Bird of Chaos: Book One of the Harpy's Curse (24 page)

“Verne?” A voice reaches me from the real world but I ignore it.

Each of Callirhoe’s pitiful cries is a curse:
Damn those who wish to destroy Tibuta. Damn those who allow it to persist.

A blast of the shofar and the workers begin their slow march around the edge of the mine past the white marble face. They breach the top like a snake slithering out of its hole and shuffle in formation on the flat.

A dark spot appears on the azure horizon. The white-tailed eagle with its two-metre wingspan soars closer, its pale brown body catching the sun, its black flight feathers like fingers grasping at the air. It uncurls its yellow talons and sweeps in for the kill. I feel the shearwater’s fear. I scream. My voice is a bird’s screech.

“Verne? What is it?”

The eagle ignores me and swoops down over the mines. I wonder what carrion it feeds on when the earth is denuded. Then it occurs to me. It hunts my people, those rotting pieces of flotsam with their arms like twigs ready to snap, their bellies swollen with hunger and their eyes too big for their sunken faces. We, the people, have become food for the beasts.

“Verne!”

I wake with a start. Callirhoe has flown away. Drayk stands over me: I lie in a nightgown, my short hair splayed around my head. I am bitterly conscious of my bare legs, my bare arms and my bare feet. His low, rumbling chuckle draws me from my thoughts. “If anyone saw you thus they would think you were as mad as your grandmother,” he says.

I look at him through one eye. He looks like one of the marble statues from along the Holy Way. His jaw is hard and his body smooth. He carries the weight of history.

“I was imagining flying over the mines. At least I think I was imagining it. Maybe it’s my gift. It is hard to know. I wish I could train.” Most Golding children receive instruction the moment their gift arrives. A child must grow into their gift slowly, with guidance. Without training they may never learn to control it and it could get the better of them.

“Your mother went to Minesend last night to inspect the damage. It’s possible her grasp on you wavered.” He offers me his hand and pulls me to my feet. I am surprised by the heat in his touch. “Once she is out of the way we can start your education.”

I cock my head, wondering at his choice of words. I find it interesting that he assumes I would train with him. “Drayk, what are you doing here?” I say because, though I am pleased he has come, it is a little odd. We don’t have training since it is the day of the execution. And I am in my nightgown.

The immortal shrugs. “I thought I would accompany you to the execution. We better hurry or we’ll miss it.”

“She really
is
taking my security seriously,” I say, referring to my mother. Usually Bolt would accompany me or maybe one of the other war-wits, but not the chiliarch of the Queen’s Guard.

Drayk’s face turns a light shade of pink. “I came of my own accord.”

I am speechless. Drayk has never done anything “of his own accord”. Not when it comes to me.

He will not look at me. I mutter something about having to get changed and escape to my room. I listen to the creak of leather as Drayk eases himself into a kline.

Suddenly a-dither, I rummage through the clothes until I find a reasonably clean peplos. I pull the short nightgown over my head and wrap the billowing sheet around my body, securing it at both shoulders. I tie a woven leather belt around my waist and slip into a pair of sandals. I check my appearance in the mirror and smooth down my unruly hair.
That will have to do
, I think and join the immortal in my solar.

He looks up from his lap and smiles. “Beautiful.”

I can’t help but blush.

It is an imperfect day for an execution. The sun threatens to reduce Elea Bay to rippling heat. There isn’t a breath of fresh air and the mob is sticky and unruly. The royal party stands facing the nine-foot-high gallows in the shade of the Justice Tree. The tree’s leaves are green and silver at the base and red and gold at the top. A single rope is tied to a branch waiting for its victim.

A row of the Queen’s Guards separates us from the crowd. Hero stands a little way away. He has not spoken to me since the incident in the kitchen. I nudge Drayk’s arm. “I think it was Hero who told my mother.”

“Who else?”

“Exactly.”

The crowd fills the square and spills down Justice Lane. People lean from the balconies of the surrounding building, the sun burning the tops of their heads. A woman waddles past calling to her child, “Elef! Come back here!” and my head snaps up as I search for the familiar face. But the child chasing the mangy dog is too young to be the boy I knew. And he is not blind. I look back at my feet and admire the webbing between my toes. Dust cakes my sandals.

Drayk is a reassuring presence beside me.

A blast of the shofar brings an end to the shuffling of impatient feet. Freemen and slaves step out of the way, or are thrown, as an argutan-drawn cart tears up the street. The prisoner grips the bars of her cage but is jostled by every bump in the marble road. Her beauty is stern, her eyes carry sadness and accusation in their depths, and I am drawn to her as if she is something sent from the Elysian Fields. We all are. Some call out to her, naming her Theodora, or Gift from God.

The cart pulls up beside the scaffold and an unsettling silence descends over the congregation. As Theodora steps from the cage she wipes a spot of blood from the corner of her mouth with her tied hands. Our eyes meet and I experience again the unsettling feeling that she knows me and expects me to do something.
What?
I want to yell.
I cannot help you. I must not make a premature enemy of my mother. I am not ready.

The guards lead Theodora to the top of the gallows. An argutan whinnies and in this moment of distraction Theodora throws her head back, shrieks and knocks one of her guards off the scaffold.

Drayk steps between me and danger, drawing his sword. My mother barks orders to unresponsive guards.

Theodora lunges at another soldier, flinging her bound hands over his head. Her eyes swirl with memories of the Tempest and a storm builds inside her. She gags a torrent of frothing salt water from her belly as if a faucet had been turned inside her. She plants her lips over the soldier’s, forming a seal, and vomits the sea into his mouth. He chokes and splutters. His eyes bulge and he fights but there is no use. The water pumps out of her like a siphon. He goes limp and she kicks him over the edge of the scaffold so he falls to the ground with a thud.

“Impossible!” people say, pointing at the pool of water oozing from his mouth. A tiny pink and yellow diadem anthias squirms uncontrollably on the hard earth, its tiny fins trying to take flight, its little mouth gasping at the air. The fish, so far from home, is slowly suffocating.

“A miracle,” they whisper.

We watch Theodora in awe, expecting the sun to burst through her brow or the moon to appear in her chest.

Finally a soldier stirs. He raises his xiphos and strikes the woman across the face with its hilt, sending her to her knees. Theodora is reptilian. Her tongue lashes out of her mouth to lick her lips. They pull her to her feet.

“Hurry up. Kill her,” my mother says through clenched teeth, aware of the unsettled crowd.

Two of the soldiers hold Theodora while the others wrap her in strips of white muslin, slowly winding her feet, her legs, her torso, her arms and finally her face. Her screams are muffled. She writhes against her constraints.

The executioner places the noose around her neck with the knot under her jaw. Without thinking, I take Drayk’s hand and look away. The crowd gasps when the lever is pulled to open the trapdoor. The rope snaps taut. I squeeze.

When I look back, a corpse like a cocoon of spun silk hangs from the Justice Tree. I will not think of it as a woman, as a once breathing, living being whose only mistake was to wash up on our shores. No, it is a pupa, not dead but merely sleeping. It turns on its silk string. Even now a butterfly is breaking free from the encasement and taking flight.

A shiver runs down my spine. Humanity has a propensity for extreme violence, I realise, and a taste for blood. We profess a desire to rehabilitate the marginalised but in truth we have a thirst for vengeance, as if utterly destroying a person might cleanse us of our own vulnerability.

“Look!” a man yells from the crowd. I cannot help myself. Like everyone else I look where he points. The corpse is stirring. “She’s not dead!”

From beneath her linen casing there comes a gurgling scream. Then the corpse explodes like an overfull water bladder. Droplets of clear liquid fly through the air. A puddle forms on the ground beneath the trapdoor. Nothing but a wad of sodden, dripping rags hangs from the tree.

For a time there is no sound as we contemplate this phenomenon. Then a woman screams and points at the sopping rage: “Behold.” Her voice is like the many tympanum of a holy rite. “The queen has destroyed our only proof of the Tempest.” Soldiers drop their swords and simply stare. “The queen has killed the prophet.”

The crowd erupts into a dissonance and surges towards us. The row of soldiers push against the crowd. It is then that I realise I am still holding Drayk’s hand. He pulls me towards him, shielding me with his body as debris flies through the air. My face pressed into his warm chest, he rushes me to a palanquin yelling, “Go! Go!” The litter is off the ground and moving before I am even properly inside.

“Highness,” Alexis says, panting. Though I cannot see her face I know her voice. I poke my head between the palanquin curtains. She and Carmyl run beside Drayk, keeping pace with the palanquin. They have their swords drawn to part the crowd. “We are almost at the gate.” She adjusts her whale-rib cuirass with hands wrapped in leather strips fitted with blades that protrude from her knuckles. The bone breast- and backplate are all that protect her from the projectiles flung by the mob.

The bells are ringing. I can hear distant shouting.

The porters on the West Gate usher us in, calling, “Hurry! Hurry!” The minute we are through, the chains rattle and the first portcullis clangs shut. The ground seems to shake from the ferocity of the group that rattle the iron bars.

Stepping down from the palanquins, I watch Drayk and the other soldiers run across the grass, up the battlement stairs and along the Wall. The beating of the drums resounds in my chest. I prepare myself for blood.

I climb the battlement. The wind whips around my head. Archers acknowledge barked orders from their commanders and fire at our countrymen below. Drayk is further along but I will not disturb him. I find Petra instead.

The calm strategos crouches through a crenel like a cat readying to pounce. This close I can see the tufts of short black hair protruding from the side of her helmet. “Wait for the command and aim for the heart. You must account for the wind,” she says to a nearby chiliarch, who relays the order. Petra pulls an arrow from her quiver. It is almost blown from her hand. She nocks the arrow, draws back slowly then peers over the Wall.

“Hold your fire,” she calls and waits for a lull in the wind. “Fire!” Arrows shoot through the air around me—
wiz, wiz, wiz
—and all of them hit the people’s makeshift shields—
thud, thud, thud
. She resets. A soldier tips a barrel of burning coals over the edge onto the unsuspecting mob below. I peer over the side to watch the embers fall.

“Highness, get back from the Wall.” Petra pulls me back by the scruff of my neck just as an arrow hurtles through the air where my head would have been.

“We must not fire on our own people,” I say.

She looks at me from beneath her helmet. “It’s the queen’s orders.”

“Yes, but we must not have a repeat of the incident at Minesend. Enough Tibutans have died. The gate is shut. They can do us no more harm.”

The strategos hesitates, weighs the decision in her mind and eventually nods. She turns and calls to her soldiers, “Cease fire.”

Her commanders echo the cry: “Cease fire!”

I hear my mother below, “Make way. Make way.” I scrabble to the bottom of the stairs to watch her approaching. Beside her march Thera and Odell. Thera reaches the gate first and with outstretched hands she pushes her gift out towards the rioters. It burns in a red line that we all feel, hot and excruciating, a migraine that starts at the back of the eyes and eats through the skull. A rebel writhes on the floor, blind. Thera fires again. Her victim claws at his bleeding eyes.

What was initially a heartfelt riot has become a real battle with casualties. The mob pulls back.

Odell is upon them. He raises his hands and with his face contorted pushes out with his gift. A blast of icy cold air shoots through the gate and hits a freewoman in the face. She stumbles back, falling to the ground. She quickly recovers and, rubbing the ice burn, gets to her feet. Before she can escape, Odell takes a deep breath, his chest rising. He closes his eyes and focuses his attention. He shoots again. This time the blast is shorter but far more intense. A stream of ice shoots from his hands, through the gate and straight through the woman’s chest. The arrow dissolves with her blood.

“No! They are retreating. Stop! Stop attacking them. They are turning back,” I yell but none of my cousins are listening. Odell fires again. “No!” I say, trying to pull him away. There are tears in my eyes. He easily pushes me off and fires again.