Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

Nona found herself one of the last out of the dormitory, hurrying with Clera to the refectory for breakfast. The pair of them clattered down the front steps, finding an unusually still day, a cloudless sky, and a rare warmth on offer.

By the dormitory wall a plump, red-faced sister attacked an area of the flagstones with a stiff brush, pausing to slosh down more water from her bucket. She glanced up at the girls. ‘Hurry!’ And returned to her task, scrubbing furiously at a dark stain. ‘Away with you.’

Clera stuck her tongue out at the woman’s back and ran off towards the refectory, giggling. ‘That’s Sister Mop. She thinks novices only have two aims in life: to get stuff dirty and to get in her way.’

‘She called herself Mop?’ Nona running behind.

‘No, but everyone else calls her that. She chose some flower name, Crysanthe-something, but nobody can pronounce it or remember it.’

A hundred yards on they passed Sister Tallow, coming from the abbess’s house. She looked away towards the eastern sky as they ran by but not before Nona saw the abrasion across the left side of her face and the bruise darkening around it.

Nona waited until they were out of earshot around the corner of the refectory. ‘What happened?’

‘Don’t know. Can’t imagine anyone getting the best of old Blade,’ Clera panted. ‘Maybe the abbess slapped her!’ She laughed, then more serious, ‘Did you see she had her arm hidden inside her habit?’

Nona hadn’t and once through the doors the sight of food bowls, full and steaming, pushed any questions from her mind. Breakfast was a hasty affair but Nona still made a valiant attempt at leaving nothing edible behind by the time she left the table.

‘Come on!’ Clera turned and beckoned as Nona jogged to keep up, one arm over her over-full stomach. Fortunately the Path cloisters came into view soon enough, past the beehives lined in the lee of the abbess’s house. Four arms of the building reached towards the compass points from a round central tower. Each arm was a framework of ornately-worked stone, open to the elements, with delicate corner pillars and trellised masonry reaching between them to complete the structure. The central tower stood dark against the sky, defying the years with the arrogance of stone, seeming in one moment foreboding and in the next beautiful. Four doors gave onto the ground floor, one for each arm of the surrounding structure.

Ahead of Nona and Clera a novice laboured towards the tower in limping steps, a crutch under her left armpit.

‘Someone must have got kicked a bit hard in Blade yesterday!’ Nona slowed her pace as they caught the girl up. No one had been limping in the dormitory, and yet there was something familiar about the novice.

‘Ha!’ Clera shouted, ‘That’s just Stumpy!’ She raced past, jostling the girl enough to make her stagger.

Nona came to a halt, almost level with the novice, reaching to catch her, then pulling back her hands as she saw it wasn’t needed. The girl was hardly taller than her, hair the colour of straw set about her head in a hundred tight curls. ‘Nona,’ she said, without turning.

Nona knew the voice. ‘Hessa?’

Hessa pivoted on her crutch. The length of the habit hid her withered leg, but only the tip of her shoe touched the ground on that side. ‘We’ve come a long way from Giljohn’s cage.’

Nona had her arms about her before she had time to blink. ‘They killed Saida.’

‘I’m sorry for it.’ Hessa lifted a hand uncertainly to pat Nona between the shoulders.

‘How are you here? Why haven’t I seen you?’ Nona released her and stepped back.

‘I’ve been in the sanatorium. Sister Rose wanted to keep me in until I got rid of this cough.’ Hessa thumped a fist against her narrow chest. ‘I’ve been here for weeks. Giljohn tried to sell me at the Academy but I failed their tests. They said I was the wrong sort, quantal maybe, but definitely not marjal. He tried to sell me to three different mages. Their houses are so big, Nona! I thought we were going into the emperor’s palace—’

‘NooooOOOooona!’ Clera hollering from the north door. ‘We’ll be late!’

‘Coming!’

‘We’d better hurry.’ Hessa shifted her weight and set her crutch forward.

A bony hand closed on both their shoulders. ‘The heathens have found each other, I see!’ Sister Wheel pushed between them. ‘The peasant and the cripple, plotting together. We’ll soon clear out those muddy little minds. Scrub away heresy and falsehood so the Ancestor may find you worthy. Even simple clay can be moulded and fired into something of worth.’

Nona opened her mouth to say something sharp. ‘I—’

‘Yes, Sister Wheel! I’m looking forward to our Spirit class.’ Hessa smiled up at the nun so sweetly that Nona almost believed she meant it. ‘But we’d best go now or Mistress Path will be cross with us.’

Sister Wheel made a sound of disgust and released both of them, wiping her hands on her habit. ‘Quickly then!’

Hessa showed a fair turn of pace with her crutch, her withered leg swinging beneath her skirts. Nona matched her speed, glancing back at Sister Wheel, now making for the dome. ‘I don’t like that old woman!’

‘Hah, Wheel’s all right once you know her ways.’ Stump, swing, stump, swing. ‘Just wait till you meet the Poisoner. Now she is scary!’

Nona entered the Tower of the Path with Hessa, using the east door. Novices were supposed to be drawn to a particular door but none of them called to her. All four doors led into the same room – an echoingly empty one with a stone spiral stair at the centre, and around the walls the strangest pictures Nona had seen, though in truth until she entered the ring-fighters’ rooms at the Caltess she had never seen paintings. While Hessa laboured up the stairs Nona took a moment to glance around at the two dozen or so portraits, nuns all of them, but with their hair uncovered and the most peculiar flights of fancy added. One lacked half a face, with tatters extending across the gap out over a night-black background. Another in place of one eye had a red star, its rays reaching in all directions. Another still had no mouth and in her hair flowers of a kind Nona had never seen, the deep blue of evening sky.

‘Nona!’

She sped up the stairs after Hessa. The stairway seemed long enough to reach the tower top but offered no doors into any rooms along the way before emerging into the middle of a classroom. At least Nona assumed it to be a classroom – it looked more like a church. Apart from the chairs on which Red Class sat, and a large iron-bound chest at the front, the room was completely bare. Even so, it had a beauty to it. Four tall and narrow windows broke the light into many colours. Scores of stained-glass panels made each window into a glowing, abstract picture that threw reds, and greens, and blues, across the walls and floor. For a moment all Nona could do was gape at the alien wonder of the place.

The nun standing before the chest was the oldest Nona had seen. Quite possibly the oldest woman she had ever seen. Nana Even’s older sister, Ora, had died a year back. Nona’s mother claimed the woman had seen eighty years come and go. Yet lying there on the pyre in the square before Grey Stephen’s stone-built home old Ora had looked young compared to Mistress Path.

‘Take a seat, Hessa.’ The ancient nun had a surprisingly young voice. ‘You too, novice …?’