Red Sister

Nona followed, hands folded over her aching belly, so full it hurt to walk, let alone run. Clera led the way back past the dormitory building and across a quadrangle, cloisters to one side, a rectangular pool and fountain in the middle. Above the range forming the western end the sails of a windmill could just be seen passing through the top of their cycle. Clera hurried Nona out through a corridor penetrating the north range.

‘That’s the Academia.’ She pointed ahead to an ornate tower close to the cliffs on the plateau’s north side. Together they half walked, half ran to the archway at its base. A rapid ascent by the stone steps of a spiral staircase brought them to an oak door, the steps continuing up. Clera stopped at the door and pushed on through to the room beyond.

‘There’s no one here.’ Nona felt stupid the moment the words left her, a peasant girl stating the obvious. The classroom lay in shadow. A large, elderly cat watched from its grey curl in the far corner: Malkin, the abbess’s beast. Four rows of empty desks faced a polished table in front of a chalk-marked board. A confusion of maps and charts decorated the wall behind that, so many that pieced together they might show the whole world.

‘Damnation!’ Clera ran to one of the windows and threw open the shutters. Diamonds of glass, leaded together into a continuous sheet, ensured that only the light came in while the cold stayed out. She pressed her face to the panes, turning one way then the other. ‘She’s taken them out somewhere – can’t see them …’

Nona advanced towards the desk. It held all manner of fascinating objects, not least three leather-bound books and a large ledger beside a quill and inkpot. The objects that drew her though were a dog’s skull, a clear crystal nearly a foot long and too wide to close her hand about, and a glistening white ball in a brass stand. This last held her attention until she found herself beside it, knees bumping against the desk.

‘What is it?’ Nona set a finger to the enamelled whiteness of the ball, finding it rough beneath her touch, tiny ridges catching the light. It was a little larger than her head and perfectly round. A stand held it top and bottom so that it could rotate. And around its middle, like a belt, a very thin strand of colour no thicker than a piece of string.

‘Don’t touch! Mistress Academia would have a fit!’ Clera elbowed Nona out of the way and immediately ignored her own instruction by setting the thing spinning on its pivots. ‘It’s the world, silly.’

‘The world?’ That made no sense at all.

‘Abeth.’ Clera huffed her breath out as if Nona’s stupidity had hit her in the stomach. ‘A model of it.’

Nona blinked. Her world had been the village, the forests, the fields, and in the distance the northern ice forming one wall of the Corridor. She hadn’t ever considered that it might have a shape and if she had she would not have guessed at a ball, white or otherwise.

‘It’s a globe.’ Clera reached out to stop it spinning. ‘We live … here.’ She put her finger on the line around the middle.

‘We do?’ Nona leaned in to look more closely.

‘Want to see something special?’ Clera grinned. Without waiting for an answer she set one hand to the top of the globe and the other to the bottom then, with a little effort, rotated each in opposite directions. Smoothly and without noise the lower part of the white surface began to retreat. Nona saw that it was not one piece as she had imagined but comprised many bladed parts that shuffled beneath each other like the feathers of a folding wing. In consequence the cord-thin strip of colour girdling the globe widened, first to a finger’s width, then wider and wider still until Nona’s whole hand couldn’t cover it. The pattern of jewel-enamelled blues and greens and browns fascinated her eye.

‘What—’

‘That’s the world fifty thousand years ago, long before the tribes even came.’ Clera rotated the halves back slowly and the ice advanced. ‘All the people that lived across all these lands, pushed back.’ She returned the ice sheets to their original position. ‘Pushed into this tiny corridor as the sun got old and weak.’

‘How could they fit?’ Nona imagined them running before the ice.

Clera shrugged. ‘Mistress Blade says people need room. You can squash them in only so far, then the bleeding starts, and when it’s done … there’s just about enough room again.’

‘It’s good to see that some of your lessons stick, Novice Clera.’

Both girls turned to see the doorway behind them now almost entirely full of Sister Rule, the convent’s Mistress Academia, a woman of considerable height and still more considerable girth, all wrapped in the dark grey of a nun’s habit. Sister Rule pushed on into the classroom, the rest of Red Class filing in behind her, diverging towards their allotted desks. Arabella already had three girls pressed around her and they took seats beside each other, all of them smirking behind their hands.

‘Explain yourselves, novices.’ The nun fixed them with dark and beady eyes.

‘We were …’ Clera searched for an explanation … and could find nothing better than the truth, which she settled on with a sigh of defeat. ‘Nona was very hungry!’

A scatter of laughter went up at that, cut off sharply as Sister Rule’s yardstick cracked across a desktop. She reached the table, looming over both girls. ‘Well, Nona does appear to need some feeding up. Do not be late to my class again, Nona. Today you missed a quick observation of the layered structure of this plateau where the Glasswater sinkhole exposes it. Next time you could miss considerably more than that – dinner included.’

Clera slipped away to her desk near the door. Nona stayed by the table. She looked up at Sister Rule’s face, which was at once both fleshy and severe, then let her eyes slip to the globe again.

‘You can take either of those two desks at the back, Nona.’ Mistress Academia laid her yardstick against her table and let out a sigh. ‘I do hope you’re not going to slow us down too much, child. The abbess casts her nets very wide sometimes …’

Nona dropped her gaze to the floor and took a step in the direction the nun had waved at. A mixture of anger and defiance boiled behind her eyes but stronger than that, more than that, was the desire to know. Besides, she was too full to be properly angry.

‘I … don’t know what geography is.’

Sister Rule’s yardstick killed the laughter before it started. ‘Good. You’re clever enough to ask questions. That’s better than many I’ve had through these doors.’ She took her seat behind the desk, straightened her habit, then looked up. ‘Geography is like history. History is the story of mankind since we first started to record it. The story and the understanding of that story. Geography is the history of the world beneath our feet. The mountains and the ice, rivers, oceans, land, all of it recorded in the very rocks themselves for those with the wit to read what’s set there. Consider this slab of rock our convent rests upon, for example. The history of this plateau is written in the limestone layers that can be seen in the sinkhole two hundred yards west of this tower.’ She sent Nona on towards her desk with a gentle poke of her stick. ‘Our history is wide and we are narrow, so perhaps its lessons no longer fit. Cut your cloth to your measure, some say. But the history of the land has lessons more important than those of kings and dynasties. The history of the ice is written there. The tale of our dying sun, etched into rock and glacier. These are the lessons we all live by. And when the moon fails we will die by them too.’