“But she said they made a boy that lives here like a prince, so he must be a child of the Lords.”
Zoe wrinkled her pale dirty face and licked her fingers as she threaded her needle. “There is a boy what lives in the Gray House and is favored of the Lords. Gam saw him when she was called to take new towels there. She said he has the mark of the Lords on him, so she was ever so careful and respectful.”
“The mark of the Lords? I don’t know of that. I’m so ignorant, being new here at the fortress.”
Zoe leaned close, the wrinkles around her mouth deepening into desert crags. “The jewels, you know.” She laid her finger on her ear tag. “It means whatever you do or say, the Lords will know it. The boy could kill you with a look if he took a mind to. You go careful if you see the mark of the Lords, Eda.”
Gar’Dena had warned me repeatedly not to reveal myself to Gerick no matter what-not until the signal came. A wise warning, it appeared.
The Gray House was the structure that faced the keep across the courtyard beyond the colonnade. On the fourth night of my stay in Zhev’Na, I decided to venture a bit farther afield and see what I could learn about it.
We had worked a bit later than usual, for Kargetha had been displeased with our day’s stitching and made us rip out half of it and do it over again. By the time my companions fell snoring onto their pallets, the compound was quiet and empty. I waited perhaps an hour, then slipped through the darkness to the colonnade, crossing into the next courtyard by way of the opening closest to the corner next to the keep.
As I stood in the dark corner, shivering in the cold air, I longed for a cloak, longed to be anywhere but this awful place. The courtyard between the Gray House and the keep-the Lords’ Court, the women called it-was much larger than the Workers’ Court, and was paved with large squares of stone that were carved with all manner of devices and symbols. Rather than trees or plants, statues of fantastical birds and beasts were set in ordered rows across the barren enclosure. The entrance to the keep was a columned portico at least six stories in height, flanked by gigantic carvings of warriors and beasts, and lit by great bowls of flame mounted above the portico. The bowl torches were so immense and so high, no servant could possibly reach them to set them alight or refresh their fuel. I shuddered, feeling quite small and alone.
The Gray House that faced this portico across the courtyard was more modestly proportioned, but of the same severe, angular construction. No elaborate entry, but only an iron gate opened onto its interior courtyard. Despite four torches that flanked the Gray House gate, I couldn’t see into the darkness beyond it. Few lights were visible in the house, but I tried to note where they were: ground level, just to the right of the gate, second level, just above the gate, and third level, to the rear.
No guards were anywhere in evidence, and I thought perhaps I’d run quickly across the courtyard and peek through the iron gate of the Gray House. Only my uncertainty as to how to proceed made me hesitate long enough to hear the quiet sneeze not twenty paces from me. Despite the chill of the night, I broke into a sweat, while attempting the difficult task of shrinking further into the shadows without moving at all.
Moments dragged past as I huddled in my dark corner, scarcely daring to breathe. At last a man stepped from the corner of the courtyard at each end of the colonnade, just as two guards emerged from the keep. The four met briefly in the middle of the courtyard. Then, while the two who had been on watch strolled back toward the keep, the other two began a circuit of the dark peripheries of the courtyard. Their path would leave them right at the posts so recently vacated. Heart pounding, I retreated into the workers’ compound before they completed their rounds. I would need to go again to learn how often the guard was changed, and how long it took the two to make the circuit. Tomorrow.
Timing would be critical, yet time was very difficult to estimate in Zhev’Na. There seemed to be no clocks, no bells, no criers, no drumbeats, no time signals at all. The sewing women had no concept of time and no interest in it. What difference would it make, they responded, when I asked how they could tell how long it took them to complete a slave tunic or when it was time to eat. They started work at dawn and ended when Kargetha said they’d done enough. They ate when food was given them and slept until wakened. Yet, someone in the fortress had to know the time. The guards knew when to go on duty, and the kitchen servant arrived at what seemed to be the exact same hour every day. Someone dispatched that servant, so someone had to know. It seemed too precise to be guesswork.
Near the end of my first week, when Kargetha spent the morning teaching us to fashion a new style of legging, I finally came to understand it. Late in the morning, the Zhid woman popped up her head and said, “Blast. The last morning hour has struck, and your log brains have not even begun to comprehend what I require. One hour more, and anyone who’s failed to complete one set will go hungry for the rest of the day. Your stomachs are all you care for.” I watched closely, and even with no external signal, Kargetha knew exactly when an hour had passed. Her head came up. Less than a moment later, the kitchen servant arrived with our midday bread.
The signal was inside the Zhid somehow. We who had no “true talent” were excluded from even so basic an amenity as knowing the time of day. The realization made me inordinately angry.
So, I would have to devise my own way of timekeeping. For half a day I fumbled about, trying various schemes. None were successful until I began to count. After four long days in the sewing room, stitching had become as regular as my pulse. The interval of one stitch became one count.
Once I worked at it a while, I could approximate fifty counts quite accurately. I would begin a row of stitches, then sew without counting-not a simple matter when I was so preoccupied with it-and then count my stitches when I believed I had done fifty. I was always within one or two. It took me two hundred counts to walk to the cistern in the corner of the compound, seventy-five counts to walk from the dormitory to the sewing room. We were allowed six hundred counts to eat. I started estimating longer times, and though I was less accurate at first, by the end of two days I could estimate three thousand counts to within twenty stitches. I called three thousand counts an hour. Then, all I needed was a reference, so sunset became nineteenth hour.
At sunset on my sixth day, I began to count. I ignored the women’s conversation. Our talk was so pointless, so lacking in substance, no one noticed who participated and who did not. We sewed ten thousand stitches more-three hours and a quarter, more or less.
By the time we ate our soup, and the dormitory had been quiet long enough that I felt relatively safe, it had been an hour and a half more. I hurried through the dark colonnade into the Lords’ Court and took up my watch from behind a column. By my reckoning, it was first hour when the guards changed. I waited, stitching in my head until my fingers ached with the intensity of it.
Two hours until the guards changed again, and just under a quarter of an hour for them to walk the periphery of the court. Two hours later, the same. By the third guard change, the edge of the world was a deep vermilion, and I hurried back to the dormitory where the women were stirring.
All day I fought to stay awake. Zoe yelled at me several times, accusing me of slacking. My hands kept falling still, though my bleary eyes were open and my mind was counting stitches.
“I’m sorry, Zoe. Didn’t sleep well. I’ll try harder,” I said.
“If you can’t stay awake, then maybe you’d best do something else. Her Worship Kargetha wants these leggings delivered to the guardroom at the Gray House. You’ll have to do it.”
My spirit quickened with excitement, but I dared not allow it to show. “I’ll try not to be so slow ever again, Zoe. Don’t make me.”
Though one would expect that they would delight in a break of the monotony, my coworkers very much disliked being sent on errands. I didn’t know whether they were afraid of doing something wrong and being punished, or if thinking had just become too difficult.
“You’ll go.”
“If you say so, Zoe.”
“And you’re to speak to the chamberlain. Some draperies have rotted from the sun and must be replaced. He’ll give them to you to bring back here.”
“Yes, Zoe.”
I couldn’t believe my good luck. Though I would do almost anything to set down my needle, I had not dared volunteer for such duty, grumbling like the others when given a mission upstairs to the threadmaker’s or next door to the tannery. I had not yet come up with a scheme to get into the Gray House. Now the opportunity had fallen in my lap.
Zoe told me how to get to the servants’ door at the Gray House and where to find the guardroom-just to the right of the front gate, where I had seen the lights so late. As I walked slowly through the archway to the Lords’ Court with my bundle of leggings, I noted carefully the exact position of the Zhid at the corner watchpost. He looked right through me.
The Gray House was larger inside than one might expect. From the back passage where Zoe had directed me to go, I glimpsed immense, sparsely furnished rooms. All rooms in the house opened onto small courtyards by way of arched doorways, but each courtyard was as dry and barren as the rest of the Zhev’Na. A sterile house.
A dark-eyed slave girl, no more than a bony child, was carrying a basket of linens down the stairs. When I asked her which way to the lower guardroom, she cringed, shook her head, and hurried away. I came upon another slave polishing the tile floor with a rag and asked him the same. The man pointed down a side passage, then angled his hand to the left and held up two fingers. Being a slave, the man was not allowed to speak. Being a Drudge and therefore nothing, I could not give him permission, even by asking a question.
“The second turning to the left?” I asked.
He nodded wearily, then went back to his work. Dreadful scars covered his shoulders. I had never been close enough to a slave to see the collar. The strip of black metal, etched with letters and symbols in brighter metal, extended all the way from collarbone to jaw. I remembered the screams I had heard the night of my arrival, and I swallowed hard.