Red Sister

‘You’ll see something now!’ A girl’s voice, excited, at Nona’s left.

Marten had explained that any hopeful wishing to win a fight purse, or even to join the Caltess, could present themselves on all-comers’ night and for a crown they might pit themselves against Partnis’s stable.

‘Raymel will kill them,’ Saida said, awestruck.

‘He won’t.’ Even shouting above the roar Marten managed to sound scornful. ‘He’s paid to win. He’ll put on a show. Killing’s not good for business.’

‘Except when it is.’ Another voice close at hand.

‘Raymel does what he wants.’ The girl to Nona’s left. ‘He might kill someone.’ She sounded almost hungry for it.

A challenger entered the ring: a bald man, fat and powerful, the hair on his back so thick and black as to hide his skin. He had arms like slabs of meat – perhaps a smith given to swinging a hammer every day. Nona couldn’t see his face.

‘Doesn’t Partnis tell Raymel—’

‘No one tells Raymel.’ The girl cut Saida off. ‘He’s the only highborn to step into a ring in fifty years. Regol said so. You don’t tell the highborn what to do. The money’s nothing to him.’

Nona had heard the same tone of worship in the Hope church where her mother and Mari Streams called on the new god and sang the hymns Preacher Mickel taught them.

The bell sounded and Raymel closed with the blacksmith.

Nona saw a slice of the ring, from one fighter’s corner to the other’s. When they stepped to the side she lost them. Raymel moved with an unhurried precision, stopping the blacksmith’s advance with punches to the head, moving back to let him recover, luring him forward into the next. It didn’t seem a contest, unless you considered the blacksmith to be competing to see how many times he could stop the giant’s fist with his face.

The baying of the crowd rose with each impact, with each spray of blood and spittle. By the time Raymel stopped punching the smith long enough for the man to fall over, his opponent had yet to land a blow.

‘Why would anyone do that?’ Saida asked, lifting from her peephole, shuddering. ‘Why would they fight him?’

‘Lot of money in that fight purse,’ Marten said. ‘It gets fatter every time someone tries and fails.’

Nona kept watching as Raymel strode back and forth across the ring. She said nothing but she knew there was more to it than money. Every hard line the fighter owned was a challenge, written across him. The masses’ roar fanned the fire, but it was Raymel that lit it. Come and try me.

Two more tried before the night was over, but the fighter in the other ring, Gretcha, had more takers. Perhaps she was more of a performer, letting her opponents take a shot, putting them down with more style and less brutality. Raymel treated his foes with disdain, dropping them to the boards bloody and humiliated.

The work Maya set was neither long, nor arduous, being split between more children than was necessary. In the great hall Nona polished, swept and scrubbed. In the kitchens she peeled, carried, washed, sliced and stoked. In the privies she slopped, bailed, wiped and retched. Maintenance of the fight equipment, the sparring rings, the training weapons and the like all fell to the apprentices. The fighters cared for their own weapons, as would anyone who trusted their life to a sharp edge or sturdy mail.

Sometimes groups of the older children were hired outside the Caltess to pick fruit, and dig ditches, but mostly, as Regol had said, their main task was to grow and to show the promise for which they had been purchased. Maya confided that none of them would be sold on for at least a year, probably two or three.

‘Sometimes the promise won’t show properly until a girl bleeds. I wasn’t half my height at thirteen. Ain’t no point Partnis putting you in training until he knows what you’ll be. Training costs. And it’s wasted on most. Nobody ain’t never going to make ring-fighter without the old blood showing in them. And even when he’s sure you’ve got the gift for it Partnis likes to wait – says best training’s done when you’re mostly grown into your size and speed, so you don’t have to be adjusting all the time.’

Twice a day Maya had the whole attic out in the yard for an hour, first clearing the fighters’ weights back into their chests in the storeroom, then running endless laps, regardless of rain or wind. Nona looked forward to these daily escapes from the closed-in boredom of the attic and the routine of indoor chores. She worked with Saida and Tooram, who had been the last of Giljohn’s acquisitions, to lift the smaller dumbbells abandoned in the yard and return them to the equipment room. In truth, she and Tooram were probably more hindrance than help to Saida. Denam would pass them as they struggled up the steps, one of the heavier dumbbells in each hand, just the sweat plastering the red flame of his hair to his forehead to let them know the effort he was hiding.

They stopped to let him pass, then Saida led them on. ‘Heave!’

Nona didn’t mind that she wasn’t helping much, or that her arms ached, her back hurt and her eyes stung with sweat. She liked to feel part of something. Saida was her friend and whilst she might not need Nona’s help with the weights, she appreciated it.

In their friendship Nona found something absent in the faith of the village, or her mother’s Hope, absent in Nana Even’s moral instruction, or in the bonds of family she had seen break. Something she considered holy and worthy of sacrifice. Making friends came hard to Nona – she didn’t see how it worked, only that sometimes it happened. She had had just one friend, only briefly, and lost him, she wouldn’t lose another.

‘Tell me how you ended up at Harriton, child. Looking up at a noose.’ Abbess Glass’s voice punctured Nona’s remembering and she discovered herself walking along a stony road that divided broad, windswept fields given over to horses and sheep. Left and right the occasional farmstead dotted the terrain, the low-gabled roofs of a villa lay ahead, and beyond that the steep escarpment below the plateau.

‘What?’ Nona shook her head. She had almost no recollection of leaving the city. Glancing back, she saw it lay a mile or more behind her, and that two nuns now flanked the abbess.

‘You were going to tell me what happened with Raymel Tacsis,’ the abbess said.

Nona looked again at the nuns, both taller than Abbess Glass, one very lean, the other with more curves to her, their habits fluttering about them. She half-remembered them joining the abbess at some small gate through the city wall. One had perhaps as many years as the abbess, her face pinched and weathered, eyes cold, lips thin. The other was younger, green-eyed, returning Nona’s distracted inspection with a full smile that made her look away.

Nona fixed her eyes on the horizon. The convent was no longer visible, set back from the edge of the escarpment. ‘Saida was told to clean the floors in Raymel’s rooms. I heard her screaming.’ It hadn’t sounded like a person. In the village when Grey Jarry slaughtered pigs … it sounded like that. Not until one of the boys crowded around the trapdoor had said ‘Raymel’s rooms’ had some cold hand taken hold inside Nona’s chest and drawn her forward.

‘I came down the ladder. Fast.’ It had been slower than falling, but not much slower. She had run into the foyer. Saida had left a bucket and mop to hold the door open, a great slab of oak with scrolling brass hinges.