L S Johnson - [BCS282 S01] - Gert of the Hundred Read online

  But Gert did not like to think about cairns, or what lay beneath them.

  Even in the cold they were working vigorously. Figures climbed in and out of the hole, emerging dusted red like carcasses; some cradling baskets of rocks, some with buckets of water that they poured into the troughs. Others carted larger stones from the piles to the tower to be hacked at with chisels. As she descended the rise she saw more clearly the furnaces’ orange mouths and shadows flitting before them; heard the endless ringing of metal on metal, so pointed a sound it made her head ache. A strange odor clung to the air, metallic and bloody.

  The camp, at least, didn’t add to the cacophony, the only sounds soft conversations and coughing from behind the tent flaps. Every tent was hemmed in by half-full barrels of rainwater skimmed with ice; so they too were avoiding the river water. The fire was tended by three women guiding stewpots on and off the heat.

  Gert had thought it would somehow be clear where Nicholas’s family resided. Now, faced with dozens of featureless tents, she felt foolish. As if they would hang out signs identifying themselves, or helpfully direct her. She wasn’t even a villager; she was something else, something from faraway that should have stayed there. As she approached the fire the women flinched and looked about warily; when she spoke, the consonants softened by her accent, they replied to the ground. But she remembered the fear in Nicholas’s voice, and she continued to ask, speaking politely outside any tent that seemed to contain life.

  At last she found his family’s tent, but when she eagerly raised the flap there were only his two little sisters, playing with one of the village dolls. When Gert asked them where their brother was, they shrugged; when she asked where their mother was, they pointed solemnly at the sky. Gert considered joining them and waiting for their father to come back, but a hand touched her arm, and when she turned it was to face a woman as old as herself.

  “He’s gone,” she said flatly. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  Gert was startled, both by her words and her age. Everyone else she had seen was markedly younger. “Where did he go?” she asked; at the woman’s confused look she repeated the question, enunciating the words as best she could.

  The woman’s expression became curious. “You’re the one they talk about. The one who pretends she survived the Hundred.”

  That terrible phrase, stated so casually, left Gert speechless.

  “I met someone once, one of the ones they made watch. He said they counted off as they killed those people, and there’s exactly one hundred bodies in that pit. One hundred beneath a twelvefoot of stone.” She looked at Gert thoughtfully. “Yet here you are, on the other side of the duchy. Three wars fought because of that day and you’re, what? Making salves for northern thickheads?” She shook her head. “Either you’re a liar or you’re a living, breathing miracle. Which is it?”

  It filled Gert, strong and swift: the feel of dirt and flesh wet with blood, the raw panic as falling rocks pummeled her deeper... She swallowed bile and let herself feel angry, told herself to feel angry. Who was this woman to speak of it? “It’s whatever you want it to be,” she spat out.

  “What I want, you crazy cow, is for you to stay on your side of the river,” the woman retorted. “The boy’s gone. He’s not coming back and neither should you. You’ll only endanger the other children.”

  “He’s dead?” Gert whispered.

  “He’s gone. Are you deaf as well? Nicholas is gone. He signed a contract just like the rest of us, to keep his fool mouth shut. The Overseer doesn’t tolerate—”

  The old woman’s eyes flashed to something over Gert’s shoulder; she shoved Gert backwards, so hard Gert nearly fell. “Get away,” she said loudly. “Crazy old woman! We don’t want you here. Get away, now!”

  Gert looked over her shoulder. Two men carrying rifles were coming towards them, their expressions grim, their legs stretching into long, rapid strides.

  She left as fast as she dared on the icy ground, her knees aching from the effort. Only when she was halfway up the rise again did she look back. The woman was framed by the two men looming over her from either side; she looked small and frail between them.

  He signed a contract. Gert knew it was a kind of answer, though perhaps to a different question. As if in agreement the crows took flight from the tower, circling wider and wider until they coursed over her head, singing their chorus of hurt; they were so close she hunched over to avoid them, and in doing so she saw the small black shape on the ground before her. A dead chick, stubbled with unformed feathers, its blue eyes half-lidded. Thrown from a nest, though to a one the branches around her were bare and it was not the season for births.

  There was a world between gone and dead, a world Gert could remember when she let herself: dark and thick with the debris of the living world, as if all the bodies and trees and stones and dirt had been forced into a smaller space, like so many goods in a closet. Was that where Nicholas was? The thought made her stomach clench in a way it had not done for years.

  Signed a contract to keep his fool mouth shut. But he had never told her anything, not really. The whole village knew there was sickness here, just as they knew the river was tainted. Surely no one blamed Nicholas for speaking of what was so apparent.

  Unless they thought he’d spoken of something else. Her fingertips were still stained from the dirt. Iron mining, carts in the dead of night; what was the Overseer’s true mandate, and what of the village if that mandate became known? Too, the coughing sickness might cross the river, and dirty water in winter would mean no fish in spring, and if the wells dried up...

  Signed a contract. Fool mouth shut. The words circled in her mind, dancing around the memory of the tent’s billowing emptiness save for those two small faces inside. Now she remembered nests of blankets where other bodies had slept; a crumpled shirt that Nicholas had worn often.

  Gone, dead... but which was it? She had to know. It was a need inside her, as strong as any craving she had ever felt; as strong as the day of the bodies and the rocks, when all she had wanted in the world was to die.

  She had to know, and she knew how she could find out.

  3.

  Gert had not lied to the villagers, but she had been careful in what she told them. She had to tell them something; young women didn’t just walk out of the woods at midday, a hundred leagues from all they knew. So Gert told them of the light in the pit, and of how when she awoke in the woods she had heard a chorus sing out live, daughter, live! A story not unlike older tales of godly voices and guiding lights; it had won her a grudging acceptance, and oh, how she had needed acceptance then. A roof to sleep under, a market for what she could not grow, time to try and make sense of what had happened. Even the hope, for a little while, of love, perhaps a family—but that was another thing she didn’t like to remember.

  She had not lied, just as she hadn’t with Nicholas. Instead she had buried the memories deep in her belly, until she had all but forgotten how the lacework of corpses had looked at her with black faceted eyes. How that echoing voice had asked are you my daughter? How the light had not been warm and beckoning but cold as a winter moon, and the chorus she heard upon emerging was no divine voice but the vibrations of a thousand webs all shuddering in unison, all from the vastness that was her.

  Now she had to remember, for Nicholas’s sake.

  She did not eat. As with all her arts, it was her grandmother who had taught Gert this: only an empty belly and empty heart could receive. The preparation itself took longer than she remembered, but she had only made it the once before, in the first months after the pit, when she did not think she could live with unanswered questions.

  Gert had learned to live with a lot since then, but she could not live with this. And she was no young woman anymore; she would not be so easily taken in by answers. She knew all too well how they could give the truth but from one side; how they could answer the words of a question but not the whole of it, for hadn’t she so dissembled every day since the pit?
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  The preparation took longer, and then she botched the first batch and had to start again, Matty meowing hungry hungry are you listening as she hurried from table to shelf to pantry and back, why hadn’t she written it down? All these years assuming her mind would never change, that nothing would ever change.

  At last the liquid was ready, the smell making her queasy. She had not thought it would come to this again, but the past was always present, written into her hands still clutching dirt and flesh, her lips still speaking in the cadences of her youth.

  She took care to dress heavily, for the cloudless sky promised a cold night. She laid out food for Matty and made sure the fire was low but glowing, the lamp had a full supply of oil, and her bed was ready to receive her.

  Only then did she drink the foul liquid down and go out to find her answer.

  On the threshold she paused to stare at the brightness of the stars against that rich purpling black. So bright—! It still took her breath away, made her feel small and soft. So many of the women who came to her were hard with grief and worry; at times she thought they needed not some remedy but to have a moment like this, when the world was so perfectly clear and beautiful that existence itself was a joy.

  An owl flew overhead, calling fool, fool. Oh she was, she was, but what else could she do?

  In the forest the trees arched overhead like the beams of a church and the air seemed to thicken as if fogged, though she could see clearly. There was a particular clearing she sought; in the summer it was a sweet hollow of wildflowers ringed with pines, but now the ground would be bare and stony. A platform for asking.

  As she walked the branches stroked her face and teased her clothes, like the men in the village when she first settled here. In the silence she fancied she heard whispers repeating other questions she had asked, questions that still hurt her heart to think on. Why the first war, the second, the third? Why our village the first to be invaded, why we hundred?

  Why me, and not another?

  Every phrase punctuated by that old sickening ache, but she knew better than to repeat any aloud. She would only get one chance to ask.

  At last she reached the clearing. The pines were taller than she remembered, standing straight and true with high branches feathering the sky, a texture not unlike the blankets the women sometimes gave as payment. Without the wildflowers she saw that the clearing rose to a little hillock in its center, as if made for her asking. She sat carefully upon it, tucking her legs as best she could and gritting her teeth against the cold earth. So very cold! The sensation entered her, she felt tendrils sliding through her cunt and filling her belly with its terrible dead darkness, why why why—

  But that wasn’t the question she was here to ask. Instead she said, raising her voice and enunciating each word, “What happened to Nicholas?”

  From nowhere, the wind. Swift and brutally cold, it rattled the trees and set the fallen pine needles into a swirling mass that lashed her hands and face. She clenched her eyes shut and raised her arms to block their stings.

  And when it stopped and she opened her eyes again, she was staring at Nicholas’s face, molded in dead white flesh, with black faceted eyes that slid one way and another as they regarded her.

  Gert opened her mouth, but no scream would come. There was only a dull recognition: of the drink turned leaden inside her, of the sickening familiarity of this moment. How in the pit every corpse had looked at her with those same eyes.

  He took a step back with legs that bent at wrong angles, crammed two apiece in the homespun trousers she had patched for him, her own neat stitching over the obscenely bending joint where his knee should have been. Beneath the rolled cuffs were furred paws from which pairs of claws jutted; they dragged at the dirt, leaving red lines in the earth that she could not stop looking at, for anything was better than looking at that sweet, sickening face.

  “What happened to Nicholas?” Gert repeated, the words thick with sorrow and terror both, so much inside her, a torpor of grief with a hundred faces.

  Daughter. The voice was at once Nicholas’s and something else, something vast and hollow. More clawed paws swam before her, jutting from shirtsleeves, and when they laid themselves on her face they were cold and wet like the corpses had been, everything cold and wet and smelling of death.

  She raised her eyes and stared into the swollen black ones bulging from the boy’s face.

  Daughter, you’ve returned at last, he repeated in a mouth stuffed with chelicerae, his face glowing with moonlight. Sooner or later, we all come back.

  “What happened to Nicholas?” she whispered.

  What is the knowing worth? The chelicerae clicked and scraped, yet she understood the sounds as clearly as if they were her own language. One mere boy: what is he worth? Neither son nor lover nor brother: what is this boy worth to you?

  Gert was weeping, weeping, but she could not speak for her full throat and fuller heart.

  The paws stroked her face, claws catching in her tangled hair. Daughter: drink. He opened his mouth, and between the chelicerae formed a single fat drop of shimmering, viscous liquid. It slid slowly downwards, where it hung for a moment on the tip of a fang. Reflected in its surface were not only the pine trees and the night sky but Gert’s own cottage, only reduced to a charred framework; beyond were the smoking ruins of the village and the shimmering black river and the tower as it would look finished, its top studded with armed, pacing soldiers—

  The drop fell onto Gert’s lips, and she drank it down.

  Gert saw: a hazy, distorted world, massive shapes moving in and out of view. A swaying landscape of interwoven corpses, the sickening lurch as she tumbled forward into a void of dirt and flesh and rocks. She was as insignificant and vulnerable as a mote of dust; she was nothing, she was dying...

  Until at last she began to parse out shape and sound; recognized the form of leaves as large as her cottage, the sound of thudding feet louder than falling trees. The colossal forms that fell upon her, sometimes shattering every bone in her body, sometimes merely knocking her senseless, were not the rocks from the pit but monstrously large hands. “Kill the fucking things” a godlike voice bellowed, and a palm crushed her into painful nothingness.

  Gert was: crouched low on the ground, hiding as feet moved past her, first two small bare ones and then others heavily booted. The sounds of whispered pleading as soft as the wind, or was it praying?

  Gert was: in a tree, watching several men pass beneath her pushing before them a lanky boy who made her tremble in recognition.

  Daughter, they hate us so, the Nicholas-spider sighed in her ear.

  Gert was: on a branch, swaying in a suddenly gusting wind, looking over a plain she did not know. Were they on the far side of the forest? Nothing but flat scrubby land to the horizon beneath a scrim of frost; the eastern plains, it had to be. Nicholas was crying, and Gert wept too, for this boy hugging himself against the cold and more.

  One of the men pointed to the empty land, and Nicholas flinched as if struck. “I didn’t say anything!” His wail so plaintive it made Gert lurch forward, to hold him close, to comfort him. “I didn’t tell anyone!”

  “Then how did the old woman know to make it?” The Overseer held up a jar that made her cringe in recognition. “Not once but many times, many trips.”

  “I only said my mother was sick—”

  “Iron in her stomach.” The words came out in a sigh. “No one crosses the river without permission, Nicholas. Those were the terms: no one leaves, no one arouses scrutiny.” He tapped the jar with a fingertip. “And this, young man, is scrutiny.”

  Nicholas turned and began trudging across the plains, stumbling on feet that were surely numb, his shoulders shaking as he took each plodding step. Time slowed as he walked, becoming smaller against the expanse, the only sounds the faint crunching of frost and his weeping and the panting breaths of the men watching, as if the sight aroused them.

  Gert was straining to shake off the drink and return. Nichola
s was in the plains; he might still be alive. A day’s walk, she would bring blankets, some kind of sledge—

  Then one of the men raised a rifle and shot Nicholas in the back. They waited a moment, but the little heap on the ground was still. Two began walking towards his corpse, shovels easy on their shoulders; the others turned back to the forest. As they passed her a man raised his hand and brought it down on Gert, plunging her into darkness.

  Daughter, they hate us. The white spider as vast as the sky, all pretense gone now. They hate us all, air and earth and all who live between, they bleed the very soil in their hatred. Her black eyes bottomless. But they will learn to fear us.

  Her furred legs glowed cool and pale as they encircled Gert, casting the world in white light. Daughter, you came back, the spider cooed in her ear. Daughter, we shall weave their bones and bodies, a boy’s worth we shall weave.

  Gert looked up at the enormous chelicerae, the two flat black eyes. “What are you?” she asked hoarsely.

  I am myself, the spider replied, amused. I am everything, and I am one of everything. And I have many children, as many as the stars.

  “But—but then why save me?” As plaintive as Nicholas’s voice had been, born of the same anguished why.

  The spider laughed, shuddering in her amusement, and they were no longer in the forest but the pit, the dark stuffed space now a web without end. A web made not from silk but corpses, all the bodies from that day twined and knotted together, all of them as familiar as Gert’s own face. Her slaughtered village. One hundred killed in broad daylight, their bodies a gauntlet thrown down from which came all the wars and towers and contracts made of silence.