Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume 5 An anthology of stories

We were going down the backs now, where it was unpaved, and smelt, and was narrow. He pushed me ahead of him. There was the barracks, with soldiers smoking at the upper windows, grinning down, and the woman-houses, the crones at the doors watching us shrewdly as we passed. Then we turned the corner, and there was the prison, blind of windows, its wall-tops all spikes and potsherds.

The guard at the entry-way saluted my father, staring hard at nothing. For a moment I felt the bitterness of belonging to a Captain. This guard’s respect was for my father’s rank only; the Captain the man was as nothing to him. I was as nothing, a parcel or a document the Captain brought with him to his place of work.

In we went, and along in the blind stony darkness, farther in and along again, until we were deep in the place. He was imprisoning me? He was placing me in a cell, to teach me this lesson? I would not learn it, no matter what weight of stone and military he put about me, no matter how long he kept me from the world.

Finally we came to a door that stood open; here the guard gave me a look of alarm, even as he sharpened his stance for my father. From inside came the sound of a whip through the air, like a little outraged shout, and a slap on something wet.

The chamber was vast, yet not airy. Evils were done here, it was easy to tell; their equipments reared and languished in the shadows, away from the men grouped torchlit in the middle of the room.

The woman was in a cleared space at their centre, as straight as if she stood on a hilltop stretching to glimpse a distant beacon. Her back was to us; her dress-cloth was shredded into her flesh from the whipping; her blood ran freely down.

“Her legs,” said the King. You could tell him by his seatedness and stillness; if a gathering can have two centres, he was the other.

Two soldiers hoisted up her skirts, from bare dirty heels, from white calves. The backs of her knees made my insides shrink, the vulnerable creases of them, the fine skin.

“Her buttocks, too,” said His Majesty.

Something gave, in the crowd of men—a kind of relief, or excitement. The soldiers pulled the skirts up above her thighs and buttocks—all I could think was how soft, how that flesh would sting to the whip. My own buttocks clenched at the sight, my own thighs expected that sting. But the woman herself, she stood straight and trembled not at all, as if there were no indignity in what they did, let alone any pain to come.

They made her hold her own skirts aside; the first strokes striped, then diamonded her flesh. She did not wince, or cry out. Her back glittered crimson in the torches’ light, and black with the wet threads; now the stripes on her thighs and calves began to join together red; now the first gleam of blood showed there.

“The arrogance of her!” growled the Captain to himself, and this seemed to remind him that he had a voice, and he took my arm harder, and shook it. “You see? This is what’s done to girls who will not be bid!”

He met my eye and he was all hot rage, that this demonstrating to me was even necessary. He could not turn me by the power of his words. He could raise his voice as loud and long as he liked, but he could not control me by the raising, as once he’d used to. I will see whom I please, I’d said. I will marry whom I please. It is Klepper I want, not some rock-headed legionnaire you owe a favor to.

“Cease,” said the King’s cold voice onto the congested air, and there was no sound but the breathing of the soldiers who had been taking turns to beat the woman. “Let me see her,” he said.

She did not wait for them to turn her, but dropped her skirts, and spun on the wetness of her own spilt blood, to face him. The soldiers moved to take her arms, much as the Captain had mine, but the King waved them aside, a casual movement, but involving many weighty rings, from which red light flashed, and a shard of kingfisher blue.

They stepped back from her; she stood, tall and full of joy, and truly my breath stopped in my throat for several moments, for it was clear what drove the King to want to marry her. She was the model of an Aquilina: broad-browed, straight-nosed, full-lipped, strong-jawed, all strength and delicacy combined. Her eyes were clear, green, open; they gazed down at the King, almost in amusement, I thought. I loved her in an instant myself, for what they had done to her, and for why. But he is the King! I thought. What does she have, that she can dismiss the King’s wishes? That she is not dazzled by him, that she holds her own ground? I wanted to know, and I wanted it for myself.

“What have you to say, shepherdess?” There was steel in the King’s voice, for he saw, as all of us could see, that she had defeated him with her carriage and beauty.

“I have nothing to say, sir,” she said happily.

“Are you mad, girl?” said a courtier at the King’s side. I had seen that man before. I didn’t like him; he was all bones and brains. “Have your pains driven you mad, that you affect such cheer, such insolence?”

She glanced at him bemused, then returned her gaze to His Majesty. “I assure you, I have all my senses at my own command.”

“You will marry me, then,” he said, his voice momentarily softer, fuller, with something in it that would have been pleading, had this not been the Aquilin king, who pled with no one, not prelate nor general nor sultan nor sent prince from foreign parts of anywhere in the world.

“I will not,” she said. “As I have told you, I belong body and soul—”

“To your lord,” said Mr Bones-and-brains disgustedly. “Yes, girl, we have heard all that.” He waved her to turn her back on us again. “Bite deeper, lads! Scatter the floor with her flesh!”

Willingly she turned. But a gasp went up, from me and from all around me. For though her blood had stained all the back of her skirt, though she stood in a puddle and her feet were red with it, her flesh within the torn dress-back was white, was clean, as if no whip had touched it. And when they lifted her skirts, her calves there, and then her thighs and buttocks, were unwelted and unbled, restored entirely to wholeness, to perfection.

Astonishment stilled them all, the soldiers agape, the nobles hands to mouths. Then gradually all turned from the marvel of the woman’s recovery to His Majesty. He gazed on her grimly, up and down, his eyes a-glisten with moving thought. What would he do? What power was being shown him, that undid this work of his upon her body? Whom did she have behind her, and how would he conquer them?

“Put her in the pot,” he said very softly—you see, Father, how much power a soft voice can carry? “We will make a soup of her.”

There, again, the air changed; the excitement pitched itself a little higher, into a kind of gaiety. All was business and haste to obey him, our King our church our god and saints. I had never seen it so direct, how his will drove us, how he sat at the centre and played us all like game-pieces, or as a spinner’s foot sets the pedal, then the wheel, in motion.

Pale-faced, the Captain pulled me back against the wall. “She is some kind of monster!” He watched the summoned servants run for kindling.

“She is one of us,” I said. Her Aquilin hair gleamed motionless, smooth black around her head, caught away forward over one shoulder so as not to snarl with the blood-wetted whip. “And she is a miracle. If truly it is her Lord—”

He slapped my cheek, hard.

I regarded him, half my face burning from the blow, my eyes drinking back the tears that had sprung from the shock of it. His fear and weakness were written strong as his rage in his face. Don’t think I cannot force you, he had said to me. But I did think it; I knew it. My sisters would bow their heads and do what he told them, but I—he had this weakness in him, when it came to me. He had this softness. I would have my way.