too savage
It’s only half seven, but I need to hurry home for the new eight o’clock curfew. The door swings to behind me and I’m in another world, quiet and dark. The sign THE LUGGER in block letters juts out above the lintel. There’s even an old Crozoni horse brass fixed at the top – so small I missed it at first. It’s a Crozoni fishing boat with two four-cornered sails. Icicles grow from the eaves after all the cold nights and sunny days.
The cobbles stop at the riverbank path, near to where it passes under the Lugger’s overhang. It’s a muddy path, not lit well, and not well travelled after nightfall. I follow it a short distance to a narrow footbridge crossing to the Skates – the poorer district north of the river – and shake Zako’s hair out beyond the stone railing. The river doesn’t freeze over here, but thin ice sheets like frosted glass collect at its edges.
From the crown of the bridge, I can see the cupola on top of the old Town Hall, a silhouette against the sky. The lower floors, where they kept us after the Cull, plunge behind a disused factory block fronting the river that they’re turning into fancy housing. It’s their Life Registry building now, of course.
The place where the clerks make and store the paperwork to keep track of who has paid and who has fallen behind. Who gets to keep breathing and who doesn’t.
Two guards are stationed at the front, night and day – two more round the back. Plus a watch inside. The paperwork is guarded jealously. It’s people’s lives on the line, after all, plus there’s a lot of money involved when you add it all up.
I used to love that building, and they’ve ruined it.
The Skøl motto, Life Is Golden, is chiselled into the stone above the grand double doors and filled with gold paint. The Life Registry symbol bookends it – two interlocking triangles shaped like an hourglass with a diamond at the centre.
Venor’s official seat, magistrate of County Portcaye Life Registry, is in there. Soon, he will be sworn in as governor of the New Western Counties, and the Portcaye Life Registry will become an even more important seat of power – a new capital of its kind.
It’s a turning point for Portcaye and for Venor. I wonder whether the rest of us will notice the difference.
I stuff my empty hair wrap back in my pocket and return to the solitude of the riverside path.
Acres of starlit sky, wood smoke coiling through the air – nights like this, a girl could pretend everything isn’t awful.
Then four figures, one swinging a lantern, appear round the corner ahead.
I ignore the urge to turn back. It’s too late to hide my savage curls away. I keep my eyes on the mud and hug the side of the path.
“Well, look at this! Waddle, waddle!” one calls out. I realize they’re boys my age or younger, maybe only sixteen, but formally dressed. I don’t slow until they block my path.
“Feeling naughty? Fuck the curfew! Have a drink with us, duckie!”
“No, thank you.” Polite, but firm.
“Leave it, Bunny.” The tallest boy eyes me with distaste. “You’re a funny-looking makkie, aren’t you?” he laughs.
“I have to get back,” I say, trying to wedge through them.
Fingers close around my arms. “Don’t waddle off.”
“Come on,” the tall one drawls. “We could be warming up with an ale by now.”
“My owner’s expecting me.”
“Show us your scar.” A hand grips my waist on the bad side. “Is it here?”
“Knock it off. Someone might see,” hisses the tall one.
But they ignore his protests – and mine. Three of them topple me into the frozen grass at the side of the path.
My top gives way before they succeed with the belt. I scream. I kick. My scar is plain to see, even in the starlight. Their hands are all over me, cold, clutching.
A ringing starts up in my head.
I thrash and bite down on what flesh I can reach, scrabbling and lurching from one grip to another.
“Makkie bit me,” one whines in disbelief.
The tall boy laughs. “What did you expect? They’re wild.”
“I have a disease – a pox.” I muster as much dignity as I can, pinned to the grass, and thicken my Crozoni accent to match Ruzi’s. “You won’t get away with this. You’ll suffer my pox and my curse. It’s painful.”
“Rubbish,” says the ringleader.
“Let me go.” I try a different appeal. “If I miss curfew they might fine you too.”
They look like they’re wavering.
I kick with renewed effort, out of the heavy coat the Glassworks gave me, almost out of their hands – but they’ve somehow, unspokenly, agreed to change tack.
“In you get.”
Into the River Rin, in winter, swollen with icy water – a death sentence. I hear myself screaming anew, frantic, as they manhandle me over the bank.
I clutch at mud and shrivelled grasses, but they don’t stop my plunge.
The cold is so sharp it’s all I can do to breathe.
The river tumbles me like a twig, its power shocking. I almost gulp it in. When I break the surface, I can hear them hooting, “Paddle, paddle, you poxy makkie!”
Their calls grow quickly faint as the current bears me away.
I kick my water-laden boots and gasp in air. Breathing’s almost harder than kicking. The icy grip crushes my lungs and the world shrinks to the churning water surrounding me as I try to steer myself to the side. At least I went in without my coat. That would have sunk me for sure, strong swimmer or no. Numbing seconds later, adrift, I realize I’m not strong enough to go anywhere this river doesn’t want me to go. Something inside me howls – not now, not like Ma.
Then my legs hit a bank of sand, shallow as anything. I dig in my boots and plunge my hands to the bottom, half dragging, half crawling my way out, smashing the glassy ice plates. Up the scree of pebbles on the shallow bank, and I’m on the path.
I want to collapse, but I know if I do, it’s over.
I push on, then off at the first turning, colliding with a woman as I stagger, half drowned, mud-smeared, from the junction between two yards on to a cobbled street.
“Idiot!” she recoils. “Filth! It’s gone eight! You lot are supposed to be off the streets!”
I’m glad I got her coat all muddy.
I start down the unfamiliar street. Lanterns spread circles of light over three or four barrows peddling their wares. A cobbler’s sign – a big boot shape – swings in the wind. My shirt is still hanging open, my underclothes torn, my boots squelching mud and water.
“Out of the way, smut,” a man sneers as he passes.
The merchants’ eyes slide over me, unmoved. I speed up. It’s freezing and I seem to be made of absent limbs and uncooperative stumps. I push on, half running as much as I’m able, back to a bigger street – this one I know, and it’s mercifully close to Opal Alley.
The river carried me nearer to home. By the grace of Thea.
I hammer on the door until Ruzi opens it, appalled.
“What’s happened?” He pulls me inside and over to the stove.
I can’t talk. Ruzi stokes the stove as I collapse in front of it. He helps me pull off what’s left of my wet top and sodden boots, socks and trousers – before throwing his coat over me. I peel my underclothes off underneath it while he fetches the blanket from his bed. I collapse as close to the stove as I can go without being inside it.
My teeth are chattering too much to speak. My whole body’s beyond my grip, uncontrollably shivering.
“Warm up, girl, warm up.” Ruzi towels my hair before asking the question he’s been holding. “What happened? Is it – Zako?”
“N-no.” I shake my head, for what it’s worth, with the whole of me still shaking. “Zakisfine.”
The heat from the stove begins to bring me back.
Ruzi fetches the blanket from my room and piles it on too.
“Did they hurt you, Mora? I mean…”
I know what he’s asking.
“N-not like that. They pushedmeinthe r-r-river.”
“Who?”
“Some b-b-b—”
“Tell me in a minute. Get warm. You’re all right now.” He pats my shoulder cautiously. “You’re safe.”
Something in Ruzi’s plain statement undoes me. I start to sob. He produces a rag for me to blow my nose into, but it’s minutes before the tears stop.
He piles more wood into the stove, starts to heat a pot of water.
“They were just boys, younger than me. Four of them.” Then I realize – “My coat. I need it. My keys.” My keys to the Glassworks are still in a pocket of the coat, abandoned by the river path – assuming the boys didn’t throw it into the river after me out of spite. The manager, Mister Wagsen, will tear strips off me if I’ve lost them.
“Where did it happen?”
I tell him, through scalding sips of water. He goes to find himself another jumper.
“You can’t go back now, alone,” I plead. “The curfew! What if the boys are still there?”
Ruzi fetches one of the bits of driftwood from his room. “I hope they are there,” he growls. “I’d love to see them.” He starts pulling on his boots. “Lock the door after me.”
“Ruzi, if you hurt them, you’ll get in trouble.”
“I won’t be long,” he says.
I crouch by the wood-stove in my nest of blankets and try to defrost.
Ever since what happened with Ma and that river, I’ve liked to imagine it as peaceful somehow. She meant to do it. It wasn’t the river’s fault. Now I’ve felt its violence. Now the mud smell is cloying – clay and weed and something foul and nameless coming off my sodden boots.
Ruzi is taking much too long.
I shrug reluctantly out of the nest of blankets and put on my spare clothes – all of them, underclothes, two jumpers, two trousers – and wrap Ruzi’s coat around me again tightly. I find the old pair of boots, falling apart, that are Ruzi’s spares. They’re clown-sized in proportion to my feet, but my only pair are still caked in filth and drying in front of the stove.
I go out. When I reach the turning, there’s Ruzi, his driftwood over one shoulder, my coat bundled under his arm. He sees me and speeds up, waving, irritated.
“Get back inside, girl, quickly. You should be in bed.”
“You’ve been gone ages. I thought something happened.”
“Found your coat, right where you said. They weren’t there, more’s the pity.”
We head back inside. My coat’s only slightly muddied. My keys are still in the breast pocket. Ruzi has something else too – a baked apple packed with sugar. It’s Skøl barrow food, and a traditional treat for poorer folk.
I’ve been curious to try one for months, and he knows it. It’s tangy and sweet and meltingly hot. I don’t care that it’s burning my mouth if it chases away the last shards of ice lodged in my belly. I eat it more quickly than I’ve eaten anything in my life.
“I should lose my coat more often.” I force out a laugh.
Ruzi gives me one of his half smiles.
“Went by the Lugger,” he says. “Thought those boys might have gone there. Your friend Kit hasn’t seen them.”
“You talked to Kit?” This is almost as surprising as being attacked by a pack of vicious boys.
“I did. Says he’ll keep an eye out for them. Four boys dressed fancy – one called Bunny?” Bunny, short for Abundance, probably. Abundantly awful.
“Keep an eye out why?”
“Well, so we find out who they are. Where they live.”
“So we can do what? Tell their mothers and fathers?” I laugh, a real laugh this time. “They’d get scolded for not finishing me off properly.”
His jaw clenches, then he sighs. “Well. You mustn’t walk that way again.”
“I won’t. Doubt they will either – they were proper afraid of my poxy curse.”
Ruzi brushes the wispy hair back from his forehead and smiles. “Your mother was a great one for curses.”
Ruzi was someone we’d call on sometimes, before Ma died. She’d take me to his shop, where he made musical instruments. He was famous for them – the best maker in the north. His workshop smelled better than a sweet stand, or perfume or anything. Sawdust and lacquers. His craft was air and water to him. It’s a waste, an artist like Ruzi doing heavy lifting for the Glassworks.
But the Skøl have their own idea of art. Their music is mostly plodding, plain and precise like the tolling of bells. They don’t go in for performances in the street or in drinking establishments. Too savage.