13 – 3
Clarke's hard, fast breathing stutters and slows. She closes her upraised hand into a loose fist. The frost that streamed between her clawing fingers now pools in the cup of her palm. I watch, through the swollen squint of the blackened eye he gave me, as the earth that buried him ceases its furious churn. The broken crumble of dirt and stone that swallowed him flattens out into a smooth, glassy plane. He's in up to his chest and struggling, plowing furrows with his fingers as he strives to dig himself free. The earth ripples like water struck, undoing any progress he makes in an instant. Clarke's blue eyes are pale and cold, like ice. He's going nowhere. Without looking away from him, she asks me, “Who are they?”
Though it's hard, maybe the hardest thing I've ever done, I tear my eye away from Dary Flint and look behind us. I think the only reason I could is because I know that Clarke will not.
Past the ruin of the gate, past the bloody mud and the corpses that lay in it, stand half a dozen people. Two of them I recognize: Hull and Turner. It was Hull who shouted, whose words echoed through the stone-walled gatehouse before falling flat in the gray-dawn fog. Now he has a hand over his mouth, blank horror in his eyes. Turner stands beside him and takes in this nightmare with a grim pallor on his face.
The three other men are all of a type: young and strong. One of them pulls an empty cart, while his fellows carry canvas sacks filled to the brim with tools and medical supplies. None of them have a sound to make or a word to say. They're transfixed by this, the worst they've ever seen in their lives.
Imagine watching it happen.
The last is a woman. She walks ahead of the rest, heedless of the sucking squelch of the bloody mud. Her steps are careful, moving over and around the dead. She plays a lantern's steady light across it all, bringing into harsh reveal much of what should've stayed well hidden.
There's a metallic clangor, muffled by canvas. One of the young men staggers away from his dropped burden, falling to one knee as he spatters puke onto the ground. “It's alright,” the woman says, turning to look back. She's reassuring and calm. “There's no shame in it.” He waves, bent over the mouthful of bile and phlegm that follows his emptied stomach. Of the others, she asks, “Make sure he's alright, would you?” His fellows move to do just that, leaving Hull and Turner to lay first eyes on what she next illuminates: the limp form of Knight-Captain Juliana Morrow, hanging by her arms from the twisted ruin of a portcullis gate.
A low, wounded groan leaves Turner at the sight. It's a sound filled with fear, with grief and heartbreak. He jolts into a run that has him stumbling and slipping through slick, clinging slime to reach the woman he believes is dead. He stops at her side; his hands tremble in the air between them; trapped there, as if touching her will make it true.
“She's alive,” I mumble to him, pushing the words through a split and swelling lip. He neither responds nor reacts, caught in a terrible rapture by the sluggish trickle of blood down the length of her crooked nose. I try again, lifting my ruin of a voice higher, “Turner.”
Still nothing. I try again, as loud as I can make myself be, “Turner!” It comes out as a harsh, crackling rasp. He blinks; turns his head, ever so slightly. That's all the answer I'm given. It's enough. “She's alive. She's gon' be...alright.”
He touches Juliana's shoulder, following the dents and scar with shaking fingers, until they find the pulse beating in her neck. Breath gusts from him. His body trembles; tossed by wave after wave of powerful feeling.
“And you?” It's the woman asking. She's made her careful way over and casts her light over us. From toe to head she takes us in; gleans some idea of the story in the ink it left on our bodies. “Who are you?”
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
“They were with the captain,” Turner answers, haunted and hollow. “Don't know their names, but one of 'em's a magi.”
Frost leaks in wisps from Clarke's loose and upraised fist; her piece of ice still glimmers with faint starlight. No point in asking which. The woman nods. In the gray-dawn, her large eyes are darkly green. “And him?” she asks. The lantern swings as she gestures beyond us, out to Flint's ongoing struggle.
“Flint,” I croak. “He – he thought –” I stop, unable and unwilling to say anymore. It hurts too much.
It falls to Clarke to finish, “I was healing Jul – the captain. He must have thought I was hurting her, because he tried to attack me. Zira stopped him, so he attacked – her – instead.”
The woman nods. Her eyes travel the ruin of the gate. Softly, she asks, “What happened?”
Clarke braces herself with a breath. “We came back from...seeing off a friend...to find the gate had been closed...”
- - -
In the course of the telling, it occurred to me that it took longer to recount than to experience; with only a leaky handful of minutes passing between the magi causing the sound and the last, blood-soaked survivor of it fleeing into the streets. Hull drifted over to stand with his captain and his brother knight, grief and sorrow worn into every last inch of him. Through it all the woman listened in grim, dark-eyed silence. Only once it was done did she look away from us, down the swaying line of twisted metal to where a man lay buried to his neck in the ground. The cut in his head, left by a knight-captain's mighty heel, had slowed its bleed. “That's him?”
Clarke hums her answer.
“And...” The lantern-light moves from him out to Flint, whose red-faced frenzy of digging had tapered off into an exhausted resignation that he was truly stuck. “I take it you buried him like that?”
“I did,” is the answer, “but it was the cap – it was Juliana who kicked him.”
“Sounds like her,” Hull says, with a shake of his head.
Beside him, Turner nods, “Surely does.”
The woman looks Juliana over, some flicker of feeling passing through her darkly green eyes. “Brave woman,” she says, as if revealing some well-kept secret, as though it weren't apparent as sunrise.
Hull snorts a breath through his nose; a brief smile pulls at the corner of his mouth. Neither have any humor to them, just a sad kind of fondness. “Best one I know,” he says. Before I left to walk my road, I would have argued. The best and bravest woman in all Araya would obviously be my mother. She still is, I should think, though the competition is much fiercer now. “We should get her down.”
“How?” Turner asks, half in rhetoric. He gestures to what keeps Juliana trapped: her own hands, locked to their opposite wrists. Both he and Flint had tried to free them. Both had failed. “She won't let go.”
Hull proves himself smarter than his brother knights; he doesn't try for a third time. Instead, he turns his attention to the metal she clings to, eyes following the bends and bites of the ruined gate. “We could cut her loose,” he muses, “There's files and a rasp-wire loop back there.” thumbs over his shoulder. “It'd take forever, but...” he shrugs.
“We could get the kids, too,” Turner adds eagerly, “And Dary, once we dig 'im out!”
The two of them then turn to the woman; they look at her as if asking for permission. Why? Aren't they knights? She gives it. Hull turns and shouts back to the three they left behind, “Hey!” They startle badly, huddling close to each other, “Bring the tool bag over, the medicine too!”
“Al – Alright!” it's the cart-puller who calls back, his voice high and crackling. He jostles his fellows into picking up their canvas burdens and joining him in a slow, exacting journey through the corpse-mire.
Watching them, I wonder: what happens next? Are they going to haul the dead away in that little cart? What are they going to do about the mud, the sour, bloody stink of death in the air? What about all the broken carts and ruined wagons, what happens to them?
Who is she? Who's this woman from nowhere; who Knights of the Fort look to for permission? I brace myself for the stinging cut of speaking and ask, “Who are you?”
Her dark, green eyes snap to me. That same flicker passes through them, leaving behind an embarrassed realization; much as one can be had in this time and place. “Right,” she says, “Forgot to introduce myself, didn't I? I'm Merigold. I was Deputy Mayor before well, – this –, and I suppose I'm the Interim Mayor until we can get one elected. Please, call me Meri.” she offers a small, reassuring smile, “We'll get to you soon, okay?”
The young men arrive, tools are distributed, and the work begins. Turner and the three young men take files to the twisted, broken ends that surround Juliana; Hull works the rasp-wire through the wider, more intact pieces that hold her up. Spars of portcullis hit the muddied earth with flat slaps.
Hull was right. By the time they've made real progress, the sun has begun to burn the fog away. It takes all three of the young men to hold Juliana up while Turner and Hull remove the last piece. They strain and they struggle, but they succeed. The last of the fog clears, Flint comes to his senses, and Juliana is finally, finally, free of the gate.
It's over. It's over.