The Dark Citadel (The Green Woman) (2 page)

Suddenly it sensed her presence, and waves of
hatred rolled down the dingy street. The waves of hatred followed the girl,
like running dogs mad with hunger, then fell back, marking the spot with their
slaver. The demon had seen it, the russet aura that enveloped the tall girl
like a mantle of flame. This was Deborah; the power to reassemble the broken
Pattern of the world lay in her memories. If only she knew.

The demon snarled. Dry wings spread, ear pressed
against the crystal. Dust settled. The demon waited.

In three
months’
time, Deborah would be sixteen. Then she would be married. Yes, even she
would be married, Serpentspawn or not. That was all the girls in her class
seemed to talk about, the stupid cows, as if it was something to look forward
to! Her green eyes flashed as she plunged the dirty pans into the washing-up
water. Well, she was
not
looking
forward to it. In fact, she thought she would rather be stoned to death as a
heretic. Deborah was going to get away.

Her mother had escaped from Providence, and her
father had tried. She knew that much, even if she refused to believe the cock
and bull story about what made them do it. One day, soon, Deborah would do the
same. She would rather be torn apart by bloodthirsty demons, or the Deformities
who haunted the desert, than marry a man like her givenfather.

Dropping the pan back into the soapy water in the
sink, Deborah wiped her hands on her apron and pushed a lock of red hair behind
her ear. She went to the door, casting a glance at her givenbrother, Baruch,
who had raided the sweetener ration and had sticky crumbs all over his podgy
cheeks.

Baruch smirked at her. “If you go out, I’ll tell.”
His cherubic features twisted into an unpleasant grimace.

“Want to find a scorpion in your bed tonight?”

The colour drained from Baruch’s rosy cheeks, and
he watched in silence as Deborah flounced out of the door.

* * * *

She just had to get out of the apartment she called home but which had all
the charm and warmth of a prison cell. Yet once the door closed behind her, she
hesitated. Deborah didn’t care that it was forbidden—she paused because
she was afraid. Fear walked behind her every day, making her jump at shadows
and constantly look over her shoulder. Fear made her peer into the stairwell
with the creeping sensation she was being watched.

Looking down over the banister, she shivered with
the certainty that something was waiting for her in the darkness beyond the
fused bulb on the second floor landing. She peered harder into the gloom,
convinced the shadows moved, swallowing the feeble light as they advanced. The
hair at the back of her neck prickled, and she tried to step backwards, but her
feet refused to respond. Darkness welled up from the floor below, catching at
her ankles, sucking her down.

Fear surrounded Deborah as she groped wildly behind
her for the door handle. Her hand caught at empty air, and she realised she was
halfway down the stair and the darkness had thickened, pushing her on. She had
just time to give a startled cry before a dark bulk rose up out of the shadows.

The dark bulk sucked in his breath and tottered
dangerously backwards. The suffocating darkness retreated, leaving lingering
rags of hatred, and the eyes of Deborah’s givenfather narrowed in anger.

“Where d’you think you’re going like that, little
bitch? After your stinking whore of a mother, maybe?” Titus glared in fury at
Deborah, his face inches from hers and his labouring breath heavy with alcohol
fumes. Deborah wrinkled her nose and turned away, her fear transformed into
disgust. “Answer me, whore’s whelp!” He punched her shoulder, furious at her
defiance.

The blow shocked more than it hurt, and unable to
contain her anger, Deborah spun round, red hair flying, her own hand raised to
strike.

“And what if she was a whore? She was a thousand
times better than you, you filthy drunken animal!”

In the silence that followed as Titus digested the
insult, Deborah could sense the tension in the air. Conversation stopped in the
neighbouring apartments. She knew the unseen men were listening; she could
almost hear their hearts beating behind the closed doors. Strangely, the fear
she sensed now was not her own. Sweaty and damp, it exuded from the loud-voiced
men. They were afraid of her.

She wanted to feel triumphant, to savour their fear
as if it was sweet vengeance. But it wasn’t sweet; it was miserable to feel so
much loathing coming from all the people around her. She bit back a sob but
refused to lower her eyes.

It was Titus who turned his head away. Even when he
was drunk he could not hold his givendaughter’s gaze. “Serpentspawn,” he
muttered and pushing Deborah aside blundered up the stairs.

* * * *

Deborah edged past Fatima, her givenmother, who blocked the doorway as she
gossiped with Goodwife Artemis across the landing. She could guess what they
were talking about; the evening air had been full of whispering, commenting on
the latest edict that had been announced to the men at evening devotions in the
temples. The Ignorant population was to be culled; it was the only solution to
the nutrition shortage, the Elders said.

Deborah had overheard the men talking on their way
home. The Ignorants had brought it on themselves, they said. If they weren’t
such pilfering, idle layabouts! No doubt Fatima would have her usual cruel
commentary to pass on to the neighbour. Deborah paused in the doorway of her room
to listen.

The women all over the city had picked up the news
and were murmuring indignantly among themselves. Some were shocked; some like
Goodwife Fatima were not. She folded her beefy arms across her bosom and nodded
sagely to Goodwife Artemis from the apartment next door.

“Of course it’s not pleasant,” she said, her small
eyes glittering with malice. “But they have to do something, don’t they? If the
Ignorants have been thieving the nutrition reserves, obviously the Elders have
to show they won’t stand for it.”

Goodwife Artemis nodded in agreement. “My Jeremiah
heard the excess nutrition hasn’t done them any good either. In fact, the
vengeance of the Wise God has begun.”

Goodwife Fatima leaned even closer to her
neighbour, her voice a conspiratorial whisper. “Indeed it has, Goodwife. It has
been visited on their babies. I have seen it in the House of Births with my own
eyes. They are punished for their greed all right. Horrible some of them are.
Limbs come out all wrong. There was even one with two heads!” She shuddered.

“It’s kinder to cull them,” Goodwife Artemis said,
flicking a bit of dust from her sleeve.

Goodwife Fatima nodded. “It’s just putting them out
of their misery.” She made the gesture of sticking an imaginary syringe into an
imaginary baby’s heart. “And as for the healthy ones, well, there are just too
many of them, aren’t there? They breed like battery rabbits! Having their
babies on the quiet at home won’t save them either. All yesterday we were
packing up doses for the birthers to take into the Ignorant tenements. They’ll
get them all sooner or later, don’t you worry.” She chuckled to herself. “After
all, you can’t take a two-headed kid with no legs to the shop without somebody
noticing it, can you?”

“But they’d do it, wouldn’t they? Disgusting, they
are. No respect for the rest of us.” Goodwife Artemis wrinkled her nose as if
she could smell the drains.

Goodwife Fatima’s voice took on an indignant tone.
“Of course it’s for their own good. But do they see it like that? They had the
nerve to cause a rumpus outside the House of Births this morning, had to have
the Black Boys called out for them.” She shook her head. “Some people. You just
can’t help them, can you?”

Goodwife Artemis turned back into her own doorway,
and Deborah ducked out of sight into her tiny room next to the kitchen. For
once, good sense had prevailed and she had not stormed out and told piggy-eyed
Artemis what she thought of her. Her husband Jeremiah hung around with a scribe
at the Ministry of Justice.

Lying in her narrow bed, Deborah mulled over what
she had heard. Horror mingled with disgust as images of babies convulsing in
their death throes and distraught, hair-tearing mothers filled her head. And
these people dared to criticise her?
She
didn’t kill babies, she fumed.

Serpent, they called her, and not just behind her
back. She knew she frightened people. It was difficult to ignore the way adults
avoided her eyes or the uneasy, furtive glances of the other girls.

Serpent! They said her mother ran away because she
was an adulteress. Why then had Deborah’s father planned to go with her?
Deborah re-ran her memories of the scene, of her mother’s last anguished look
before she ran out of sight into the desert, her father, blood pouring from a
leg wound, reaching out to her, the silver-clad guard scooping up her
five-year-old self and bundling her back into the city.

But were they real memories, or a fiction she had
invented to ease the pain of being abandoned? She saw so many things nobody
else could see, visions that came in blinding flashes that made her head hurt.
She saw unimaginably bright colours, extraordinary growing, living things. And
people. Their smiling faces were filled with expressions of tenderness and
affection, and something deeper she remembered from years ago. She wanted to
reach out to these faces and touch them. They must belong to people who had
been close to her, resurfacing from the deep recesses of her memory.

Deborah knew she must never tell anyone about these
visions, because they belonged to her real life, not the cold, harsh existence
with Titus and Fatima. They belonged to a life the Elders thought they had
destroyed.

As Deborah lay in her bed, wanting her parents back
more than anything in the world, her head was filled with an aching flash. She saw
a woman’s face, young, with damp, tousled red hair, beads of sweat on her lip,
and tears welling up in her eyes despite the broad smile on her full lips. The
face came closer and closer, until Deborah’s vision was filled with green eyes
and dark red lashes and the smiling lips. Her heart stopped beating, the lips
moved, and in a whispered breath came a word, a name.

Deborah.

And she knew she was looking at her mother in the
moments after her birth. Her mother had held her, smiled at her, in defiance of
all the rules, and had whispered her name. When the shock subsided, she closed
her eyes and let herself be rocked to sleep on a wave of euphoria. The secret
she had just learned sprang from her memory. She was certain of it; there could
be no other explanation.

What if all the other visions were memories too?
The trees and mountains, the smiling faces? Surely not her own: she who had
only known grey, silent Providence. So whose memories were they?

* * * *

Deborah woke the next morning from dreams full of bright colours and savage
landscapes, with a wild excitement that still tingled in the pit of her
stomach. She opened her eyes with familiar throaty laughter echoing in her
head. She opened her eyes with a smile on her lips despite remembering that she
was in disgrace. Sometimes it was gales of laughter she heard, sometimes a
whistled tune or snatches of a song and, whoever the voice belonged to, it
always made her smile. She had never heard a sound like it in Providence and
wondered at the kind of person who could be so carefree and cheerful.

The ringing notes comforted her as Goodwife Fatima
draped her in the shameful black veil that left only her eyes visible. For
once, her givenmother was going to accompany Deborah to school, and she seemed
to be taking a malicious pleasure in it. Baruch, still shovelling his
breakfast, sniggered as Fatima pushed her out of the door. He couldn’t see the
terrible faces Deborah was pulling at him behind her veil, but something in her
eyes made him stop and lower his eyes to his plate.

* * * *

In grovelling, obsequious tones, Fatima related to the principal her
givendaughter’s unpardonable behaviour of the previous evening. Titus had been
whining to her about how he’d had to stop Deborah running out into the street
with her head uncovered, how she had insulted him and threatened to hit him.
Fatima begged Principal Anastasias to use all means in his power to cast out
the demon of arrogance in her givendaughter’s soul.

The dark-bearded man in spotless white robes
clicked his tongue in irritation and eyed Deborah sternly. “Your origins
unfortunately predispose you to rebellion and heresy. Be warned that you are
being closely watched for disobedience.”

Goodwife Fatima glanced at Deborah from the corner
of her eye and smirked. She bowed her head as she took her leave of the man in
white, pressing the hem of his robe to her lips in a sign of respect. Deborah
hung her head, not in shame, but so no one would see the fury and the dangerous
curiosity in her green eyes. The mention of her
origins
had the effect of an electric shock, and she held her
breath, hoping to hear something new. But the principal said nothing more. In
any case, she knew she could only expect lies about her parents. She would have
to find out for herself what really happened ten years ago.

“Do not think I am taken in by your false show of
submission,” Principal Anastasias said icily as Deborah turned to leave. “And
do not think I am unaware of your disgraceful behaviour in public yesterday
afternoon. You will
not
take the
defence of convicted criminals in defiance of your teachers, nor will you
incite discontent among your classmates by insulting the sacred institution of
marriage. From now on, your supervisors will be warned of your character and
will take the necessary measures to prevent you influencing the girls of your
class.”