Rocky Crag
Copyright© 2016 by Gina Marie Wylie
Chapter 1
The tall young woman peeked cautiously out into the long hallway. She didn’t see anyone living, so she moved quickly, but still furtively, along the inner wall, the mid-morning light streaming into windows that lined the other side of the hall.
She had gone thirty of the hundred feet to the window that was the object of her flight when she saw a man ahead of her move. He was slumped on a chair, covered with gore. She had thought him one of the very many, entirely too many, dead that littered the corridor, forlorn rag dolls, lying broken, along the way. Now, she was startled when the man lifted his head, opened his eyes, and looked right at her.
“Bad day to be about, miss,” his voice was hoarse and strained.
Jane was dressed in a dark green cotton smock, a white apron tied around her waist, her black hair done up in a long braid, and all of it tucked under a bandana. She looked like one of the kitchen help.
He was covered in a welter of gore. Gore, that since he was alive couldn’t possibly be all his. She saw that underneath the mess, he wore the tunic of one of the officer cadets. He wasn’t someone she recognized. Sixteen or so, as she was.
He surprised her even more by standing up, although he moved gingerly. “I had thought to sit here until one of the Shastri came by, then...” He stopped talking, his throat working. “But even one, if I can save even one...” his voice dropped to a whisper.
“They are firing the lower floors; that’s why there aren’t any about,” Jane said plainly, eyeing him curiously. “To drive out the vermin, I heard one say.”
The young man turned towards the main stairs and saw no one living. The shouting and clamor of the battle was absent now. There were a few faint whiffs of smoke.
“Come,” the girl said, “if you can.” She had to be hard, but there was no other way. Either he could come or he could not. The way wasn’t going to be easy, even for one hale and fit.
“Where?” he asked, nodding towards the direction she’d been headed.
“Come and see.” She led him the remainder of the hundred feet, and then tossed open the dormer window.
“Jump, rather than burn?” He nodded. “Faster, you’re right.”
“Aye, a jump at the end. Not as far as you might think. Come.” She stepped through the window and put her feet on the ledge, and started to move in the direction she wanted.
He poked his head out and looked around. He pointed at the flying buttress that came up from the ocean, soaring up to support the vast weight of masonry that represented the palace. “You mean to go down that?”
This side of the palace was the east side; rocky crags were at the foot of the walls. Below was a small bay, a mile wide and four long. Water much too shallow for large ships, but just fine for pleasure boats. Once upon a time when there had been pleasure here. Yesterday. And the days before that for more than two hundred years. But not today, not ever again. The girl nodded and said simply, “I’ve done this before.”
He stepped out, not nearly as confident as the young kitchen worker. But now the smoke was a steady stream; in the distance he could hear the roar of the flames. They were a hundred feet above the bay here, the buttress a two-foot climb up. She stopped at the point where the ledge was covered by the buttress and waited for him to catch up.
“The first time I did this, I tried sitting on my rump,” she told him matter-of-factly. “I like to have killed myself twice over. You can’t guide yourself very well, plus the bricks are rough. Hop up and start running. Jump as far as you can when you get to the end.”
Run? He had thought all he had to do was walk. He took a deep breath. She lifted herself up, turned and faced him for a second. “Luck, and God be with you,” she said softly, and then she was off, running.
He resolutely watched as she went flying down the arc of the buttress, right up to the final plunge into the water of the bay, now only forty feet below. She surfaced after a few seconds, looking back at him. He pulled himself up, careful of the stitch in his side, then stood for a moment. A few feet away, the window they had come out was now a chimney flue; black smoke was pouring out in a torrent.
Once started, it was impossible to stop, impossible to do anything but put one foot in front of another. At the last second, he realized that he had misjudged; he went over the edge, his legs wind-milling. Hitting the water was unpleasant. Hitting the bottom of the bay startled him, and he pushed up frantically and surfaced instantly later.
“I forgot to ask if you could swim,” the girl said when she swam up beside him.
The young man laughed. “I don’t know who he is, but you must love him enormously.”
The girl looked confused. “Pardon? Who?”
“The man in town you go to see.”
She shook her head. “There are friends of mine in town, a few. Some men, some women. None like that.”
“I can’t believe I haven’t heard of someone going off the walls ... none like that,” he told her, aping her words.
“I do it at night.” On bright, clear nights, she mentally added. This side of the palace wasn’t guarded. “I was going to swim for one of the boats. Can you sail?”
“I am Skolian. I was born on a boat, I grew up on ships.”
“First-year cadet?” she asked, and he nodded. “That means you can swim,” she agreed.
“Skolian mothers throw their infants in the nearest deep water the day they are weaned. Sink or swim. It’s in my blood.” He started swimming in the right direction, and she started after him.
“Swim faster,” the girl ordered as she quickly passed him. “At some point in time, one of the damn Shastri will remember that the palace has a backside. If nothing else, one of them will just want to piss in the bay, and he’ll see us.”
“I’ll get there,” he told her, sounding confident. “Slow and steady, but I’ll get there. You don’t sound much like a kitchen drudge.”
She sniffed, but turned her attention to swimming. A little later, they reached the boat mooring, half a mile from where they had entered the water. She pulled herself into the first one; she saw her companion was only a little behind.
When he reached the skiff, she saw that he couldn’t pull himself up and in. She pulled and tugged, and he grunted in pain, collapsing in an unconscious heap in the bottom of the small sailboat.
She could see the bilges were red with his blood; she leaned down and lifted up the tail of his shirt. There was a deep gash in his side, six inches or so long, clear to the ribs, into the ribs a little. Maybe broken ribs, the girl thought, but most likely not since he seemed able to move freely. But he was bleeding heavily now; the immersion in water had washed away any clots.
For a moment, she stared at the wound, then shook her head, unable to imagine what salt water must have felt like against such as that. Still and all, first things first. She went forward in the fourteen-foot boat and opened the sail locker. These boats were intended to be simple enough for anyone to use. She clipped the top of the sail to a lanyard on the mast, tugged and pulled it up, then, again, along the boom of the lateen rig. The sail promptly filled, and for the first time, she paid attention to where the wind was blowing.
For once this day, something was favorable. The entrance to the little bay was almost directly downwind. She pulled a knife from her apron, sliced the anchor rope, and they were moving. She glanced behind her, and instantly, she wished she had not. The palace was burning like a giant torch; the pillar of smoke was going to be visible, she thought, for fifty miles. She turned away, making sure that the boom was lashed right, checking the tiller, and lashed it as well, and covering her racking sobs for what had been lost.
Survival, she had heard once, is a simple thing; you do things right and everything is fine. A single misstep and you die. How many times could things have gone wrong today?
Jane S’Harris had been up early, at the crack of dawn. She was nearly finished sewing the brocade on her older sister’s wedding dress, and she had wanted to finish it this morning to be free to do as she pleased in the afternoon. Everyone thought of her as a tomboy, but sewing was like anything else they had her learn: she learned it as well or better than anyone else.
No one, no one in the palace did brocade seams as well as she did. She’d been at it just a few minutes when her sister appeared, cooing and happy, pleased at the work.
It had been Jane’s sister standing in the bright early morning sun that had saved Jane. The wedding would be early in the morning, with the sun shining long columns of golden light down the main transept of the cathedral. On a table in her room was a piece of blue satin ribbon. With the morning sun shining like that, it would set off her sister’s skin with the dress perfectly! Jane had been excited, ecstatic, and had raced through the palace back to her room to fetch it.
She hadn’t been sure what the shouting was about as she approached the main staircase, so she’d slowed to look.
For a change the hubbub though wasn’t about her. A hundred armed men had stormed the main entrance to the palace. Fighting had started just moments before she would have been in her room. She had thought it was a prank at first, but the screams and shouts, followed by warning trumpets from the city, the slam of the alarm drums from the palace ... it was no prank.
She’d retreated down the hall, to their private quarters where her father was with her mother and her two older brothers in the sitting room of their private apartments.
Her father was buckling on a sword, as were her brothers. “You will stay and guard that door with your life!” her father told her. “Protect your mother!” Jane had nodded, then went and found an old, battered blade hanging from the wall and had done just that.
For what? Ten minutes?
More and more strange men poured into the palace. Someone shouted that the citadel gate had been forced, and even more attackers were coming. The new invaders were from a party that had taken the Sea Gate, troops coming from a transport there.
She stepped through the main door and looked around. The scene outside would be something she would never forget.
The main stairs were a crazy patchwork of men fighting; men dying. She saw her father go down, run through. Her older brother stepped forward, killing the man who’d done it and then had his sword arm hacked off by another enemy. Someone else slammed a mailed fist into David’s face, but he was already falling. She never saw Thomas, she never saw him at all.
Her mother touched her shoulder. “Come back inside, there is one thing left for us to do, daughter.”
Jane had no idea what her mother meant. There was a sudden sound of fighting on the second floor, from the presence chamber. Some of the enemy on the stairs went to deal with it, the rest continued to work to finish the few left opposing their way higher up the staircase.
Her mother had barred the door, knowing it was futile; the door wasn’t that stout, and there was plenty of material for battering rams all through the palace.
“You go to your room,” her mother told Jane. “Then you will save yourself.”
Jane S’Harris had stared at her mother in shock and surprise. Her mother knew she could leave the palace from her room? Jane had thought no one knew! And could not imagine that her mother knew and hadn’t spoken to her of it!
“Wear the wig! Survive, Jane! If you do nothing else, survive! The Shastri are cowardly, backstabbing vermin! They’ve won here; there’s nothing that can be done. Survive, daughter! I charge you, daughter! Do that for your father, for me! For your brothers and sister! Above all, do what you must for S’Harris!”
Jane had nodded. Then something heavy slammed into the door, nearly tearing it from its hinges. And that was the first stroke!
She’d turned and fled to her room, closed and locked that door. It wasn’t as stout as the outer door, although it had a better lock. She dashed to her closet and pulled the black wig over her own short blonde hair, pulled on the dark smock over her apron. These were her keys to the city; she could go out, dressed as such, and be unremarked. Something she had craved from her earliest memories.
To be allowed to be herself, that was all she wanted. Was that too much to ask? Damn the Shastri! Eternally damn the Shastri!
She went to the window. Behind her, she heard her mother’s scream, abruptly cut off.
Jane went out the window, then along the ledge, and finally carefully down a steeply slanting roof, to another ledge. That led to a small door in the roof, a door that opened into a storeroom. She peeped in carefully, saw no one, and went inside.
They would know someone had been in her room; they would know someone went outside. She had hidden in the palace since she was a toddler and had been allowed to roam the palace as she pleased. There were few who knew it as well as she did. She moved slowly, carefully, and at long last, to the gallery on the east side, the one with the buttresses.
Here and now, Jane S’Harris looked down at the young man lying in the bottom of the boat. He was still bleeding, and she could hear the rasp of his breathing. If she did nothing, he would bleed to death. He could have already lost too much blood; he could die any second. What could she do? What should she do?
Jane remembered once, a long time ago, when she had watched a man having his cheek stitched after a fight. The guardsmen had known she was there; they’d deliberately let her stay, expecting her to be sick. But she hadn’t been! She had watched and learned that except for what was being stitched, it wasn’t that much different than running a seam on a dress or a smock.
Jane laughed, then. She lifted her smock, quite immodestly! Except for the fact that she still wore breeches and a tunic underneath. She undid the bag that hung from her breeches belt, pulled it out, and settled everything back into place.
Silk thread or cotton? The silk was stronger, but you had to be careful with silk thread; if the seam took any pressure, the silk thread would cut the other threads around it, particularly if they were cotton. No, cotton thread wasn’t as strong, but it was strong enough. And wouldn’t tear his skin.
Jane looked up, towards the entrance to the bay. Another half hour, perhaps a little less, she thought, she was properly aligned.
Jane did what she had to do, finished up, and admired her work. The young man was going to have an ugly scar if he lived. But at least the stitches were neat and even; some of her best work. And they were holding; the bleeding had all but stopped. She’d checked the boat’s progress often the last few minutes, until she had to busy herself with getting through the hundred-yard-wide entrance to the bay. There were some rocks, but mostly just mud and sand. Today, though, would not be a good day to go aground!
She did as good a job on threading the entrance as she had on the stitches. Once in the open sea, she’d given some thought as to what to do next. Going north was stupid; that way was towards the Sea Gate, and she’d heard they’d taken that. That had to mean the Shastri had brought Tall Ships! Ahead of her, in the direction the wind was blowing towards, was open water. One hundred and fifty miles across the Bight of Gordon was Shelm, one of the stronger cities in the Land. She’d head that way, an easy choice.
She looked at the sun. It wasn’t even noon; perhaps a couple of hours before noon, even. This had been the day of the Spring Festival, the first day of planting in the new spring. Later in the day, they would have gone outside the city, and her father would have set his shoulder to a plow, her brothers helping. Not this year! Never again! The Shastri were going to pay! Pay and pay and pay over and over, again and again!
She looked north where a group of a half dozen Tall Ships clustered by the Sea Gate. Even as she watched, the spars on one of the Tall Ships shivered as the sails started to draw the wind. Turning her way, she was sure. It would be a tossup, she thought. A tossup.
Call it ten more hours of daylight. What had someone told her once, in a tavern down at the docks, talking of pirates and raiders and such? “A stern chase is a long chase.” How much faster than a skiff would a Tall Ship be?
Jane stood and carefully judged the distance between her and her pursuer. She was six miles, perhaps five and a half, ahead of the pursuit.
The other ship was pulling the wind now. Jane reached down and broke off a short length of thread, held her thumb out at her arm’s distance, and measured the height of the Tall Ship against her thumb, tying the string to mark the height.
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