Uprooted(115)
Sarkan snorted. “What good would it do them for you to roam around asking them questions, so you know that one’s from Debna, and this one’s father is a tailor, and the other one has three children at home? They’re better served by your building walls to keep Marek’s soldiers from killing them in the morning.”
“They’d be better served by Marek not trying in the first place,” I said, impatient with him for refusing to understand. The only way we could make Marek bargain was to make the walls too costly to breach, so he wouldn’t want to pay. But it still made me angry, at him, at the baron, at Sarkan, at myself. “Have you got any family left?” I asked him abruptly.
“I couldn’t say,” he said. “I was a three-year-old beggar child when I set fire to Varsha, trying to stay warm on the street one winter’s night. They didn’t bother to hunt up my family before they packed me off to the capital.” He spoke indifferently, as if he didn’t mind it, being unmoored from all the world. “Don’t make mournful faces at me,” he added. “That was a century and a half ago, and five kings have breathed their last since then—six kings,” he amended. “Come here and help me find a crack to open.”
It was full dark by then, and no way of finding any crack except by touch. I put my hand on the wall and almost jerked it back again. The stone murmured so strangely under my fingers, a chorus of deep voices. I looked closer. We had turned up more than bare rock and earth: there were broken pieces of carved blocks jutting from the dirt, the bones of the old lost tower. Ancient words were carved upon them in places, faint and nearly worn away, but still there to be felt even if not seen. I took my hands away and rubbed them against each other. My fingers felt dusty, dry.
“They’re long gone,” Sarkan said, but the echoes lingered. The Wood had thrown down that last tower; the Wood had devoured and scattered all those people. Maybe it had happened like this for them, too: maybe they’d been turned and twisted into weapons against one another, until all of them were dead and the roots of the Wood could quietly creep over their bodies.
I put my hands back on the stone. Sarkan had found a narrow crack in the wall, barely wide enough for fingertips. We took hold of it on opposite sides and pulled together. “Fulmedesh,” I said, as he made a spell of opening, and between us the crack widened with a sound like plates breaking on a stone floor. A crumbling waterfall of pebbles came pouring out.
The soldiers dug out the loose stones with their helmets and their gauntleted hands while we pulled the crack still wider. When we were done, the tunnel was just big enough for a man in armor to get through, if he stooped. Inside the faint gleams of silvery blue letters shone here and there out of the dark. I scurried through the mouse-hole of it as quickly as I could, trying not to look at them. The soldiers began working in the trench behind us while we walked all the long curve of the wall to the southern end, to make the second opening.
By the time we finished the second tunnel, Marek’s men had begun to try the outer wall, not very seriously yet: they were lobbing over burning rags soaked in lamp-oil, small thorny bits of iron with spikes pointing in every direction. But that almost made the baron’s soldiers happier. They stopped watching me and Sarkan like we were poisonous snakes, and began comfortably bawling out orders and making siege-preparations, work they all plainly knew well.
There wasn’t a place for us among them; we were only in their way. I didn’t try to speak to any of them, after all; I silently followed the Dragon back to the tower.
He shut the great doors behind us, the thump of the bar falling into the iron braces echoing against the marble. The entry and the great hall were unchanged, the unwelcoming narrow wooden benches standing against the walls, the hanging lamps above. Everything as stiff and formal as the first day I’d come wandering through here with my tray of food, so frightened and alone. Even the baron preferred to sleep outside with his men in the warm weather. I could hear their voices outside through the arrow-slit windows, but only faintly, as if they came from far away. Some of the soldiers were singing a song together, a bawdy song probably, but full of glad working rhythm. I couldn’t make out the words.
“We’ll have a little quiet, at least,” Sarkan said, turning from the doors, towards me. He wiped a hand across his forehead, streaking a clean line through the fine layer of grey stone dust clinging to his skin; his hands were stained with green powder and iridescent traces of oil that shone in the lamp-light. He looked down at them with a grimace of distaste, at the loose sleeves of his work-shirt coming unrolled.
For a moment we might have been alone in the tower again, just the two of us with no armies waiting outside, no royal children hiding in the cellar, with the shadow of the Wood falling across our door. I forgot I was trying to be angry at him. I wanted to go into his arms and press my face into his chest and breathe him in, smoke and ash and sweat all together; I wanted to shut my eyes and have him put his arms around me. I wanted to rub handprints through his dust. “Sarkan,” I said.
“They’ll most likely attack at the first light of morning,” he said too quickly, cutting me off before I could say anything more. His face was as closed up as the doors. He stepped back from me and gestured at the stairs. “The best thing you can do at the moment is get some sleep.”
Chapter 27
What perfectly sensible advice. It sat in my stomach, an indigestible lump. I went down to the cellars to lie down with Kasia and the children, and curled up quietly seething around it. Their small even breaths came behind me. The sound should have been comforting; instead it just taunted me: They’re asleep and you aren’t! The cellar floor couldn’t cool my feverish skin.