Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

‘No lanterns up here. Ever. No candles. No lamps. Break that rule and I break you.’ She made the motion with heavy-knuckled hands. ‘When you’re not working you’re up here. Meals are in the kitchen. You’ll hear the bell when it’s time. Miss it and you won’t eat.’

Nona and the others crouched close to the trapdoor, watching the giant. The musty air reminded Nona of James Baker’s grain store at the village. Around them the shadows rustled. Cats most likely, rats and spiders of a certainty, but also other children watching the new arrivals.

Maya raised her voice. ‘Don’t pick on the new meat. There’s time enough for that down below.’ She stared at a patch of darkness seemingly no darker than any other. ‘I see any lumps and bumps on Partnis’s new purchases, Denam, Regol, and I’ll knock your heads together so hard you swap brains. Hear me?’ A pause. ‘Hear me?’ Loud enough to shake the roof.

‘I hear you.’ A snarl.

‘Heard.’ Chuckled in the distance.

The others emerged as soon as Maya withdrew. Two long-limbed boys dropped from the rafters into the midst of the newcomers. Nona hadn’t seen them lurking there. Others scampered in from the shadows, or strolled, or crept, each according to their nature. None of them as small or as young as Nona, but most of them not many years older. From the direction in which Maya had stared came a huge boy, a scowl beneath a thick shock of red hair, muscles heaped and shifting below his shapeless linen shift. Moments later a lad near as tall but willow-thin joined him, black hair sweeping down across his eyes, a crooked smile hung between the corners of his mouth.

A throng gathered, many more than Nona had anticipated. Huddled and watchful, waiting to be entertained.

The red-haired giant opened his mouth to threaten them. ‘You—’

‘Oh hush, Denam.’ The dark-haired boy stepped in front of him. ‘You’re newbies. I’m Regol. This is Denam, soon-to-be apprentice, and the toughest, fiercest warrior the Caltess attic has ever seen. Look at him wrong and he’ll chew you up then spit out the pieces.’ Regol glanced back at Denam. ‘That’s the gist, ain’t it?’ He returned his gaze to the newbies. ‘Now we’ve got the chest-thumping out of the way and saved Maya the bother of spanking Denam you can find yourself a place to sleep.’ He waved a hand airily at the gloom. ‘Don’t tread on any toes.’

Regol turned as if to go then paused. ‘Sooner rather than later someone will try to convince you that the reason so many of us up here are titchies like yourselves is that Partnis eats children, or there’s some test so deadly that almost nobody survives it, or sometimes Maya forgets to look before she sits down. The truth is that you’ve been bought early and cheap. Most of you will be disappointments. You won’t grow into something Partnis can use. He’ll sell you on.’ Regol raised a hand as Denam started to speak. ‘And not to a salt mine or to be used as the filling in a pie – just to any place that has a need you can meet.’ He lowered his hand. ‘Any questions?’

A cracking sound filled the immediate silence and it took Nona a moment to realize it was Denam’s knuckles as he formed fists. The giant’s scowl deepened. ‘I really hate you, Regol.’

‘Not a question. Anyone else?’

Silence.

Regol walked back into the darkness, stepping rafter to rafter with the unconscious grace of a cat.

Life in the Caltess proved to be a big improvement on an open cage rattling along the back-lanes of empire. Truth be told, it was an improvement on life in Nona’s village. Here she might be the smallest but she wasn’t the odd one out. The isolation of the village bred generations so similar in looks you might pick any handful at random to make a convincing family. Nona alone hadn’t fit the mould. A goat in the sheep herd. The family Partnis’s purse had furnished him with mixed every size and shape, every colour and shade, and in the attic’s gloom they were much of a muchness even so.

In addition to the four dozen children Partnis kept immediately beneath his roof, he housed a dozen apprentices, and seven fighters in their own set of rooms around the great hall. The apprentices shared a barracks house out in the rear of the compound.

Nona found a spot wedged between grain sacks larger than herself. Saida had more difficulty finding a space to squeeze into and was turned away by older residents time and again, even those she dwarfed. But in the end she settled on the boards close to Nona’s sack-pile, further back where the roof sloped so low that she had to roll into place.

That first night the hall opened its doors and the world flowed in to see men bleed. Denam and Regol got to watch from the highest rungs of the ladder in the furthest corner of the great hall, behind counters where the apprentices sold ale and wine to the crowd. The eldest of the remaining children crowded around the trapdoor. Everyone else had to find some chink among the rafters through which the events below might be glimpsed.

Nona’s spot afforded her a narrow view of the second ring. She wondered that they called it a ring when in fact the ropes strung between the four posts enclosed a square perhaps eight yards on a side, the whole thing a raised platform so that the fighter’s feet were level with the average man’s brow. She could see the tops of many heads, hundreds packed tight. The hubbub of their voices filled the attic. As the crowd built so did the noise, each of them having to shout just to be heard by their neighbour.

Saida lay close by, her eye to a crack. At her side an older boy, Marten, peered through a knot hole to which he laid ownership.

‘It’s all-comers tonight,’ Marten said, without looking up. ‘Ranking bouts on the seven-day, all comers on the second, exhibitions on the fourth. Blade matches are the last day of the month.’

‘My da said men fight in pits in the city …’ Saida said timidly, waiting to be told she was wrong.

‘In the Marn ports some do,’ Marten said. ‘Partnis says it’s a foolishness. If you’ve got willing fighters and a paying crowd you put them up on a platform, not down in a hole, where only the first row can see them.’

Nona lay, watching the throng below her while fights progressed unseen at the hall’s far end. Her view offered only the tops of heads, but she judged reactions by the pulse and flow of the crowd. Their roaring sounded at times like the howl of a single great beast, so loud it resonated in her chest, throbbing in her own voice when she yelled her challenge back at them.

At last a figure climbed into the ring beneath them. All around her Nona could feel other children scrambling for a view. Someone tried to lift her from her spot but she caught the hands that grabbed her and dug her nails in. The unknown someone dropped her with a howl and she put her eye back to the crack.

‘Raymel!’ The voices around her echoed the cries of the mob.

In the ring he looked a heavily-built man with thick blond hair, naked save for the white cloth bound around his groin, his skin gleaming with oil, the muscles of his stomach in sharp relief, showing each band divided from the next. Nona had glimpsed him wandering the hall earlier in the day and knew that he was enormous, taller even than Maya, and moving with none of her awkward blunder. Raymel prowled, a killer’s confidence in each motion. The man was a gerant prime. In the attic’s dimness Nona had learned the code that Partnis and Giljohn had used when selling her. The range ran from touch through half-blood and prime to full-blood. A touch could be thought of as quarter-blood and a prime as three-quarters. For gerants, primes often made the best fighters, full-bloods though rarer still and larger were too slow – though perhaps they just said that at the Caltess as they had none to show.