Uprooted(97)
Author: Naomi Novik

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.

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.