“Wake up.”
A shudder ran through her body and her dreams warped and shifted beneath her feet as her mind raced to right itself under the incoming pressure of an unknown reality.
“Wake up!”
Her vision swirled into a variety of blurry images, focused enough that she could just about make out a dark figure leaning over the bed.
“Father…?”
Strong arms lifted her up along with all the blankets and her sleeping-bear. Cradled securely in her father’s arms her head jostled from side to side as his long strides sent him running down the hallway.
“Father, where are you taking me?”
“Hush now Lee Lee.”
She stopped asking, knowing she would get no response. Instead she focused on keeping her bear safely wrapped in her arms, as her father was doing for her. Velvet on one side, silk on the other, the bear had been a gift from her aunt in Germania and she cherished it like it was her own child. She had never seen her father like this before, normally he was a paragon of stoic, businesslike indifference. All the love a father can give, but no time for the games of little girls. His hair had fallen over his eyes in wild curls, obscuring the fear in them as he searched, room by room, for an escape.
But every window looked out upon a sea of angry faces.
He shouldered his way through a door at the end of the hall. Inside was a woman rocking a small infant at her bosom.
“Oh, oh Sir! The little babe is safe, thank the Lords. Please, help us! Sir!” Instinctually her hands reached for his shirt, the toddler nestled into her apron.
“Sir thank the gods you’re here, please they mean to kill us! Please sir take us with you.”
“Father, look, it’s Christopher! Hello Christopher.”
The child did not look up.
“Father, can we take him with us?”
“The keys.” His voice was a monotone.
“The keys, yes yes… The keys, here they are Sir.” The young woman fished around in her pockets, the motion setting the baby to crying, before holding out a large iron ring of servant’s back-of-house keys. He took them without comment, and turned to leave.
“Sir, Sir, leave don’t go! Don’t leave us here, please Sir! Please, take us with you.” He smacked at her hands as they clung to his clothes. She wrapped her arms around his leg, tears soaking into the weave of his trousers.
“Please Sir, my baby… I been in this house all my life, you little ‘un is like my own, please Sir I beg of you, I be-”
The kick hit her sharply in the mouth. Blood flew swiftly down from her nose and lip as she blubbered on the floor. He did not look back at her calls.
“But father, I like playing with Christopher!” But her protest went unheeded.
Taking the servant’s staircase he was able to get down to the ground floor without notice. the kitchens were empty. Some of the servants, he suspected, were outside in the mob. Others had fled. He put her down, covers and all, onto one of the long kitchen tables and set about pushing a large wooden dresser in front of the door. Radishes and bowls fell from their shelves as he struggled to push it into place before turning once again to his daughter.
“Now, listen to me.”
She nodded.
“You must survive, no matter what.”He gestured to a large, disused oven.
“Climb in through the grate. Put your hand on the left wall and follow the tunnel to the end. Do not leave until it is daytime. Do you understand so far?”
She bit her lip, mute.
“Lydia, I need you to tell me yes or no. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Very good. When you emerge, you will see a convent in the distance. Go there, speak to the Mother Superior, and do not look back.”
“But-”
“Do you understand?”
“...Yes.”
His hand patted her head tenderly.
“Good girl. Now, go.”
He hoisted her off the table and pushed her in through the oven door. It was dark, and sooty, and smelt like burnt toast. But, sure enough, there was a grate at the back which was quite well oiled, and swung open without effort.
“You will be safe there.” His voice was muffled behind her.
She jumped, and hit her head, when the thudding began. Hard pounding at the door. Her father closed the oven door behind her, and all was black and muffled.
She crawled in through the grate, but could not bring herself to go any further. The tunnel was very small, it was true, perhaps once used by runner-dogs carrying messages to the front lines, but there may still be room for her father to come too?
Her question was answered by the crashing sound of the dresser falling over, and the steady steps of big, oversized workboots on the tiles. There were some words spoken, but she couldn’t hear what they said through the sound of the blood pounding in her ears. But she could make out her father, angry, shouting something. Another crash, and the oven shaked.
The hearts of children are strong but at this point Lydia’s courage ran out, and she fled down the tunnel - one hand on the left wall, another on her sleeping-bear - until she hit the end and cried and cried until she fell asleep with tears still on her cheeks.
In the morning, she opened the hatch at the end of the tunnel and spent quite some time allowing her eyes to adjust to the sudden light. She was on the side of a small hillock, mossy and green with wildflowers aplenty. As he had promised, ahead of her and not two miles away perched the brooding stones of what she assumed must be the convent her father spoke of. She loved her father, though he could be very stern, but he was not here right now and so could not stop her from looking back.
She turned, and saw her home in the distance. There was no longer a mob outside, but several figures moved around the grounds. If she squinted, she could see them moving things out of the house. Bags, furniture, the distant twinkle of a silver candelabra. Her gaze moved to the side, and she saw three figures hanging from the old oak. One was wearing a teal silk dress, like her mother used to wear. One was smaller than the others, but bigger than she was. Her brother had always teased her about that. The final figure was her father, no doubt about it.
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She had no more tears left. She turned her back on her home, and wandered slowly down the hill, her mind empty and numb.
Two miles was a long walk for small legs, and she stood out like a sore thumb with her soot-stained nightgown - worth more than an average month’s wages - and bare feet. A kindly matron tried to invite her inside, offering warm bread and a hearth, but Lydia had slapped her hand away and continued onwards down the muddy road. She must reach this convent (an unfamiliar word to her vocabulary), and she was not about to let anything stand between her and her father’s dying wish.
Her stomach rumbled.
Later that evening, a nun who had been walking to evening mass noticed a small figure standing at the gates. Cold and bedraggled, Lydia was hurried into the main hall and several tall, imposing strangers talked above her head about what they should do with this poor, strange, temperamental child. The child spoke not a word until Mother superior arrived, and the nuns looked at each other in horror at the girl’s story.
The next day, word reached them that the nearby village of Ystre, which straddled the boundary between the marsh and the middle downs, had staged a rebellion against the local family who owned the local lime quarry and, more importantly, a large, gated estate. Gol attacks becoming more frequent, the villagers had repeatedly asked to be allowed sanctuary within the walls. One by one the villagers lost loved ones in the nightly attacks, and parents pleaded with the estate owners to let them inside, bearing in their clenched fists the bloodstained smocks of lost children. Their pleas were denied. Until eventually, they did not ask anymore. They took.
They took Lydia’s father, her mother, her brother and her home.
The senior nuns sat in conference for many hours, debating the likelihood of further attacks. But dealings with the newly gated community of Ystre were cordial, and donations abundant. Religion, and most importantly, the guilt that followed murderers was their shield. Ashamed of their actions and writhing beneath the judgement of the glassy stares of the dead, the rioters turned to their faith for salvation. The nuns encouraged this, and for a while it was a time of plenty. Lydia was being fed by the grain from her own granary, though she did not know it.
In time, contact with Ystre dwindled and eventually ceased, as it had with many other settlements in the area. The final contact they had with Ystre was a couple of years later, when a child carrying a bundle in a willow-weaved basket arrived on their doorstep. The same age as Lydia, but already taller than her, the newcomer was given to Lydia who was tasked with mentoring her in the ways of convent life. The bundle in the basket turned out to be a small and sickly baby, which despite their best efforts and tender ministrations did not survive long.
“My mama went missing, and my papa got sick and died, and now my sister died too - ow!”
Lydia had pinched the girl hard on her arm.
“Ow! Lydia, stop! Please, Lydia that hurts!”
“Your mama and papa were murderers. I’m glad they’re dead and I hope you die too.”
She said the words ‘mama’ and ‘papa’ as though they were curses, filled with vitriol and bile. Tears rolled down the new girl’s cheeks and she struggled against her aggressor.
“Everyone says it was you who killed your sister.”
“What?”
“You should have looked after her better. She died because of you!”
The girl stopped struggling as Lydia began to sing, a playground teasing song of her own invention:
O fear, fear the girl called Willow!
Wickedness had her filled with woe.
She sent the baby to its casket,
In a tiny willow-woven basket.
It was a childish taunt, but one fuelled by trauma and unbridled hatred. Later that day, Lydia returned to her room to find that her sleeping-bear, who had accompanied her all these years, had gone missing. She had cried and screamed so loud that the matrons worried she would not stop at sundown, and would lure out the horrors of the dark.
There was a long and frantic search and eventually the bear was found. Pieces of it, at least. Someone had taken a pair of scissors and cut methodically, and the toy was unsalvageable.
“SHE did it! Willow the wicked, Willow the wicked!” Lydia had shouted, spittle flying from her lips, and before anyone could stop them both girls were on the floor, bunches of each other's hair in hand.
All trust had been lost between the last two survivors of Ystre.
---
Lydia was woken to the sound of hammering, close outside her window. She opened her bleary eyes to the darkened room, the morning dawn making thin beams from between the cracks in the shutters. There was no clock in her quarters, but by the ache in her body she could tell that she was due at least an hour more sleep. She pulled aside the covers and the woman next to her groaned in her sleep, bare shoulders pale and luminescent in the half-light.
Lydia slipped out of bed, tied a robe around her nakedness and threw back the wooden shutters, scanning the grounds for the source of her interrupted sleep. A figure, half obscured by planks of wood, was constructing some kind of platform beneath the ever-looming wall. She narrowed her eyes.
“Mhm, Lee Lee, what time is it?” The woman in the bed had sat up when the light had hit her face. Motes of dust danced in the sunbeams around her nude figure, giving her a regal air of golden grace as the bedsheets draped themselves artfully over her thighs and hips.
“Time to see what all the fuss is about!” Lydia practically dragged her out of bed and into her clothes, down the stairs and into the courtyard. The source of the noise watched them approach.
“Sister Elizabeth, Sister Lydia, what a lovely sight this fine morning!”
Elizabeth went to hold Lydia’s hand, but she slapped it away. In public, they were nothing more than friends.
“Freya. Do you have any idea what time it is? What is it you are doing?” Her voice was dripping with venom but the bite missed its mark, Sister Freya was notoriously laid back and immune to Lydia’s taunts. She lent over and put down her hammer, and the two of them could see various other tools arranged around her belt.
“Well you see now, it’s like this. I do a fortnightly inspection of the walls. Make sure they’re stable, fill in any cracks, you know?”
Lydia only glowered in response.
“This wall here.” Sister Freya tapped the brick with her foot. “It’s going to break if we don’t do something about it.”
“That’s impossible, don’t be absurd. These walls don’t break, they have never broken! Check again.”
“Well that’s what I’m doing, Sister. Just because they never broke before don’t mean they wont now. These walls don’t break because I tend to them, not because they’re invincible.”
Freya flicked some of her greying hair back behind her ear and looked thoughtful for a moment.
“Still, this time we might need something better to hold ‘em up.”
“Better?”
Freya nodded.
“We got bricks, we got stone. Problem is we don’t have any mortar. Some quicklime would do it, but… we ran out of that nary a month past.”
At the mention of lime Lydia’s face went pale. There was plenty of lime nearby, back at her family’s lime quarry in Ystre. She looked up at the wall, directly outside her window, and saw that the engineer was right. The stonework was buckled and warped, as though some great hand had squashed it down from above. She thought about the Gol she saw at night, the ones she teased and taunted and stood up against, moonclad and defiant under the banner of her faith. She thought about her father, who told her she would be safe here. The others were sheep. Stupid, whining little sheep who were scared of their own shadows and did not fully trust the divine protection they were afforded. She did. She believed. But now she was faced with the material consequences to her actions, and fate had decided that she was not untouchable after all.
She thought these things for a moment, then dismissed them. She was, after all, Lydia. She would never let anything into her sanctuary.
“Freya, I know how to help you. There is a quarry near here, and kilns. Many of them. A good team of four… no, five, would do it, given the weather.”
Both Freya and Elizabeth looked at her, expectantly.
“We’re going to leave Palus Somni.”
There was a silence for a moment, and it was Elizabeth who reacted first.
“Lee-Lydia, what do you mean? Have you gone mad? We can’t just leave, there are monsters out there!”
She took her lover’s hand in hers, and this time she did not protest, too lost in her grand plans.
“Lydia, no-one except Inka has gone beyond the walls in… in… decades! Maybe even a hundred years.”
“Then we stand at the end of a hundred years of fools!”
“Lydia…”
“No. I’m sick of living, shut up inside. It’s time to go out and claim back what is owed to us. But now...” Her voice softened, and a smile played over her lips.
“Now, it’s time for breakfast.”
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