‘Florian.’
Not yet.
The blanket was still there, but there wasn’t the cart anymore. Wheels were turning somewhere else now, part of a bigger, fuller noise. And it was day. I knew that even without the faint glow on my eyelids. Hot, dry eyelids. I’d keep them closed as long as I could, let nothing in, just not yet. Not yet.
They opened by themselves. I found myself looking at the face of a rough wall charred about as black as my own hair.
‘You awake, Flor?’
Focus on the wall. I tried to do that for a while, blocking out his voice, but then he touched my shoulder. Only when his hand lifted away did I move; finding my muscles stiff and sore as I turned half-way on my back and tried to find him. My eyelids quivered in the daylight streaming from the doorway behind him; I couldn’t look at him properly.
‘Here.’ He nudged something at my mouth; a small skin-bottle. I took it and he helped me squeeze out what little water was left inside. It trickled over my lips, so dry I hadn’t even felt them, and onto my tongue. Bitter but cool. I swallowed, but it barely moistened my throat.
‘Who has it? Where’s that skin?’ someone barked. Jolting forward at the sound, easily the hardest voice I’d ever heard, I dribbled some of my second sip onto my neck. It had been a man, from outside the daylight-doorway.
Jerome snatched the skin away. ‘Gotta give it back,’ he rattled, voice low. On edge.
Before he went, I croaked, ‘Sarah.’
He shuffled. That shuffle, and the shuffle told it all. And as he hurried out to daylight I was suddenly aware of all the sobbing and moaning that I’d been hearing since I woke, coming from close by, outside that daylight-door. Some of it stopped after a little while, but more started somewhere else. Then others.
My eyes were closed again when Jerome came back. He was trying to be quiet but I knew the way he breathed and he was shuffling again. ‘I’m real sorry, Flor . . .’ I wanted to tell him to just go, go away, but my throat had closed up. It was too dry to shout anyway. ‘Sarah and Erik . . .’ But he couldn’t say it. I tensed up my arms to clench in the convulsions that had already started, hating that daylight-doorway. Hating Jerome. Hating the stupid sound of his voice when he tried to be gentle. ‘We got to Antissa.’
‘Leave me alone.’
I dragged myself, in my blanket, to the wall.
----------------------------------------
When I let the world back in, the daylight-glow of the outside was brighter on the charred wall in front of my face, and the sounds it made were louder. I lay and listened. So many voices all at once, not just talking but arguing and even yelling. Some laughing too. And children shouting. Again, the rumble of wheels turning, and a gritty grinding that came with it. A fierce clanging from somewhere. A clapping and cracking and snapping of cloth, or hides. Bleating and flapping of small animals, snorting and stomping of bigger ones. A horse whinnying at a distance. Farther off, something like a flute playing a strain of music and then trailing off or simply getting lost in other noise. The last sound to reach me, again, was the weeping, closest of all. I turned my body around from the wall.
The room was small, narrowed towards the daylight-doorway, and it was across one of several rough stone shelves that I lay. Three others lay here too, also in blankets, their short breaths making it look like their bodies shook with cold. But it wasn’t cold.
Fumbling with my own blanket, I eased myself up slowly, stroked hair out of my face and shifted my legs off the shelf. My feet landed in sand; a thick carpet of sand across the floor.
‘There,’ said Jerome. Legs drawn to his chin, he was crouching in the daylight-doorway as he pointed out my sandals. A weird, giddy rush of gratitude exploded out of nowhere and ran through me to know that they hadn’t been lost. As if it mattered. Still, I stood up on shaky legs, went towards them as if walking for the very first time, and crouched to put them on. Then I pulled the blanket tighter around my body and moved towards the doorway.
With every step towards the brightness and the noise, another wave of warmth washed over me. Then sheer heat. It spread through the blanket and had me sweating in seconds, but I wouldn’t let the blanket go. Defiant, I hugged it closer and, with my back to the inside of the doorway, shielded my eyes from the light and sank down to my haunches. Looked at my friend.
There were scrapes on his face and a lot of dirt stuck in his hair. I waited for him to look at me too, which took a while.
‘You okay?’
‘Yuh.’ Those big eyes of his, the eyes that had always been so easy to read, were empty circles. He didn’t want to talk and that was fine: I didn’t either.
So I looked into the world.
Where everything moved. Too much all at the same time—a mad mess of coloured clothes and skin and shapes that streamed through stone and sand and didn’t stop. My eyes stung in the glare, starting to water, but I couldn’t look away. There had to be something that was fixed in the current!
There were shops; little stalls with bright tarpaulins, and merchants standing inside them like puppets in boxes. The puppets called out to the people going by all the time. Some in these crowds pushed barrows stacked high with foods I’d never seen before, while others led donkeys or braces of goats. Others still strode ahead of great brown shaggy camels that drooled milky slime into the dust or flapped up clouds of it with their feet. It was too bright and too busy, all this! Even the air was choked too full – full of wafting haze and thick heat and curling smokes and sticky smells and . . . weeping.
Behind me the weeping. Don’t turn, don’t look.
So I looked at the houses; far more houses than I’d ever seen before in one place, their blocks of egg-white and ochre rising from ridges of sand as if grown from the street itself. Some houses sat on top of other houses, like mismatched yellow cubes at funny angles, climbing by windows and ledges and stairs, between long wooden chutes and criss-crossing lines of hung clothing, to flat roofs. Further than the houses I couldn’t see properly, only above them where some other, even larger, expanse of yellow stone loomed. Was it a wall? My eyes were still watering and they ached when I looked up towards the sky.
More weeping.
Along the street that I could see past Jerome’s shoulder were more strange sights. An even busier place: some kind of a market or plaza. But before that, worse things. A group of women in orange yashmaks who nattered at one another in shrill voices like a clutch of angry chickens. On a step, a shrivelled creature belching fumes from nose and mouth. And farther off, a group of big boys fighting.
No . . . they were playing. With a ball. As if it wasn’t a game but a match to the death.
Death.
‘Con,’ I thought out-loud. Jerome’s eyes bounced off my face. ‘Jerms, Con?’ I demanded.
He met my eyes. ‘Yeh, he made it,’ he said.
My neck went slack with the relief, but I still wouldn’t turn. Wouldn’t look around. ‘Where is he?’
Jerome took a breath and pushed it out. Only now did I see that he wasn’t only scraped and bruised and tired. He was scared. Really scared.
‘With the healers,’ he said. ‘Got spiked in the leg before he got to the cart. After we got here, they took him away with the others.’
‘Got spiked how bad?’
‘Pretty bad.’
He was worried, I could see it, and that made me worried too. There was nothing else to ask except for the one thing I was too scared to turn and see for myself. But then I did it. Shifting my back on the stone of the door-frame, I peered over my shoulder.
The next building along was wooden and broad; a kind of warehouse that shared its timber roof with our smaller stone place. In the narrow shade it cast on the ground were the rest of us. Naemian people, huddled with their rolled-up belongings or all they had left of them. Some slept, many wept, a few tried to give comfort to others. I spotted Dewar and Mother Far and some small children with them. They all looked like children: dusty, lost, frightened, shrunken. Thirty was the most I could count, but there were others inside the building, I thought. I pulled the blanket tighter. ‘How many . . .?’
‘Huh?’
I turned back to Jerome. ‘How many from our huts?’
That knocked his eyes to the ground. ‘Two carts,’ he said. ‘There were three, but . . .’ I forced away the thought that came with the way he trailed off, relieved to see he didn’t mean to say the rest. ‘Took us the whole night and this morning to get here. In the night we crossed a river with no water in it. The white soldier was waiting there. And two more carts from up the plain. You were awake, don’t you remember?’
‘No.’
He gave me a long, morose stare. ‘Well, see, the white soldier led us here. Then them other soldiers took our carts and our mules away somewhere . . . and that one woman who died on our cart.’ He stopped to swallow. ‘They took Con and all the others who were hurt to the healers, like I told you. Then they gave us water and some food.’ Saying so, he scrounged in his trouser pocket and held out something like a rock. He shrugged when he saw me recognise it as bread, though it was now really more of a grubby lump of crumb. ‘It’s what I saved.’
I parted the blanket just enough to reach out and take it. ‘Thanks.’
For a while I simply let it sit there in my hand while, in my mind, I heard Con’s voice calling my name. Over and over. That was the last thing I remembered of last night and now, I realised, I knew what had really happened. He’d been wounded by that creature when he pulled me out of the hut. He was the reason I was here. And alive.
Slowly, I ate the bread. It was hard and very salty, not like normal bread. Meanwhile fat flies batted my face. Acrid smoke wafted into my eyes from the stalls. And all the time the weeping lapped on and on at my back, its vicious misery like grit in every nibble I took.
As it droned on, I thought of the Vedans from long ago and the rich browns – almost golds – of the faces I remembered from the other side of our river. They were everywhere now. Not just ochre and tan and that soft, earthy fawn but deeper umber like the riverbed’s clay. Some Vedans, just a few, were even blacker than peat. Most went about in cloaks of rough hessian, just like the sacks they’d sent us coal in; while others, like the shopkeepers, wore richer fabrics in reds, oranges and yellows. Some walked with cowls drawn high against the sun, others coiling headdresses or weird hats. There were hats of all colours.
The flow thickened. After a while, across the street, a kind of official came into view and strolled to stop under the shade of an awning. There he wedged the butt of his spear in an embankment of sand and stood a while, watching the traffic. I studied him. Under an open cloak, he wore black cloth with cord-bound leathers at chest and legs. His headpiece was a dome with strips of hide at the neck.
Jerome wildly shook his head at me. ‘Don’t!’
‘Why, is he a soldier?’
‘Think so.’ I let my eyes drift back to the official, but Jerome was serious. He hissed, ‘Stop it! They’re the ones who put us here. They’re watching us.’
I risked one more look, but now the man had moved off into the crowd.
Finishing the bread, I willed the street to be louder than the weeping. To the left of our doorway, someone hammered at something that clanged a high note. I didn’t like to look at his face: ruddy, scowling, beard untamed. Brutish. Wherever a stall or a shop or a merchant could be seen, people shouted. So much shouting! And even where they didn’t, voices were harsh and accents thick.
Still, I listened.
‘. . . never half a tallan! Just look at that . . .’ Something. ‘. . . five smelt, two schrod of . . .’ Something else. ‘And don’t go skimping on the kelp like last time!’ Another voice was all out of another unheard-of thing, but he did have—‘Khapent, very good khapent!’ Twenty pounds of that at least, and more smelt, whatever smelt was. ‘Rubai!’ someone yelled hoarsely before demanding to know what someone took her for. That someone shouted back did she know what district this was. And on it went.
Meaningless, most of it, though it was clear to me now that the Vedans spoke the common Prate, as we did, and not their own desert language. The accents were hard, but it was better to listen to than the weeping.
Directly across the street where the official had stood, three stalls faced us, each one shaded by an awning. One was yellow, one was purple, and one had red and white stripes. The richest smells were coming from under the yellow one, where a man whose beard was black and curly sold fish and florid creatures from a pot. From under the purple awning, a woman dressed in shiny cloth sold long rolls of dyed fabric. And her neighbour, under the red and white stripes, dealt in coal. This was a gangly, grey-skinned man who I now watched as he chatted with one of his customers. The customer himself had a ratty grey beard and a green turban. I stared at him, slowly coming to realise that he was easily as old as Mother Far, maybe older. And then, suddenly, that there were many others like him here. I’d always thought her so ancient!
Before long, the old man with the green turban turned and left the coal stall. His dark brown wrinkles glistened with oil and he was chewing on something – nuts, I guessed – still cupping a handful as he went. Crossing to our side of the street, he approached the shop to our left where the brute clanged with the hammer. Looking past Jerome’s shoulder, I kept watching.
The hammer stopped. ‘. . . fare the Guilds today, ekh Loquar?’
‘Bah, none too worse,’ the old man said in a voice that sounded choked with phlegm. ‘What of the districts, ekh Ghalib?’
Two clangs of the hammer. ‘. . . at my doorstep and ask me again!’
‘Aye.’ Old green-turban glanced at our warehouse, his yellow teeth flashing as he chomped open-mouthed on flaky pulp. ‘Sore day for ‘em, sore day for you.’
‘Esha’s arse, sore day—they’ve doubled!’
Behind me came a moan from one of the smallest of the children in our group. A mother ‒ young Miss Nindry, she’d made it! ‒ began joylessly singing to calm her. The singing was almost worse, but then, thankfully, the hammer clanged harder. Through it I couldn’t hear any more of the conversation between green turban and the brute, and when it paused again for the old man to make a purchase the accents seemed even coarser. The man had bought a little bag of clicking, clinking things which he slipped into the hollow of his turban. But even as he turned back into the crowds, one fell out of it. He didn’t notice, and it rolled across the dust all the way to our doorway.
Jerome saw too. At first he stared. Then reached out, picked it up and lay it flat on his palm.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Metal.
I’d never seen much metal; just our rusted old farm tools, the brazier . . . some of the treasures in Sarah’s box, but I rejected those memories just forcefully as the weeping. Those things of ours had been poor examples anyway, I now saw. Hardly bigger than a Naemian coin, a hexagon of shiny yellow winked against Jerome’s grubby skin. Every side of it was perfect, a hole in the middle fashioned without a flaw and finely threaded with ruts as thin as hairs. Jerome turned around to see where it had come from and, sure enough, on the ground below the clanging brute’s counter many more were scattered about. But that was two yards away at least, and I saw Jerome make up his mind that it might as well be two miles. He went back to studying his own, lifting it up to his eye and peering through its hole at me. I looked away.
How little I knew about this place. Well, nothing really. They built things here, I’d once heard someone say that, but never paid enough attention to know what it was that they built. Or maybe I didn’t want to think right now about who had said it.
I could bear it though, this strangeness.
Just not the weeping. Not the fear.
One more time I looked over my shoulder. I did it just as Mother Far recoiled from a movement in the street. Some Vedans had pulled their wheelbarrow almost straight over her legs, and now they were yelling at her and raising the backs of their hands. They didn’t hit her, but the anger of their voices set off more of the small children. While Dewar held the old woman close and tried to steady her nerves, she trembled. Then the children wailed louder. No.
I swung my face back to Jerome. ‘Where are the healers?’
‘What?’
‘You said they took Con to the healers. So where are they, the healers?’
He looked blank. ‘How should I know?’
I tugged my blanket out from under myself and stood up. ‘I’ll find them.’
‘What?’
‘I said I’ll go find them. You coming?’
‘You crazy?’
‘He’s your brother!’ I snapped.
‘So?’
‘So you coming or not?’
He swallowed his horror and glanced out of the doorway like a rodent from its burrow. Like all the rest of them. ‘Better not.’
‘Fine.’
I knew I looked ridiculous wearing the blanket like a robe but didn’t care. If it had been with me on the cart, it might have been with me once at home. Home. Not that awful, broken sound behind me. I filled my lungs with the closest thing to courage I could find and walked out, over the blinking metal jewels and past the clanging of the hammer, into the street.
It was very different from watching. Vedans and their vehicles, mounts and beasts of burden doubled in size, doubled in speed and occupied every part of the way. Keeping to the sides to avoid them wasn’t easy either, no one side ever clear for long. But I made sure to give a wide berth to the nattering women and steered well clear of the fuming man’s clouds.
Up ahead were the big boys and the ball. It looked like flap of stitched pigskin, whatever had puffed it up long since beaten out by play. They were batting it fiercely at one another with their fists, elbows and knees, darting in and out of the shifting traffic, unfazed by rebukes. There was no way around the game. So I waited for the first break in the flurry of their feet, put my head down and walked through it. Immediately their yells surrounded me, as if now meant for me, which I pretended they weren’t even when I knew the tallest boy had stopped to stare. Even when I’d glanced up and caught the wicked smirk on his mouth. Just keep walking.
They were only just behind me, and the plaza not far ahead, when I sensed that they had all dropped out of the game. One said something in a bitter, taunting voice. Another laughed. One gave a whistle. And then—
‘Border boy!’
Keep walking, keep walking . . .
‘Eya, border boy!’ A second whistle, then more laughter. ‘Eya, talking to you!’
It wasn’t so much the force of the ball as how little I expected them to throw it at me; it struck the back of my knee and I buckled. Going down, arms tangled in blanket, my cheek bit the dirt. Quick as I could, I scrambled up and turned around, only to trip on the end of the blanket. That brought me to my knees again, blanket sliding off my shoulders while the tall boy swaggered closer. Four others converged behind him like a crew of pirates.
A streak of watery red came off on my fingers when I touched them to my cheek. ‘Only blood, border boy. Never seen blood before?’
Get up, I told myself, and walk! What did I care if he called me “border boy”?
I stood, more carefully this time, and as I did he brushed his chest into mine; only a nudge but enough to rock me back on my feet. From somewhere I found the nerve to meet his eyes – if only for a moment, fascinated by his skin: that rich gold I’d begun to think I’d imagined. I wondered if he was older, or simply taller, than me. All of them were taller. Now I looked at the grime that traced his lips, his smirk filling to a grin as he glanced down at my shirt.
‘Hey look, what’s these things?’ he blurted and pulled my collar. He tugged on a button and laughed while the other boys grouped and looked too, asking each other things like, ‘What’s wrong with his face?’ and ‘Why’s he so small like that?’ The leader let go of my button with a flick and I touched it to make sure he’d even left it attached. ‘So what you doing in ‘Tissa?’
I didn’t say anything. Didn’t feel safe to answer.
His smile shrank back behind the re-curling of his lip. ‘I asked you a question.’
The others started heckling, moving back and forth as they mocked me in their accents. Their horrible accents. One kicked a spray of sand up at my shins and I flinched. They all cackled.
‘You borderlings got tongues?’ gibed the leader. ‘Go on, tell us why you can come running to our city soon as trouble’s stirrin’ up north, easy as that, huh?’
This time I didn’t understand the question.
‘Think you can stay?’
I thought about that. I must have frowned as I did, and he mustn’t have liked it because he shoved both hands into my chest. I staggered back but managed not to fall.
‘Well?’
Like a coward I shook my head, rubbing my chest below the buttons. That made him smile again.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Going back to your border then?’
‘Don’t know,’ I replied, and when I said it the other boys clustered in to gawk at me, ogling my mouth so as not to miss my next reply.
‘What you say?’
‘I don’t know!’ I shouted back.
While the others jeered and clapped their hands at the show, kicking more sand, the leader raised a dusty eyebrow at my shout. Even I was surprised that I’d got cross enough to shout at him and now my chest was moving up and down at speed. I glared from face to dirty Vedish face and back to the leader just as he shoved me a second time, much harder. I fell down on my backside and it was hilarious. And even though there was no use in standing up, I wouldn’t stay on the ground. So I stood, bracing myself.
‘Leave me alone,’ I told his ugly curled-up mouth. Then turned to reach for my blanket, but a boy darted from behind with all the speed of their ball-game. With a snigger he snatched it, snapped it away from my grasp and whipped sand into my eyes. Through the eye I wasn’t rubbing clear of sand I saw him wrap it around himself and, to the amusement of the gang, fling one end theatrically over his shoulder.
‘We like you, border boy,’ said the leader in a chummy tone. I looked back at him, still blinking sand. It made something burn inside my chest and I wanted to shout at him again to leave off, just leave me be. But the force behind those words had gone – simply dried up in the Vedish sun – and so had the courage. ‘Where’s your ma?’
Who needed courage. Like a coil I sprung at his chest and brought him down. Before I knew what I was doing or even thinking, I was squared on top of his legs, fists digging into his ribs one by one. I heard the air going out of him, then struck for his nose. He turned his face aside so that my knuckles only grazed his cheek, then flailed his arms, found my shoulders and threw me off of him.
We rolled. Scraping at each other, we tussled through the street’s sand and dust. But I’d only got him down because he’d not expected it. He was bigger and it didn’t take him long to shove me fully clear.
I landed hard and something like a rock or piece of flagstone in the sand bit into my hip.
I heard a voice from somewhere say: ‘It’ll start.’
Oh it’s started!
Then wheels were groaning much too close to my head. I tumbled quickly onto my feet, just in time, to dodge the cart that grumbled by.
The boys had formed a whooping circle.
When he came at me again I caught his hands and tried to push with all my strength to grapple him. But he had height over me too, not just the strength. Even so, as my sandals slipped and skidded in loose sand, I broke the handhold to grab his stupid ball and smack his head with it. Clap!
He let me go with a cry – the pigskin drier and stiffer than I’d thought.
‘Pelkhish rat!’ he cursed, then rebounded, aiming a high, clumsy kick at my ribs. I squirmed away, then made a low lunge at him from the side. Misjudging the distance to his legs, instead of catching both his shins, I tripped him clear off his feet and felt him tip over my back. I collapsed under his weight, and as my body went belly-flat someone else squashed my face down. I fought against the pressure, spitting dirt, and pushed free, whirling to face him. Taking his fist in the jaw.
I flopped back down with a thump.
‘Like that, borderling!?’ The street-side buildings wheeled while boys cheered on and laughed at me. I propped myself up on one elbow, panting fiercely, glaring up. ‘Had enough?’ he shouted. My head went all soupy and the sun was baking through my hair to my scalp, but I hadn’t had enough. I launched.
But went nowhere. A strong hand pulled me from behind into hot leather and metal. ‘Enough!’ I looked up into the face of the official with the spear.
‘He’s mad, sir!’ yelled the leader boy. ‘Attacked me so he did! Should’a seen.’
‘That right?’ boomed the leather-clad man, yanking my arm so hard I thought my shoulder would pop out. I struggled against him but the hand only snapped shut around my forearm, pulling me closer. His eyes widened on my face. ‘A refugee!’
‘Yessir, from the warehouse,’ chimed the sand-kicker, still swathed in my blanket. The laughter had stopped but I could still see the stolen grins. My opponent had shrunk to just another one of their number while, behind them along the side of the street, I saw Jerome creep into view.
Spear-man rattled me. ‘Better watch yourself, boy. You’re lucky to have this fortress for a shelter—hellish lucky! Don’t need your borderland wildness on our streets, you understand?’ I pulled but he shook me again, repeating the same word like an order. ‘Understand!’
Pulling even harder and twisting, I somehow came free of his grip, then tripped forward and ran. Not to Jerome or to the warehouse but away, not looking back. And without the stupid blanket, I didn’t want it anymore.
Crowds were thicker in the plaza. Hard voices haggled. Square coins clattered over wood and clinked together into hands. Buyers and sellers moved in all directions and it didn’t matter to them if I could dodge them in time. Nor could I get near any of the tarpaulins of merchant caravans where hagglers bustled even closer, none with a care for a twelve-year-old boy.
Or a borderland boy.
My cheek burned from its scrape and my jaw and lip itched where he’d punched it. I didn’t know where I was going; had no idea where to find the healers and who could I ask for directions?
Ducking under a canopy to the side, I found myself in some kind of factory where people worked to make paint, or maybe dye. Inky frowns flashed, but I hurried between them and from there found my way out of the plaza. Walked on faster from there. Block-like apartments stood stacked on either side of the street. Crones gazed from doorways, eyes thinned to tiny, venomous slits, clutching at besoms that seemed to have teeth instead of bristles. Ahead was the big wall I’d seen above the houses earlier: rearing high over the streets, a rugged thing of sandstone rock. That’s where I’d go.
The street sloped downward. I passed two palm trees. Under them a pump lurched and squeaked as folk drew water from below to fill their amphorae. Then there were merchants again, these selling salt and spices, dried fish, tanned hides, bundles of wood.
The studded leather of more officials with spears winked through the dust. To avoid them, I dashed for the cover of alleys but those alleys were choked with smokers of pipes who made the air even more impossible to breathe or see through. So I moved as best I could within the stream of the traffic and slipped by the door where the officials were standing. I passed a dome-shaped storehouse where people were hurling sacks into a pit and fogging the air with grainy spores. My lungs were tight, my mouth was clawing.
But at the base of the high wall there were steps, leading up. Without hesitation I scrambled onto them and climbed, now wanting more than anything else to be up and away from the streets, above the rooftops, leaving dust and noise below. It couldn’t come soon enough, that clean lemony sunlight; that touch of breeze. The breeze grew stronger and fresher the higher I climbed. Sand and dust blew off my face and out of my hair as I stopped to catch my breath just two steps from the top. Suddenly alone. All there was up here was the sandstone and a clear, wan-blue sky. At least until I looked back.
Inside the confines of the fortress, the buildings I’d woven through to get here now looked like so many hundreds of barnacles, all dried-out and baking, on a rock. Their close-pressed roofs – flat, domed and tiled – climbed up the mound between smaller, intersecting grey walls. Lording the very crest of the mound, a grand palace pushed up a tower and some great big domes from behind another wall of whiter stone, sun glancing off their bronze to pierce the haze. I sucked a breath, and mouthed ‒ Antissa.
Sure enough the sounds were softer from up here, floating with the smokes above the city. Some way to my right, on the walkway, stood two men holding flagpoles, their conversation now and then wafting to reach me on the breeze.
I faced the battlements: a crust of sandstone crudely hewn into squares about as tall as a man and just as wide in some places. The spaces in between them were twice that. Coming closer, I stepped into an in-between gap where the top of the wall reached not much higher than my waist, and even as my belly tightened up, I gripped the stone and leaned to look over the edge.
Much, much higher than the steps I’d just climbed, I realised, swaying. By a hundred feet at least, the sandstone dropped from here to meet the knuckles of the hill this place was built on. My eyes strained for focus, unready for just how high above the desert earth that was! Beyond the foot of the hill stretched open plains in dirty greys and reds and browns. I saw a powdery horizon but had no clue which one it was. No view to the sea, or any river. Nothing at all by which to tell in which direction I was looking.
My breath felt shorter. My heart beat faster. A sheet of white crossed my eyes for a moment and then my head started to throb. I winced at the pain in my cheek and my lip, then felt dizzy. Dizzy and sick.
Also, there was something in my pocket. Trouser pocket. I put my palm against my hip and felt it there. So it hadn’t been a rock or piece of flagstone I’d landed on in the street; there was something there. Small and smooth, but definitely solid. Quite heavy. How hadn’t I . . .? I slid my hand into the pocket and touched it. Whatever it was, it was strangely cool.
My head throbbed harder.
‘Whittle’s mark,’ someone said.
I turned quickly, despite the dizziness, not having heard anyone else coming up behind me; maybe even more startled to see that nobody was there after all. The two flagpole men were still along the wall’s walkway; must have been the breeze playing with their voices . . .
Nausea bloomed through my stomach. My legs wobbled a bit. All the same, I closed my fingers around the thing inside my trouser pocket and pulled it out.
All it took was one look.
Squeezing my fist closed again I reeled, grabbed the sandstone edge and pitched forward at the waist. Black speckles on my eyes obscured the plummet below my perch as my stomach heaved and I spewed whatever had been in it towards the crags far below. My sick took the fall and I slammed my eyes shut as it went. Then I heaved and spewed two more times.
As the breeze cooled the vomit left on my lips, I swayed back but kept my one-handed grip on the stone edge.
‘You!’ called someone. Tears clung to my lashes but through their blur I saw one of the flagmen jog towards me. I didn’t have it in me to run. ‘What d’you think you’re doing?’
When he reached me he shoved me aside, stepped into the gap and looked down. Then at me with an expression between anger and disgust.
‘Let me handle him, watchman,’ came another voice.
Confused, still dizzy, I looked back towards the steps to see two spear-holding officials coming up. One was the man who had broken up my fight in the street. Had he followed me here? Now he crossed the walkway to the gap and peered down too before rounding on me with so much blistering outrage that I half-expected to be raised into the air and hurled over the battlements. Instead he grabbed me by the collar and hauled me back into the gap. I couldn’t have resisted if he’d led me by the hand. He forced my head down.
‘Got something to say, have you?’ he brayed in my ear. ‘Opinion to share with your protectors, borderlander?’
Because he seemed to be pointing, I blinked away more tears and tried to focus on what. About ten feet below, a pole jutted out of the face of the wall; clear enough. But what he was actually pointing at took a little longer to come clear, along with two smart slaps to my left cheek. The pole suspended a weave of fabric, heavy fabric, blue and white, which the breeze was rocking back and forth. Vaguely I could make out the emblem it bore: a circle with outward-splaying rays and streaks of yellow going down.
No, those streaks weren’t part of it.
So much for the fall.
Seizing a handful of my hair, the official yanked me back again. ‘Despoiling the Satrap’s colours already, eh? Thought you’d add a few of your own?’
‘Some start this one’s having,’ remarked his partner.
‘He’ll have manners soon enough.’ They peeled my body away from the wall and I let them, thinking only to squeeze the thing tighter in my hand.