Mitchell Smith: Moonrise

Patience going slowly now, they filed out onto the widest landing yet, that opened onto a broad stairwell to the left – and a long, open gallery to the right, its ice pillars fenced between with tall iron bars from rampart to roof.

Past those barriers… out and two stories down, the narrow west roadway lay carved in the ice. Running alongside it, the great crevass yawned deep blue, to darker blue, to black.

Voices rose from the stairwell, and Patience led that way, but in no hurry.

They came onto the staircase – its wide ice steps descending – and were met by silence absolute, and the eyes of many women… Many women, and girls not yet women.

"The Pens," Patience said, into that silence.

Baj saw, within a huge high-ceilinged chamber – lamp-lit as all the city's spaces – four wide, barred corridors stretching away, each lined down either side with ordered pallets and stools. The corridor bars for some convenient separation, apparently, though all four entrance gates now stood open beyond the foot of the stairs… There were artful little flowers of colored ribbon tied to the bars here and there… and on several of the nearest pallets, small rag dolls lay as if asleep.

There was the salt-sweet scent of many women – an odor warm, even in freezing cold. That scent… a growing murmur… and the eyes of hundreds, staring.

Dolphus-Shrike looked across the great room as the women and girls, crowding from their corridors, gazed back, some now calling questions. Tribe-talk… book-English. "… There must be almost five hundred," he said, and shook his head. "Boston will not give us time enough to finish this." He tapped his javelin's butt on a step's blue ice.

As if that soft tapping had been a signal heard, the women and young girls – all in furs, none naked in Warming-talent – fell silent again in their barred corridors.

"No children," Nancy said. "But I was a child, here… I know this place very well."

"No." Patience shook her head. "The girls and women only. Now, what… children… they breed, are soon taken from them."

The women stirred – talking, calling out – some coming running down the corridors, and Baj saw tribal tattoos, scarring, long hair pigtailed or twisted into particular knots… Below the steps, a young girl shouted a question in some clattering tribe-talk – then was shushed to silence as others were quieted, so only Boston's great bell of alarm sounded, dull with distance.

Baj felt a deeper silence close beside him. Nancy's silence, and Richard's. Patience's silence, and the Shrikes'. It was a silence that seemed to have been slowly descending upon him through the years, so now he must speak to fill it.

"Do… what we are here to do," he said, and gripping his innocent sword, started down wide frost-crusted steps, the others shuffling to follow.

As he went down, one of the women – leaving the others after hugging, reassuring another – came up the stairs to meet him. She was tall, wore a torn, long sealskin cloak, and was smiling. Her teeth were filed to points, her braided hair gold and gray, and tribal tattooing laced her forehead. Her eyes were an older woman's, a weary dark brown.

"We heard the bell," she said, in fair book-English with a soft tongue-click to it. She stood an ice step down, but was so tall she and Baj were almost eye to eye. "Is there now a difference?"

"Yes," Baj said, but would not have known his voice.

"I have been here eleven years, and have been bred five times… Young man, is it to be a great difference?" Baj saw hope rising in her eyes as the sun must have risen for Warm-time summers.

Other women began calling questions. Some in book-English, some not.

"My name is Mary-Shearwater," the tall woman said, "from the ice at Map-Roque Bluffs. My father is Elder Simon -" She stopped talking, and looked into Baj's eyes. "Have you come to take us free?"

"No, my lady."

She looked down at the rapier's blade. "You were sent. Did my father send you?"

"We were sent by… necessity."

"Ah… Now, I understand." She tried to smile. "You've come to take Boston's advantage from them. – Yes?"

"Yes."

She nodded. "As we would have done ourselves, and gone into the crevasse, but for the gallery bars. They have not allowed us means, though a few have hanged themselves. Though one swallowed sewing needles…"

"Dear lady," Baj said, "we have no time."

"Yes, the Talents will return, bring others, Constables. You have no time." She reached for his left hand, held it hard in both of hers, then let it go. "We of the Ice-coast are raised to necessity."

She turned and called out to the others. "Listen!… Listen! These who've come, have work to do – great, great injury to Boston-town! But they have little time in which to do it. So -" Baj heard her take a shaking breath, "the brave among us will help them accomplish it quickly. Remember that Pen-mothers past are watching from the sky."

She turned back to Baj, and touched the fur cloak at her breast. "Tell my father," she said, "for his peace."

"I will." Baj – though not the Baj he'd always been – drew his left-hand dagger to spare his sword's honor, and thrust Mary-Shearwater through the heart.

She fell away, fell down the ice steps, struggling with death. Baj saw her try to breathe, the fur at her breast soaking in blood from the ruined heart. She tried to breathe – then coughed blood, put her hands to her mouth, and died with red running through her fingers.

Screaming then in the Pens, a tumult of shouts and weeping. And although a number of women and a few girls knelt to await blade edges, some praying to the Jesus from their homes – others shrank back, withdrawing as a sea's tide falls away, crowding back into their corridors, calling for someone to help them.

"Baj – oh, my Baj." Nancy gripped his dagger wrist, made to force the blade sheathed again. "Wrong for you. Wrong for you."

Then Patience pushed past them and went down the stairs, calling, "Sorry! Oh, sorry, my sweet ones!"

Richard, muttering, lumbered down after her, his ax in his hand. The Shrikes rushed past, silent.

"Nancy," Baj said, and had to raise his voice over screaming, "- stay here."

"No."

Below, Patience called again she was sorry, struck and killed a small brown-haired woman who'd knelt waiting. Richard and the Shrikes were among the women – all of those the bravest, who knelt or stood still for the steel.

Nancy, her face white as fine paper, started down after them, but Baj gripped her arm and held her. "No, my dear. You are not needed. I'll slaughter for both of us."

"Not so."

"Obey me," Baj said, "so at least a part of us is saved." It seemed his fathers spoke through him, since Nancy, scimitar in her hand, stayed weeping on the stairs of ice while he went down.

… There was a difficulty in killing women. Their beauty, of course, and their value – so much dearer than a man's. Their very cushioned softness seemed to oppose the steel, making it appear so rude, so rough in what it did to them. Baj found, after the second one – the third, an older woman, had closed her eyes, bared her throat to make it easier for him – he found it a chore so odd, so dreadful as not to be real at all. It seemed no slender arms were actually raised to keep the dagger's long blade away. No delicate hands truly tried to guard, only to be struck aside. Certainly no lovely eyes were wide in terror, no screams sounded… It was all imagined, though noisy, strenuous in its way.

What might have been blood, was only something like it.

Baj had a girl's white throat in view; she was backing frantically away, as if all were serious. The imagined dagger swung back to slash – when another blade, though unreal as his, blocked the stroke.