The Dark Citadel (The Green Woman) Read online

  Suddenly it sensed her presence, and waves of hatred rolled down the dingy street. The waves of hatred followed the girl, like running dogs mad with hunger, then fell back, marking the spot with their slaver. The demon had seen it, the russet aura that enveloped the tall girl like a mantle of flame. This was Deborah; the power to reassemble the broken Pattern of the world lay in her memories. If only she knew.

  The demon snarled. Dry wings spread, ear pressed against the crystal. Dust settled. The demon waited.

  Chapter 2

  In three months’ time, Deborah would be sixteen. Then she would be married. Yes, even she would be married, Serpentspawn or not. That was all the girls in her class seemed to talk about, the stupid cows, as if it was something to look forward to! Her green eyes flashed as she plunged the dirty pans into the washing-up water. Well, she was not looking forward to it. In fact, she thought she would rather be stoned to death as a heretic. Deborah was going to get away.

  Her mother had escaped from Providence, and her father had tried. She knew that much, even if she refused to believe the cock and bull story about what made them do it. One day, soon, Deborah would do the same. She would rather be torn apart by bloodthirsty demons, or the Deformities who haunted the desert, than marry a man like her givenfather.

  Dropping the pan back into the soapy water in the sink, Deborah wiped her hands on her apron and pushed a lock of red hair behind her ear. She went to the door, casting a glance at her givenbrother, Baruch, who had raided the sweetener ration and had sticky crumbs all over his podgy cheeks.

  Baruch smirked at her. “If you go out, I’ll tell.” His cherubic features twisted into an unpleasant grimace.

  “Want to find a scorpion in your bed tonight?”

  The colour drained from Baruch’s rosy cheeks, and he watched in silence as Deborah flounced out of the door.

  * * * *

  She just had to get out of the apartment she called home but which had all the charm and warmth of a prison cell. Yet once the door closed behind her, she hesitated. Deborah didn’t care that it was forbidden—she paused because she was afraid. Fear walked behind her every day, making her jump at shadows and constantly look over her shoulder. Fear made her peer into the stairwell with the creeping sensation she was being watched.

  Looking down over the banister, she shivered with the certainty that something was waiting for her in the darkness beyond the fused bulb on the second floor landing. She peered harder into the gloom, convinced the shadows moved, swallowing the feeble light as they advanced. The hair at the back of her neck prickled, and she tried to step backwards, but her feet refused to respond. Darkness welled up from the floor below, catching at her ankles, sucking her down.

  Fear surrounded Deborah as she groped wildly behind her for the door handle. Her hand caught at empty air, and she realised she was halfway down the stair and the darkness had thickened, pushing her on. She had just time to give a startled cry before a dark bulk rose up out of the shadows.

  The dark bulk sucked in his breath and tottered dangerously backwards. The suffocating darkness retreated, leaving lingering rags of hatred, and the eyes of Deborah’s givenfather narrowed in anger.

  “Where d’you think you’re going like that, little bitch? After your stinking whore of a mother, maybe?” Titus glared in fury at Deborah, his face inches from hers and his labouring breath heavy with alcohol fumes. Deborah wrinkled her nose and turned away, her fear transformed into disgust. “Answer me, whore’s whelp!” He punched her shoulder, furious at her defiance.

  The blow shocked more than it hurt, and unable to contain her anger, Deborah spun round, red hair flying, her own hand raised to strike.

  “And what if she was a whore? She was a thousand times better than you, you filthy drunken animal!”

  In the silence that followed as Titus digested the insult, Deborah could sense the tension in the air. Conversation stopped in the neighbouring apartments. She knew the unseen men were listening; she could almost hear their hearts beating behind the closed doors. Strangely, the fear she sensed now was not her own. Sweaty and damp, it exuded from the loud-voiced men. They were afraid of her.

  She wanted to feel triumphant, to savour their fear as if it was sweet vengeance. But it wasn’t sweet; it was miserable to feel so much loathing coming from all the people around her. She bit back a sob but refused to lower her eyes.

  It was Titus who turned his head away. Even when he was drunk he could not hold his givendaughter’s gaze. “Serpentspawn,” he muttered and pushing Deborah aside blundered up the stairs.

  * * * *

  Deborah edged past Fatima, her givenmother, who blocked the doorway as she gossiped with Goodwife Artemis across the landing. She could guess what they were talking about; the evening air had been full of whispering, commenting on the latest edict that had been announced to the men at evening devotions in the temples. The Ignorant population was to be culled; it was the only solution to the nutrition shortage, the Elders said.

  Deborah had overheard the men talking on their way home. The Ignorants had brought it on themselves, they said. If they weren’t such pilfering, idle layabouts! No doubt Fatima would have her usual cruel commentary to pass on to the neighbour. Deborah paused in the doorway of her room to listen.

  The women all over the city had picked up the news and were murmuring indignantly among themselves. Some were shocked; some like Goodwife Fatima were not. She folded her beefy arms across her bosom and nodded sagely to Goodwife Artemis from the apartment next door.

  “Of course it’s not pleasant,” she said, her small eyes glittering with malice. “But they have to do something, don’t they? If the Ignorants have been thieving the nutrition reserves, obviously the Elders have to show they won’t stand for it.”

  Goodwife Artemis nodded in agreement. “My Jeremiah heard the excess nutrition hasn’t done them any good either. In fact, the vengeance of the Wise God has begun.”

  Goodwife Fatima leaned even closer to her neighbour, her voice a conspiratorial whisper. “Indeed it has, Goodwife. It has been visited on their babies. I have seen it in the House of Births with my own eyes. They are punished for their greed all right. Horrible some of them are. Limbs come out all wrong. There was even one with two heads!” She shuddered.

  “It’s kinder to cull them,” Goodwife Artemis said, flicking a bit of dust from her sleeve.

  Goodwife Fatima nodded. “It’s just putting them out of their misery.” She made the gesture of sticking an imaginary syringe into an imaginary baby’s heart. “And as for the healthy ones, well, there are just too many of them, aren’t there? They breed like battery rabbits! Having their babies on the quiet at home won’t save them either. All yesterday we were packing up doses for the birthers to take into the Ignorant tenements. They’ll get them all sooner or later, don’t you worry.” She chuckled to herself. “After all, you can’t take a two-headed kid with no legs to the shop without somebody noticing it, can you?”

  “But they’d do it, wouldn’t they? Disgusting, they are. No respect for the rest of us.” Goodwife Artemis wrinkled her nose as if she could smell the drains.

  Goodwife Fatima’s voice took on an indignant tone. “Of course it’s for their own good. But do they see it like that? They had the nerve to cause a rumpus outside the House of Births this morning, had to have the Black Boys called out for them.” She shook her head. “Some people. You just can’t help them, can you?”

  Goodwife Artemis turned back into her own doorway, and Deborah ducked out of sight into her tiny room next to the kitchen. For once, good sense had prevailed and she had not stormed out and told piggy-eyed Artemis what she thought of her. Her husband Jeremiah hung around with a scribe at the Ministry of Justice.

  Lying in her narrow bed, Deborah mulled over what she had heard. Horror mingled with disgust as images of babies convulsing in their death throes and distraught, hair-tearing mothers filled her head. And these people dared to criticise her? She didn’t kill babies,
she fumed.

  Serpent, they called her, and not just behind her back. She knew she frightened people. It was difficult to ignore the way adults avoided her eyes or the uneasy, furtive glances of the other girls.

  Serpent! They said her mother ran away because she was an adulteress. Why then had Deborah’s father planned to go with her? Deborah re-ran her memories of the scene, of her mother’s last anguished look before she ran out of sight into the desert, her father, blood pouring from a leg wound, reaching out to her, the silver-clad guard scooping up her five-year-old self and bundling her back into the city.

  But were they real memories, or a fiction she had invented to ease the pain of being abandoned? She saw so many things nobody else could see, visions that came in blinding flashes that made her head hurt. She saw unimaginably bright colours, extraordinary growing, living things. And people. Their smiling faces were filled with expressions of tenderness and affection, and something deeper she remembered from years ago. She wanted to reach out to these faces and touch them. They must belong to people who had been close to her, resurfacing from the deep recesses of her memory.

  Deborah knew she must never tell anyone about these visions, because they belonged to her real life, not the cold, harsh existence with Titus and Fatima. They belonged to a life the Elders thought they had destroyed.

  As Deborah lay in her bed, wanting her parents back more than anything in the world, her head was filled with an aching flash. She saw a woman’s face, young, with damp, tousled red hair, beads of sweat on her lip, and tears welling up in her eyes despite the broad smile on her full lips. The face came closer and closer, until Deborah’s vision was filled with green eyes and dark red lashes and the smiling lips. Her heart stopped beating, the lips moved, and in a whispered breath came a word, a name.

  Deborah.

  And she knew she was looking at her mother in the moments after her birth. Her mother had held her, smiled at her, in defiance of all the rules, and had whispered her name. When the shock subsided, she closed her eyes and let herself be rocked to sleep on a wave of euphoria. The secret she had just learned sprang from her memory. She was certain of it; there could be no other explanation.

  What if all the other visions were memories too? The trees and mountains, the smiling faces? Surely not her own: she who had only known grey, silent Providence. So whose memories were they?

  * * * *

  Deborah woke the next morning from dreams full of bright colours and savage landscapes, with a wild excitement that still tingled in the pit of her stomach. She opened her eyes with familiar throaty laughter echoing in her head. She opened her eyes with a smile on her lips despite remembering that she was in disgrace. Sometimes it was gales of laughter she heard, sometimes a whistled tune or snatches of a song and, whoever the voice belonged to, it always made her smile. She had never heard a sound like it in Providence and wondered at the kind of person who could be so carefree and cheerful.

  The ringing notes comforted her as Goodwife Fatima draped her in the shameful black veil that left only her eyes visible. For once, her givenmother was going to accompany Deborah to school, and she seemed to be taking a malicious pleasure in it. Baruch, still shovelling his breakfast, sniggered as Fatima pushed her out of the door. He couldn’t see the terrible faces Deborah was pulling at him behind her veil, but something in her eyes made him stop and lower his eyes to his plate.

  * * * *

  In grovelling, obsequious tones, Fatima related to the principal her givendaughter’s unpardonable behaviour of the previous evening. Titus had been whining to her about how he’d had to stop Deborah running out into the street with her head uncovered, how she had insulted him and threatened to hit him. Fatima begged Principal Anastasias to use all means in his power to cast out the demon of arrogance in her givendaughter’s soul.

  The dark-bearded man in spotless white robes clicked his tongue in irritation and eyed Deborah sternly. “Your origins unfortunately predispose you to rebellion and heresy. Be warned that you are being closely watched for disobedience.”

  Goodwife Fatima glanced at Deborah from the corner of her eye and smirked. She bowed her head as she took her leave of the man in white, pressing the hem of his robe to her lips in a sign of respect. Deborah hung her head, not in shame, but so no one would see the fury and the dangerous curiosity in her green eyes. The mention of her origins had the effect of an electric shock, and she held her breath, hoping to hear something new. But the principal said nothing more. In any case, she knew she could only expect lies about her parents. She would have to find out for herself what really happened ten years ago.

  “Do not think I am taken in by your false show of submission,” Principal Anastasias said icily as Deborah turned to leave. “And do not think I am unaware of your disgraceful behaviour in public yesterday afternoon. You will not take the defence of convicted criminals in defiance of your teachers, nor will you incite discontent among your classmates by insulting the sacred institution of marriage. From now on, your supervisors will be warned of your character and will take the necessary measures to prevent you influencing the girls of your class.”

  * * * *

  Deborah’s green eyes flashed at the girls who sniggered behind their hands at the sight of her penitence veil. How she hated them! Sitting there like a flock of chickens waiting to be trussed and shoved into the oven. How could they be so indifferent to the colourless life that was in store for them?

  Matron was droning on about some futile ritual in the futile daily routine of young wives, and suddenly Deborah couldn’t resist the temptation to provoke a confrontation. She got to her feet and Matron raised an eyebrow.

  “I know it’s got nothing to do with techniques for getting oil stains out of carpets, but I have a question relating to ritual and social organisation.”

  Matron gave a wary nod of the head. “Go on.”

  “I heard my parents talking last night about a population cull. It sounds horribly sinister. Could you explain what it means?”

  “There is a mortal sickness among the Ignorants from consuming stolen nutrition.” Matron’s voice hissed through thin lips. “Does that answer your question?”

  “Not really. I was referring to the edict, the one that says we have to murder their babies.”

  The class held its breath as Matron’s face turned scarlet then white as fury drained the blood from it. When she found her voice, the temperature in the room fell to several degrees below zero.

  “There is no such edict. The Ignorant women systematically defy the law and produce more than two children. A certain number of them are being sterilised. It is for their own good as well as the good of the community.”

  “Sterilised? But I heard that—”

  “Young girls should not eavesdrop on their elders’ conversations. You all know the law; each girl must bear and bring up two children, a boy and a girl. No more. No less. Some of you, those with the surname Deodata, have been brought up by your biological parents because your sibling is male. Others are called Givenchild because you were given to a woman who had a second son, so he could be given to a woman who had produced a second daughter. A few of you,” she fixed Deborah with a baleful stare, “were taken away from criminals to be brought up by good citizens.”

  “But the Ignorants—”

  “The Ignorants break the Family Law! They are idle and thieving, and young girls who understand nothing of social policy should refrain from criticism.”

  Deborah bit her tongue to stop the angry retort escaping. They called her Serpentspawn, the green witch’s daughter. The punishment for heresy was stoning, and she had seen no mercy in the steely eyes of the principal.

  Chapter 3

  Hera’s long, fine fingers delicately crumbled soya curd into a bowl and sprinkled onto it the salty concoction of the midday vitamins. Her dark-lashed grey eyes were troubled, and she frowned as she always did when she was perplexed.

  “Why do you do it, Deborah?” she asked. “Why do
you say those things?”

  Deborah shrugged and her lower lip jutted in a petulant expression. “Because somebody has to.”

  The slight girl squeezed her friend’s arm. Hera smiled but unease still showed in her eyes. “One day you’ll get into serious trouble. You know the Elders won’t tolerate criticism. You shouldn’t repeat those terrible stories about the Ignorant babies. They won’t stand for it.”

  “But they’re not stories, Hera. It’s the truth! My givenmother works at the House of Births in the Ignorant sector. She took the trolley of injections round to the birth wards herself. I heard her telling the neighbour. Something about deformed babies. But it seemed like just a pretext. It sounded like all the Ignorant babies were going to be…they were going to…you know!” Deborah was shaking now, her green eyes flashing with anger.

  Hera squeezed her arm tighter, her own grey eyes wide with concern and fear. “At least Matron gave you an explanation. She could have turned you straight in to the principal for insolence.”

  “But she was lying,” Deborah shouted. “There may well be a programme to sterilise the Ignorant women, but what my givenmother was delivering to the birth wards wasn’t free tickets for the next entertainments at the arena. It was a batch of lethal injections.”

  Hera glanced around, afraid they would be overheard, but the other girls in their class were huddled together at the other side of the refectory, as if unwilling to sit too close to Deborah the troublemaker and her friend.

  “She could have got the wrong end of the stick.” Hera looked hopeful. “Your givenmother wasn’t at the front of the queue when the Wise God was handing out the brains, was she?”