Читать книгу The Girl and the Stars - Mark Lawrence - Страница 11

‘You stand before us still wet from the drop. Your tribe and your clan have thrown you aside and not one of them raised their voice to save you. They called you flawed, wrong, unworthy, and you were cast into darkness to die.’ The man who addressed them was neither tall nor old. Yaz had thought one of the gerants would lead, for who could stand against them? Or failing that, the eldest would hold sway with the wisdom of years. But the man who paced back and forth before the crowd seemed unremarkable save for the darkness of his skin which gleamed blacker than the rock itself, something Yaz had never seen even among the many tribes of the gathering. Even his head gleamed, lacking any hair. ‘We are your family now and we have all fallen here. We are the unwanted, the things of such little use that they are thrown away. We are what is beyond repair. We are the Broken.’

‘The Broken!’ The name rang in dozens of mouths.

‘I am Tarko. I command here by the will of the Broken. You have questions. We have answers. You are wet, and the cold will kill you long before you starve. We have heat and food. You were given no choice at the mouth of the pit. I give you a choice. A hard choice.’ He shrugged and pressed his lips together in apology. ‘A hard choice, but still a choice. You may join us or …’ He raised a hand towards the tunnel they had entered by. ‘Or make your own way.’

Tarko watched them, the handful of shivering southerners, and Yaz. She glared back at him, boiling with her fury at … everything … and as angry at having nothing and no one to blame as she was at the rest of it. A short silence reigned. Yaz felt the pressure of many eyes upon her, and still Tarko held his arm towards the dark tunnel.

‘No?’ His arm fell. ‘Then welcome, brothers and sisters.’ Tarko turned his gaze on the rest of Yaz’s new tribe. ‘Five … it is not what we hoped for. A single drop-leader will be sufficient—’

Pome stepped forward, raising his light-stick. ‘I was first to be selected! Arka and—’

‘Arka will be drop-leader for this group.’ Tarko singled out the woman who had brought Yaz in.

‘This is nonsense.’ Pome wasn’t done. A gerant moved to stand at his shoulder, glowering at Tarko, one eye filled with malice, the other milky white. This one looked as if he could crush ice in his fist, the muscles of his arm mounding beneath his furs. ‘We should have taken the centre pool back. We can’t survive on …’ He gave Yaz and the others a withering look. ‘… five.’

‘The Tainted are too many—’

‘And how many of us will there be in ten years if we only gain only five each gathering?’

Tarko sighed. ‘More than if we fight the Tainted for the centre pool each time.’ He looked away. ‘Drop-Leader Arka, dry these wets off and let’s see if they were worth the price we paid.’

‘Come on, I know where it’s warm.’ Arka strode past them and the children hurried after her. Yaz paused, gazing back at the dark entrance that had been the other choice Tarko offered. She watched the Broken, crowding around their leader and around Pome who had spoken against him, most of them trying to make themselves heard. Some were angry, some stern, but most just looked worried. It seemed that the ripples spreading from the arrival of Yaz and the others had not stopped at the edges of the pools into which they had fallen.

‘You, Ictha girl!’ Arka called from the rear of the cavern. ‘Come on!’

Yaz frowned then hurried after the group.

She caught up with the last of them. The girl glanced back and offered a nervous grin. ‘I’m M-M-M-aya.’ She stuttered the name past her shivering. Maya, who had said that thing about the stars shining brighter. Beyond the girl a boy more than a head taller than Yaz and broad with it, owning a man’s size but a child’s face, then another also tall but slender.

The cavern narrowed, then widened, then spread to join a maze of other wide, low-roofed caverns. It appeared that the warmth, which eventually found its way out through the Pit of the Missing, created an air gap above the bedrock of between one and five yards, leaving an ice sky above them supported here and there by still-frozen areas. Seams of the dust-like stars mottled the glacial ice above them providing a faint illumination, brighter here, darker there, and in some places a larger star, like the one Pome carried in his stick, seemed to have been deliberately sunk into a wall to provide better light.

Yaz swung her head from side to side, trying to take it all in, trying and failing to keep her bearings in case she should need to leave in a hurry. The glowing bands overhead kept distracting her, fascinating her eye and putting her in mind of the shimmering veils of light that haunt the polar night. The Ictha called those dragons’ tails, though it seemed each tribe had its own story to tell about them.

‘Down here.’ Arka led the way into a ravine in the bedrock. Rough steps had been carved into the stone and the sound of rushing water rose from far below.

Yaz brought up the rear, stepping cautiously, unused to having rock beneath her feet. Somehow it felt more treacherous than ice. Pinpricks of light broke the darkness ahead of them. Yaz shivered, not so much from the dampness of her clothes but from the thought that this was her life now. Rock and wet ice. She tried to imagine how anyone could live down here not just for days and weeks but for decades, without the ocean to supply hides and fur, sinew and oil, food and fuel … all the materials a people needed to construct their lives.

‘This is the hothouse.’ Arka’s voice drew Yaz from her thoughts and from focusing on her feet as she negotiated the last of the steps. The woman stood before a structure made from neither rock nor ice nor bone nor hide. Yaz had never seen anything like it. She found herself gawping and took comfort that at least the others seemed similarly amazed.

‘What is it?’ Yaz was the first to find her words.

‘The hothouse,’ Arka said. ‘Follow me.’ And she ducked inside through what seemed to be a tent flap but didn’t look like one.

‘It’s a door,’ said an older girl, suddenly scornful now that she realized she knew something the rest did not. She went in after Arka. One by one the others followed.

Yaz came last, running her fingers over the walls and ‘door’. They were flat like stretched hide though much thicker, vertical like the cliffs of the Hot Sea, hard like rock, smooth like bone. The whole structure sat upon a ledge with the ravine carrying on down to unknown depths, and backed against a rock wall. The small girl, Maya, went through ahead of her and Yaz followed.

‘Gods below!’ The blast of heat that met her was like nothing Yaz had ever experienced. As if every oil lamp the Ictha owned were lit and placed side by side in the same tent. She joined the others, noticing that unlike the rest of them the thinner of the two boys wasn’t wet or shivering. He had a narrow face, high cheekbones and, beneath a shock of black hair, dark eyes with a haunted look to them.

‘You come wet into the world and the next time you get wet will be your last.’ Arka’s tribe clearly shared some of the Ictha’s sayings. ‘That’s how it is up there where we came from. Down here things are different.’ She stepped aside and they saw behind her the rocky cave that the small building fronted. The space was both large and crowded, and it was lit by the light of stars set in what looked to be bowls of glass, a thing only Mother Mazai owned, and then just a small disc of it. For a moment, her vision still blurred by the heat, Yaz thought it was people crowding the space beyond, but she soon saw that only the skins they wore hung there, on lines strung from the ceiling, dozens of sets.

‘We dry our clothes here. Hang yours on the wire.’ Arka pointed to a line strung across the width of the cave. She walked into the centre, pushing aside sets of hanging skins as she went and setting them swinging. The shadows swung too and for a moment it looked again as if they were people, the Ictha perhaps, dancing for the sun at the end of the long night. Arka clapped her hands. ‘Hurry!’

She turned her back on them, bending to retrieve something from the floor. When she turned to face them again she seemed surprised that none of them had moved. In a silence broken only by the chattering of teeth she lifted the object she’d retrieved. A clan’s wealth in iron, a squat, heavy cylinder of the stuff, thick-walled and gripped by two bone handles. Deeply etched symbols covered the outside. Yaz knew that the priesthood had a writing that they used to put words on hides. That had always fascinated her. The idea that words, such fleeting things, gone almost as they left your lips, could be trapped and lie there bound in black lines inked into permanence such that they could outlive the one who gave them life. But these symbols were something else again. Like the ice stars they seemed both more real and more distant than the world around them. Complex as the many-legged spider-fish that crawl beneath the sea ice, each was different from its neighbour and yet the same. Each tangled her eye, trying to draw her through … to somewhere.

‘If you don’t warm up soon you may well never warm up.’ Arka frowned at them. ‘What? It’s a pot. You’ve seen a pot before, surely?’

Yaz hadn’t.

Arka set the iron tube on the floor and using a long metal rod she took one of the glass bowls from its niche in the wall, putting it on the floor. With a small scoop at the end of the rod she removed the star from the bowl and dropped it into the iron pot. Immediately the symbols carved into the metal began to glow. The heat radiating from them made Yaz’s face burn. It was as if she held her hand just an inch from a lamp flame. ‘Hang those clothes up! Now!’ Arka barked the order like a woman used to being obeyed. ‘You stay there, Thurin.’ She raised a hand to the black-haired boy as he moved forward with the others.

Yaz stayed with Thurin, though she backed away from the heat. Even Arka seemed surprised by its fierceness, raising an arm to shield her face. ‘I must have used too large a stone … ah … there, it’s easing off.’ She relaxed, then lifted her voice to address them all, falling into her role as their teacher. ‘The sigils set into the iron convert the energy the stone gives off into heat.’

‘I call them stars,’ Yaz said. She tried to look anywhere but at the naked flesh being exposed. The Ictha generally only took something off in order to replace it with something warmer. They would shed layers in their tents but never retain fewer than three. Only in the Hot Sea would they strip, and there the mists shrouded everything, hiding one end of a small boat from the other. The drying, when the Hot Sea closed, was a time of great hardship and more died in that handful of days than in the rest of the year together. ‘Stars. Not stones …’ She faltered under Arka’s hard stare.

‘Some do call them that. Heart-stones, core-stones, ice stars, it’s all the same. Strip.’

Yaz hesitated. With the exception of Thurin the others had moved among the hanging skins, seeking privacy.

‘Why isn’t he wet?’ She pointed an accusing finger at Thurin, who frowned, almost in pain.

‘Because he didn’t drop today. He’s here for … other reasons.’ Arka folded her arms and looked Yaz up then down. ‘Do the Ictha have something under their hides that the rest of us don’t?’

Yaz scowled. If she protested further they would all be watching her as Arka wrestled her out of her wet skins. With a snarl Yaz walked into the area where the clothing already strung up offered the most shelter. She stripped off her outer skins, wrestling with tight knots. Her innermost layer was sewn on, requiring a knife to remove and a needle to replace. She would not need it down here out of the wind. The wind was the true killer. It amazed her not to hear it. Its absence was a silence battering at her ears. Once when Yaz was little the wind had stopped. Not dropped or weakened, but stopped. It was a thing that even the grey among them had never seen. The elders thought that it might be the end of the world. Some wept. Some tore at their hair. And then the wind blew again and it was as if that moment of stillness had never been.

Yaz shed her sodden outer hides. Her best sealskins were still stored on her sled. The Ictha would make good use of them. She peered back at Arka around a hanging coat. ‘I need a knife.’ She said the words through gritted teeth.

‘Hey! We’re not that dangerous!’ A girl’s voice from among the drying clothes, Maya perhaps.

‘I am!’ A boy. Laughter followed that one.

‘She thinks we can’t resist her without her furs.’ Another girl.

More laughter. A slightly hysterical edge to it. Yaz reminded herself that they were children and she an adult. And that the pit had taken them all from their lives. If they didn’t laugh they would cry. She shook her head, trying to press a smile from her lips. It was funny, she guessed, to find herself next to naked in the Pit of the Missing and to still be sweating.

‘That’s all I can get off without a knife.’ Yaz walked back out wearing only the black mole-fish skins that her mother had sewn her into at the onset of the long night. ‘At least they got a good wash today.’ More laughter.

Arka sighed and shook her head. ‘Ictha!’

Yaz moved closer to the burning heat of the pot until the skins began to steam. The mole-fish hides had been softened with nagga venom, giving them a velvety feel, but they resisted water and wouldn’t stay wet for long. Yaz stretched. She had never felt so warm and lacked any inclination to ever step away. Then, remembering herself, and feeling the black-haired boy, Thurin, trying not to look at her, she hunched again, to present as small a target as she could for others’ stares.

Arka called to the three now naked among the hanging skins. ‘There are capes at the back, to wear when you’ve hung your clothes to dry. Then come out here and join us.’

Maya and Yaz sat with the iron pot between them, the huge boy and a black-haired girl completed the circle, the heat making their faces glow. Arka and Thurin sat further back, knees drawn up before them. The boy, Kao, had shrugged his cape from his shoulders and gathered it around his waist. His arms were so thick with muscle that it had to fight for space along his bones, heaping itself up. He watched them all with disdain from blue eyes that sheltered beneath a yellow fringe.

‘The old man made a mistake.’ Kao’s voice rumbled deeper than Yaz’s father’s. ‘I don’t belong down here. I’m as strong as any man in the Golin clan. Stronger than most. I’m not some broken thing. I don’t belong here with you …’

‘Us what?’ The dark girl was called Quina. Her face reminded Yaz of a hawk, eyes like black stones.

‘Rejects.’ Kao spat the word. ‘There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m going to climb out and throw that scrawny priest down his own hole then—’

‘If you can climb out of the pit it shows that Kazik was right about you,’ Arka said. ‘If you can’t then maybe he was wrong, but nobody will ever know. It’s the perfect system.’ She raised a hand to forestall Kao’s hot reply. ‘But I would enjoy watching you do it.’

‘Me too.’ Yaz hadn’t intended to speak but the words left her mouth. She dropped her gaze as the others glanced her way. In the heat of the moment she had forgotten that not only was she bare-handed before strangers but she was showing more of her skin than an Ictha sees on their wedding night.

‘In any event,’ Arka said. ‘We are all here, rightly or wrongly, and there is no returning to the surface. My task is to educate you in the ways of the Broken so that you can become useful and earn your keep. Our lives are … hard. You will have noticed that fewer of us grow old than even the Ictha.’

Yaz bowed her head as the others looked her way again. She hadn’t spotted even a single greyhead among the Broken. At perhaps thirty Arka looked as old as any of those Yaz had seen.

‘There should be more of us,’ Quina said. ‘I saw a dozen pushed and there were many still behind me.’

‘Did the hetta eat them all?’ Maya asked, round-eyed. Yaz guessed her to be the youngest of them, around thirteen. Quina might be fifteen. Kao her own age or a year younger. Despite the size of him his was a boy’s face.

‘Where did you hear about Hetta?’ Arka frowned at Maya and glanced towards Yaz.

‘The boy said it.’ Maya looked nervous. Yaz suddenly wondered why the girl was the youngest of them. Most got the push at their first gathering. There should be plenty of smaller ones. ‘Petrick. He said a hetta got someone …’

‘Hetta is one of the Tainted. A wild one even for them. A rogue. She hunts alone,’ Arka said, and beside her Thurin, dry and fully clothed, shivered despite the heat. ‘And to understand the Tainted you have to understand that the stories told to scare little children are true. The black ice is real.’

Kao snorted with laughter, Maya paled, Yaz quietly made the sign invoking the protection of both the Gods in the Sky and the Gods in the Sea. Quina, however, just nodded.

‘The Ictha have never seen such a thing,’ Yaz said.

‘Nor have the Golin.’ Kao leaned into the heat. ‘Because there is no such thing.’

‘My people have seen it in the south. Far to the south. A grey scar in the ice, black at its heart.’ Quina narrowed her eyes at Kao, daring him to dispute her.

‘It is rare for black ice to reach the surface. But down here it exists.’ Arka turned towards Thurin as if checking on him. His gaze had fallen to his hands and he made a slow study of his fingers, a twitch in his cheek giving the lie to this show of disinterest.

‘They say if you walk on the black ice it fills you with terrors,’ Quina said.

‘And if a man touches it’ – Maya’s voice trembled – ‘it can make him murder his children.’

‘The Tainted are people who have touched the black ice?’ Yaz asked, and once more she saw Jaysin’s head dangling by the hair from Hetta’s belt.

‘Worse.’ Arka looked grim. ‘They swim in the pools that form where it melts.’

Maya gasped. Yaz, an adult grown, allowed herself no expression of horror but drew her knees up under her chin, feeling even now the touch of Hetta’s vast hand as it had closed around her lower leg and begun to pull her towards those teeth.

Thurin had grown still and very pale. And he was pale enough to start with. ‘It takes more than a touch of the black ice to taint most people. There are spirits in the ice, looking for a way inside you, looking for cracks. Anger will let them in, cruelty, greed, any weakness, even fear will invite them in eventually.’ He stood and turned to leave.

‘Thurin. Sit.’ Arka motioned for him to return.

‘And the Tainted do worse than swim in the black pools.’ Thurin had his back to the others now. ‘They drink from them.’ And he walked away, with Arka’s demands that he stay ringing in his wake.

‘What’s up with him?’ Kao snorted.

Arka made no reply and they joined her in silence, soaking up the heat until at last a distant clanging reached the cave. Arka cocked her head to listen then relaxed. ‘It’s the signal for night. We keep our own cycle down here. I’ll take you to the settlement. You can collect your clothes here tomorrow.’

‘What about Zeen?’ Yaz was no longer sure why she had thrown herself down the pit. In the moment she did it it had seemed that it was for her brother, though quite how it might have helped she couldn’t have said. But now, against all odds, she really did have a chance to help him and she was damned if she would just shut up about it and go to sleep.

‘The Tainted have him,’ Arka said.

Even though she had guessed the answer a cold fist still clenched around Yaz’s heart. ‘Then I need to find him before they eat him.’

‘They won’t eat him.’ Arka shook her head. ‘They are vile but none are quite as crazed as Hetta. They’ll taint him along with the rest of those they caught from today’s drop.’ Arka stood to go. ‘You don’t have to worry about finding your brother, Yaz. You have to worry about him finding you.’

Yaz got hurriedly to her feet and caught Arka’s shoulder. ‘There must be a way to save him.’

The woman turned, the scars on her face very white against heat-reddened skin. ‘Oh, there’s a way. It’s just very hard, is all. It’s a lot easier to taint someone than to untaint them. I’ve been here twenty years and only seen it work once.’

‘Then I need to meet that person,’ Yaz said. ‘The one who was saved.’

Arka pulled free and started towards the door. ‘You already have,’ she said. ‘He’s called Thurin.’