Stands a Shadow

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Enlistment

She had been a child – perhaps four years of age – when her mother had died giving birth to her youngest sister, Annalese. So young in fact that she could hardly recall the experience now, whether it had been day or night, summer of winter, quick or slow; nor even who had been there, and who had not.

Only the few moments before the end did Curl truly remember, and those moments were so fresh in her still that to recall them brought a flush of emotion from her beating heart.

Her mother, pale as moonlight, wasted and bloody on the birthing bed with her gaze fixed distantly on the ceiling above. The dark curls of her hair plastered around the sheen of her complexion. Her chest barely rising as she fought to breath, a faint rhythm growing fainter. Her nipples, dark and hard on stretch-marked breasts made plump with milk, the wooden charm hanging between them, a dolphin, shaped from unseasoned jupe. The newborn, screeching in the room beyond the open doorway.

In the end, her mother had seemed hardly aware at all as Curl gripped her hand and shed her tears over her prone, draining body. Just once their eyes had locked. For a moment, her mother had looked upon her daughter with a blink of recognition. She had gripped Curl’s small hand until it burned with pain, and had glared at her as though trying to impart something of meaning in her last moments on this world.

Make the most of this life, my daughter, her eyes had seemed to say to Curl in the years to come. Follow no path but your own!

And then she had passed into sleep, and into death, and into the ground.

The years after that were dim too in Curl’s memory, as though some shroud of forgetfulness had covered her world. Only glimpses remained.

Her father, silent and spiteful, no longer the man he once had been, losing himself in his work as the local physician. A house without joy or happiness or laughter. Foot-creaks on floorboards; everyone treading lightly. And beyond the confines of their family grief, soldiers passing through the village; priests of Mann shouting sermons, decrying the old faith; rumours of war and rebellion like thunder in the distance.

At thirteen, her aunt and younger sisters celebrated Curl’s coming of age.

It was her aunt, whispery and wise and subtly beautiful, who had explained to Curl the budding of the moon’s cycles within her body, who had taught them all how they would some day become women. On that night of celebration, the woman had made a gift to Curl of a simple lump of wood. It was a knot from a fallen willow, she had explained.

‘Carve it tonight,’ she said, ‘when you are alone. Finish it before you sleep.’

‘What will I carve?’ Curl had asked in wonder.

‘Whatever you like, sister’s-daughter. Whatever brings warmth to your heart.’

When the others went up to bed, she sat on the deep rug in front of the hearthfire, a little drunk on the apple cider she had been allowed to sample for the first time, and with her father’s smallest carving knife and polishing stone, began to carve the piece of wood in whatever way seemed most appropriate. Hours passed fleeting; the fire dwindled until it was only ashes glimmering with the memory of heat.

She awoke where she had fallen asleep before the hearth. It was still night. Her aunt was lifting her into her arms. The woman had wrapped a blanket about her and was carrying her up to bed. Curl’s two sisters slept soundly in the other bunk.

‘What have you carved?’ her aunt whispered as she placed Curl beneath the blankets. Curl opened her hand to show her.

In her palm lay a simple figurine the size of her thumb, a woman of plump, fulsome curves. There were few discernable details in the carving, merely the vague contours of shape. The breasts were big. The belly swollen.

Her aunt smiled. Kissed Curl’s forehead.

‘Your mother would have liked that,’ she told her. ‘It’s a fine ally indeed. Now make sure you wear it always, and may it look out for you when you most have need of aid.’

Curl slept, knowing she would remember this day for the rest of her years.

Later, during the coldest nights of deep winter, her father began to visit Curl while her younger sisters feigned sleep across the room.

And so their world changed once more.

For Curl it was a winter of bitter dreams and darkness, marking more loss in their lives, not least of all a father.

In the spring of the following year, they found him hanging by the neck from the rafters of the smokehouse. They stood there, all three of them, gazing up at his gently spinning body clad in his old and handsome wedding garments, his shoes freshly polished, his hair neatly combed across his balding head.

Against his chest hung the wooden dolphin charm once carved and worn by their mother.

The morning the soldiers came, Curl was out gathering sixbell in the fields that overlooked the town of Hart, where her aunt had taken them to live following their father’s demise.

She was hoping to ward off the chance of pregnancy with the little blue herb, for she was secretly seeing a man in the town by then, a married wagoneer more than twice her age. That morning she wandered far, ranging over the hills in her searching, spending quiet hours slowly filling her pocket.

It was only upon her return that she noticed the smoke filling the sky ahead like storm clouds. Hitching up her skirts, she hurried over the crest of the last hill and gasped in incomprehension at what lay before her.

The town was on fire. White specks of soldiers surrounded it, and they were moving inwards.

The screams of its people fluttered like bird cries on the wind.

Curl thought of her aunt and her sisters down there. She thought of their faces as the soldiers and flames approached them. She doubled over in anguish and thought she would be sick.

Curl hid all day in the grasses, listening to the sounds of the town’s folk dying even as she pressed her hands to her ears. At times the shame of her guilt became too much, and she would try to rise as though to go and help them. But each time she froze, unable to move any further. She wept until she could weep no more, and then she grew numb, and silent.

The soldiers left in the fading light, marching out with their wagons loaded high with booty. Behind them, the town was a smoking desolation.

Curl waited another hour before she could bring herself to venture down to the ruins.

Blinded with tears, choking with grief, she was unable to find her family amongst the smouldering pile that had once been their house.

She lived a feral existence after that, wandering aimlessly amongst the pyres and ruins of her homeland. Her mind was a little gone by then. Her sense of time stretched into an eternal moment.

One day, Curl was walking along a beach when she sighted the man ahead of her, large and thickly bearded. She retained enough sense to fling herself flat to the ground.

Too late, though, as it happened. The man came to where she lay with her face pressed against the rough grasses of the dunes.

‘It’s all right,’ he said to her gently. ‘I won’t harm you, girl.’

She looked up into a tired and weather-beaten old face. His voice sounded strange, though it was only that she hadn’t heard another’s voice for so long.

‘Come with me,’ the man said, holding out a hand. ‘We must leave now.’

Curl climbed to her feet and turned to make a run for it.

Go with him.

At once she faltered in her tracks.

‘It’s all right,’ he said again, taking her carefully by the arm. ‘Come now, we need to be gone from here.’

He led her down to a cove and a small beach of shingle. A fishing boat bobbed in the water. Men and women were wading through the waves to climb aboard.

The man led her out into the water. Curl convulsed from the bitter shock of it against her thighs.

‘One more!’ he hollered to someone already on board, and a few heads turned to acknowledge her. She saw men and women with reddened eyes, hair askew, faces sagging. No one spoke as they helped her into the boat. Curl found a space amongst the bundles of goods and sat down and huddled with her knees pulled up to her chest.

‘Is that everyone?’ asked the man.

‘Aye, skipper,’ replied another. ‘Now let’s bloody well get away from here while we still can.’

Two men pulled on oars, slowly dragging the boat out through the waves of the cove into the breakers beyond. The sail was unfurled, snapping as it caught the offshore wind. After a time they were shooting across the choppy water, with all eyes turned to the distant island behind.

‘That fool Lucian and his rebels,’ spat a small bald man, glancing about him with a set of black eyes. ‘He brought it down on all of us, and damn his soul for it. Damn your soul, I say! ’ he bellowed, shaking his fist at the land.

The rest of the group sat in silence. They continued to gaze upon their homeland as it faded into the distance.

The old skipper shouted a command. At the rudder, a young lad turned the boat so that the sun wheeled behind them.

The bald man calmed himself by steady degrees, his muttering diminishing until he was silent. He sobbed for a while, the other men looking away in embarrassment. One by one the women began to cry too, though Curl only stared over the side of the boat, still numb.

‘You’re a lucky girl to stumble across us like that,’ said the bald man, his eyes dry now as he shifted across to sit beside her. Curl inched away from his touch. ‘Perhaps your ally there was looking out for you, hey?’ And he chuckled drily to himself in mockery.

‘Leave the girl alone,’ snapped the old skipper. The man scowled, but he let her be.

Curl heard the women beside her talking amongst themselves.

‘Where are we going?’ asked the youngest.

‘The Free Ports,’ replied the oldest. ‘They are free, still. And they are not so hostile to refugees as Zanzahar.’

Refugees. Curl tried the word against her tongue. So that was what she was now. She thought it was a small word for all that it meant.

Curl looked back at the island of Lagos, a mere smudge on the horizon now. In her hand she clutched the piece of wood that was her ally, rubbing it with her thumb as the lean wind cut through her body, piercing her to the heart.

‘Enough of that, now. I don’t want the children hearing you.’ Rosa spoke in an exaggerated hush, and bustled to the kitchen door to close it before she returned to folding the children’s clothing on the table.

‘What?’ exclaimed Curl, sitting across from her and watching the woman work. Exasperated, she glanced through the open window at some of the half-wild urchins in the backyard, where they were enacting street robberies for play.

Rosa’s movements were stiff and angry. The table rocked whenever the woman leaned any weight on it, so that its legs clattered against the wooden floor and transmitted the urgency of her frustrations. They were alone together. Breakfast had been served long ago, shortly after dawn, and the assorted lodgers had eaten their small portions of gruel with the sound of the guns on the nearby Lansway fuelling their talk of invasion and war. Even now, across the room, the main dining table squatted in silent accusation at Curl. She eyed it with distaste, the filthy oil-cloth that was never removed from it, not even when eating, the debris of used bowls and platters and cutlery of the lodgers. It was Curl’s turn this morning to clean up after them all. Try as she might, she couldn’t rouse herself to start it.

‘I’m only telling you what I’ve heard,’ she said.

‘Well, whether we know of these things or not, it won’t make a bit of difference to what’s happening. We’ll know it soon enough if those monsters come tearing over the walls for us. Until then, please, give it a rest. Let us live in some peace while we still can.’

Curl plucked at a loose thread on her linen blouse and held her tongue. It wasn’t easy, though, when her blood was still humming from the tail-end of her high, and her mouth wanted nothing more than to flap away in idle chatter.

‘I’ve half a mind to go and volunteer myself.’

A roar of laughter burst from the woman. ‘Oh Curl, you do make me laugh!’

Curl found her face flushing red. ‘What? I don’t mean to fight. But they need people for other things. Cooks and… such.’

Rosa stopped laughing and threw a folded nightshirt into the basket on the floor. She picked up the last of the freshly washed nightshirts, her breathing loud. ‘I don’t know what’s got into you today, my girl. You’d better not go saying anything like that to the children. I’ll clip you one, I truly will. You’ll have the poor things heartbroken with all your talk.’

The door to the kitchen burst open and Misha and Neese came running in. ‘ Out, out! ’ shouted Rosa. ‘You’re trailing dirt all over the place!’ But the girls were brave enough to ignore her for a moment, and they stopped before Curl, and opened their mouths and widened their eyes in feigned surprise, and let out a chorus of screams at the sight of her prominent hair.

‘ Out! ’ shouted Rosa as they ran back outside again, hollering all the way.

‘Very funny, girls,’ Curl shouted after them.

Pea was standing in the doorway, her nose running and a thumb held in her mouth. She was new to the house, and still hadn’t learned to take Rosa’s barks for what they were.

The girl was holding a hand to her small belly. ‘I’m hungry,’ she said.

‘You’ll just have to wait,’ Rosa told her. ‘Now run along, little one.’

As the girl wandered away, Rosa sighed and wiped the back of her hand across her forehead. She stood there framed in the light of the window with her other hand on her hip, looking out at the children in the yard with tender consternation in her eyes.

It softened Curl too to see her like that. She had grown deeply fond of this woman in her time here.

Curl knew she had been blessed all those months ago when she had first arrived in the city of Bar-Khos, and had spotted the sign on the door and knocked upon it in search of lodging. She’d stood there wearing hand-me-downs donated by the volunteers from the refugee camp, feeling lost in a city of this size, lacking the faintest idea of how she was going to support herself; and then the door had suddenly tugged open, and Rosa stood before her with her tired, kind eyes.

Now, like her night terrors come real, the Mannians were coming to destroy her world once again.

‘It’s just…’ she ventured. ‘I need to feel like I’m doing something.’

Rosa turned her head, observed her for a moment with sympathy.

‘You could do something useful for me right now, my girl.’

‘Oh?’

Her head gestured to the table of dirty platters, a sly humour in her expression.

Curl clapped her hands to her cheeks and blew an exasperated breath of air.

The shutters of the window lay open, so that over the grumble of the guns Curl could hear the faint sounds of shouted orders, and the dim beat of marching feet in great numbers. She was sitting on her bed with the small box on her lap, the dross half-unwrapped on its open lid. The sounds outside, though, caused her to set them aside and cross to the window.

There was nothing to see, save for the houses opposite, and a handcart being pushed along the street by an old rag man, some children running past him in silence. No street girls in sight anywhere, she saw. Most likely they were out along the Avenue of Lies, snatching what quick business they could from the troops filtering out of the city towards the marshalling grounds beyond the northern walls.

Curl felt a moment’s relief that she didn’t have to work the streets any more. She wasn’t proud of how easily she had taken to this profession of hers, nor how popular she was amongst the roving clientele of the area. Still, in only a few months of working she’d been able to gain a steady number of reliable customers, enough so that now she could take appointments in her room, and charge all the more for doing so.

She recalled that she was entertaining that evening, that old letch Bostani, with his stench of tarweed and ale and stale sweat, and his pig eyes that seemed dead to everything, even to pleasure. Curl made it a habit to never think of these things in her own time. She retreated back to the bed and placed the open box on her lap once more, and stared down at it unblinking.

The grey dust was something else she was hardly proud of. She’d taken to the stuff much too easily as well, finding in it something that could get her through the long days and the even longer, lonely nights. A dross-addicted prostitute, she thought to herself. Her aunt and sisters would be distraught to see what had become of her. And her mother, her ally…

Curl looked away from the box of dross with a sudden glimmer in her eyes.

Why had she even come to Bar-Khos, she wondered? The city-port of Al-Khos had been closer to the northern refugee camp than to here. Yet some compulsion had led her to tramp and hitch rides all the way to the south of the island barefoot and alone, often only escaping trouble by luck or the kindness of strangers.

Curl didn’t know why, but some part of her had needed to come to Bar-Khos and the legendary Shield; this city of eternal siege where they had stood and held firm against the forces of Mann, and where they were still doing so, even now, while an imperial army massed on the eastern coast intent on their conquest.

She’d come to like these Khosians and their ways. At first, she’d been distrustful of the aid they had given her party of refugees, freshly arrived in their boat from Lagos. In short time, though, Curl had realized that this generosity of spirit was an honoured trait amongst these people, and humility too, for all their contradictions of pride and hardiness.

As a people, their moods seemed prone to melancholy, though they were romantics too, so that even their soldiers could be poets and lovers as easily as drunks and suicides. They relished their freedoms yet favoured cooperation and community. They prioritized families and simple, peaceful lives above all else. Those of wealth and power, like their own Michine nobles, were often spoken of with a kind of bitter sympathy, as if the painted men and women of influence were ill of spirit, warped by their own desires to lord it over others.

Speaking with other refugees living in the area, those who had travelled the Mercian Isles and knew them well, Curl had heard how it was the same with all the peoples of the Free Ports – if not even more so – where people lived with no nobles at all. She still found the notion a hard one to grasp.

Curl glanced back to the dross in her lap. At breakfast, one of the lodgers had said that the imperial invaders were from the Sixth Army. The same men who had laid waste to Lagos.

Curl thought of a town on fire, a pale sky obscured by smoke. Her family’s cries lost amongst the tumult of so many others. The tears spilled down her cheeks. For long moments she sat there, shaking and awash with heartache, a wet hand covering her burning face.

When a sob finally forced its way from her chest she sat up straight and shook her head in self-admonishment. She sniffed, and brushed a hand across her cheek as though to swipe away a cobweb.

She looked up at her little shrine to Oreos, a decision somehow made within her.

‘Shit,’ Curl said.

The interior of the Stadium of Arms was larger than she’d imagined from its outer facade of pillars and curving stonework.

As she stood in its main entranceway, pressed against the side to stay clear of the soldiers rushing past in both directions, she looked on a scene of barely contained chaos. Men in their hundreds occupied the sandy floor of the amphitheatre, where every Fool’s Day the zel races were held, and every other day it was used for the training of recruits.

She saw Red Guards and Specials, Greyjackets and Free Volunteers. Many of the older men were dressed in civilian clothing. Some men even wore dirty rags, and were having manacles removed from their ankles. Amongst them all, soldiers ran back and forth humping loads of equipment, which they were piling into mounds scattered across the sand. There seemed no order to it. Yet men bawled commands as though they knew the lie of this land.

Curl pressed even closer to the stonework as a company of Red Guards began to march by in rank and file, some of the men jeering and whistling at her as they stamped past, even though she wore the plain boy’s clothes she had been wearing on her arrival to the city. She ducked her head and hurried past, fleeing into the wide arcade that ran beneath the tiers of seating overhead.

A zel was rearing beneath the arches as men tried to hitch a cart to it. Its hooves clattered on the flagging. Blacksmiths hammered away at swords or spearheads; soldiers brushed past without a second glance, or cursed her out of the way. Curl felt her blood beginning to rise at the confusion of it all. She stopped a young man with a quick smile, and asked where she might find the recruiting office.

He thought she was joking at first, but she scowled until he relented. ‘On the right,’ he said with his glance darting all over her body and a hand flapping vaguely. ‘Through the doorway there. Then take the second on your left.’

When Curl followed his directions through a bustling passageway she found herself standing in a latrine. A row of armoured men were lined against the trough talking and pissing. In an instant a dozen faces were calling out to her in the close confines of the stinking room, while they tried to pierce her eardrums with their whistles. She ignored the flashes they gave her; instead she raised a single eyebrow, and left with a tirade of curses tumbling from her lips.

Curl was hot and flustered by the time she finally found herself at the door to the recruitment office, a room that turned out to be busiest she had yet seen. She slipped past a man hurrying through the doorway and made her way into the centre of the room, where a heavy desk stood piled with papers, and behind it sat a man who by all appearances was in the midst of a heart attack. His face was redder than any Curl had ever seen before. The sweat flowed off him in ribbons.

‘I don’t care!’ he was shouting to a nervous man hovering by his side, his voice hoarse and strangled. ‘If they can march then they go!’

‘But their gear is weather damaged,’ the nervous man told him. ‘All of it.’

‘I don’t care! Just do what you need to get them moving!’

Curl waited for him to take a breath before approaching. ‘Excuse me,’ she tried, then bent over the desk to be heard better, placing her hands carefully so as not to disturb the papers there, or the stylus and the jar of ink. ‘Excuse me,’ she said even louder.

The officer turned his rounded eyes on her. She watched them trace a figure of eight. ‘What is it now?’ he growled. ‘You want to kiss a sweetheart goodbye?’

On the desk, her hands screwed themselves into small, tight fists. ‘I’m here to enlist,’ she told him.

The man opened his mouth and kept it that way. Around him, the silence spread outwards until the room was wholly quiet and every man was looking at her.

‘Go home, girl,’ he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘We haven’t need for any more camp whores, believe me.’

Curl seized the inkwell in her hand without thinking. She flung it at the man and watched it bounce off his forehead even as she realized what she had done.

‘You little bitch!’ he screeched as he clutched his forehead in shock. She found herself picking up the jar for the stylus too, and swinging her arm back to finish the job.

But then a hand gripped her own from behind, and the jar was plucked from her grasp.

She spun around in a hot temper, looking up as she did so. A man towered there in black leather armour, heavily scarred about the face and neck.

‘Bad girl,’ he said from behind his thick beard. ‘You almost took the man’s eye out.’

‘I was trying to,’ she said in a pant.

He laughed, and then the men around him were chuckling too.

‘You’re serious, about wishing to enlist?’

‘This is the recruitment office, isn’t it?’

The man looked at the officer behind the desk, then studied Curl for a moment.

‘Can you stitch wounds?’

She thought of her father the physician; his scalp wound that had needed stitching once, how he had talked her through it while her fingers trembled.

‘Well enough,’ she told him. ‘I know some medicines too, home folk stuff. Herbs and ointments.’

‘Give your details to Hooch over there. Our medicos might make some use of you. I’m Major Bolt, by the way.’

She smiled, opened her mouth to thank him.

‘No, don’t thank me, girl,’ he said, holding up one of his large hands. ‘You can curse me in your own time – but just don’t bloody thank me.’