Uprooted(114)

I drew his magic into my working, running my hands back along the walls, my chant still marching away beneath the melody of his spell. I darted a quick glance at him. He was staring down at the dough trying to keep his scowl, and flushed at the same time with the high transcendent light that he brought to his elaborate workings: delighted and also annoyed, trying not to be.

Outside, the sun had gone down. A faint blue-violet glow flickered over the surface of the dough like strong liquor burning off in a pot. I could just barely make it out in the dim twilight of the room. Then the working went up like dry kindling. There was a jolt, a rush of magic, but this time Sarkan was ready for the dam-bursting. Even as the spell caught, he pulled abruptly back from me. Instinctively I reached after him at first, but then I pulled back, too. We fell away into our separate skins instead of spilling magic all over each other.

A cracking noise like winter ice breaking came in through the window, and shouts rose. I hurried past Sarkan, my face hot, to go and look. The spell-lamps outside Marek’s tent were rolling slowly up and down as if they were lanterns on boats climbing a wave. The ground was shuddering like water.

The baron’s men all backed hastily to the tower walls. Their thin fencework, little more than heaped bundles of sticks they’d gathered, was falling apart. In the spell-light, I saw Marek come ducking out of his tent, hair and armor shining brilliant and a gold chain—the gold chain the herald had been wearing—gripped in his fist. A scurrying crowd of men and servants poured out behind him, escaping: the whole great pavilion was collapsing. “Put out the torches and the fires!” Marek bellowed, his voice unnaturally loud. The earth groaned and rumbled all around with complaining voices.

Solya came out of the pavilion with the others. He seized one of the spell-lamps out of the ground and held it up with a sharp word that brightened it. The ground between the tower and the encampment was heaved and hunched up like some complaining lazy beast getting to its feet. Stone and earth began to rear themselves into three high walls around the tower, made of fresh-quarried stone laced full of white veins and jagged edges. Marek had to give orders for his men to pull the cannon back quickly, the rising walls pulling the ground out from under their feet.

The ground settled, sighing out. A few final tremors shuddered away from the tower, like ripples, and died away. Small showers of dirt and pebbles ran off the walls. Marek’s face in the light was baffled and furious. For one moment he looked up straight at me, glaring; I glared right back. Sarkan dragged me away from the window.

“You won’t persuade Marek to listen any sooner by provoking him into a high rage,” he said when I wheeled on him, forgetting to be embarrassed in my anger.

We were standing very close. He noticed the same moment that I did. He let go of me abruptly and stepped back. He looked aside and put up his hand to wipe a trickle of sweat from the side of his forehead. He said, “We’d better go down and tell Vladimir that he needn’t worry, we aren’t planning to drop him and all his soldiers into the center of the earth.”

“You might have warned us ahead of time,” the baron said dryly when we came outside, “but I won’t complain too much. We can make him pay for these walls, more than he can afford—as long as we can move between them ourselves. The stones are cutting up our ropes. We need a way through.”

He wanted us to make two tunnels at opposite ends of the walls from each other, so he could make Marek fight the whole length of the walls to get through each one. Sarkan and I went to the northern end to begin. The soldiers were already laying pikes along the wall by torch-light, with the points bristling upwards; they had draped cloaks over the poles to make small tents to sleep under. A few of them were sitting around small campfires, soaking dried meat in boiling water, stirring kasha into the broth to cook up. They cleared hastily out of our way without our even having to say a word, afraid. Sarkan seemed not to notice, but I couldn’t help feeling sorry and strange and wrong.

One of the soldiers was a boy my own age, industriously sharpening pike-heads one by one with a stone, skillfully: six strokes for each one and done as quick as the two men putting them along the wall could come back for them. He must have put himself to it, to learn how to do it so well. He didn’t look sullen or unhappy. He’d chosen to go for a soldier. Maybe he had a story that began that way: a poor widowed mother at home and three young sisters to feed, and a girl from down the lane who smiled at him over the fence as she drove her father’s herd out into the meadows every morning. So he’d given his mother his signing-money and gone to make his fortune. He worked hard; he meant to be a corporal soon, and after that a sergeant: he’d go home then in his fine uniform, and put silver in his mother’s hands, and ask the smiling girl to marry him.

Or maybe he’d lose a leg, and go home sorrowful and bitter to find her married to a man who could farm; or maybe he’d take to drink to forget that he’d killed men in trying to make himself rich. That was a story, too; they all had stories. They had mothers or fathers, sisters or lovers. They weren’t alone in the world, mattering to no one but themselves. It seemed utterly wrong to treat them like pennies in a purse. I wanted to go and speak to that boy, to ask him his name, to find out what his story really was. But that would have been dishonest, a sop to my own feelings. I felt the soldiers understood perfectly well that we were making sums out of them—this many safe to spend, this number too high, as if each one wasn’t a whole man.