She clambered down again. To avoid pacing uselessly, Maia sat down and resumed plaiting her rope, keeping her pencil handy nearby and anxiously hoping for the clicking sounds that would tell her Renna was all right. The long, hard quiet stretched on and on, until a rasp of keys caused her to throw a rug over her work once more. She stood up as the guards entered and put her dinner on the rickety table. Maia ate silently, hurriedly, as eager for her jailers to leave as they were to be gone..
When they left, she hated the return of solitude.
What if Tizbe has already taken Renna away?
Several times, Maia interrupted her work to go to the window. The third time she looked, the horses and escorts were gone. A panicky chill arrested when she saw no traffic on the road. As twilight settled and temperatures dropped, they must have all gone inside, where the empty halls offered plenty of room for women and mounts.
Maia climbed down and resumed worrying, while her fingers plaited fibers together. Tizbe said they'd be leaving tomorrow, but she never said whether or not they —
The first clicks from the wall plate sent her heart leaping.
Renna! She's safe!
Maia threw her weaving aside and picked up her notebook. Soon it was clear that Renna wasn't sending any ornately planned Game of Life scenario, but a rushed series of simple Morse dots and dashes. The message ended. Concentrating, Maia had to guess at meanings for several of the letters and words. Finally, she cried out. "No!"
MAIA. DONT ANSWR. THEY R TAKNG ME AWAY. WILL REMBR U ALWYS. GOD KEEP U SAFE. RENNA.
It can get bitterly cold on the high plains, especially on early winter evenings, to one lying perched up high along a precipice, exposed to the wind.
There was barely room to stretch prone in the window niche, whose gritty, chill surface rubbed Maia's shoulders on both sides. Using a plank from the broken box as a sort of fishing rod, Maia still had to lean out so the rope hung properly, to keep its burden from scraping against the rough cliff face. The leverage helped as she rocked the plank gently left to right, back and forth, pumping gradually until the rope began to swing like a pendulum.
It took concentration not to let her shivering interfere. Nor was the shaking due entirely to the cold. By moonlight, the ground looked awfully far away. Even if she had a rope long enough — one made by master craftswomen, not hand-twined by an inexperienced fiver — she would never have been able to get herself to climb down all that distance.
Yet, look what you're trying to do, instead!
After getting Renna's message, there had passed over Maia a wave of utter panic. It wasn't just envisioning months, perhaps years, stretching ahead in loneliness. The loss of this new friend, when she had still not gotten over Leie, felt like a physical blow. Her first impulse was to curl up under piles of curtain material and let depression take her. There was a sick, sweet-sour attraction to melancholy, as an alternative to action.
Maia had been tempted for all of thirty seconds. Then she got to work, searching for some way to solve her problem, reevaluating every possibility, even those she had previously discarded.
The door and walls? They would take explosives to breach. She turned over in her mind ways of calling the guards and overpowering them, but that fantasy was also absurd, especially with them at their wariest, and Tizbe's escorts to back them up.
That left the window. She could just barely manage to squeeze through, but to what purpose? The ground was impossibly far. Turning left, she could make out more storerooms, visible as slit-windows stretching away on both sides. They seemed almost as out of reach as the prairie floor. Besides, why trade one prison cell for another?
Looking about desperately, she had finally twisted around to look upward, and saw the pillared loggia overhead, part of a grand patio girdling the sanctuary, five or six meters higher.
If only somebody would drop a rope down, she had fantasized ironically.
Desperation led to inspiration.
Could I send one up?
It would be a gamble at best. Even if it was possible to swing a rope and bob the way she had in mind, she'd still need something to act as a grappling hook. Yet, it mustn't interfere as she oscillated the rope back and forth along the wall, giving it momentum to rise and — if all went well — catch on the railing overhead.
She refused to think about the last drawback — trusting her weight to the makeshift contraption. Cross that bridge when we come to it, Maia thought.
Back inside, she had started by ripping apart her supply of notebooks for the springlike clips that bound loose pages inside. Maybe I can rig some of these to pop open when they hit. . . .
It was difficult to put into practice. First she had to tear the clips out and then use a wooden plank to lever them into the shape she wanted. Tying several together at the end of her rope, she practiced on the sill of the window until she felt sure the improvised hook would catch two times out of three. The short section of cable used in the trial held her weight, though trusting her life to the improvised gimmickry seemed lunatic, or desperate, or both.
Maia wrapped a single loop of thread around the clips to bind them into a compact bundle, to keep the cluster from clattering and rattling as she swung it back and forth. Ideally, it would come apart on impact with the balcony, and not at some inopportune moment before. Finally, she had crawled back into the window carrying some curtain material for padding, and a plank with a notch in one end, to use as a fishing pole. Once settled in, she commenced laying out rope.
It was hard to even see the cable's end when it was hanging straight down. Once she set the pendulum in motion, however, she could make out the makeshift grapnel whenever it passed before a small patch of snow on the ground. Soon it rose high enough to occult a low white cloud bank, veiling one of the moons to the east.
Back and forth … rocking back and forth. Despite her arrangements to let the plank take most of the weight, Maia's arms were tiring by the time the swinging rope rose high enough to point horizontal, level with the row of storeroom windows. Her heart caught each time the bundle of clips tapped or snagged against some protuberance, forcing her to lean even farther to avoid catching it on the backswing.
"Come on, you can hold better than that!" she remembered Leie used to say, back when they were both four and a half, and would sneak out at night to paint mothers blue. After the third time a statue in the Summer Courtyard had been defaced, the clan matriarchs had locked all doors leading to the yard, and sprinkled marker dust around the monuments, to trace anyone who stepped in it. That did not stop the incidents.
"I'm doing as best I can!" she had hissed back at Leie on the night of that final foray, gripping one end of a rope made of bedsheets, the other wrapped around her sister's feet. Lowering Leie from the roof, with paintbrush and bucket in hand, had been easier on prior occasions because there were crenelated battlements Maia could use for leverage. But that last time it had been just her own, preadolescent muscles, battling the insistent pull of gravity.
Now, over a year later, as she struggled to control a distant weight that jerked and fought like a fish caught at the end of her line, Maia moaned, "I'm . . . doin' . . . as best I … can!" Her breath whistled as she held on, letting out and taking up slack, trying to force momentum into a pendulum that seemed reluctant to rise much past horizontal and kept yanking at her burning shoulders on each downward swing.
Under questioning the next day, Leie had insisted she was acting alone. She refused to implicate Maia, even though it was clear she could not have done it without help. Everyone knew Maia had been the one with the rope. Everyone knew she had been the one unable to hold on when a tile broke, loosening her grip, causing Leie to go crashing in a clatter of paint and tracer dust and chipped plaster.