Читать книгу Red Sister - Mark Lawrence - Страница 9

No child truly believes they will be hanged. Even on the gallows platform with the rope scratching at their wrists and the shadow of the noose upon their face they know that someone will step forward, a mother, a father returned from some long absence, a king dispensing justice … someone. Few children have lived long enough to understand the world into which they were born. Perhaps few adults have either, but they at least have learned some bitter lessons.

Saida climbed the scaffold steps as she had climbed the wooden rungs to the Caltess attic so many times. They all slept there together, the youngest workers, bedding down among the sacks and dust and spiders. They would all climb those rungs tonight and whisper about her in the darkness. Tomorrow night the whispers would be spent and a new boy or girl would fill the empty space she left beneath the eaves.

‘I didn’t do anything.’ Saida said it without hope, her tears dry now. The wind sliced cold from the west, a Corridor wind, and the sun burned red, filling half the sky yet offering little heat. Her last day?

The guard prodded her on, indifferent rather than unkind. She looked back at him, tall, old, flesh tight as if the wind had worn it down to the bone. Another step, the noose dangling, dark against the sun. The prison yard lay near-deserted, a handful watching from the black shadows where the outer wall offered shelter, old women, grey hair trailing. Saida wondered what drew them. Perhaps being so old they worried about dying and wanted to see how it was done.

‘I didn’t do it. It was Nona. She even said so.’ She had spoken the words so many times that meaning had leached away leaving them just pale noise. But it was true. All of it. Even Nona said so.

The hangman offered Saida the thinnest of smiles and bent to check the rope confining her wrists. It itched and it was too tight, her arm hurt where Raymel had cracked it, but Saida said nothing, only scanned the yard, the doors to the cell blocks, the outer buildings, even the great gates to the world outside. Someone would come.

A door clanged open from the Pivot, a squat tower where the warden was said to live in luxury to rival any lord’s. A guardsman emerged, squinting against the sun. Just a guardsman: the hope, that had leapt so easily in Saida’s breast, crashed once more.

Stepping from behind the guardsman a smaller, wider figure. Saida looked again, hoping again. A woman in the long habit of a nun came walking into the yard. Only the staff in her hand, its end curled and golden, marked her office.

The hangman glanced across, his narrow smile replaced by a broad frown. ‘The abbess …’

‘I ain’t seen her down here before.’ The old guardsman tightened his fingers on Saida’s shoulder.

Saida opened her mouth but found it too dry for her thoughts. The abbess had come for her. Come to take her to the Ancestor’s convent. Come to give her a new name and a new place. Saida wasn’t even surprised. She had never truly thought she would be hanged.