Grizelda

GRIZELDA

By Margaret Taylor

Smashwords Edition

 2009 Margaret Taylor

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Chapter 1

Grizelda shot up in bet the moment Elisabet
started to shake her. She hadn’t been sleeping very deeply anyway,
hadn’t managed to sleep deeply for days. She looked at the face of
her friend, pale and seeming disembodied in the half-light, her
expression telling everything.
It’s happened, hasn’t it?
she
was about to say, but Elisabet beat her to the words.

“They’re at the door,” Elisabet said in a
terrified whisper.

In a moment Grizelda was up and at the
dormitory window. Rain trickled down the glass in rivulets, lit
gold from the lone streetlamp below. If she stood on her tiptoes
and turned her head in an awkward angle, she could just make out
the street, where two men in dark greatcoats huddled by the lamp,
trying to read a piece of paper. Gendarmes.

“I’ll get you some clothes for the weather.”
Elisabet was flying, throwing open dresser drawers and ransacking
their contents. “Here!” She threw a coat at Grizelda. Grizelda
caught it awkwardly and resumed pulling on her dress and shoes. She
was trying to do it standing up and was only getting herself into a
tangle, but she couldn’t afford to sit down, she didn’t have
time.

Time? She’d had bucketloads of time. Three
days ago Meaven Godey the informer had found out her secret. What
kind of an idiot stayed home after an incident like that?

The commotion was starting to wake up the
other girls in the dormitory. They stirred and lifted their heads
to see what was the matter.

“It’s the gendarmes,” Elisabet told them.
“For Grizelda.”

Meanwhile Grizelda had managed to get her
dress on straight. “Somebody go wake the mistress. I’ll get out the
back way.”

With that she threw the coat around herself
and made for the door.

“I’ll go with you,” Elisabet declared.

Together they hurried out of the dormitory,
past the mistress’s bedroom, and down a darkened stairway. With
luck they would be able to get down to the public part of the shop
before the gendarmes got inside. After that it was only a short way
through some back rooms to the alley.

“I’m so sorry, Liz,” Grizelda said as they
stole down quietly in the dark.

“Don’t be.”

“I should have left when it happened. I’ve
put you all in danger.”

Their whispered conversation was cut off
abruptly. A glare of candlelight lanced upward through the
balusters along with the sound of voices. They froze,
listening.

“We take unfortunate girls off the streets
and put them to good use. We’re all upstanding citizens of Corvain.
I don’t know what you’re doing here.”

That was Miss Hesslehamer, the mistress,
already awake and downstairs. Another voice, a male one, answered
her. “We’ve got here a letter of cachet. You can’t stop us doing a
search upstairs.”

Elisabet squeezed Grizelda’s hand. “Quick!
Use your power and hide us!”

“Liz, you know I can’t when I’m under
pressure–”

She lost her chance when Miss Hesslehamer and
the two gendarmes came to the foot of the stairs and spotted the
two of them. Miss Hesslehamer looked terrible, with her glasses
askew and a wrap clumsily thrown over her nightdress. When she saw
Grizelda standing there in her coat, for a moment it looked like
she would speak. Instead she turned back to the gendarmes.

“What is it you’re going to search, sirs?”
she said. It was clear in her voice she was frightened. It was the
first time in her life Grizelda had ever heard Miss Hesslehamer
frightened, and that scared her more than even the gendarmes
did.

But the gendarmes pushed past her without
speaking. Grizelda tried to bolt for it. She almost thought she was
going to make it past them, but one of them snatched her by the
collar.

“Not you, miss. You’ve got gray hair. You’re
the one we’re here to search for.”

She tried to sneak in a bite, but the
gendarme clouted her across the head and forced her to walk back
upstairs and back into the dormitory. Elisabet followed them,
wringing her hands, and Miss Hesslehamer bore the candle.

They made her stand in one corner where they
could keep an eye on her. Like a nightmare, she could watch the
whole scene play out but could do nothing about it. The girls were
all sitting up in bed now, terrified but silent.

The taller one pointed at Grizelda. “Ma’am,
where does that one keep her personal belongings?”

“What are you investigating her for? How do
you know it was even her?”

“Under her bed, I’ll rate,” said the other,
and he went to the nearest empty bed and tipped out the mattress.
Elisabet’s bedding landed on the floor in a snarl. The gendarme
pawed through it, not caring that his boots were treading
street-grease on them.

“She’s under arrest for sorcery,” said the
first to Miss Hesslehamer.

“I’m training these girls to be law-abiding
citizens!”

The gendarme gave up his search and went for
the other empty bed in the dormitory.

“No!” Grizelda ran forward to stop him,
though Elisabet tried to hold her back. The gendarme knocked her
down and heaved over the mattress.

A flurry of brightly-colored papers spilled
out onto the floor.

Grizelda still lay dazed, half on her side on
the floor, but when she saw these she knew she was in for it. She
dropped her head.

“That’s enough!” cried Miss Hesslehamer. “I
won’t have people treated this way in my own home!” There was a
noise like Miss Hesslehamer struggling, then a thud as the light
went out. Somebody screamed. Grizelda felt a sharp twist of her arm
behind her back, then she was dragged to her feet and made to march
out of the room.

Lonnes’s skyline was dominated by the massive
constructions of the Auks. They had been birds. Great intelligent
black birds from across the sea. They’d built their fortresses here
and tried to rule Corvain and for two hundred years they’d nearly
succeeded. Greater than man-sized, they must have been, for those
high, broad doors were far too big for mere humans to pass in and
out of. The smaller, human dwellings of Lonnes clustered together
in their shadow. But the relics of the old Aukish domination were
crumbling now, painted over with the slogans of the Republic. They
were reduced to not much more than a charcoal-colored smudge,
blurred by the rain and light of predawn.

Most of the streetlamps had long since gone
out, but a few still made wavering pools of yellow here and there
against the late November gray. The rain fell in a steady,
insistent mist, hissing against the cobblestones and pouring off of
roofs in sheets. Sogged liberty bows hung limply against citizens’
doors.

Grizelda screamed and struggled at first. She
kicked them in the shins as much as she was able, and cursed them
for wrongly arresting her and acting against the values of the
Revolution. What was this government coming to anyway, when it
dragged innocent citizens out of their homes in the middle of the
night in the name of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity?

The gendarmes were not at all interested in
her speeches, though, and they were too strong for her. One held
her arms twisted tightly behind her back while the other clamped
his arm over her face so that her screams wouldn’t wake any
citizens. The fight was exhausting. By the time dawn had broken,
she was so drained that she mutely allowed them to drag her through
the streets, head bent. The rain ran down her head and soaked
through her clothing, coat and all, so that it clung heavily to her
body. She felt ashamed of herself, too. Not only had she sinned
against the ideals of the Republic, but her stupid mistake had
gotten all the shop tainted with guilt by association. What would
happen to them now? She would face the Committee with dignity,
though, and not look like a coward. Just after she had rested.

Oh, Corvain!
she thought.
The
Revolution wasn’t supposed to be like this!

The timber of the rain’s hiss changed,
deepening to a roar. The river Sarny was nearby. Grizelda looked up
in fresh terror. There was a low, dark mass out where the land
jutted into the river and the river took a sharp turn around it.
Promontory. It had been a fort in the feudal days of the Auks and
the sorcerers, but when the Republic took over, they had not
abandoned it like the other buildings. They had converted it to a
prison.

Grizelda’s steps faltered a little when she
got to the bridge. Promontory was separated from the mainland by a
moat and this bridge was the sole way in and out. It was a narrow
arc of stone spanning the gap, without railings – part of the old
fort’s defenses. The gendarme gave her a warning nudge in the back.
She swallowed and walked forward. Early risers were just beginning
to show on the streets now. Some of them stared at her as she
passed but most of them hunched themselves against the wet and
hurried on their way.

“Long live the Revolution!” somebody yelled.
She looked around, but she couldn’t tell who it had been.

She made the perilous journey over the
bridge, stumbling every few steps, then the gendarmes stopped to
haggle with the gatekeeper at Promontory’s outer wall. One gendarme
kept a firm grip on her while the other did the talking, until
finally the gatekeeper opened up the door and let them into the
courtyard.

There was a scattering of buildings inside
looking sorry for themselves, separated from each other by swaths
of sodden turf. But what dominated the view, even drawing her
attention away from the firing range, was the bone clock. She had
heard the stories about it, but she never thought she would be
within the walls of Promontory to see it. They said it had been a
sick joke of the Auks. The bone clock was a sort of sundial, with a
gnomon of stone set at an angle in the middle of the courtyard. But
the uprights, marking the twelve positions of the clock, were human
femurs. Another reminder of who was predator and who was prey.

Grizelda wanted to retch, but she bit down on
her lip, hard.
Courage, Grizelda.

The gendarmes took her inside to be searched.
Not by themselves, thank God. They led her to a small, brightly-lit
room where they had a woman for these sorts of situations.
Expressionless, she ordered Grizelda to take off her coat, her
shoes, her dress and lay them on a bench. She was allowed to keep
her undergarments on.

The woman picked up each garment and rubbed
it, looking like she’d been asked to handle old seaweed.

“What’s this?” she said, holding up the
sleeve of Grizelda’s dress.

There were spools running down the length of
the sleeve in a line, attached by delicate leather thongs so they
would wind freely when the thread was pulled. It had been
Grizelda’s own idea to sew the spools on, so she could keep the
thread handy in Miss Hesslehamer’s shop. She clenched her fists,
wanting to snatch it back from her, but she did not.

“It’s just so I could have my thread,” she
muttered.

“Hm.”

The woman removed a pair of scissors from the
dress pocket and dropped them into an envelope. There was nothing
else offending, so after she had patted Grizelda down, she was
allowed to have her clothes back.

Grizelda pulled her dress back on, inwardly
relieved. The woman hadn’t found her little packet of needles, in
the inside pocket of the bodice. So she had something sharp on her.
She had no idea what she might do with them, though.

“Write your name here.” The woman handed her
the envelope, all folded up and sealed.

Grizelda took the pen. “Why?”

“To identify you. You can have this back when
you’ve served your term.”

Not likely,
Grizelda thought. It was
only under exceptional circumstances that someone ever came out of
Promontory alive. Somebody with connections, with a powerful or a
rich family to buy them out of jail. Not like her. Still, she
signed her name on the packet and handed it back over.

Somewhere in the Fish District, three rats
were trotting down the pitch of a rooftop. It was midmorning by
now, and the rain had still not let up. But it had softened to a
steady patter, and out in the street the light would have been
strong enough to read by. On the rooftop, shielded by heavy
foliage, it was as good as night. Any rain that managed to filter
through the tree’s leaves collected into heavy, fat raindrops that
exploded on impact. The rats didn’t give the water a moment’s
notice as they cleared the gutter and landed on the top of a wall.
From the wall it was a quick scurry downward to the surface of the
street.