Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

‘Exactly.’ Clera stood up, brushing crumbs from her habit. ‘None of them really expected to find a candidate, so they didn’t have a plan for what to do if one turned up.’

Academia that morning saw Clera and Nona first through the door. Sister Rule waited behind her desk, massive even when seated, her headdress bulging as much as her habit as if it too had a lot to confine. The abbess’s cat, Malkin, lay on the desk in an arthritic coil.

‘Good morning, Mistress Academia,’ they both chorused, taking seats at the front of the class.

Sister Rule watched them with dark eyes and said nothing. Behind them other novices began to file in. Nona’s gaze was drawn again to the globe on the mistress’s table, Abeth wrapped in ice with its thread-thin girdle of green. Nona had always considered the Corridor to be vast – endless really. It was hard to imagine how much space there had been before the ice advanced.

‘Why …’ So many questions twisted half-formed across her tongue that Nona didn’t know what she would say before the words came. ‘Why isn’t the moon round too?’

Sister Rule’s voice overrode the smirks from behind her. ‘That, Nona, is an excellent question. Though you should say, why is the moon not also a sphere?’

‘Sphere.’ Nona rolled the word in her mouth.

‘Why do you think the moon should be a sphere?’ Sister Rule asked.

‘Well …’ Nona didn’t really know – it just seemed right. ‘Well … the world is. And in the sky Badon is round sometimes and a crescent other times … if you really squint at it. And at the Hope church they say that Badon is a whole world like ours, not a star like the Hope and that Badon isn’t coming to save us like the Hope is because Badon is ice and more ice and locked to our sun just like we are …’ Nona took a breath. ‘So … I just thought that everything really, really big seems to be round …’ She looked up at Sister Rule – who it had to be said was really big and, whilst not spherical, beginning to head that way.

Sister Rule only had to reach for her yardstick to silence the titters.

‘You know that, with the blessing of the Ancestor, our forebears put the moon in the sky in the distant long ago, Nona?’

Nona nodded, she wasn’t wholly ignorant, though she didn’t know the name for the shape of the moon.

Sister Rule reached into her drawer and picked out something. She raised her hand and held it towards the class. ‘The moon.’ A silver circle-square in her palm. She turned it sideways and Nona saw with surprise that it was a dish, paper-thin. ‘Watch!’ Sister Rule held the ‘moon’ behind Abeth’s globe, positioning it where the morning sun slanted down from the windows, filling it full of light. She tapped the globe and Nona saw a bright red spot, moving as Sister Rule moved her hand and the ‘moon’ held in it. ‘All the light it gathers is thrown down onto this one spot. The focus. Put your hand there, child.’

Nona stood and did as she was told. ‘It’s warm! Hot!’

‘And that’s how the moon keeps the Corridor open. The sunlight from a large area focused by a vast mirror into a small area. There’s no reason for it to be circular.’ Sister Rule put the mirror away. ‘We stand between two huge walls of ice, Nona, and winter has been coming for fifty thousand years.’ She held her hands as if they were the two walls and pressed them together with disturbing finality. ‘Today though, we’re talking about rocks!’

The girls groaned at that and got out their slates. Nona did her best to pay attention, but rocks proved less interesting than they sounded, and they hadn’t sounded that interesting to being with. Time and again she found herself thinking of the moon that some distant ancestor of hers had set to hang above the world, and about how one thin and breakable mirror seemed to be all that stood between everyone she might ever know and the ice advancing from north and south.

After lunch Clera led Nona to the novices’ cloisters, flipping her penny as she went.

‘Why are you always playing with that?’ Nona asked. It seemed that Clera, who thought herself poor now her family’s fortune lay ruined, considered the penny a trivial sum, no more than a toy, but Nona had seen a child purchased from her parents for a single penny and to see one tossed about so lightly always gave her a sense of disquiet.

‘My father gave it to me. Told me to learn how to turn one into many.’ Clera shrugged. ‘The Corridor is divided into a hundred lands, maybe a thousand, but you know what doesn’t care about those borders or who rules there? Two things.’ She counted them off on her fingers. ‘The Corridor wind, and money. Traders move through it like blood in a body. No queen or emperor is stupid enough to try to stop them. That’s why the rich spice their food with black-salt from the mines in Cremot. Nobody from Cremot has ever set foot in the empire, but the money flows and the trade flows.’ Clera flicked her penny up and caught it. ‘Money is at the centre of everything we do: it has the loudest voice.’ She sounded as though she were quoting her father.

‘But … you’re training to be a nun. Nuns don’t have money.’ Nona wasn’t even sure if Clera was allowed to own the penny. She certainly kept it hidden in classes.

‘When I’m trained I’ll leave.’ She put the coin into a pocket. ‘The kind of education we get here is highly sought after …’

‘But—’ Nona was going to ask who paid her confirmation fee – it must be a hefty sum to pay for board and keep along with an education that gave such valuable qualifications – but she bit down on the question, not wanting to find it pointing back at her. Instead she nodded. ‘I’m going to do the same thing.’ She thought of the priest who took Markus and beat Four-Foot to death. ‘I don’t want to be a nun.’

The novices’ cloisters proved to be a galleried walkway around the internal courtyard of the building that served both as laundry and repair for nuns and novices alike. Fifty or so novices of all ages either walked slow circuits, chatting as they went, or sat on the long stone benches looking out through the arches onto the gravelled yard at the middle. At the middle of the yard a single huge tree, the centre oak, spread its branches, though quite what anchored it to the rock Nona couldn’t guess.

‘The nuns’ cloisters are much grander,’ Clera said. ‘The sisters come out in the dead of night and lie in the centre waiting for the focus.’

‘No they don’t,’ Nona said.

‘Naked!’ Clera nodded her head.

‘Clera!’ Ruli made a face.

‘Well they didn’t do it when I was sleeping in the cells,’ Nona said.

‘You were sleeping,’ Clera said.

Nona tried to imagine Sister Wheel, Sister Rule, and the matronly Sister Sand moonbathing. ‘I think you’re the one who’s dreaming, Clera.’

‘We’ve got Shade next.’ Jula came to join them, squeezing between Nona and Ruli. ‘Have you told her yet?’

‘Told who what?’ Clera fell silent as Arabella walked past with several girls in tow. She always seemed to be laughing. Nona didn’t think she would be laughing if she’d had to leave the luxury of life in a noble family for the convent and had assassins trying to kill her.