Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

‘You’ll pay for that.’ Denam had seemed on the point of saying more but a dull thud interrupted him. The vise-like grip on Nona’s arms relaxed and in a moment she’d torn free. She had turned to see Denam clutching his lower back with both hands, and behind him another figure, a touch shorter.

‘Go.’

The newcomer hadn’t raised his voice but Denam ran for it, still clutching his back, pushing past Nona and out into the yard beyond. Nona kicked him in the back of the knee as he passed, but he hadn’t seemed to notice.

‘Kidney punch. Be pissing blood for a week.’ The man had had the flat eyes and facial scars of one of the ice-tribes, two lines slanting down across each cheek. He had worn a leather jerkin, sealskin trousers, an iron chain loose about his neck, and at his side the flat sword known as a tular. Nona had seen one amid the huge variety in the Caltess weapon store: the blade was all straight lines, wider at the end than at the hilt, requiring a scabbard open all along its length. In the village they told worse tales about the ice tribes than they did about the Pelarthi. Nobody knew what they ate up there on the sheet. The consensus being that it was each other. ‘You’re very small. Smallest Partnis has?’

The man was bald, not overly tall, but solid, and he had spoken slowly and with so deep a voice that each word had been like the rolling out of a heavy stone, both measured and considered. Nona had got the feeling that he might never rush a sentence, whether his firstborn lay dead in his arms or he had woken to find his house ablaze all around him.

She had rubbed her forearms where Denam had gripped her. ‘You’re a ring-fighter?’ She hadn’t seen him before, she would have known if she had. His eyes were the faint cloudy blue of an ice-lake, his skin a dark red.

He nodded. ‘I fight in the ring – I fight outside it. They call me Tarkax.’ He watched her.

Nona had found the man’s scrutiny uncomfortable. He had something of the wolf about him, but Nona knew wolves.

‘Had trouble before.’ The man set his hand to the side of his face, indicating the bruising from where Nona had let Giljohn slap her on the day he sold her. ‘Got first blood today though. That’s good.’ He had looked past her to the yard beyond. ‘They going to be teaching you soon enough. Like that.’ Outside the horses still cantered around the grooms on their training ropes. ‘Partnis’s fight-masters will tell you it’s a science, this business of fists and knives. They’ll tell you, keep a cool head, detached, control.’ The man had given a quick shrug of his shoulders and spat. ‘He’ll tell you the professional calculates, watches, plans.’

‘Don’t they?’ Nona had turned back towards him.

‘Nature shaped us, little girl. Shaped the animals. Predators. Prey. Millions of years. Fighting, making children, dying. A cycle that hones each to its purpose. And what have we in common, wolf, eagle, man, under-killers, bears, all of us?’ His eyebrows had shaped the question.

Nona had waited for him to answer, wondering what exactly under-killers were.

‘Rage. We’ve got hate and anger and red fury, child. Saw it in you too. Got your teeth into that idiot boy. Didn’t care that he might snap your arms off.’ The man had gone down on one knee, face close to hers. ‘Here in the Corridor they teach you to put that anger aside. They got their reasons. Keep a calm head and you’ll see more. But on the ice we know better than to let go of the weapons so many hard years have forged for us.’ He had jabbed a blunt finger at Nona’s chest. ‘Keep that fire. Use it. We’re wild things us men, and when we remember it we’re at our most dangerous.’

Nona hadn’t seen the man after that, but his words had struck her like hammers to a bell, and she rang with them, even now in the quiet dark, and she held on to her anger.

‘Get up! They’re coming!’

Nona opened eyes she felt sure had just that minute closed, and saw only night.

‘Quickly!’

She groaned, stiff in every limb, and rolled in time to see a tall figure retreating from the doorway, lantern in hand. All around her novices were spilling from their beds, some grumbling, some anxious.

‘Sherzal wasn’t supposed to be here until noon!’

‘Royals do what they want.’ Clera, still a lump in her bed.

‘Everyone up! Everyone dressed.’ Mally, Grey Class’s head-girl, turned up the wick in her night-lantern.

Nona groaned, shrugged off her blanket and started to wriggle into her skirts. Fingers busied themselves with laces and ties, not needing instruction from her sleep-fuddled mind. She hadn’t lied about being too sore to share a bed with Clera. Sleep had only stiffened her: she hoped Darla’s finger and toes hurt as much as the bruises she gave in exchange.

The novices stumbled out into a freezing pre-dawn, the sun a red promise to the east. The scattered ice melted by the focus moon had frozen into a continuous film, treacherous and hard to see. Clera skated out across the courtyard with a dancer’s grace, disdaining the threat of a sudden fall, just as she did on the blade-path.

‘Novice Clera! Get in line!’ Sister Flint rounded the corner, a thin dark line that the sun could not yet muster the courage to unwrap. ‘We’re required at the abbess’s house. Quickly, quietly, and with decorum.’

The slow, cold passing of an hour found both novices and nuns numb-fingered, shivering in their lines before Abbess Glass’s steps, watching the pillars for any sign of the royal party’s approach. Hessa saw them first. Nona, following the line of Hessa’s finger, had to squint for several moments before she too saw the flicker of motion between the pillars.

The soldiers came into view first: five ranks of five, all in scarlet and silver. The sight of them gave her a sense of unease, something tugging at her memory … The troop wasn’t matched in height as the high priest’s church-guards had been, but cut from many cloths with varying degrees of generosity. As the soldiers drew closer Nona could see that they all shared two things: none were young and none looked as though crossing them would be a good idea.

Nona had been expecting the emperor’s sister to arrive in a sedan chair larger and more grand than the high priest’s, but both came mounted, despite the ice-wind. Sherzal cut an impressive figure in the furs of a white bear, astride a huge white horse. High Priest Nevis, on the other hand, looked uncomfortable and ill at ease, huddled in a hooded robe on the back of a grey mare.

Behind the two riders straggled a long train of priests, attendants, and baggage porters, many bent against the wind like ridge-top trees.

The choir started up with the first high notes of Concordiance as the soldiers began to form lines before the steps. Poor Sister Rule had only a moment of song to glory in though before the ice-wind raised its own voice and drowned the novices out, scouring the plateau with shards straight from the northern sheets. Decorum blew away too as Abbess Glass led the charge for the Dome of the Ancestor.

Within minutes the visitors and the whole population of the convent stood packed together in a chaotic and ice-spattered mix, spilling out beyond the foyer’s pillared space into the main dome, an unearned privilege for any novices in Red Class who happened to be swept in amid the crush.

Sherzal of course stood in her own space, at the centre of a tight ring of soldiers who had no qualms about knocking young girls or old nuns aside to make room. Nona slipped and twisted ahead of them to enter the echoing space beneath the dome for the first time. Being in Grey Class now she was entitled to stand beneath the dome, though it wouldn’t have been untypical of Sister Wheel to delay her introduction by weeks or even months just to keep her in her place. Nona looked up, dwarfed by great walls curving away towards a distant, golden vertex. The enclosed space swallowed the intruders, making them seem few and tiny, enfolding their conversation and complaint in its silence. Nona stood, rooted to the spot, the walls seeming to rotate around her as she gazed at the distant heights. Her habit steamed and fat drops of water fell from the hem.