.
Nona set to scraping the goo off as soon as he set her down on the tailgate.
Whats a bit of mud to a farm-girl? Giljohn wanted to know.
Nona only scowled and kept on scraping. She hated being dirty, always had. Her mother said she ate her food like a highborn lady, holding each morsel with precision so as not to smear herself.
Shes not a farm-girl. Saida spoke up for her. Nonas ma wove baskets.
Giljohn returned to the drivers seat. Shes not anything now, and neither are the rest of you until I sell you. Just mouths to feed.
Roads that led nowhere took them to people who had nothing. Giljohn never asked to buy a child. Hed pull up alongside any farm that grew more weeds and rocks than crop, places where calling the harvest failed would be over generous, implying that it had made some sort of effort to succeed. In such places the tenant farmer might pause his plough or lay down his scythe to approach the wagon at his boundary wall.
A man driving a wagonload of children in a cage doesnt have to state his business. A farmer whose flesh lies sunken around his bones, and whose eyes are the colour of hunger, doesnt have to explain himself if he walks up to such a man. Hunger lies beneath all of our ugliest transactions.
Sometimes a farmer would make that long, slow crossing of his field, from right to wrong, and stand, lean in his overalls, chewing on a corn stalk, eyes a-glitter in the shadows of his face. On such occasions it wouldnt take more than a few minutes before a string of dirty children were lined up beside him, graduated in height from those narrowing their eyes against the suspicion of what theyd been summoned for, down to those still clutching in one hand the stick theyd been playing with and in the other the rags about their middle, their eyes wide and without guile.
Giljohn picked out any child with possible gerant traits on a swift first pass. When they knew their ages it was easier, but even without anything more than a rough guess at a childs years he would find clues to help him. Often he looked at the backs of their necks, or took their wrists and bent them back just until they winced. Those children he would set aside. On a second pass he would examine the eyes, pulling at the corners and peering at the whites. Nona remembered those hands. She had felt like a pear picked from the market stall, squeezed, sniffed over, replaced. The village had asked nothing for her, yet still Giljohn had carried out his checks. A space in his cage and meals from his pot had to be earned.