Читать книгу Red Sister онлайн | страница 62

‘I dreamed of the focus moon, burning its way down the Corridor, and the boys and girls rising from their beds to play in the heat of it. The children joined hands around my mother’s hut, singing that old song:

She’s falling down, she’s falling down,

The moon, the moon,

She’s falling down, she’s falling down,

Soon, soon,

The ice will come, the ice will close,

No moon, no moon,

We’ll all fall down, we’ll all fall down,

Soon, too soon.

‘In the focus the boys and girls look so red they could be covered in blood. They’re coming. The bad ones. I know they’re coming. I see their path in my mind, a line that runs through everything, zig-zagging, curving left, right, coiling, trying to throw them off, but they’re following it – and it leads to me.

‘Outside the hut the children fall down. All at once. Without a scream.

‘I wake. All at once. Without a scream. It’s dark, the focus has passed and the fields lie restless beneath the wind. I sit up and the darkness moves around me like black water, deep enough to drown. For the longest time I sit there, shivering, my blanket wrapped tight around me, eyes on the door that I can’t see. I’m waiting for it to open.’

Dogs barking. A distant scream. Then a crash close at hand. The door-bar breaks at the first kick and a warrior fills the doorway, a lantern in one hand, sword in the other. He’s tall as any man in the village and muscle cords the length of him.

‘Take her!’ He steps in and others follow. The lantern finds dull glints among the iron plates on his leather shirt. He moves towards the workshop door, the other room where Mother sleeps on the reeds piled for her weaving.

Strong hands seize me, iron-hard and pinching. The men have braided beards. A woman slips a loop of rope around my wrists and draws it tight. Her face is marked with vertical bars of paint. Wooden charms hang in her tangle of dreadlocks. A Pelarthi. Raiders from the ice-margins.

Mother breaks from the workshop as the first raider reaches it. She’s very fast. Her reed-knife makes a bright sound as the blade skitters across the iron plates over his stomach. He swings his heavy sword but she’s not there. Her hand is at the neck of the woman holding me – the knife buried in the woman’s throat. My mother hauls me towards the main door. We nearly get there, but the man in leather and iron turns and swings again. The point of his sword finds the back of her neck. She falls. I fall beneath her. And the night goes dark again, and quiet.