‘I’m only telling you what I’ve heard,’ she said.
‘Well, whether we know of these things or not, it won’t make a bit of difference to what’s happening. We’ll know it soon enough if those monsters come tearing over the walls for us. Until then, please, give it a rest. Let us live in some peace while we still can.’
Curl plucked at a loose thread on her linen blouse and held her tongue. It wasn’t easy, though, when her blood was still humming from the tail-end of her high, and her mouth wanted nothing more than to flap away in idle chatter.
‘I’ve half a mind to go and volunteer myself.’
A roar of laughter burst from the woman. ‘Oh Curl, you do make me laugh!’
Curl found her face flushing red. ‘What? I don’t mean to fight. But they need people for other things. Cooks and… such.’
Rosa stopped laughing and threw a folded nightshirt into the basket on the floor. She picked up the last of the freshly washed nightshirts, her breathing loud. ‘I don’t know what’s got into you today, my girl. You’d better not go saying anything like that to the children. I’ll clip you one, I truly will. You’ll have the poor things heartbroken with all your talk.’
The door to the kitchen burst open and Misha and Neese came running in. ‘ Out, out! ’ shouted Rosa. ‘You’re trailing dirt all over the place!’ But the girls were brave enough to ignore her for a moment, and they stopped before Curl, and opened their mouths and widened their eyes in feigned surprise, and let out a chorus of screams at the sight of her prominent hair.
‘ Out! ’ shouted Rosa as they ran back outside again, hollering all the way.
‘Very funny, girls,’ Curl shouted after them.
Pea was standing in the doorway, her nose running and a thumb held in her mouth. She was new to the house, and still hadn’t learned to take Rosa’s barks for what they were.
The girl was holding a hand to her small belly. ‘I’m hungry,’ she said.
‘You’ll just have to wait,’ Rosa told her. ‘Now run along, little one.’
As the girl wandered away, Rosa sighed and wiped the back of her hand across her forehead. She stood there framed in the light of the window with her other hand on her hip, looking out at the children in the yard with tender consternation in her eyes.
It softened Curl too to see her like that. She had grown deeply fond of this woman in her time here.
Curl knew she had been blessed all those months ago when she had first arrived in the city of Bar-Khos, and had spotted the sign on the door and knocked upon it in search of lodging. She’d stood there wearing hand-me-downs donated by the volunteers from the refugee camp, feeling lost in a city of this size, lacking the faintest idea of how she was going to support herself; and then the door had suddenly tugged open, and Rosa stood before her with her tired, kind eyes.
Now, like her night terrors come real, the Mannians were coming to destroy her world once again.
‘It’s just…’ she ventured. ‘I need to feel like I’m doing something.’
Rosa turned her head, observed her for a moment with sympathy.
‘You could do something useful for me right now, my girl.’
‘Oh?’
Her head gestured to the table of dirty platters, a sly humour in her expression.
Curl clapped her hands to her cheeks and blew an exasperated breath of air.
The shutters of the window lay open, so that over the grumble of the guns Curl could hear the faint sounds of shouted orders, and the dim beat of marching feet in great numbers. She was sitting on her bed with the small box on her lap, the dross half-unwrapped on its open lid. The sounds outside, though, caused her to set them aside and cross to the window.
There was nothing to see, save for the houses opposite, and a handcart being pushed along the street by an old rag man, some children running past him in silence. No street girls in sight anywhere, she saw. Most likely they were out along the Avenue of Lies, snatching what quick business they could from the troops filtering out of the city towards the marshalling grounds beyond the northern walls.
Curl felt a moment’s relief that she didn’t have to work the streets any more. She wasn’t proud of how easily she had taken to this profession of hers, nor how popular she was amongst the roving clientele of the area. Still, in only a few months of working she’d been able to gain a steady number of reliable customers, enough so that now she could take appointments in her room, and charge all the more for doing so.
She recalled that she was entertaining that evening, that old letch Bostani, with his stench of tarweed and ale and stale sweat, and his pig eyes that seemed dead to everything, even to pleasure. Curl made it a habit to never think of these things in her own time. She retreated back to the bed and placed the open box on her lap once more, and stared down at it unblinking.
The grey dust was something else she was hardly proud of. She’d taken to the stuff much too easily as well, finding in it something that could get her through the long days and the even longer, lonely nights. A dross-addicted prostitute, she thought to herself. Her aunt and sisters would be distraught to see what had become of her. And her mother, her ally…
Curl looked away from the box of dross with a sudden glimmer in her eyes.
Why had she even come to Bar-Khos, she wondered? The city-port of Al-Khos had been closer to the northern refugee camp than to here. Yet some compulsion had led her to tramp and hitch rides all the way to the south of the island barefoot and alone, often only escaping trouble by luck or the kindness of strangers.
Curl didn’t know why, but some part of her had needed to come to Bar-Khos and the legendary Shield; this city of eternal siege where they had stood and held firm against the forces of Mann, and where they were still doing so, even now, while an imperial army massed on the eastern coast intent on their conquest.
She’d come to like these Khosians and their ways. At first, she’d been distrustful of the aid they had given her party of refugees, freshly arrived in their boat from Lagos. In short time, though, Curl had realized that this generosity of spirit was an honoured trait amongst these people, and humility too, for all their contradictions of pride and hardiness.
As a people, their moods seemed prone to melancholy, though they were romantics too, so that even their soldiers could be poets and lovers as easily as drunks and suicides. They relished their freedoms yet favoured cooperation and community. They prioritized families and simple, peaceful lives above all else. Those of wealth and power, like their own Michine nobles, were often spoken of with a kind of bitter sympathy, as if the painted men and women of influence were ill of spirit, warped by their own desires to lord it over others.
Speaking with other refugees living in the area, those who had travelled the Mercian Isles and knew them well, Curl had heard how it was the same with all the peoples of the Free Ports – if not even more so – where people lived with no nobles at all. She still found the notion a hard one to grasp.
Curl glanced back to the dross in her lap. At breakfast, one of the lodgers had said that the imperial invaders were from the Sixth Army. The same men who had laid waste to Lagos.
Curl thought of a town on fire, a pale sky obscured by smoke. Her family’s cries lost amongst the tumult of so many others. The tears spilled down her cheeks. For long moments she sat there, shaking and awash with heartache, a wet hand covering her burning face.
When a sob finally forced its way from her chest she sat up straight and shook her head in self-admonishment. She sniffed, and brushed a hand across her cheek as though to swipe away a cobweb.