The Mansions of Idumea (Book 3 Forest at the Edge series) (10 page)

Cautiously she put her hand on the back porch
door handle and tugged. It was tighter than normal and she assumed
the house had settled a bit, compacting the frame. She yanked open
the door and jumped backward, in case the door was all that held up
her house. Jaytsy and Peto, several steps behind her, gasped and
held their breath.

They listened for any creaks or groans but
heard nothing. Mahrree took a deep breath and stepped into the back
porch and to the larder.

As quickly as she could she filled her arms
with dried vegetables and beef. She walked it out quickly to the
back door and into the waiting arms of her children, then went back
to retrieve the ingredients for biscuits.

“What are we going to cook all of this in,
Mother?” Jaytsy asked timidly.

“I need to go further in,” Mahrree said,
picking up a sack of flour. She wished she had more goods in the
cellar, which would have been safer to slip into. But at the
beginning of Planting Season, her cellar along with everyone else’s
was nearly empty. There were, however, plenty of slips of gold and
silver hidden. It now seemed silly to have more than five year’s
worth of metal stored when what they really needed was food.

“But Father said not to go back in!” her
panicked daughter reminded.

“But I’ve asked the Creator if I can go back
in,” Mahrree answered calmly.

“And what did He say?”

Mahrree paused. “Still waiting for an
answer,” she admitted as she handed Peto the flour. “But I don’t
feel too concerned, so I’m going to test the house. Stay back, both
of you.” She stood on the back porch and faced the kitchen
door.

Peto glanced at his sister and took two big
steps back.

“Mother, this isn’t a good idea,” Jaytsy
informed her.

“Thank you, daughter.” Mahrree glanced over
her shoulder at Jaytsy. “I’ll remember you said that as I’m crushed
by the stone.”

Jaytsy’s mouth fell open in horror.

“I’m joking! Goodness, I’m only joking.
Still, step back, Jaytsy.”

Mahrree tried the door that led to her
kitchen. It opened freely. Taking that as a good sign, she pushed
experimentally on the door frame, then the stone walls around it.
“If you’re going to come down, let me know so I have time to get
out, all right?”

Several paces behind her in the back garden
Jaytsy whimpered and Peto cleared his throat.

The house answered nothing.

Mahrree decided that was the answer she was
looking for. “Here I come!” she announced and walked purposefully
into her kitchen. Several cast iron pots were already on the
ground, waiting. Their heaviness had dinged the wooden floor when
they’d fallen out of the cabinets.

“That’s all right,” she told the house
consolingly as she ran her finger into the grooves left by the
pots. “It just adds character. We like character.”

She picked up the pots and placed them on the
work table, then she tugged on a drawer which stuck before
opening.

“But you always stick, don’t you.” Mahrree
patted the drawer and retrieved several large spoons and a sharp
knife. She took a handful of cloths and placed them in the pots,
then rushed all of it out to Jaytsy and Peto.

“One more trip is all, I promise,” and she
bounded back into the house, ignoring their shocked faces that once
again she was going against the orders of their father and the
Commander of Edge.

The house was still quiet, and she wanted to
risk a look. In the kitchen she gently pushed on the door to the
combined eating and gathering room. It stuck a little before giving
way.

Mahrree held her breath to listen for any
sound to signal it was all about to come down, but she was met with
only safe silence.

She crept into the room and looked at the
rock walls. Hairline cracks traveled throughout the mortar, but no
rocks bulged in unfamiliar ways. She smoothed her hand along one
wall, then the next and the next, past the staircase and the door
to the study, the door to Jaytsy’s room, the front door, and around
to Peto’s room then back to the kitchen door. All felt normal.

With each aftershock that morning, Mahrree
had visions of her house collapsing. She’d half expected to come
home to a pile of rock and wood, with bits of paper floating around
like huge snowflakes.

Satisfied with the walls, she finally allowed
herself to look at the piles of books scattered all along the
floor. Those would be easy to clean up. Easier than her bedroom,
which she decided not to consider. She and Perrin might be spending
many nights down here until their roof was replaced.

Her gaze traveled up to the ceiling and the
large oak timbers that supported the upper-level bedroom and
adjoining attic. She smiled. There was no obvious structural
damage, but wasn’t ready to climb upstairs just yet.

“Mother!” Jaytsy called frantically. “Are you
still all right?”

“Yes, yes, just checking things here. I’ll be
right out.” Mahrree patted the walls of her old house. “Better than
blocks, you are, aren’t you? Good old house. If you haven’t come
down yet, I’ll bet you won’t at all. I’ll never abandon you!”

Then, on pure impulse, she gave a quick kiss
to the largest stone next to her. Her father had placed that one,
she was sure of it.

“Coming, children!”

---

It was a bad idea to irritate the Commander
of Edge on a good day, but to annoy him on a terrible day like this
one was near to suicide. Perrin could scarcely believe that his
efforts to clear out the market place, now that the last of the
fires was mere smolders, were interrupted by such an errand. But
when he intercepted the message sent to one of his sergeants, he
glared at the worried soldiers around him and said in a dreadful
tone, “I’ll handle this one. Personally.”

He scowled as he rode up to the arena,
erected a year before the incarceration building was expanded—and
he always suspected there was a connection there. The arena took up
the vast area of the village green where children used to play
organizing their own teams, deciding their rules, and negotiating
their problems. Now none of the children played unless some adult
was paid to direct their every move, and in the evenings they sat
with their parents watching adults play bizarre versions of “Tie Up
Your Uncle” and blatantly cheat at kickball. That was why Perrin
took his family a couple of times a week to the fort to play games
with other families like Mr. Hegek and his wife and son, and with
soldiers who were also perennially eleven-years-old, like Shem.

As he tied his horse to the hitching post he
evaluated the structural integrity of the building. To his
disappointment, it seemed quite sturdy. Then again, it was made by
Idumean craftsmen to be a smaller replica of the massive arena in
the middle of Idumea, which every village now wanted to
emulate.

Perrin retrieved a length of rope from his
tackle bag and strode up a corridor to where he heard shouts of
disparagement and some ugly laughter. When he reached the rows of
bleachers, he paused and glared at the cluster of thirty or so
young men. They didn’t notice him because they were too busy
mocking a friend who was on all fours in the dirt of the arena,
with a bull slowly circling him.

“Come on!” one of the men called out, and
Perrin remembered the plump pimply thing was one that washed out of
his basic training, fortunately. “You’re supposed to climb that
scaffolding, then swing out over the bulls, and land on that
spinning thing over there. You’re not supposed to fall off the
second rung of the scaffold!”

“I want my silver slips back!” another friend
demanded. “Wait, we didn’t pay our silver yet, did we?”

“Because this isn’t entertaining. Release the
other bulls!”

Perrin knew his boots were loud—he’d
developed a way of thunking his heel when he needed his steps to
sound particularly ominous. But even over the overgrown boys’
laughter, which sounded as if it was being helped along by a
generous amount of mead—he wasn’t heard approaching until he was
nearly on top of them.

“And WHAT do WE have HERE?”

Half of the young men fell off their
bleachers in alarm, while the other half grinned and cheered.

“Ah, now we’ll get some action! Commander
Shin—where are the entertainers? There’s supposed to be an obstacle
course and bulls and molasses and feathers and girls—”

“Girls!” a few more men called loudly and
looked around as if expecting them to materialize out of thin
air.

“—but there’s just this, this, this nothing!
Command something!”

Out of the corner of his eye Perrin noticed
their friend under the scaffolding, looking a bit confused and
slowly crawling toward a gate hoping the snorting bull wouldn’t
notice the movement. Perhaps if the hapless contestant wasn’t
belching so loudly, the bull wouldn’t be pawing the ground just
now—

Perrin left his jeering friends and trotted
down to the arena floor to use his little-known weapon: his ability
to terrify steak. With one smooth movement he hopped over the stone
and iron wall separating the bleachers from the action, and
gestured for the crawler to come over to him.

“And get on your feet, for crying out loud,”
he hissed at him. “The bull knows exactly where you are, and that
you’re slower than frozen mud. I can see why he wants to trample
you.”

Perrin strode past the now loping young man
and stopped abruptly with his hands on his waist. He eyed the bull,
which had stopped advancing.

“I remember the days when this field was
filled with children playing their own games,” he grumbled. “Now
adults sit around waiting for idiots to make up new ones.”

The bull snuffed, a tad unsure of itself.

Perrin always had that effect on livestock.
He narrowed his squint. At least he had a ready audience in the
form of a nervous animal. Mahrree always rolled her eyes whenever
he got started, and reminded him that she, too, lived in Edge
during the good old days, but didn’t remember them
quite
as
well as he did.

“Used to make up our own entertainment,” he
told the bull, which was shifting its eyes away from his. “Our own
plays, songs, even had debates. What do you think of that, eh?
People discussing things intelligently. And now look what we have
here: me, lecturing a future roast.”

The animal took a few wary steps
backward.

“And occasionally Idumea would send us
broad-chested women who could sing so high the dogs were agitated
for days, and skinny men who could make pyramids on top of each
other, while juggling knives. Now
that
was entertainment,”
he said with a grunt of satisfaction. “Never did learn how they did
that. But now we settle for throwing our own drunks at someone’s
cattle. Where’s the talent and skill in that?”

The bull slowly backed away as if embarrassed
it had any thoughts of charging, or being involved in anything
Perrin deemed unworthy.

“Where are the screaming girls, huh?” he
glanced around. “Those loopy-eyed things that chant stupid rhymes
to get the crowd excited about whatever’s about to happen here, but
just get in the way of the action instead?”

The bull lowered his head and looked almost
apologetic.

“It’s all right if you ate them,” Perrin said
generously, taking a few more confident steps toward the middle of
the arena. “Those girls are as bright as hay, I suppose. You
shouldn’t be here either. Instead, you should be on my plate, thick
and pink and sizzling.” He grinned as the bull backed all the way
to the opposite wall.

Perrin nodded at it and noticed that the
young man had scrambled to safety and was now sitting in the middle
of his friends, fascinated. Perrin slowly backed up to the gate
himself. The bull hugged the other side of the arena, waiting for
the massive man to leave.

When Perrin climbed up the wall, it was to
hear the cheers of the drunken young men.

“Now that was a show! Do it again. Scare some
more bulls.”

“How do you do that? Can they smell you
salivating or something?”

“Bullying bulls—is that an army thing? Slag,
I shouldn’t have quit basic training.”

But Perrin wasn’t amused. “And just what do
you think you’re doing here?” he repeated his earlier question.

The men looked at each other in surprise.

“And which one of you had the gall to send a
message to my busy soldiers demanding that ‘The show must go
on’?”

The men glanced blankly around, as if they
thought that was a good idea, but now, in hindsight, maybe not so
much . . . and whose idea was it anyway to insist the soldiers find
the arena manager to get the scheduled entertainment on its
way?

“There will be nothing interesting to watch
here tonight,” Perrin intoned, “or any night, for a very long
time.”

“Well what are we supposed to do?” one of men
whined, while the others, a bit quicker on the uptake, tried vainly
to hush him. But the cold smile on Perrin’s face told them they
were too late, and he had a brilliant idea.

“What are you supposed to do?” He held up the
rope and smiled grimly. “Five of you are going to take that
beautiful piece of meat-on-the-hoof to the butcher’s on the south
side of the marketplace. It’ll be easy to find because it’s the
only building still standing there. Then, after the butcher turns
that entertainment into meals for two neighborhoods, you’ll
distribute the beef to those who have nothing to eat. The rest of
you will follow me to do something more interesting,” he said,
almost nastily. “It’s a new entertainment called Moving Rubble! And
the loser will become my new best buddy tomorrow, going with me
everywhere I go. No, no, no—don’t need to take off running. I have
a dozen soldiers at the exits by now, ready to hand each of you a
shovel and escort you to the areas of greatest need. Ah, nice to
see you all so eager to get to work. And what do we have here, even
more
people looking for some entertainment? My, my, do I
have plans for
all of you
. . .”